Philosophers and Love - Love, from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir

“Some of the greatest thinkers of the West reserved for this ‘feeling’ [love], which is ours only because we are inconceivably its own, their attention and their philosophical scrutiny. And without ‘any philosophy,’ they were at the same time the ‘closed, dizzying place of incandescence, turmoil, glory or unspeakable misery’ of the only mortal god of our existences.” Eduardo Lourenço

For Plato, love is access to eternity; for Lucretius, it is a mortal illusion. For Kierkegaard, the challenge of an entire existence; for Schopenhauer, it is nothing more than a trick of sexual instinct.

As for Rousseau, the inventor of Romanticism, it is difficult to find a philosophical system more closely linked to the neuroses of its author.

In addition to theoretical conceptions of love, sex, and the relationships between the two sexes of the human species, this book also reveals the love lives of the philosophers: Sartre’s unbridled Don Juanism, Kant’s legendary lack of libido, Nietzsche’s failures with young girls, including numerous more or less serious, more or less bizarre, and for the most part little-known episodes.

It will be up to the reader to decide whether they can offer consolation for his woes in love.

Plato | Lucretius | Montaigne | Rousseau | Kant | Schopenhauer | Kierkegaard | Nietzsche | Heidegger | Arendt | Sartre