In A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman cites Stendal as asserting there are four kinds of love: mannered love, physical love, vanity love, passionate love.1 An unofficial count in Love in the Time of Cholera revealed the word bestowed with twenty different modifiers.2 Yet, contemporary philosophy has been quite frugal in the distinctions it provides in its discourse on love. Perhaps therefore we have not yet understood love and lust. Hegel gave desire a position of honor in philosophical thought that it has not had since The Symposium. He makes it (Begierde) the condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. In Hegel's account, desire is transcendence. Yet, Hegel did not follow the seemingly straightforward path of the levels of love (eras) that Plato does. As the great translator of and commentator on Hegel, Jean Hyppolite observed: One more thing needs to be said here, at least in order to characterize Hegel's venture: it would have been possible to present the duality of self-consciousnesses and their unity in the element of life as the dialectic of love. The importance attributed to love by the German romantics, by Schiller for example, and by Hegel in his early works, is well known. Love is the miracle through which two become one, without, however, completely suppressing the duality. Love goes beyond the categories of objectivity and makes the essence of life actually real by preserving difference within union. But in the Phenomenology, Hegel takes a different tack. Love does not dwell sufficiently on the tragic nature of separation; it lacks 'the seriousness, the torment, the patience, and the labor of the negative.3 Hegel intersected the path of Plato, the path that seemingly has not been taken up in this original manner after Hegel. And yet, particularly in the work of Sartre we do find desire, love, as an original encounter with the other, one that is, of necessity, conflict. Even though it is clear in the Phenomenology that desire is the larger notion of which love is a subset, that eras is not singular, neither Hegel nor the thinkers who follow him, Sartre, Levinas, Lingis, clarified the relation(s) of desire and love. may well be that this is an ambiguity, or a vagueness, that comes to us from life itself, or perhaps from the contexts in which we think life and seek to articulate it. is a commonplace to differentiate (sexual) desire, lust from love, and to do so by establishing a hidden hierarchy. It was only lust, it didn't mean anything. Or: It wasn't only lust; I love you. Lust we often designate as having to do with animal or physical need. Or: in accord with conventional experience and the wisdom thereof, we distinguish phases of love and life, and affirm that (sexual) desire, or lust, is often what draws people into love, as does the philosopher John Armstrong.4 Or: we accept the Freudian account that all of the different types of love are simply weakened, diluted forms of the basic biological erotic drive for pleasure determined by the constitution of the human animal. One of the more fascinating aspects of Hegel's work in the Phenomenology, however, is that desire for otherness that finds its satisfaction only in another consciousness, is already the humanizing force; it is desire that makes consciousness human.5 For later thinkers of the phenomenologicalexistential tradition, that desire is humanizing and humanized is taken as a given, which does not mean, however, that the lust-love relation becomes perfectly clear. Although finding the origination of the relation to the other in a way different than did Hegel, Sartre, Levinas, and Lingis have doctrines on lust and love that are, in part, because of their lack of clarity, phenomenologically questionable. Drawing lessons from Hegel, Sartre affirms that conflict is the original meaning of being for others, explicating that in terms of the ontological structure of human reality or being foritself, in that I am responsible for my being for others, but I am not the foundation of it. …