The courage of the truth: clues about the production of academic research as an ethical bet on the care for oneself

Abstract

This article presents some ethical, theoretical and methodological assumptions that recognize academic research as an ethical bet on care for oneself. Following the intellectual itinerary of Michel Foucault the article approaches the path that the philosopher takes through Greek and Roman antiquity in which he recognizes experiences of subjectivation linked to an ethic of care for oneself. Foucault recognizes a shift from the relationship of subjectivity and truth in Antiquity to that of Modern morals which, from the sciences of men, recognizes the knowledge of oneself, the one linked to identity, as capable of establishing the truth about the subjects. This knowledge as capable of fixing and naturalizing the modes of existence, modes of subjectivation that has as reference the ideal subject of knowledge. From the approach to the Greeks and Romans, Foucault recognizes other experiences of subjectivation, another regime of the subject's relationship with truth, in which subject and truth are not bound by the outside (as for example in that relationship prescribed by science and Christianity), but by a stylistic of existence. In view of this, we raise some clues about the possibilities of thinking about research processes as an ethical bet of care for oneself, where academic research is recognized as the effect of the affections produced in the meetings and not on the contrary as defend some rationalities that start from the assumptions that researcher and research are distinct products and it is possible to establish neutrality between both.