((It’s ya girl, back again with another philosophy-themed post that absolutely no one asked for))
Paris has long been considered one of the intellectual and artistic centers of the western world. The city has been home to numerous artists, visionaries, and writers throughout her long life, and the reason for this is clear; Paris is stimulating and complex and walking her streets is a sort of spiritual exploration in and of itself. Countless figures have found inspiration in the city of sandstone and light, but for the purpose of this post (and most of my philosophical scholarship), I only care about Simone de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir was a force of nature and her life itself is an interesting study in feminism. My cat is also named after her, in case you were wondering/ didn’t glean it from the “Stuff in Paris Ranked” post, so I’m very much biased on the subject. She’s one of the most- if not the most- well known female philosophers in the western canon, and her work on feminism basically spurned the movement and created a syllabus for women’s studies before it was even considered a scholarly subject. Coincidentally, she also lived in Paris for a great deal of her life, so it should come as no surprise that most of the items on my ‘must see while here’ list are related to de Beauvoir.
I wanted to do four things: see the Place Sartre-Beauvoir, walk the corresponding stretch of Boulevard Saint-Germain, get pictures with the passerelle Simone de Beauvoir, and pay my respects at her grave at Montparnasse. Here are my pictures of doing those things and my corresponding commentary on Beauvoir herself.
I feel the need to express the fact that Simone de Beauvoir, like almost all favorites, did have aspects of her works and life that were problematic. She was rumored to have conducted affairs with some of her students while she was teaching in France and had her license revoked because of it. Her work in The Second Sex, though revolutionary, is a little narrow minded in its goals and its focus on the plight of middle class predominantly white women. However, she was a dynamic figure and social activist, and unlike many philosophers, she lived according to her own theories and claims.
She was in a lifelong open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and though they never married or lived together, they had a “soul partnership.” De Beauvoir herself was one of the first handful of contemporary feminists to loudly express her disdain for marriage as an institution; she believed it a form of domestic slavery that inherently exploited the emotional and physical labor of the woman without ever compensating her. Moreover, she believed it to be a tool of the patriarchal system whose sole purpose was to legally cement the oppression of women and resign them to a secondary societal role. There is argument that Simone de Beauvoir’s personal life often overshadows her philosophical contributions, but I’d counter that the way she lived was an expression of her values as a philosopher. I can’t describe how remarkable this is in the canon of philosophy; the fact that the city that she lived in played such a large role in her individual and intellectual freedom shouldn’t be downplayed either.
To summarize, I love Simone de Beauvoir, she has faults, Paris has a lot of stuff related to her. This was a philosophy-lite post sponsored by me re-reading She Came to Stay yesterday.