When Pure Reason Was Defeated by Love / Philosophers Without Rationality in Life

The book ‘Great Philosophers Who Failed in Love,’ written by Andrew Schaffer and translated by Goli Emami, has been published in 231 pages by Dexa Publishers.

This book deals with the private and emotional lives of a number of great philosophers; thinkers who excelled in the realm of reason and argument but failed in the field of emotion. The author, with short, engaging, and sometimes thought-provoking narratives, reviews the romantic lives of 37 famous philosophers worldwide; from Plato and Kant to Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. He shows that even the greatest minds in history have remained defenseless against the power of love.

Schaffer, in this work, brings philosophy down from the ivory tower to everyday life and, amidst romantic failures, paints a new picture of the relationship between reason and emotion.

A Book About the Conflict of Reason and Emotion

The author states in the introduction that the idea for writing this book originated from observing a simple paradox: How could people who spent their lives analyzing reason, ethics, beauty, and truth suffer great failures in the simplest form of human relationships, namely love? This question is, in fact, the main focus of the book: Can philosophy find a way to understand love? Or is love itself a realm where reason fails?

The book ‘Great Philosophers Who Failed in Love,’ while being entertaining, also carries a deep layer of contemplation. Schaffer does not try to mock philosophers; rather, with a human and sometimes empathetic perspective, he shows that behind their rational facade stand humans with real fears, attachments, and real failures.

Nietzsche and Paul Rée standing beside Lou Salomé seated

From Failure in Love to Hatred of Marriage

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the great German philosopher, despite his profound thoughts and influence in philosophy, could never establish a stable romantic relationship in his personal life. He remained single until the end of his life. His first love at 32 was a woman named Mathilde Trampedach, whom he proposed to by letter after a few meetings but received a negative answer.

Five years later, in 1882, he became acquainted with Lou Andreas Salomé, a young and intelligent Russian girl, who, although she liked his ideas, had no emotional interest in him and rejected his marriage proposals several times. Nietzsche was deeply hurt by this failure and could no longer establish a real relationship.

He later wrote that marriage would be ‘pure foolishness’ for him. In his writings, Nietzsche criticized the repression of desire in Christian morality and Victorian society and considered it a kind of ‘hatred of life.’ However, he himself suffered throughout his life from physical and psychological pains resulting from that suppressed desire and unhealthy relationships.

Collage of Immanuel Kant

Exiling Love to the Realm of Reason

Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, was a man of exemplary order and discipline whose life remained devoid of any romantic passion or emotional experience. He spent his days with a precise and repetitive schedule, to the extent that his neighbors set their watches by the time of his walks. Kant’s dryness and extreme order were reflected not only in his daily life but also in his view of love and human relationships.

Kant believed that any sexual desire, if not within the framework of marriage, was immoral, because it turns a human into a means for another’s pleasure. He considered a relationship moral only when it occurred within marriage and with the goal of procreation; where both parties, in his own words, ‘become objects of equal desire.’ In his view, desire before marriage was a kind of one-sided exploitation, and he even compared it to slavery, because it lacked a contract of equality and moral commitment.

In Kant’s view, marriage was not merely a bond for pleasure, but a moral contract in which two people ‘became owners of each other’s properties,’ and only within this framework was it permissible to take pleasure from another. However, he practically had the least personal experience with women, and in his behavior, speech, and even thought, there was no sign of human passion or romantic desire.

Kant’s personal life and moral philosophy were a reflection of absolute order, dry discipline, and the negation of any human passion and desire. He exiled love to the realm of reason and enslaved the body to morality; perhaps for this reason, he never fell in love and lived in solitude and discipline until the end of his life.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Bad-tempered and Pessimistic

Arthur Schopenhauer, the pessimistic German philosopher, had a harsh and merciless view towards love and women. He considered love not a romantic feeling but merely an instinctive tool for the survival of the human species; an unconscious effort for procreation and the continuation of the species. In his view, romantic relationships are fleeting illusions which, after the satisfaction of desire, lead to frustration and emptiness. According to Schopenhauer, the lover, after union, realizes that ‘he has been fooled’ and all that passion and excitement was nothing but a trick of instinct.

Despite his pessimism towards women, he himself also had experiences in romantic relationships. His first relationship was with a maid with whom he had a daughter; a daughter who died in infancy, and Schopenhauer never saw her mother again. A few years later, he entered into a relationship with a young singer named Caroline Richter, but pessimism and fear of commitment caused this bond to also break apart. His famous quote, ‘Marriage means halving your rights and doubling your duties,’ speaks volumes about his bitter outlook on married life. His last interest, too, in a seventeen-year-old girl named Flora Weiss, remained fruitless; a girl who detested him and even refused his gift because of ‘the touch of old Schopenhauer’s hand.’

Schopenhauer remained completely alone in old age and died in isolation in 1860. In his works, he considered women weak, superficial, and incapable of creativity, and in his famous essay ‘On Women,’ he claimed that no famous woman had ever created a lasting artistic or intellectual work. Such a view naturally deprived him of any popularity with women.

Despite his pessimism and biting tone, Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers to consider love a worthy subject for philosophical contemplation. He said it was astonishing that philosophers had thought little about a force that occupies half of human mind and energy and is the most important motivator of human behavior. For him, love was a powerful and inescapable emotion which appeared noble on the surface, but at its core was nothing but nature’s tool for the continuation of the species; a deceptive force that enslaved humans and ultimately ended in frustration and boredom.

Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt

Vacillating and Cunning

Martin Heidegger, the renowned German philosopher and one of the main figures of 20th-century philosophy, was also a complex and mysterious figure in his personal life, just like his difficult and enigmatic works. He married Elfride Petri in 1917, and this marriage lasted nearly sixty years, although his faithfulness to his wife remained only in name. Throughout his married life, Heidegger had numerous relationships with his students, but the most important and famous among them was the romantic relationship with Hannah Arendt; a young and intelligent Jewish student who later became one of the greatest thinkers of the century.

Their acquaintance began at Marburg University, where Heidegger, a professor of philosophy, wrote in a passionate letter to his eighteen-year-old student that he must see her to ‘speak with his heart.’ This relationship, which lasted four years, was a mixture of passion, thought, and prohibition. They met in the professor’s office and sometimes in the forests around the university. With the rise of the Nazis, Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and Arendt, being Jewish, was forced to flee to America. Despite their separation and political differences, the bond between them was never completely broken.

Years later, after the end of World War II, Arendt, while married, met Heidegger again and even defended him against criticisms leveled at his collaboration with the Nazi regime. She wrote in her letters that she considered herself Heidegger’s only true love and saw no one else in his life as replaceable. Critics found this forgiveness incomprehensible, but as their biographer says, ‘love knows no logic.’

Martin Heidegger and his wife Elfride in their youth

In 2005, with the publication of private letters, another secret from Heidegger’s life was revealed: His son Hermann was actually the child of a relationship between Elfride, his wife, and a family friend. This truth showed that even in Heidegger’s marital life, there was infidelity and contradiction, just like his philosophy, which oscillated between presence and absence, being and non-being.

The same philosophical ambiguity prevails in Heidegger’s writings on love. He considered love an experience in which a human both remains himself and transforms into another; a feeling that, while close, maintains a distance that never disappears. In his view, love is a kind of mutual presence; a presence in which the other penetrates into our lives, without being fully possessible or comprehensible.

Heidegger’s life, like his philosophy, was a mixture of passion and mystery, closeness and distance, and reason and liberation; an experience that found meaning on the border between philosophy and emotion, reality and concealment.

Andrew Schaffer – Author of the Book

Philosophy in the Hearts of Humans

The book ‘Great Philosophers Who Failed in Love’ consists of 37 short chapters, and each chapter is dedicated to the life of one philosopher.

In each section, Schaffer, with simple and engaging language, provides a summary of the philosopher’s romantic life and accompanies it with humorous and sometimes thought-provoking points.

The author’s language is far from philosophical heaviness, and this feature has made the book attractive to the general reader. However, behind the jokes and simple narratives, a deep insight into the conflict between reason and emotion, freedom and dependence, faith and desire is hidden. In fact, Schaffer uses the romantic failures of philosophers as a mirror to show that philosophy flows not only in books but also in the hearts of humans.

‘Great Philosophers Who Failed in Love: written by Andrew Schaffer with Goli Emami’s translation, has been published in 231 pages by Dexa Publishers.