Heroism of Life and Philosophical Brilliance in Three Mid-20th-Century Jewesses: Stein, Weil, Arendt

They are easily the most creative, brilliant and profound female intellects of the century. It is more: their luminous femininity and their Homeric courage as protagonists in the defining Drama of the 20th century. Contemporary collaborators against the Nazi Evil; Jews; world class philosophers. Each in an utterly distinctive, creative manner engaged with their Judaism, femininity, Christianity, Nazism and philosophy. 

The century is a long litany of intelligent, saintly and heroic women. But none compare with these in intellectual brilliance. Among their male counterparts there are perhaps three in their league in the combination of dramatic courage and wisdom: John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrandt, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. All three combatants against Hitler; the first two similar to Stein in their marriage of personalism with Thomism. 

Judaism 

Weil renounced her Judaism. She despised the idea of a chosen people and strenuously advocated a universalism in a solidarity with the poor and suffering. She suffered guilt over the privilege of her family and overidentified with the afflicted. In accord with a deeply personal Gnosticism she entirely rejected the Hebrew Scriptures and observant Judaism. Like her family, she was a secular, liberal intellectual up until her mystical experiences of the suffering Christ. 

Arendt was the extreme opposite in her assertive Jewish identity. She was taught by her mother to defend her Jewishness and she did this her entire life. A Zionist, she risked her life fighting Nazism and was arrested by the Gestapo. Entirely secular, she was fierce in defense of Jews and Israel. She was a combative intellectual, confrontational and controversial on many fronts.

Stein was the only of the three raised in a religious family. In youth she rejected Judaism. Later, in embracing Catholicism she also retrieved her Jewishness. She wrote Life in a Jewish Family as she painfully grieved the rupture her conversion brought to her family. She implored Pope Pius XI to condemn antisemitism. Together with her blood sister, a Carmelite nun like herself, she surrendered her life to God for her people, the Jews, and died in Auschwitz a double martyr: for her Catholicism and her Judaism. She embodied the Catholic reconciliation with Judaism that found expression in Vatican II.

Femininity, Sex, Romance

Weil, ever eccentric, despised her femininity and adapted a masculinity in style, an asexuality. Already in childhood she disdained all things feminine and gravitated to the masculine. Her parents serenely accepted this. Her brother, a prodigy, later a world class mathematician, apparently elicited in her admiration, envy and low self esteem. In an exaggerated empathy for the poor, she starved herself to death as a spiritual anorexic. Her mystical communion with Christ and the suffering was accompanied by a deep negativity of deprivation so that she refused baptism and rejected ecclesial communion in a sacramental anorexia. Her femininity took the course of a profound, intense empathy, unrelieved by boundaries, masculine protection or self care.

Stein was by contrast an icon of natural and saintly femininity. Unlike the anti-feminine Weil but like Arendt, she was a striking beauty. 

(Aside: we are stunned in both Stein and Arendt with the quality of intelligence that radiates in their feminine loveliness. We know that "smart is sexy" and that women, for various reasons, are attracted to intelligence in men. But we less frequently attend to the erotic/romantic appeal of feminine intelligence. Think: Jackie Kennedy, Grace Kelly, Kiera Knightly, Jodi Foster, Felicity Jones, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, Maureen O'Hara, Helena Bonham Carter, Amy Coney Barrett, Emily Blunt, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Meryl Streep, Cher, Barbara Streisand, Helen Mirren, Lilly James, Emma Thomson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oprah, Queen Elizabeth...Don't get me started! It is certain that insecure men can be threatened by a woman who is strong, confident, intelligent. But one confident in his virility welcomes such as friend, partner, lover, spouse.)

She dreamed in youth of a great love but apparently never had a lover. She enjoyed rich, intimate, chaste friendships with men and women. A close friend and philosophy colleague died in WWI; when she visited the widow she was drawn by the serenity of her Catholic faith towards the Church. She was classically a virgin, a bride of Christ, a martyr and a mother...caring for children in Auschwitz just before her death. Like John Paul and Hildebrandt, she articulate a profound philosophy of the woman as compassionate, welcoming, sheltering, integrating and integrated.

Arendt was an entirely different, far more complex woman. As an 18-year-old student of philosophy she entered an adulterous affair with her 35-year-old professor, the great Martin Heidegger. This affair was to last her lifetime. Hitler soon after came to power; Arendt married another philosopher student of Heidegger; the couple were separated by the war and divorced congenially. Hannah fell in love with a nonacademic, a leftist activist of considerable charm and masculine energy. They married and stayed together through the war, into life in the USA until his death in 1970. Theirs was a stable, serene and "open" marriage. This allowed him to follow his promiscuous propensities. On her end, she entertained no sexual or romantic dalliances. But she did renew her intimate, now platonic affair with Heidegger. 

This may be the strangest romance in human history. Heidegger went totally Nazi: as rector of a university he expelled Jewish students and professors. Hannah was out of touch with him in his postwar disgrace until the early 1950s. She got in touch and astoundingly reignited the romance, now no longer physical. It is incomprehensible that a strong, ardent, Zionist, combatant, anti-totalitarian Jewess should pardon this adulterous, woman abusing, lying Nazi. Not only did she pardon him, but she went on to actively restore his reputation. She excused his Nazism as a temporary lapse of weakness, not indicative of his moral character. This will remain a mystery, but several factors shed light.

 

First, she was a passionate Romantic. In Heidegger she met the love of her life.

Second, intelligence. As noted above, intelligence is attractive, especially to the intelligent. He may have been the smartest man of the century; her the smartest woman. She was infatuated, not with raw cognitive ability but with his sensitivity, profundity, creativity.

Third, she was the ultimate non-victim. She had an enormous self-confidence, strength of will, sense of agency. At 15 she was expelled from school for leading a protest against an insult from a teacher. In her pivotal Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Banality of Evil, she inverted the standard narrative. She saw Eichmann not as a superpowered monster of evil, but as a pathetic, passive cog in the bureaucracy. Along with that she noted the widespread compliance and failure to resist on the part of Jewish leadership. She stood by her views in the face of furious hostility. As Jew and as lover she was never the passive victim, but always the actor, the protagonist, the free agent. And so it was not in her character to remain the victim. She is a fall cry than our contemporary cult of self-pity and victimization ( Epstein).

Lastly, her admiration and delusional idealization of Heidegger seems to be accompanied by a sympathy for him as sad and lonely. Male/female erotic chemistry is always a dance of strength/weakness by both partners. Heidegger was a miserable man: a lying Nazi, an unfaithful husband, an abuser of women. His entire philosophy is saturated with the postwar, existential despair, isolation, and nihilism. His is a universe without God, hope, moral order or meaning. A wise man once said: "If you want to be depressed, pick up Heidegger and read about "being unto death," "thrownness," and "Dasein." Thats what happens when you are the smartest man alive and you go Nazi, sexual predator, adulterer, and liar." The suggestion here is that at a deeper, indeliberate level, Hannah surrendered to a maternal instinct to comfort this tormented soul.

We conclude by noting how significant to each protagonist...in thought and life... is the feminine capacity for empathy. Stein developed it phenomenologically as a path to overcome the solipsism of phenomenology (and the entirety of modern philosophy) and retrieve realistic epistemology and the ontology of being in union with contemporary personalism. Weil sacrificed herself in an extreme compassion for the suffering. Arendt, ever the tough combatant, clearly yielded to a sentimental mercy, free of masculine retribution, for her deplorable lover.

Protagonists Against Nazism

Arendt  was strikingly virile in her lucidity, assertiveness, confidence. Throughout her entire life she was fierce and fearless on a number of fronts. Yet we will see in her personal life(Heidegger) and philosophy (Natality) a piercing maternal empathy.

Stein by contrast was flamingly Marian in her holiness, surrender, charity, wisdom and sacrificial gift of self.

Weil in a more extreme, disordered fashion gave herself over to mystical identification with the victims of that era. 

Their Philosophical Thought

Each is an entirely original, distinctive thinker. None is a disciple or member of a school of thought; nor did they originate such a school. 

Weil was the most independent and creative. She excelled in philosophy in school, writing a dissertation on Descartes. But she followed no particular thinker. She read randomly and broadly: Plato, Hindu mystics, St. John of the Cross, the Christian scriptures. She was deeply involved in social activism: unionism and the left side in the Spanish Civil War. She developed her own mystical spirituality. But she provided most profound moral insight in a fluid, spontaneous phenomenology.

Stein and Arendt were deeply schooled in formal phenomenology. Stein was with Heidegger a protege of Husserl. They were collegial early on but differed sharply as they developed their own views.  Arendt was a student of Heidegger. But both women developed their own distinctive philosophies, which contrasted sharply with their mentors: deeply feminine, intuitive, spiritual and moral. Let's consider a key concept of each: Empathy in Stein, Attention in Weil, Natality in Arendt.

Stein on Empathy.  Already in her doctoral dissertation she pondered empathy as the human capacity for communion with others. She developed a detailed, sophisticated philosophy of femininity.

Weil on Attention.  Perhaps Weil's strongest contribution was her consideration of attention as the most pure, selfless gift we can give each other.

Arendt on Natality. This is an entirely original idea of Arendt; I am unaware of any other philosophical usage, before or after her. She intuited that the sheer fact of a human birth is an absolutely new beginning and therefore heralds that newness, creativity, revival, hope, promise and freedom are possible.  This stunning discovery is all the more astonishing as she was entirely secular, disbelieving in the supernatural, eternal life, or the immortality of the human soul. The idea underlies her entire political philosophy of action, agency, and freedom. She saw in the birth of a single, random baby the definitive triumph over the totalitarianisms that she confronted and studied. This is a spiritual, although secular, perception that comes straight from the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the same time it is strikingly feminine and maternal. Recall: with her husband she deliberately decided not to bring children into the violence and chaos of the world of her young adulthood. She dedicated herself to study, teaching, and advocacy. And yet, at the heart of her thought is this motherly apprehension of the absolute value of a single infant, a promise opening up infinitely. Such feminine resilience characterized her entire life and thought; and contrasts with the nihilism of her dismal mentor/lover/friend. (She died in 1975 in USA and did not write on legal abortion which was at the time exploding. Both sides of the dispute claim her approval. It is hard to imagine such a secular feminist protecting the embryo, but clearly the impetus of her intuition is in that directions.)

Conclusion

We do well to ponder the life and thought of these three fascinating, brilliant, heroic, utterly creative and unique women. As Catholics we venerate St. Teresa of the Cross...genius, philosopher, theologian, virgin, martyr, mystic, Jew, Catholic...and seek her intercession.  We are grateful also to Hannah and Simone...in their very wounds and disorders they left us a profound legacy of wisdom, courage, and inspiration.