LARA PIMENTEL FIGUEIRA ANASTACIO

This work exposes some of Nietzsche's genealogical hypotheses about the origins of European morality and the ascetic practices of “renunciation of self”. The problem of asceticism as the foundation of morality leads to Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the Will, and the relationship between moral philosophy and philosophy of nature, which was based on a certain tradition of physiology and comparative anatomy. Returning to Schopenhauer allows us to compare him with Nietzsche's philosophy and his strategic use of scientific knowledge, highlighting the differences between them in relation to their physiological models. This is important to show how Nietzsche draws his concept of experience from physiology from experimental medicine and from the critique of teleology of biology: the contact and incorporation of new scientific principles allowed Nietzsche to conceive an extra-moral critique of human values, and the historical origin of asceticism is identified by him through a historical-drive method, which criticizes both self-preservation and the conservation of the species as principles of intelligibility of life organization. In the second part, the thesis deals with some developments of these hypotheses, especially in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, works that expose a method that manages to extract kinships between philosophical concepts, also proposing an investigation that relates individual and society as well as philosophy and its history.