Philosophy
Across centuries, philosophers kept trying to theorise love, yet their own lives kept betraying the theory. From Spinoza’s cosmic intellect to Arendt’s impossible affair, love keeps erupting where philosophy least wants it: in bodies, memories, contradictions, and attachments that refuse abstraction.
The Personal as Philosophical: Letters and Desire
Spinoza’s Intellectual Love: Spinoza offers “intellectual love of God”, understanding ourselves as modes of infinite substance, finding joy in comprehending our place in nature’s causal web. This sounds abstract, but something is compelling here: love as a form of understanding, recognising our interconnection with all that exists. For Spinoza, we are not separate subjects confronting an external world. We are modifications of a single infinite substance, that is, nature/God. When we understand this adequately, we experience joy, freedom and what Spinoza calls amor Dei intellectualis. This is not romantic love, but it suggests love might be epistemic, a way of knowing through relation rather than observation.
Abelard and Heloise’s Philosophy Written in Desire: In the 12th century, the philosopher Peter Abelard and his student Heloise began an affair that would become legendary and tragic. After their secret marriage, Heloise’s uncle had Abelard castrated. They spent the rest of their lives in separate monasteries, exchanging letters that blend philosophical inquiry with erotic longing. Heloise writes: “God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours.” This is love as attention to particularity; not Abelard’s status, his brilliance, what he could provide, but him in his irreducible existence.
But she also writes with searing honesty about desire’s persistence: “Those pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet-…they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn, they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings.”
The philosophical question: Can contemplative life coexist with erotic memory? Must spiritual love require forgetting bodily love? Heloise refuses the easy answer. She entered the monastery, but she won’t pretend that desire simply disappeared through religious vows.
Beauvoir and Sartre’s Philosophical Experiment: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre conducted a decades-long experiment: what would non-possessive love look like? They developed “essential love” (leur amour nécessaire) alongside “contingent loves” (amours contingentes), other relationships that wouldn’t threaten their primary bond.
Beauvoir writes to Sartre in 1939: “I love you, my love, with a tenderness and passion I’ve never felt for anyone before… You are my life and all my happiness, my darling, you, and you alone.” Yet this “essential love” explicitly permits both of them to have other lovers. Sartre writes back: “You are not only the person I love most, but you are also the only one I love… My love, I would so like you to feel to what extent you are my life, my only life.” The language sounds conventional- “you alone”- but the practice isn’t. Both maintained other relationships, writing to each other about these loves with remarkable candour.
When Beauvoir writes The Second Sex, she analyses how romantic love ideology traps women: “Woman is asked to make herself object and prey; that is, she must renounce her autonomy. She is told that to win the man’s love, she must make herself loved; she should turn herself into a thing. She renounces autonomy because love requires it.” Yet her letters show her negotiating exactly this tension. How does one love intensely without self-abnegation? How does one commit without possession? Their experiment wasn’t always successful (jealousies emerged, pain was inflicted), but they were trying to think love differently, to make philosophical principles livable.
The philosophical question: Can you love someone as “your only life” while simultaneously loving others? Does freedom require rejecting exclusivity, or does commitment always entail limitation? Their letters reveal moments of pain and territoriality despite their theoretical framework. Perhaps the experiment’s value isn’t in proving non-possessive love works perfectly, but in forcing philosophical engagement with love’s tensions- freedom versus bond, multiplicity versus depth, principle versus felt experience!
Arendt and Heidegger’s Impossible Love: Hannah Arendt, eighteen years old, meets her professor, Martin Heidegger. They begin an affair. He is married, twenty-five years older, and will later join the Nazi party. She is his student, Jewish, and will have to flee Germany. Heidegger writes to her in 1925: I never told you that… from the very first I loved your wild, imperious, self-sufficient nature… I would like to be certain that you will remain my pupil, even if I can never again be your teacher.” The entanglement of pedagogical and erotic love, the impossibility of separating thinking from desiring, but also the profound power imbalance. After the war, after Heidegger’s Nazi involvement, after Arendt’s escape and her own philosophical eminence, they correspond again. Arendt writes in 1950: “That business is not my business and never was… There is something for me in this which is hard to express: something that has to do with time and has been preserved from it, which I could never lose and which I somehow knew I could never lose.”
The philosophical question: What does it mean to preserve philosophical connection despite political betrayal? Can you separate loving someone’s mind from evaluating their actions? Arendt seems to suggest some loves exist outside ordinary moral judgment, not because they are beyond ethics, but because they occupy a different register of human connection. Her early dissertation explored Augustine’s concept of love: love as that which connects us to the world, gives us our place, and makes things matter. Perhaps she was living the question: can you renounce a love that shaped your philosophical formation, that exists “preserved from time”?