What if we could tell the history of philosophy through the history of philosophers’ love lives? Like the rest of us, philosophers are mere humans, driven by their bodies and desires, not just their rational minds. Looking at the unrequited love of Nietzsche for Lou Salomé, Sartre’s open relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arrandt, and Foucault’s homosexuality, Warren Ward shows how tracing the links between their relationships and their philosophy can help us understand the origins and fate of much of modern European philosophy. 

In April 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche fell madly in love with Lou Salomé, a beautiful and fiercely independent young woman from St Petersburg. Soon after meeting her, he wrote to a friend:

Lou is the daughter of a Russian general and she is twenty years old; she is as shrewd as an eagle and as brave as a lion … and [seems} amazingly well prepared for my way of thinking and ideas.

Nietzsche followed Salomé all over Europe, from the Italian Alps to Germany’s Tautenburg forest, but he never managed to consummate his desires. In August, she left him a note to tell him she had entered into a relationship with Nietzsche’s best friend Paul Rée, and was leaving the next day to set up house with him in Berlin.

Nietzsche was devastated. He retreated to the Italian town of Rapallo to lick his wounds. Several times he climbed the town’s highest tower and, in despair, seriously contemplated throwing himself into the Mediterranean below. But he didn’t. Instead, he walked for ten days and ten nights in the rain, until — in a flash — the idea for his masterpiece Thus Spake Zarathustra came to him. In this work, Nietzsche declared that ‘God is Dead’. This famous proclamation not only revealed something profound that Nietzsche had observed vis-à-vis European culture, but also, I would suggest, about his state of mind after being cruelly abandoned by Salomé.

As I aim to show in Lovers of Philosophy, Nietzsche was not alone in having the intimate part of his life help shape his ideas. I investigate the philosophical (and psychoanalytic) significance of Kant’s unrequited desires, Hegel’s premarital liaisons, Heidegger’s hypocrisy, Sartre’s promiscuous polyamory, Foucault’s liberation and Derrida’s dalliances in extramarital love.

___

___

My interest in the love lives of philosophers was inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, an autobiographical novel which describes her struggles with feelings of insecurity and jealousy when Sartre brings the young philosophy student Olga Kosakiewicz into their open relationship. Beauvoir, a master storyteller, portrays Sartre in this novel as not only a philosopher, but as her lover, a highly imperfect man with all his faults and foibles laid bare. Reading that novel inspired me to ask the question: What if we could learn about other philosophers through the eyes of their lovers?

Jean-Paul Sartre’s childhood provides a fascinating case study of how one’s childhood experiences of love might affect the way they see the world.  Sartre’s was only fifteen months old when his father died, and after that the shy and awkward youngster was propelled into a highly oedipalised relationship with his mother. The two shared a bedroom in his grandfather’s house until Sartre was twelve, at which point his life was turned upside down when Sartre’s mother fell in love and remarried.