It's All Saints Day today, so here'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 'The Mystic' chapter of The Second Sex Teresa is compared to other mystics Beauvoir calls her 'lesser sisters'. 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'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 'dark night of the soul' 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's Paris lectures and first French translations) discussed the 'lived experience' of 'becoming' 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 'saint' Simone?

(by Stockholm artist Elin Sandström: http://eplet.se/sisterhood-of- …)