Exercício de si e formação humana em Michel Foucault

Abstract

The research developed has as it´s main goal to reflect over the role of the exercise itself, centralized and essential to the tradition of Greco-Roman Hellenistic Philosophy from Antiquity, to the construction of free human subjectivity. It initiates with a diagnosis over the subject, seeking to evidence that, throughout their life, they have their subjectivity exposed to inner and outer mechanisms, which determines their way of being. The severity of this process downright attaches leans on, among other things, in the severe limitation of autonomy capacity of the subject in the relation with themselves and with others in the world, resulting in the vulnerability of their own resources, in the meaning of being alone without feeling lonely. As a way of reflective foundation regarding to this deforming situation of human subjectivity, the paperwork centers it´s efforts in the critical-interpretative reading of the work The subject's hermeneutics, by Michel Foucault. In this one, specifically, Foucault realizes an unique and enlightening approach of the Hellenistic tradition, recovering it´s original philosophical assumptions, demonstrating the transformation of some of it´s aspects in the I and II centuries of our era and indicating the relevance of the referred philosophical period so we think about the matter of constitution of human subjectivity. Upon the realization of the existence of criticism precisely to Foucault´s singular incursion in the Greco-Roman Hellenism, the work reconstructs aspects of the reading of Pierre Hadot, focusing on his book What is Ancient philosophy?, in which the referred author defines the decisive concepts of philosophy, of philosophizing, of sophy and philosopher. In the sequence, the thesis enters in the specificities of the philosophical schools of this period, to know, Plato´s Academy, the Lyceum of Aristotle and the philosophical chains of Cynicism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Platonism, and of Skepticism, detailing still the changes occurred in their inner in the Imperial era. The intent was of identifying in Hadot, also a critic of the Ancient foucaultian reading, common interpretative traces to both which, in it´s set, substantiate subsidies to the investigation. From that point, the work transited primarily for the quoted work of Foucault, always alert to the hadotian specifics, to present singular aspects from the Hellenistic period in the foucaltian perspective. In this sense, describes, with Foucault, the peculiarities of the concepts of gnôthi seauton, of the self-care in Socrates, of epiméleia heautoû and shows the link between philosophy and spirituality. Still, recomposes the basic features in three different ways of access of the Hellenistic position, the platonic epistrophé, the Christian ascesis and the Cartesian moment. Concludes by exposing, in the exegesis of the work The subject's hermeneutics, as Foucault understands the idea of self-care as self-practices and details nuclear elements of askesis philosophical proposition countersigned by the Hellenistic tradition Greco-Roman of Antiquity. In that context, highlights a dual function; on the one hand, the askesis works as a mechanism of conversion to itself and; on the other hand, as a process of subjectivation of the true speech, considering both primordial dimensions to the self-exercise. Signs, also, as important elements to the goal of self-constitution, the conscious practice of attentive listening, of meditative reading and writing and the art of speaking in parrhesiastic terms. Finallt, the work points, as a result, to the relevance of self-exercise as a self-formative process in the sense of extracting from it´s inside an idea of human formation and teaching action which potentiates the emergency of a subject capable of veracity and fit to the permanent confrontation of the always present and unavoidable contingencies of existence.