Abstract
This article presents the thoughts of Michel Foucault, a cultural historian, philosopher, and intellectual, who brilliantly analyses the historical events of the past as creative criticisms for shaping human attitudes today. Through this historical analysis, Foucault examines the ways in which subjects were formed from classical times to the present. Foucault sees how this process takes a long time, starting from the subject as formed through various discourses to the subject as forming itself. To arrive at the latter, Foucault brings his readers to the classical Greco-Roman era to see how humans live their freedom and responsibilities. He also shows them various practices of the self through meditation and inner examination, as well as the practice of telling the truth (parrhesia) to oneself and to others. All this in the era was known as ethics and also seen as a practice of freedom. For Foucault, life must always be seen as a work of art that requires the attention of the artist from time to time in order to arrive at an art level considered useful and valuable to many people. Foucault calls this an aesthetic of existence, where life is not merely seen as something given, but also that must always be fought for creatively from day to day. Life must be seen as an unstable condition in which there are always cracks, therefore it has to be fixed from time to time. This is what Foucault calls a model of human existence.
Highlights
Michel Foucault, a 20th century intellectual and thinker, whose name was closely attached to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a French atheistic existentialist thinker, was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France, and died untimely on June 2, 1984.2 He was a specialist in many fields of study and he is known as a historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, a penologist and an expert in the study of criminology, a politician, an expert in archaeology, etc
See Joseph Pearson, op. cit., and Konrad Kebung, Parrhesia dan Persoalan mengenai Etika, op. cit
Summary
Michel Foucault, a 20th century intellectual and thinker, whose name was closely attached to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), a French atheistic existentialist thinker, was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France, and died untimely on June 2, 1984.2 He was a specialist in many fields of study and he is known as a historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, a penologist and an expert in the study of criminology, a politician, an expert in archaeology, etc. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault discusses the problematization of pleasure, concentrating on the aphrodisia, a term understood as acts, gestures, and contacts that produced certain form of pleasure.[13] There he discloses the aphrodisia known in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works, the practice of sexual acts which enhanced desire that is within human beings, as well as gestures and all kinds of human contacts which are dynamic and enhancing There he discusses the moral issues emerging from the discussion of the sexual act, reproduction, sexual withdrawal, how husband and wife should live their married life, and erotic relations with boys, etc. The discussion on subjectivity reaches the telos of his project, namely the care of the self Foucault deliberately brings his readers to the classical Greco-Roman period with all their life styles, and he wants to show that in antiquity ethics was seen as the practice of freedom. People’s freedom was highly respected and everybody seemed mature in his or her own self, in the sense that the individual had a good relation to his or her self
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