Posted on 04/11/2008 6:24:41 PM PDT by Beowulf9
He was one of the most brilliant minds. She was his lifelong companion who pioneered feminism.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were perhaps the most influential couple of the 20th century.
Their legendary love pact - they never married but swore mutual devotion to each other with the freedom to have affairs - was an attempt to overthrow the stifling hypocrisy that, for so long, had dictated most people's lives. Always pushing new boundaries, they explored their thoughts in novels, plays and philosophical works.
It earned Sartre the world's greatest literary accolade, the Nobel Prize.
Yet he refused to accept it because he thought it would make him an establishment figure and thus silence his inquiring mind.
Their private lives were wildly experimental. Simone de Beauvoir had affairs with both men and women, while Sartre, despite his stunted stature and ugly squint, was always surrounded by adoring muses happy to pamper his genius.
When he died in 1980, 50,000 people turned out on to the Paris streets.
But that was not the end of the story. For their influence continues to this day - often with disastrous consequences.
For this luminous pair, who were at the peak of their fame just after World War II, arguably legitimised the Godless and permissive society in which we now live.
On the other hand, de Beauvoir to her credit became an iconic figure for feminism and the battle for equality between the sexes.
Yet a fascinating new book paints this supposedly high-minded duo as serial seducers bent on their own gratification and as a couple who used their apparently lofty philosophy as a springboard to excuse their multiple liaisons, often with under-age teenagers who were broken by the experience.
And yet, when we read about the intellectual geniuses on the right, what do we get?
Russell Kirk, family man.
Milton Friedman, great professor. Devoted to his wife.
Ronald Reagan, heroic lifeguard, honorable union president, fine husaband.
Okay, I’m sure there’s been the conservative or two who hasen’t live up to their ideals, but our side seems to produce far better-behaved intellectuals. (I don’t count the ideologues like Ayn Rand—that’s not true conservativism.)
Sadly, many on the left more or less take this approach.
Yeah, well, y’ain’t French.
I wonder what book this is? The article does not give the title and author.
One of the things that rings true is Camus not intertested in Beauvoir. His off and on Leftism notwithstanding, his greater consciousness would see through her in an instant.
There is also something here much deeper, the schism between verbalism, dealing in the world through the shallow symbolism of verbal manipulation, and engaging the world through graphic and quantitative talent. One can design microprocessors, diesel-electrics, cosmological models, or one can be a NYT journalist. One can be an engineer, or a lawyer.
The name of the book is A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones is published by Century at £20. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free) call 0845 606 4206.
heheh, British.
What is up with the French? I thought the scene in John Adams quite well showed where they were at before the French Revolution, heck aren’t they going to move on?
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