A dimensão ética do corpo nos pensamentos de Schopenhauer e de Freud

• Ano de defesa: 2015
• Autor(a) principal: Marinella Morgana de Mendonça
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; Brasil; FAF - DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Schopenhauer; Metafísica da Vontade; Freud; Metapsicologia; Corpo; Ética da compaixão; Filosofia - Teses; Ética - Teses; Metafísica - Teses; Vontade - Teses
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/48648

The current study has as its aim the investigation of the issue referring to the apprehension mode of the body in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, focusing in its implications to the field of ethics. We start from the presupposition that both thinkers, departing from their own specific theoretical concerns, have proposed a new comprehension of the body which is different from diffused materialism, which saw in this object a physical reality to be taken as an element of a science of nature. The Frankfurt philosopher starts out from the Kantian critical philosophy in order to try to understand the world, but seems himself in front of the impasse of transcendental idealism: all the objects, as is proposed by the Copernican Revolution, revolve around the subject, but there is no human subject without a body. This fleshless subject, foreign to the advances of the biological sciences, knows not the specificity of the body, which is the only object in the world that is, at the same time, representation and Will. This singular condition of the body turns the Schopenhauerian idealism into a metaphysical theory, which places the Will as an essence of the world. The Viennese psychoanalyst, on his turn, does not start out from idealism, but starts its clinical practice inserted in the medical scientific scenario at the end of the 19th century, deeply oriented by a physicalistic materialism. However, in the treatment of hysterical patients, he comes across a different body from that one that the medicine of his time used to explain. Freud, then, creates the metapsychological theory with the intent of understanding the body and, concomitantly, to harbor the suffering of his patients. Both Schopenhauer and Freud have undertaken criticism of the view of man that is based solely on rationality. The philosopher and the psychoanalyst have recognized man‟s pathos as a subject that is incarnated and liable to an unavoidable suffering, derived from his condition as an individual that is marked by Drive and by Will. In front of this condition, psychoanalytic treatment has been oriented, since its birth, by an ethics of care – understood as hearing the desire of the subject – and it was this initial ethical commitment that oriented the Freudian theory in a direction progressively further from its reductionist starting point. On the other hand, Schopenhauer‟s philosophical perspective did not unfold into nihilism or a thought that is indifferent to suffering inherent to the blind will to live. On the contrary, his dense criticism to philosophical systems of his time results in the search for different paths of salvation and, amongst them, the path of an ethics of compassion by means of the suppression of the differences between a wanting and another. The suffering body is the privileged path so that this understanding of the other‟s pain and living can be possible. Freud, on his turn, did not propose an ascetic perspective in order to extenuate human suffering; however, he understands that, by means of the analytic experience, the subject can destitute himself from his idealizations and narcissistic identifications – which are source not only of one‟s own suffering, but also of alienation towards the other‟s suffering. The two thinkers follow different paths, since Freud, from his clinical practice, has founded a new field of knowledge, and Schopenhauer, starting from his philosophical speculation, has unveiled a new way of thinking. Nevertheless, our hypothesis consists in the possibility of a fruitful approximation between both authors, not just due to the philosopher‟s influence in the psychoanalyst, but because the former opens new possibilities for a philosophical elucidation of the latter‟ psychoanalytic theory. After all, the Schopenhauerian metaphysics converges with Freudian metapsychology in a common ethical orientation: the destitution of the self as an outlet for human pathos, the most evident manifestation of which consists in psychosomatic suffering, i. e., in the pain of living as an incarnated subject. Schopenhauer and Freud‟s ways of thinking, therefore, point to the same direction, even though in different manners.