L’eccitazione che raggiunge il cuore

Philosophical reflection on eros, beginning with the Platonic dialogues and particularly the Symposium, has always been confronted with the idea of its mediating role between the experience of earthly beauty and the aspiration to possess beauty (goodness) forever. This dynamic of desire cannot be reduced either to the dimension of sexual pleasure or to the exercise of a purely intellectual asceticism. Rather, it finds in the reference to the 'heart' the locus of the search for a unifying 'center' that makes it possible to overcome the alternative between sublimation and repression without resigning oneself to the equivalence between the erotic and the pornographic and gaining, precisely in this way, the possibility of a better understanding also of other forms of being-in-relation, of the role of the agapic dimension, of the alternative between domination and philia in political as well as in private life. Texts by Marcuse, Lacan, Panofsky, Freud, Nussbaum, Thomas Aquinas and two popes, Benedict XVI and Francis, are analyzed, among others, in support of this thesis.