Antropología del deseo en Agustín de Hipona

Abstract

The leading question of this work asks about the relation between desire and personal identity: how does desire and the way in which it show to my self, configure my existence and constitute or discover my identity? The answer begins with the description of the fundamental situation of the existence in which desire appears as a phenomenon. This fundamental situation is called "restlessness" (inquietudo) and, on the contrary of other descriptions as the one of Seneca or Heidegger, it describes the eschatological ending in which desire has its resolution, because the world and everything that exists according to it is unable to satisfy desire in a permanent way by giving it the definitive peace. The fundamental destiny of the human is situated beyond de borders of the topologic. This condition makes more complicated the life in the world, because this extra-topologic destiny is not and has never been a phenomenon to human being. Nobody has experimented absolute happiness (beatitudo) nor the Perfect Good (summum bonum) and nobody can describe it definitively, so living facing it implies a double act of conversion. On the first place, an inversion in the law of nature and the world and, in the second place, a conversion of desire in itself (appetitus) that, although it is natural, it can reverse its natural tendencies in order to achieve an ordo amoris -and also because of it- that gives him the necessary virtues and forces so it can stop idolatrizing the world. Human desire -and its insatiability within the world- is unable to give an identity to human being, but reveals him as being a person. Indeed, human appetitus has a natural dimension that, as it is experienced inside topology, tends permanently to stabilize in homeostasis, in order to achieve its own well-being. However, this stabilization is always disappointed by the finitude of the world so, if desire continues its logic of survival, it ends devouring itself and as a prey of fear, because all mundane goods to which it tends according the natural law of the world, are perishable and they can be lost against its will. The fact that the human being is a persona means that desire can appeal to a different order, an ordo amoris. According to this, the magna quaestio does not present as an inquietudo about the personal identity, about the form that the self acquires through life, but for the form that my suffering neighbour demands to be replaced. Person is, in this sense, a paradox, because in order to find its own identity and fulfil with meaning its own proper name, the person must abandon individual perspective and embrace a primary responsibility about his neighbour inside of a community. Personal being of man means that his singular constitution is given by a permanent relation towards Good, and that this relation has two vectors. On the first place, the constituent relation is the permanent vocation that this Good, makes to person through memory and the events and, on the second place, the relation is the movement this person makes to answer this first call, by the means of pendulous movements of confession and conversion. Person is, thus, image and likeness of the Good. Image because in its interiority, person lives a trinitarian dynamics that refers to an infinite intimacy with the Perfect Good. Likeness because person can, with his free will, in an act of love, make effective and real to his neighbour the promise of Perfect Good.