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It& #39;s All Saints Day today, so here& #39;s the Spanish saint Simone de Beauvoir claimed was "one of the only women to have lived the human condition for herself, in total abandonment": Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582). 1/
In the & #39;The Mystic& #39; chapter of The Second Sex Teresa is compared to other mystics Beauvoir calls her & #39;lesser sisters& #39;. Why lesser? Because she thought their religious devotion was self-love in disguise. Teresa, however, recognised that the subjective experience of contemplation
was not the point of it. Long before Marx& #39;s theses on Feuerbach, Teresa concluded that praxis was the point--& acted accordingly. She wrote, reformed the Carmelites, founded 16 convents, mentored Saint John of the Cross (of & #39;dark night of the soul& #39; fame), & reformed monasteries.
In early 20th C Paris, including the 1920s & 1930s when Beauvoir was a philosophy student and teacher, several philosophers were studying mystics as metaphysicians, & continuing an old debate about which was better: the mysticism of contemplation or the mysticism of action.
The Spanish mystics Teresa and John were welcomed into French by (among others) Pierre de Bérulle, the spiritual director of a certain René Descartes, and their ontologies and imagery continued to inform French philosophical and literary culture in subsequent centuries.
Beauvoir read many mystics as philosophers & her early work was supervised by Jean Baruzi, who (before Husserl& #39;s Paris lectures and first French translations) discussed the & #39;lived experience& #39; of & #39;becoming& #39; in his work on the psychology of mysticism in John of the Cross & Leibniz.
So all that to say: Happy All Saints Day!
& I wonder what Beauvoir would think of being depicted as & #39;saint& #39; Simone?
(by Stockholm artist Elin Sandström: http://eplet.se/sisterhood-of- …)">https://eplet.se/sisterhoo...
& I wonder what Beauvoir would think of being depicted as & #39;saint& #39; Simone?
(by Stockholm artist Elin Sandström: http://eplet.se/sisterhood-of- …)">https://eplet.se/sisterhoo...
