Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt Iain Thomson 1 Published online: 22 June 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract ‘‘Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt’’ explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called ‘‘the passion of his life.’’ I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. Keywords Heidegger Á Arendt Á Love Á Philosophy Á Perfectionism Á Ontology Á Agamben This work can be understood as a philosophical investigation of the nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called ‘‘the passion of his life.’’ 1 As anyone who has studied the & Iain Thomson ithomson@unm.edu 1 Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA 1 Giorgio Agamben begins his short essay on Heidegger and love by pointing out that many of Heidegger’s most influential early critics—including Karl Jaspers, Karl Lo ¨with, and Ludwig Binswanger (and, I would add, Herbert Marcuse)—mistakenly believed that Heidegger ‘‘maintained an obstinate silence on the subject of love.’’ See Agamben, ‘‘La passion de la facticite ´,’’ in Agamben and Valeria Piazza, L’ombre de l’amour: Le concept d’amour chez Heidegger (Paris: Rivages Poche, 2003), pp. 9–15 123 Cont Philos Rev (2017) 50:453–478 DOI 10.1007/s11007-017-9421-9