Gay Desire and the Longing for Beauty

The paper is an overview of a project underway on the philosophy of desire as a prolegomena to a theological analysis. The thesis is that gay promiscuous desire and activity, rather than being some disordered or fruitless endeavor, is a witness to a missing aspect of our embodied human nature. The philosophical analysis of beauty and sensuality has a complicated history. I will show that from Plato, through Plotinus, the medieval thinkers, to Hume, Kant, and Heidegger, there is a recognition of desire as essentially bodily that has often been negated at the service of the immaterial, intellectual, spiritual. In this overview, i will focus on the two framing points of the tradition, Plato and Heidegger, to show that both have in their thought the potential for grounding a robust affirmation of physical erotic interaction.