Heartbreaks in the Big Easy: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Love

During spring break I flew into New Orleans with my girlfriend, seeking the authentic Big Easy jazz experience. We waltzed into a bar on Bourbon Street and found the place roaring. Girls in stilettos flitted up and down the stairs and even the bartender’s foot tapped to the rhythm, his grin reaching his knowing wink. We sipped milk punch and Sazerac and surrendered to the music, dancing until the wee hours of the morning.

I kissed her goodbye and returned to Harvard. The next day, she wrote me a long breakup text. I sat stunned in my room, staring at the ceiling as John Coltrane’s All or Nothing at All spun on the turntable, the vinyl’s soft crackle filling the space wall to wall. It didn’t come all at once—the melancholy—but the sky slowly drained of its hue. As I attended a lecture on the Gordon Growth model, my thoughts swirled in a tumultuous storm, and in its eye, appeared Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

As an aspiring philosopher, my preferred interpretation of love is through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. At the heart of his tome is the master-slave dialectic, a metaphysical concept intended to explain the development of human consciousness and self-understanding. The central thought is that consciousness cannot claim to be what it is without justification—it must become self-consciousness. Since Descartes, philosophers have affirmed their self-consciousness through “I think, therefore I am.” However, Hegel rejected this aphorism as empty self-affirmation because self-consciousness cannot be solipsistic; it requires validation from others. He writes, “Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other.”

Thus begins Hegel’s famous thought experiment: what transpires when two solitary human consciousnesses first meet in Eden? Answer: a struggle to the death culminating in one individual’s dominion over the other. However, this scenario is more intricate than it first appears. The victor, now the master, cannot genuinely acknowledge the consciousness of the subjugated, leading to an unfulfilled longing for recognition. In a stunning twist, Hegel contends that authentic self-sufficient consciousness actually arises from the enslaved. What made the “slave” was their fear for their life and willingness to submit to the other rather than die. This experience throws everything into question for them: everything that had appeared stable and true had been shattered by their submission. Thus, they face the contingency of everything, and it dawns on them that if everything is contingent, then so too is their subjugation; Hegel believed that it is precisely the enslaved’s fear of death and their total submission that allows true self-consciousness to rise from the ashes. 

Adapting Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, I view love as an extension of the struggle for recognition. Like Hegel, I begin with the cogito, where the thinking ego desires to affirm its own existence. My consciousness, by thinking and turning inward, sustains itself—and yet, this solipsistic, self-enclosed desire of the ego remains trapped in the epistemic tautology of ego = ego, unable to venture beyond self-affirmation amidst endless strife. Thus, the ego’s desires begin extending beyond serene self-absorption mediated through the prism of Eros. More specifically, my consciousness now desires to project itself, externalize itself, and reproduce itself. Therefore, the consciousness seeks another consciousness in order to be recognized as self-conscious. It seeks another to love. It seeks a loving, differentiated unity that is beyond either one of us individually even as we both remain grounded in ourselves. 

Although Hegel’s initial proposition suggests that the meeting of two consciousnesses results in one dominating the other, love enables both consciousnesses to embrace each other as equals. While the master revels in and demands their own freedom, the lover wants the beloved’s freedom above their own. Instead of blindly demanding validation from one another, as alien consciousnesses do, lovers discover a reflection of themselves in each other’s eyes through the look. It is this love that permits them to rise above their inherent urge for domination and attain mutually-sustained freedom. In Hegel’s original interpretation, the master is not genuinely free because their quest for recognition is thwarted as the enslaved ceases to fully recognize them upon subjugation. Similarly, the slave is not entirely free, as their desires are dictated by the master’s will. Only through love do both egos near the verge of dialectical sublation reach true self-consciousness: love through one another, where the lovers genuinely discover a fragment of themselves in each other as negativity.

At least that’s what I recalled as I reminisced while Professor Gabaix droned on. I felt tears welling up and wiped them off with my sweater. Clinging to Hegel in the storm of my thoughts was not making things easier nor could it change anything. To reference Hegel’s words from the preface of the Philosophy of Right, “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” My interpretation of the master-slave dialectic transcended the unhealthy cycle of domination and submission, but it failed to acknowledge that love can only be grasped in retrospection hindsight.

While it may be true that lovers reach a higher state of consciousness through sublation, my Hegelian understanding of love was limited by the notion that love could even have a telos: a clear, ideal end to work towards. While love may be a journey, it presupposes no destination. In constructing all-encompassing philosophical systems attempting to predict everything,  I inadvertently sabotaged the potential of love. Like Daphne and Apollo, the more I chased the further it withdrew: my paralyzing introspection on my love rendered it lifeless. As my girlfriend tellingly wrote in her breakup letter, “knowing a lot can sometimes make you ignorant.”

Perhaps, philosophical inquiry initiates the alienation between subject and object, and as such, will further draw the experience of love away. Maybe, no matter the interpretation we give or how deep we probe, the search for love’s true meaning, its essence, escapes us and remains hidden on the outside of the reality that perceives it. But what if such a withdrawal is exactly what constitutes the very existence of love itself? What if the phenomena of love rises up as self-concealing exactly when we try to probe it? What if love means not understanding and still leaning into the fall?

I closed my eyes, quieting the striving I. As my mind emptied, I recalled Kierkegaard from the innermost recesses of my mind: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Philosophy can retrospectively comprehend love, but it cannot dictate its course. After all, the course of true love never did run smooth. And with this thought, I was transposed into a midsummer

“While love may be a journey, it presupposes no destina- tion. In constructing all-en- compassing philosophical systems attempting to pre- dict everything, I inadver- tently sabotaged the poten- tial of love. Like Daphne and Apollo, the more I chased the further it withdrew: my par- alyzing introspection on my love rendered it lifeless.”

night dream, enveloped by the sound of jazz, reminiscent of that dimly-lit New Orleans bar where it all began. Love is more about improvising and surrendering than I thought. After all, no jazz player knows what is coming next—they just play.

Lecture ends and I walk down Quincy Street, attuning myself to the world: the Earth seemed to play a different tune for the rhythm of my heart. The sun rose above Emerson Hall, painting the dusk with golden light, while the celestial panorama above revealed the moon’s crescent, gently adrift upon the expanse. In a quiet, serene clearing, I tended Dasein and assumed the mantle of its shepherd. In its soft murmurings, I discerned a resolute voice that urged: go to New York. And in an instant, a breathtaking harmony resonated through the trees, stars, clouds, rainbows, rivers, and the morning dew gracing each verdant leaf. With open arms, I surrendered to its allure, tumbling towards the beckoning unknown.

We end up listening to Sidney Bechet all night long.