Top 10 books about great thinkers

What is the connection between the thinker and the thought? This is a query that every one writers of mental biographies grapple with. One should relate the life to the thought with out conflating them, with out ascribing to each impact a trigger, and each argument a cause. As Jacques Derrida warned, “You want me to say things like: ‘I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but …’ Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.”

And but Derrida additionally argued that one of many great unacknowledged features of all philosophical writing is that it’s a sort of autobiography. Would Socrates have developed the reward of the gab if he wasn’t so ugly? Would Julia Kristeva have developed her concepts about the symbolic if she wasn’t an outsider by start in her adopted France? Would Nietzsche have proclaimed the Overman if he was much less shy at dinner events?

The absolute best mental biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a spot, and by exploring how they negotiate the tough artwork of residing by means of the merchandise of their minds. Here are 10 great books that thread collectively the lives and concepts of their thinkers in a manner that intensifies our understanding of every.

1. St Augustine by Rebecca West
“I write books,” famous Rebecca West, “to find out about things.” Here my stone-cold favorite author of all time turns her mixture of searing mind and droll wit on one of many shapers of Christianity. She is especially transferring on Augustine’s closing encounter along with his mom, Monica: maybe, writes West, “the most intense experience ever commemorated”. As daring and opinionated as you’d count on from the lady who wrote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
For anybody learning philosophy, studying Wittgenstein can really feel like taking a draught of cool water. Suddenly the deepest issues appear straightforward, to be mere issues of language, straightforward to resolve. And then, as you learn extra deeply, that every one falls aside as each downside turns into knottier, each query deeper nonetheless. Ray Monk’s biography is the gold customary within the style, revealing a person whose life was as easy and sophisticated as his work.

3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil
Any thinker price their salt must have a Simone Weil obsession sooner or later. No mental of the twentieth century was as ready to take their pondering to its logical conclusion, making her for a lot of a secular saint. And but sainthood is usually higher appreciated at a distance, as her niece Sylvie reveals. Sleeping on the ground subsequent to a lovingly made mattress on the home of your brother (the revered mathematician André Weil) is noble within the telling, irritating within the execution. A author herself, Sylvie Weil presents a biography of three minds, working for and towards one another.

4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn
Very few folks learn Kant for pleasure. If you already know anybody who has, I’d prefer to have a chat to them. Kuehn’s biography is all the time promoted as revelatory, in that it reveals Kant was sometimes 5 minutes late in having his breakfast, and typically put his footwear on within the flawed order. In truth this biography is the whole lot Kant was – thorough, witty (in the way in which philosophy lecturers are witty: that’s, not very) and goes on only a bit too lengthy. Even the title is suitably uninteresting. But, like The Critique of Pure Reason, it’s also magnificent and to learn it’s to enter into a wonderful dialogue with one of many great minds.

5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi
“To say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” It’s onerous to go previous Deirdre Bair’s biography of De Beauvoir. But Moi’s telling can also be good and affecting. A robust, important investigation of De Beauvoir’s pondering, it situates her in a historical past of feminine thinkers and the way in which their thought has been marginalised, or handled reductively as absolutely explicable by their lives (and loves). In a difficult learn, Moi forces you to argue along with her, and to be rattling certain of your place as you achieve this.

6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey
Derrida’s childhood in Algeria was essential to his pondering, as he himself famous, and one can’t write about Algeria with out studying Fanon’s political works. Macey explores them brilliantly, however it’s Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist that could be a revelation. During the warfare of independence, Fanon typically attended to sufferers struggling psychological trauma after being tortured, in addition to to the psychological traumas of the torturers. That he attended to each with equal care is astonishing, and that he did so whereas writing the tracts that will make him well-known is much more so. Macey does him justice, which actually is saying one thing.

7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
One good life possibility is to simply learn the whole lot David Bellos has ever written (in addition to his translations). His life of Jacques Tati is great, however right here he’s in his factor attempting to pin the butterfly that’s Perec. Perec is the kind of author most writers need to be, good, creative and prolific, managing to mix big erudition with the power to inform a very good yarn. A novel without the letter “e” (or a novella that makes use of solely that vowel)? Why not? A novel that does a knight’s tour of an condominium block and appears to cowl each facet of life because it skips round? Sure! We ought to all be grateful he discovered Bellos to put in writing his story – nobody else would have gotten it proper.

8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has turn out to be the ne plus extremely of group biographies, to the purpose the place any pitch for a guide on this space lately has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a cause for this. Bakewell’s potential to attach a thinker’s concepts to their life and character is spectacular. I notably love her gradual, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the person: displaying Paul Celan’s books within the window of his native bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.

9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis
Note that is “An” autobiography, not “The” – Davis is all the time in motion, and this is only one second on the way in which someplace, politically and intellectually. Writing in her late 20s, Davis had already served time in jail and been instrumental within the civil rights motion, making this an intoxicating journey by means of an period of incendiary politics and mental ferment. That she has maintained the fashion and continued to place each physique and thoughts on the road is exhilarating – one other autobiography can be no much less thrilling.

10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre is a foul biographer. In forcing Flaubert and Genet by means of the sausage machine of existentialism he performs the astonishing feat of creating you need to keep away from studying them. As a person, thinker and novelist he’s additionally onerous to like. And but love him I do, due to these diaries. They are the story of a thoughts discovering itself, groping about for the theoretical scaffolding on which he would erect his thought. They are additionally the transferring chronicle of a thoughts recovering from melancholy, thrown right into a world of mindless chaos, earlier than there was a Sartre to theorise absurdity. Of his breakdown, he writes: “I suddenly realised that anyone could become anything.” What he grew to become is astonishing.

• An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon is revealed by Verso. To order a duplicate, go to guardianbookshop.com.