Par sentiment de cœur. Polisemia di un luogo etico-antropologico pascaliano

Abstract

The ‘heart’, an object of misunderstanding in a sentimentalist sense, condenses in Pascal’s thought a plurality of meanings that make it, in several respects, an anthropologically pregnant and fundamental ‘place’ for the understanding of his philosophy. The apparent opposition between heart and reason should be overcome in a complementary understanding, in which the former represents the intellectual-intuitive moment of the apprehension of principles that precedes the discursive development of reason and its foundation and condition of practice. In the heart, however, there is also the significance of the biblical-patristic tradition, familiar to Pascal, of the moral and spiritual barycentre of the person and, from there, the common root of the intellectual and volitional powers, where the unity of experience firmly unites the knowing and the loving of being, so that authentic knowledge is revealed as the love of the intended reality and, vice versa, this alone guarantees the cognitive relationship as the experience of truth. In this way, we find in the heart the place and expression of a sentimental dimension that is also profoundly human and harmoniously united to the rationality proper to the thinking nature of man.