Product Description

Three women, all philosophers, all of Jewish descent, provide a human face for a decade of crisis in this powerful and moving book. The dark years when the Nazis rose to power are here seen through the lives of Edith Stein, a disciple of Husserl and author of La science et la croix, who died in Auschwitz in 1942; Hannah Arendt, pupil of Heidegger and Jaspers and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, who unhesitatingly responded to Hitler by making a personal commitment to Zionism; and Simone Weil, a student of Alain and author of La pesanteur et la grace.

Following her subjects from 1933 to 1943, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy recounts how these three great philosophers of the twentieth century endeavored with profound moral commitment to address the issues confronting them. Condemned to exile, they not only sought to understand a horrible reality, but also attempted to make peace with it. To do so, Edith Stein and Simone Weil encouraged a stoic acceptance of necessity while Hannah Arendt argued for the capacity for renewal and the need to fight against the banality of evil.

Courtine-Denamy also describes how as a student each woman caught the eye of her famous male teacher, yet dared to criticize and go beyond him. She explores each one's sense of her femininity, her position on the "woman question," and her relation to her Jewishness.

"All three," the author writes, "are compelling figures who move us with their fierce desire to understand a world out of joint, reconcile it with itself, and, despite everything, love it."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1234204 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The darkness of the decade 1933-1943 was at least partially illumined by the energetic syntheses of thought and action that Courtine-Denamy (Hannah Arendt) skillfully examines in the three remarkable women of this book's subtitle. What animates the comparison are stark differences overlaid on basic similarities: all three were Jews and philosophers, all were imperiled by the Nazi menace. But by 1943 Stein had become a Carmelite nun and perished in Auschwitz; Weil had allied with the French Resistance and died of malnutrition in London; and Arendt had emigrated to New York, where she called for a Jewish army in Palestine. Weil, whose passions split between politics and religion, serves as linchpin for comparisons with the cloistered nun Stein and the fervently Zionist, eminently unmystical Arendt. Stein, the traditional Catholic, accepted her Jewishness; Weil, the wayward gnostic who never converted to the Christianity she loved, did not. Intersecting images from the personal lives of the three women, who never met (of the three, only Arendt knew of the other two), suggest temperamental affinities among them: Stein and Weil memorized the Lord's Prayer in premodern languages (Stein in medieval Gothic, Weil in ancient Greek); at different points of their lives, Arendt and Weil broke into absurdist laughter over the impact of Nazism (Arendt while observing the Eichmann trial, Weil while fleeing France in the company of devout Jews). A glossary of names and terms from French political life during the Nazi years would have enhanced this otherwise highly readable American edition of an originally French work. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

disappointing story of three remarkable women
I am no philosopher, but have read the works of the three women who are the subjects of the book.
I was hoping to put the three lives into the context of the intellectual and social world they lived in, and how and why they made their individual decisions on philosophy, religion, and their approach to the questions posed by both Nazism and the feminist movement.
But little detail is given about the intellectual life. We are told the names of their mentors: but not any details of what these mentors taught (a major flaw for the non philosophy student who is not familiar with Heddiger etc.).
At the same time, except for some fine passages on Simone Weil, there is little detail on the inner lives of the women: we see only the outline of their parallel lives, often mixed together in a confusing manner. Arendt's affair with her professor, a subject recently treated in detail in a recent Atlantic magazine article, is given one sentence. Stein converts, with no more detail on her inner life than one could read in a blurb in the Catholic encyclopedia.
In summary, the author fails to provide details for the novice to understand the lives of these women, but does not go into sufficient depth for a philosophy student to learn anything new.
However, the passages on Simone Weil are an exception to my criticism. I did learn a lot about both her writings and why she thought and wrote her famous letters.

A good intro to these ladies and their times
This is not an easy book. It is a glance into the lives of 3 women, Hanna Arendt, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein, each of Jewish descent and, in particular, at the response each one made to Nazism. There is a review of each woman's life and her career. A lot of space is given to the education of these women, which is especially interesting since each studied under some of the biggest names in philosophy in the 20th century. It is not easy to follow, however, unless you have some basic knowledge of Heidegger, Jaspers, Alain, Husserl. But it is still interesting. Each of these women chose a different response (not just to nazism, but to the world, actually). Arendt became strongly Zionist, and an author of wonderful books; Simone Weil, strangely at odds with her heritage, but whose essays are marvels of clarity, chose a strange path of starvation (whatever the philosophical underpinnings, one wonders about anorexia); Edith Stein converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, devoting her life to prayer (though still writing). Each of these responses is fascinating in its own right. I highly recommend this difficult, but rewarding book.