THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE AND THE ROLE OF THE SENSITIVE IN THE BECOMING (OF) THE SELF. ASCESIS AND ETHO-POIETICS IN MICHEL FOUCAULT
“To be the truth and to be thought is nothing other than discovering that this night that thought thinks of its origin, this night that the flash of truth exhausts itself in designating in an instant, is the south of the world is its righteous light. The night of truth is the sunny being. This noon, it is the will tearing itself away from the will to truth, from the cowardice and laziness of a will which wants to linger beyond appearances on what there can be of stability, of permanent, consistent. This noon of being and thought is the will freeing itself from all wanting of truth, and courageously resuming itself as wanting the always dissolved truth, of becoming, of mirage, as wanting of appearance. » (Foucault, 2022, p. 186)
“Nihilism is one with Western metaphysics, symbolized by the opposition of the sensible and the supersensible, but whose essence is in the search for what there is of truth of being in what there is moreover being among being. Nihilism is the space deserted by being in which the sovereign metaphysics of being is deployed.Deciphered through Nietzsche's experience of the death of God, nihilism is much more than a cultural revolution in which Christian civilization is engulfed: it is even more than a historical catastrophe in which man would come to lose its light and the earth its sun. It is the movement of Western history as the destiny of being; This is the Grundworgang of Western history, its law and its logic. Far from being the fall of Christianity and the end of metaphysics, it originally made them possible. Western history as the destiny of being was nihilism. » (Id., op. cit., p. 217)
Introduction
We often hear that everyone has their own philosophy, that everyone is a philosopher in their own way, that representations of the world, proverbs, ancestral visions, popular adages, are philosophies and that, all in all, there is no There would be no need for anything else to philosophize than to use one's good sense and one's reason, one's common sense, and one's savvy. In short, that everyone would philosophize without really realizing it, and that in this sense, there is no point in learning what everyone already knows how to do, practice, by instinct, naturally, immediately, without having received of specific training and elaborate, technical culture, a type of hasty judgment and close to the truth, if not truthful. We philosophize, they say, as we breathe, and this is done, like M. Jourdain, in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière, makes prose, that is to say, without knowing it, by a sort of natural operation, more or less immediate, unreflective, consisting of making judgments or having general representations about life, love , politics, women, money, Africa, the destiny of the world, history, war, peace, the State, justice, and even on truth or God. However, it must be noted that we do not really know who it is who speaks, who judges, who consents or does not consent: there is here a confusion between an anonymous and unfounded dogmatic world of doxa and argued work , referenced from the exercise of philosophical thought (2). Because, when we question precisely the subject of these representations, the author of these thoughtless and almost oracular opinions, he almost always affirms that what he thinks is true from all eternity and that he does not need to demonstrate it further because it is obvious, manifest, clear and patent for everyone (which is no one other than him) and that wanting to explain his language, to explain his reasons or the foundation of his assertions comes down to sophistry or the art, if there is such a thing, of splitting hairs. The doxic “we” violently asserts that any reason for things turns out to be totally useless. This grand lordly tone, to speak like Kant (1776/1997), puts an end to the discussion and the dialogue by lowering the interlocutor to the rank of opportunist, of a fool, or of an uneducated simpleton who does not know the art of knowing without to know and think without explaining the reasons for one's judgments. This way of doing things immediately introduces a distinction between those who know from all eternity in an infused and elective way what they know about others, more profane or worldly, ugly lackeys of the thought of understanding who need of pedagogy and didactics to understand what everyone could understand effortlessly through an immanent and immediate immersion in the full and ahistorical substance of truth. Now, precisely what the philosopher does is to carefully and critically question what we say and scrupulously observe the form with which we say it to know if we know what we say and if the knowledge of what we say knowledge is known or unknown, up to and including its thoughtless dogmatic repetition. Philosophy does not immediately know everything it knows because it seeks it in a questioning form; the questioning form is not affirmative and declarative. It is interrogative and proceeds from a path and a journey which transforms the seeker and the field of his question into objects, into problems, into logics, furthermore producing ethical effects of subjectivation and transformation of the self and the questions which are at the foundation of the questioning attitude. This is how philosophy differentiates itself from wisdom in the sense that it never builds anything or never posits affirmative universal truths from the outset without first basing them on a search for meaning and significance and, above all, without testing through the effectiveness of criticism, in dialogical arguments, coherence and truth. It is interrogative and proceeds from a path and a journey which transforms the seeker and the field of his question into objects, into problems, into logics, furthermore producing ethical effects of subjectivation and transformation of the self and the questions which are at the foundation of the questioning attitude. This is how philosophy differentiates itself from wisdom in the sense that it never builds anything or never posits affirmative universal truths from the outset without first basing them on a search for meaning and significance and, above all, without testing through the effectiveness of criticism, in dialogical arguments, coherence and truth. It is interrogative and proceeds from a path and a journey which transforms the seeker and the field of his question into objects, into problems, into logics, furthermore producing ethical effects of subjectivation and transformation of the self and the questions which are at the foundation of the questioning attitude. This is how philosophy differentiates itself from wisdom in the sense that it never builds anything or never posits affirmative universal truths from the outset without first basing them on a search for meaning and significance and, above all, without testing through the effectiveness of criticism, in dialogical arguments, coherence and truth. further producing ethical effects of subjectivation and transformation of the self and questions which are at the foundation of the questioning attitude. This is how philosophy differentiates itself from wisdom in the sense that it never builds anything or never posits affirmative universal truths from the outset without first basing them on a search for meaning and significance and, above all, without testing through the effectiveness of criticism, in dialogical arguments, coherence and truth. further producing ethical effects of subjectivation and transformation of the self and questions which are at the foundation of the questioning attitude. This is how philosophy differentiates itself from wisdom in the sense that it never builds anything or never posits affirmative universal truths from the outset without first basing them on a search for meaning and significance and, above all, without testing through the effectiveness of criticism, in dialogical arguments, coherence and truth.
Philosophy is not a set of ready-made truths, but truths to be made and constructed in a dialectic, a logic of argumentation and deductions based more or less rigorously on experiences, knowledge and close reasoning. and proceeding from a logic of logical necessity established in an epistemology of knowledge. It is therefore based on logos (conceptual activity) and not on doxa (rhetorical posture); it proceeds like the mathesis of mathematicians by seeking through a language faithful to what it states the reality that it describes and aims to demonstrate or show.
Also, a philosopher relies on language, the memory of what he states and defines, and proceeds in a concerted manner, based on the agreement of his partners' desires for truth; this presupposes a desire to know, a love of and of knowledge, which precisely defines the concept of philosophia: desire for speech with a view to acquiring an ethics of truth in the act of searching through logos for what makes sense for oneself, for the other, in this world.
But what exactly is this sophia? And how to access it? Why are humans questioning beings and in search of knowledge and wisdom, as shown by the universal desire to speak truth and to base all discourse on a truth or a being or a Real in order to give it substance? Is there not, moreover, in this will to truth, a form of will to subjugate the other which in fact resembles a type of will to power, as suggested by Nietzsche and his sequel Michel Foucault? We will try to answer these questions while knowing that the essay is worth, here, humbly, as an attempt at first philosophy or propaedeutics, or initiation to the philosophical act (3). And while saying that any philosophy is always a first philosophy or the non-repetitive reiteration of the initial act of philosophy which demands authenticity and commitment in thought or in thinking as such: we must understand that beginning is the the riskiest act that there is in a philosophical approach because it is necessary to start from something which is based on a proposition or a statement or a fabric of fact already caught in the noise of the world. The suspension of the world, Husserl's epochè, is a constitutive act of all thought located in the world but which must break away from it in order to think it and thus put between thought and oneself a necessary distance both for 'there are objects of thought for a subject to construct in the world to know and think, and, on the other hand, in order to be able to return to the truth of the immanent world while having its own language allowing it to be thought of as such, from this inaugural beginning of the thought of the world. In this sense, all philosophy is an anthropological foundation. And it cannot be separated from the total body of this world: the flesh, the body itself, sensation, experience, existence, all human practices, give matter and life as much as form and content to the search for truth and knowledge of philosophical knowledge.
The question of the success of this project is secondary if we consider that the tearing away from immanence is tragically irreversible for thought in the sense that we will never again find the primary ontological naivety of the original question of philosophy, otherwise, in the fiction of the hackneyed myth of an origin of the world or of truth. In this sense, literature or the art of language (poetry, novel, theater, fiction in the broad sense) approaches this wild truth of an immanence forever lost.
Sophia and Aletheia: wisdom and truth
First, the curiosity of philosophy and the philosopher resembles the attitude of astonished naivety of the child who constantly questions, in a stubborn and naive manner, the things of life: what is this and that ? Why is the sky blue? Is there an end to the sequence of numbers, in life? So what's in the clouds? Why do we dream, love, desire to live and enjoy or no longer live sometimes? What is the meaning of life ? What is the being of things? Is there any other life than human life after death? Etc.
The philosopher's questions are traditionally metaphysical: why is there being rather than nothing? What is this? Then: why is this the way it is and not otherwise?
It has been said, since Plato, that the word philosophy designates the human being seeking and desiring wisdom precisely because he does not possess it. This word was coined by Pythagoras who opposed the sophos, the one who knows, and who thus no longer questions his knowledge and the world since he is knowing and knows himself to be knowledgeable in the absolute knowledge of what he knows . The act of doubting and seeking to know what is happening with the world, with being, with life, with oneself, is in itself a quest for wisdom, a desire for wisdom, a philo-sophia.
The first attitude of the philosopher would therefore be to doubt the validity of evidence, representations, conceptions of the world, prejudices and common sense which dogmatize and tell the truth about everything, without taking the trouble to validate or reason in an appropriate manner. argumentative on the being which is and which is not. In this sense, the philosopher is closer to the scientist who never trusts appearances except to better overcome them in experimentation (different from experience) than to the poet who exalts them in order to magnify them. But he locates his quest first and foremost in language and in what is expressed in what is said in language. Because saying and thinking must be the same; this therefore means that it is never the same functions that are at work in language a priori when humans speak the world.
To speak according to the being of things, according to the coherence of what we know, and to say what must be consistent with the being of things, these are as many figures of truth as philosophical forms of its enunciation: - saying this which is: it is to make an ontology of events based on their appearance in this world
- order your knowledge: it is to build a logic and a science of the episteme which makes the experience a structure correlated to a transcendental which gives it its necessity and its more or less complex determinations
- to say what is appropriate for the thing or the action: it is to practice an ethics of saying well or doing well (praxis) as the word moves towards being or makes it appear, at the risk to see it disappear in the rustle of words and the breath of speech
Philosophizing therefore requires a threefold relationship to the aisthesis of the world:
- firstly, a link to the sensitivity of lived experience,
- secondly, another to a grammar of forms and their possible and real meaning for and through a language which comes from this aesthetic relationship to the experience of the world,
- thirdly, a relationship to the form of utterances and statements, to be in touch with the reality of its object.
All this presupposes a complex and teleologically elaborate device in order to correlate existence and sensitivity in philosophical praxis to make it a true or veridical event. Truth in philosophy therefore proceeds from a search for wisdom which leads theory to the practice which fundamentally controls it: it is a theoretical practice which does not split theory on the one hand and practice on the other, as a naive metaphysics of thought fixed on what it does, forgetting what it constructs, develops and determines. Namely: a subject of knowledge who produces his existence (ethical ontology) at the moment when he discovers and produces the truth of the conditions of his knowledge (ethics based on a relationship with the truth). We can safely state that contemporary nihilism is a refusal of theory-practice dualisms, body-soul, thought-being, etc., for the benefit of a critical and hermeneutic interrogation on the meaning of action and meaning in time and knowledge for human beings, considered from the point of view of their historicity fundamental and from a point of view that could be called nominalist since it is not certain that the notion of truth is indexed to an eternal, stable, unique or permanent transcendence. Philosophy is the first killing of the sacred by the fact that it recognizes the value of the becoming of being and the dialectical mobility of knowledge in the very history of their constitution. The story of this story is the criticism of the forgetting of the conditions of production of truths in time where knowledge is systematized and thus comes to be superimposed over time on the very being of human life.
Thinking and acting: philosophy as action in the world, on oneself, and with others.
The philosopher does not live alone in the world: he lives with others and must deal with their presence before, and during (sometimes, after, without this directly concerning him (4)) his life, his existence. Also, he does not just think, alone in his corner, isolated from reality. He lives with and among humans: he is not a hermit, even if he adopts an ascetic attitude. Even when he founded Schools (Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, etc.), he did not live alone, he surrounded himself with friends, companions, brothers, and rarely disciples (philosophy is not a sect ). He is not a guru or a gang leader. He transmits his knowledge and his research in the questioning and careful quest for knowledge that he experiences with others, in the world where they live (5).
This is why the figure of the wise man isolated in his ivory tower is a false figure of the philosopher, marked again and again by the caricatured figure of a contrived Socrates who spends his time in dialogue with young people and the elite. of Athenian society. There is a very relative truth in making Socrates a street educator for the sons of idle nobles...
The philosopher must therefore leave speculative solitude or meditation, not out of assumed freedom, but out of necessity in order to come into contact with the world and, possibly, change it. Because the world is not such as the idealism or cynicism of the doxa thinks: we must know it and recognize it as it is to know if it lies, if it conforms to what we think of it. we know and the Idea that we can and must have. Philosophical research presupposes a commitment to the world and a commitment to others; this is what distinguishes philosophy from commercial and consumerist social practices. Whatever one says, philosophy is not a sophistry, nor a type of rhetoric, nor a liberal practice: it seeks neither to convince or persuade, nor to produce effects of seduction, nor a personal interest. It is an activity freed from any constraint other than that which it gives itself. It has self-concern and it is a practice of speaking the truth and acting the truth according to an ethic which presupposes the courage to say the right thing and do the right thing whatever the cost. It is therefore neither a morality, nor a science in the formal sense of the term, nor a technique of discourse: it relates to an art and a practice of life which makes life an art of living and a test of truth for oneself. The Self that philosophy constructs is a self freed from the passions of interests, of impulses, of material calculations. He is not disinterested because he seeks a certain form of joy, happiness, freedom that his research and his future give him. In this sense, truth is a subject or subjectivity in the making (Hegela also very well formalized this Odyssey of Consciousness6) and it has to manifest itself in the life itself that the philosopher lives in search of his truth. Let us remember that the philosopher shares with those who engage like him on and in a path of knowing and not knowing a whole type of behavior, actions, regimes of discourse, modes of being, ways of saying and not to say, to do and not to do, which define and determine a philosophical existence and ethics. Michel Foucault (2020) analyzed in his History of Sexuality, and in particular in volumes 2, 3, and 4, the sexual, erotic, dietary, literary, dietary, reflexive practices, and the different exercises which have shaped Western subjectivity .
Games and work on oneself on memory, from anamnesis to review, from meditation to confession, from solitude to community life, from self-restraint to social work of helping others, licentious emotions and self-centered in the logic of Stoic active and passive passions, an entire internal and social economy of desires and the tumults of feelings and concupiscence has profoundly determined the psyche of the man of desire and reason. It is then hardly surprising that the subjectivation produced by all these practices of the self, culminating in writing – literary or philosophical – and in a sense close to Aristotle's hexis (2022), or Platonic philia (Plato, 2020), constructs a history of truth linked to that of freedom. This etho-poietic is an aesthetic of existence which does not oppose desire to its sculpture of the self or to the rigorous exercise of the games of passions and wills, of emotions and perceptions, of intellections and imaginations, in the self-formation. This self is not an entity cut off from others and from the world: it is an intersection of several worlds and proceeds from a qualitative and intensive ontology by which the movement of the self does not stop in a frozen and hypostatized experience in a substance, a story, a phenomenon or a specific moment of being and life.
Aesthetics, in a philosophical life, from ancient cynicism to contemporary dandyism, from imperial stoicism to Benedictine monasticism, and in our modernity, and in order to avoid an active nihilism like that which is produced by a certain metaphysical reading of Nietzsche (8 ), requires a stylization of the self and a politics of passions arising from a sort of permanent and infinite subjectivation, in excess of the impositions of identity or the imaginations of health and a balanced life specific to a civilization in search of truth. A critical and aesthetic position is not a withdrawal from the world or a life removed from social and political action; Rather, such asceticism requires that we reflect and act by taking into account the multiple determinations that make and unmake our imaginary identities and our “truths.” The era seeks to stop thought in an abstract and formal grasp of reality (algorithm, ecologism, economism, etc.) to precisely define it as a static ontology and essential truth: this metaphysical bias obliges societies and individuals to normalize their being-in-the-world in conformity with models that commercial society knows how to produce to its satisfaction in order to continue to accumulate unrealized added values and cut off from any anthropological relationship to the human world (that of the affects of the concrete, of work, of in relation and in the enigma of the world). It is in this sense that asceticism as withdrawal from the world, and as intensification of a certain relationship to the world in the continuous exercise of work on oneself and on the way in which the world and the other constitute us, this asceticism therefore as an exercise of self produced, constitutes a subject, a story, a meaning and a truth which relate to a logical and sensitive activity at the same time. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. a story, a meaning and a truth which arise from a logical and sensitive activity at the same time. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. a story, a meaning and a truth which arise from a logical and sensitive activity at the same time. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. a meaning and a truth which arise from a logical and sensitive activity at the same time. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. a meaning and a truth which arise from a logical and sensitive activity at the same time. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. This work or this ethos of the self is done in an empirical and immanent field but with a transcendence applied to the things and experiences of the world. In this precise sense, this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as an active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject. which brings them together in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject who recaptures them in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. this type of action of the self on a constituting self defines an original historical transcendental experience: the self, as active subject, works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject who recaptures them in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject who grasps them in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme. works on its determinations to redeploy them in a world where they are subjectivizing and reflective for the subject who grasps them in the logic of their constitution and their foundation. It is an eminently ethical and ascetic act in that it requires one to be aware of everything that determines thought in being and the being of thought in the moment when it inscribes its knowledge in a given episteme.
The return to oneself does not take place on an already constituted subject but through a tearing away from this Self, that of history and the truth of the historicity of all psychology, in order to produce a loss of self (we know the importance that the problem of the abandonment of the self takes on in the work of the later Foucault) allowing, in an act of resistance to the subjectivity constructed in history, and of the permanent invention of an unprecedented self, a stylization of the self, a certain relationship with oneself where truth is no longer a matter of technology of knowledge but of confronting the truths that they carry or abandon. Thus, a certain relationship with oneself allows one to escape from the influence of “truths” and knowledge to produce others, which are not abstract and romantic negations of scientific positivism but a cartography of its omissions and its unsaid things. In this posture there is a courage of truth and an obligation of minimal or nominalist erudition in order to avoid the essentialist traps and the naiveties of established sciences.
This asceticism is not about withdrawing from the world, separating oneself from society or taking a skeptical distance from experience; but, the philosopher inhabits the experience by practicing a certain way of being in the world while adhering very little to it since this world does not allow him to escape from his "truths" and forces him to think and live according to the norms and the devices that the sciences, driven by a desire for power and knowledge, tend to impose on us in the name of a luminous version of history which would have no gray areas, nor even obscure points impossible to understand. state within the framework of the order of the discourse, to use the title of Michel Foucault's initial conference at the Collège de France.
Asceticism or this way of being in the world is rather an aesthetic of the sensitive and of meaning which defines the ethics of the philosopher: never cut off from the world of men and the world of "truths", even if they are necessary bearers of shadows and falsity, the aesthetics of the philosopher is a way of being one's own and of not being caught in the dogmatic nets of truth and of placing above it a freedom which is precisely at the principle of desire for truth lost or forgotten in scientific practices instituted and institutionalized by discursive regimes and more or less violent practices of imposing truths.Speaking the truth is opposed to the truth and the courage to speak the truth is an ethic as much as an aesthetic aimed at freeing humans from the shackles of nihilistic determinations which force them to limit their acts and actions within the perimeter of the episteme of the day.
We then understand that the relationship to the sensitive, to ethics, to the truth and to the way of living it, of saying it, of embodying it, of putting it at the center of one's being in the world, all these continuous links with experience and the world, with oneself and others, all these micro-actions and these resistances or these submissions to the norms and the rules of the game of truths, define a way of drawing another plan of life, another subjectivity, a another way of feeling, seeing, listening, speaking and experiencing the world. It is these continuous and discontinuous practices of oneself on oneself and others, with or against them, which define the configuration to be invented, freely, of one's way of being in the world, of one's subjectivity. This subjectivity is not dialectically linked to an objectivity which would leave the games and logics of history outside of subjectivity: there is no receding of subjectivity into a transcendence which would give ontological weight to the sacred to a Pre-existing being, God, History, Nihilism or any other signifier designating an encompassing or historical transcendental. Criticism through aesthetics is an ethics of permanent vigilance so as not to mortgage the freedom of this movement in an object, a reification, an essence, a transcendence which would stop the movement of self against itself to become a self which relates to the aesthetic in the ascetic and ethical sense that we have just specified. there is no recession of subjectivity in a transcendence which would give ontological weight to the sacred to a pre-existing Being, God, History, Nihilism or any other signifier designating an encompassing or historical transcendental. Criticism through aesthetics is an ethics of permanent vigilance so as not to mortgage the freedom of this movement in an object, a reification, an essence, a transcendence which would stop the movement of self against itself to become a self which relates to the aesthetic in the ascetic and ethical sense that we have just specified. there is no recession of subjectivity in a transcendence which would give ontological weight to the sacred to a pre-existing Being, God, History, Nihilism or any other signifier designating an encompassing or historical transcendental. Criticism through aesthetics is an ethics of permanent vigilance so as not to mortgage the freedom of this movement in an object, a reification, an essence, a transcendence which would stop the movement of self against itself to become a self which relates to the aesthetic in the ascetic and ethical sense that we have just specified.
Provisional and impermanent conclusion:
The philosopher practices an art of living, of thinking, of speaking which necessarily leads him to change his way of being in the world, of knowing, of acting with others. The philosopher, in this specific activity, proposes a world and values which are not absolute and unconditional principles but foundations or attempts at the foundation of possible life. These possible lives, these lives of exercise and self-training are based on knowledge, truths, exercises of power (ethical, emotional, passionate, discursive, political, etc.) which oblige him to go against the doxa see the knowledge of his time. When he places his existence in the courage of this truth in the free quest for the best possible life for himself and others, he transforms the world by acting in a way closest to being because he acts on himself (Hadot , nineteen eighty one; 2014). Thus, he knows himself and he learns to live by knowing himself and by rigorously and freely constructing the best life possible for him. He leaves the ego of the passive history of humanity to construct another history, a heterotopia, which is not a utopia, in which he lives in the free sovereignty of his knowledge and his powers.
Philosophy is an asceticism that deals with oneself and the world, the other and the language of power, to live as best as possible with an applied concern for constructed and not given truth. In this sense, it is the opposite of the forces of division and simulacra that make life useless and deadly.
Philosophy then and in a singular way makes life more exciting, exciting, intense: by confronting its mysterious enigma and thinking about it, it always intensifies life and amplifies it in order to make it even more alive and true. It is through this difficult but beautiful task that he becomes like a free and wise god as much as a poet and artisan of the universe. Becoming this freedom corresponds exactly to exercising over oneself a power of transformation and action that the world prohibits in its inauthentic mode of operation.
Also, to resist and contravene the ease of refusing this asceticism is to continue the infinite task of interior experience which consists, in the free games of truth and knowledge, of wanting to give meaning and form to this affirmed philosophical life which tears thought away from the inertia of current events from the desire for ignorance and occultation of our horizons of life characterizing contemporary nihilism.
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(2) - From Plato to Descartes, the idea that doxa or common sense would take itself for truth without doubting itself and its aesthetic world of absolute truths, is a topos well known to philosophers; what is a little less so is the historical and dialectical structure of the remanence of this ideology of truth insensitive to the dialogic and to the tests of the epistemology of the verification of this type of statements.
(3) - Philosophy, as Hegel reminds us in the Preface to the System of Science which is the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1806, never ceases to begin an incessant beginning again which it must actualize in the process of its elaboration itself. This is why it is historically dedicated to reflecting historically on the link it has with time and with the sense of its inexhaustible historicity in the moment in which it appears as a beginning. It is another way of saying that chronology is not the fundamental question of history for philosophy (without it being a superfluous question) but that time and the construction of meaning in temporality participate in the logic of philosophical event as such.History can be a myth if it forgets the conditions of its epistemological constitution and those of its productions as a discourse located in an era which constitutes it as it does, in a web of determinations which it must understand and explain in order not to forget the conditions which make it its truth.
(4) - The Courses given at the Collège de France by Michel Foucault form a part of the French philosopher's written work that is more important than that written during his lifetime; which is the most legitimate given the will of the author, the relevance of the work, and the issues of the time which published them? We see that the question of the meaning of a complete work is as much a matter for the author as for his rights holders and publishers.
(5) - It is one of Heidegger's theses in Being and Time (1927) to develop the forgetting of being in the will of will leading to a humanism obscuring the nihilistic project of the recovery of being through science or the difference between being as the appearance of being and being as light which allows the coloring of the objects of the world. We will read with this indication Heidegger's text: “Nietzsche's words: ''God is dead! ''” in Paths that Lead Nowhere (1962, pp. 253-322).
(6) - Hegel introduces a remarkable anthropological dimension into his encyclopedic philosophy which was well analyzed by Jean Hyppolite and by his student, who succeeded him at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault, notably in The Anthropological Question (Foucault, 2022, pp. 83-89).
(7) - Parrhesia is an attitude consisting of telling the truth at the risk of one's reputation, one's social status, or even one's life. Speaking the truth translates a strength and a courage to tell the truth which determines a way of being one's own and of becoming a self producing a subjectivity resistant to solicitations reducing the powers of the subject. It is clear that the reading of Foucault's ancient and medieval wisdom is marked by Nietzsche's genealogical method and his erudite nominalism. We will refer to my essay, augmented by an original afterword in the Brazilian edition: Foucault. A philosophical life (Mokaddem, 2021), in which I develop this singular point.
(8) - It is precisely this nihilism and the metaphysical trap concealed in the ideas of the Eternal Return and the Will to Power formulated by Nietzsche in his last opuses that the third part of the 1954-1955 course of Michel Foucault (2022): The anthropological question.
The references
ARISTOTLE. Nicomachean Ethics In: ARISTOTLE. Complete works, translations under the direction of P. Pellegrin. Paris: Flammarion, 2022.
HADOT, Pierre. Spiritual exercises and ancient philosophy. Paris: Albin Michel, 1981.
HADOT, Pierre. Philosophy as a way of living. Paris: Albin Michel, 2014.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. "Nietzsche's words: 'God is dead!' '' » In: Paths that lead nowhere, trans. French Wolfgang Brokmeier, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, p. 253-322.
FOUCAULT, Michel. The anthropological question. Course 1954-1955. Paris: Seuil-Gallimard-Hautes Études, 2022.
FOUCAULT, Michel. History of sexuality, 4 volumes, volume 1: The Will to Know, 1976; volume 2: The Concern for the Self and volume 3: The Use of Pleasures, 1984; volume 4: Confessions of the flesh. Paris: Gallimard, 2020.
KANT, E. (1776), In a grand lordly tone formerly adopted in philosophy. Trans. L. Guillermit. Paris: Vrin, 1997.
MOKADDEM, Salim. Foucault. A philosophical life, Brazilian translation
by Avelino Neto. São Paulo: ed. LiberArs, 2021.
PLATO. Phaedrus; Feast. Trans. Luc Brisson. Complete Works. Paris: Flammarion, 2020.
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