We tend to think that great philosophy emerges from pure reason, not love or heartbreak. And for a large part of 20th-century philosophy, from analytic philosophy to Roland Barthes’ declaration that the author is dead, an author’s biography was seen as merely a distraction. But philosopher Adrián Gordaliza Vega, author of In Love and Pain, argues that, in fact, an author’s biography is crucial to understanding their work, and their love life is especially important. From Heidegger to Nietzsche to Einstein, he shows how the ideas of great thinkers were influenced by their romantic relationships.

When confronted with a text or a work of art, we must address the following issue: How does an author’s own biography affect the interpretation of their work? And to refine it even further, does their romantic life—with its lights and shadows—truly influence their output?

Let me illustrate this with an example: Martin Heidegger retained his Nazi Party membership card until the end of the Second World War. He was an admirer of Hitler and, as rector of the University of Freiburg, made decisions that harmed some of his Jewish colleagues. However, at the same time, he maintained an extramarital relationship with a young Jewish student—none other than Hannah Arendt.

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Faced with this paradox, can we dismiss the evenings they spent discussing philosophy in the dim light of her room? Or the letters laden with love and ontology that they wrote to each other? Finally, would it not also be foolish to ignore the influence that this romance would have on Arendt’s future work? There was a philosophical dialogue between them throughout their lives—something that did not particularly thrill Elfride, Heidegger’s anti-Semitic wife.

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A large part of 20th-century philosophy has tended to ignore, or even despise, this intrusion of biography into theory.

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Arendt inherited from her teacher—and lover— the critique of Western metaphysics for having forgotten Being and focused on beings—in other words, we have ignored the very existence of our lives and concentrated on things. However, she gave a less abstract character to this critique. Arendt believed that human action has been reduced to mere production, and in this way we have distanced ourselves from the “common world”—another Heideggerian concept—which ultimately gave rise to totalitarianisms and the “banality of evil.” Through their many conversations and letters, Martin Heidegger also modulated his abstract philosophy to ground it in the political present of his time, and Hannah Arendt had a great influence in this regard.

A large part of 20th-century philosophy has tended to ignore, or even despise, this intrusion of biography into theory. On one hand, analytic philosophy has sought the meaning of a work within public linguistic or literary conventions. This means that an author’s intentions and circumstances lack relevance. The Russian formalist school, and the American New Criticism, state that an author's work is an autonomous and closed object that should be studied independently. An author’s biography is merely a distraction. Their intention was to turn the analysis of texts, and of works of art in general, into an autonomous and scientific discipline. Once created, the work detaches itself from its author in the same way that a geometric theorem becomes independent of its “discoverer.”