Self-care: an ethical - aesthetic event in Seneca and Michel Foucault

Abstract

This article is the result of a first reflection of the research exercise focused to rebuild the criticism that Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, has offered from self-care toward the two classical conceptions of power. According to this, we can say that Foucault’s greatest achievement is to address power as an ethic of self-care, however this is not normative and institutional but a singular and particular subject that invites to self-create; that is, self-government.

Since a substantial sense the project has two perspectives: first, try to interpret Seneca’s and Foucault’s thought, from the self-care, and secondly, to establish a relationship of power and freedom in the field of ethics, the reflection in the field of teaching, the social reality and the university criticism. For developing the research process, it was involved the historical hermeneutic method, allowing rebuild the issues raised, and get in consequence a new critical and applied eye toward the pedagogy and teaching.

The article aims to understand and argue, in a critical way, the meaning and significance of “self care” into these important philosophers’ thinking. Self-care is a real and authentic ethical competence in freedom and autonomy with oneself; it is quality and excellence of life, and an educational project of training and self-training; it is authority and self-control, duty and right, critical and reasoned appropriation of possibility of being, doing, how to live together and knowing how to live.