masterThesis
Corpo, prazer e estilo: a ética hedonista de Michel Onfray
Fecha
2020-02-17Registro en:
COSTA, Marcelo Henrique Pereira. Corpo, prazer e estilo: a ética hedonista de Michel Onfray. 2020. 254f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Filosofia) - Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2020.
Autor
Costa, Marcelo Henrique Pereira
Resumen
Pleasure is the main engine that boosts human behavior, a force of nature that drives life to its
utmost affirmation. That is why it is also the greatest ethical and moral issue for a whole
thinking tradition, from Democritus to contemporary neuroscientists. Michel Onfray, one of
the most interesting libertarian thinkers acting in the current French intellectual scenario,
claims that there is no ethics outside Hedonism, which is why his work is organized according
to the long lineage of hedonistic philosophical tradition. Onfray thinks of body and pleasure
as existential guides by means of conceiving human being as an entity comprised of raw
passions and vital forces that need to be shaped by a philosophical and ethical project.
Therefore, this study addresses this jubilant ethics from two important works of Onfray’s
bibliography: L’Art de jouir: pour un matérialisme hédoniste (1991); and La Sculpture de soi:
la Morale esthétique (1993). Considering such texts as theoretical horizon, this study is
organized into four chapters. The first one addresses the body – a hypesthetic machine of
which every philosophy is the expression. The Existential Hapax that guides this chapter was
developed by Onfray in order to manage the relation between body and thought. Afterwards,
the foundations of Hedonism are addressed by seeking to examine the very nature of pleasure
and pain as primary affections of life. Hence, the following questions are raised: Why is
pleasure a moral issue? What are its ethical implications? Is pleasure a necessary condition for
happiness? Are Hedonism and Eudemonism distinct or intertwined notions? In the third
chapter, the founding ethical developments of Hedonism are discussed, which are unfolded by
the philosophies of Aristippus and Epicurus – two thinkers from the ancient Greece. A
commented presentation of Onfray’s interpretation concerning such representatives of
Hedonism is proposed in this chapter. Pleasure and Style title the fourth and last chapter of
this dissertation. In fact, the Ethical Hedonism of Onfray is synonymous with aesthetics of
existence. Based on Nietzsche, Onfray addresses an individualism that is not a selfish. In
addition, Onfray supports an ethical relativism contrary to all castrating morals and glimpse
the conception of oneself out of the raw and chaotic material of which we are made in
advance. Afterwards, Onfray proposes a theory called aesthetic enjoyment in which the author
contemplates the body and its five senses but emphasizing the smell, taste and touch, since
these are ignoble senses devoid of intellectual status, according to the idealistic tradition to
which Onfray opposes. In conclusion, the purpose of Onfray’s work is to promote a
rematerialization of life as a way to counteract the contemporary nihilism – something only
possible if there is a reconciliation with the body in order to affirm its hedonic power. Hence,
it arises Onfray’s conception that philosophy is an art of living and not only a theory. In this
ethical project that celebrates friendship as the greatest virtue, the hedonistic thinker aims to
“know how to loyally enjoy oneself”.