Moral, ética e estética da existência em Michel Foucault

Abstract

The present text has as objective not only to define the concepts of "moral", "ethics" and "aesthetics of existence", in the periods studied by Michel Foucault, but also to capture their significant differences, in view of the orientation towards the possibility of an ethical-political in and of the present time. Such arche-genealogical studies of Classical Greece (4th century BC), of the Greco-Roman period (1st and 2nd century AD) and of Christianity (3rd and 4th centuries AD), show that these concepts maintain their mark, by the use of techniques aimed at achieving temperance and an increasing and detailed care of itself. The stylization of life gained forms of the most varied in this historical process, based on practices that sometimes approached the moral attitude of the ethical attitude. This flexibility of the uses of concepts, consequently of historical and cultural practices, brings in Foucault the opening of thought in the search for a political attitude towards acts, thoughts and freedom.