Descartes and Nietzsche: perspectives about the body

Abstract

This article traces the conceptions of the body in the approaches of the French philosopher René Descartes and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the review of various works by each of the thinkers, it is exposed on one hand, the modern conception of the subject that finds the identity of what it is and the value of its truth in the reason. Therefore, a Cartesian dualism in which, at least in the canonical interpretation of the French philosopher, the body is considered as an “Epistemological obstacle”, as something inferior to reason and spirit from which no knowledge of any kind comes.

On the other hand, we expose the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who displays a critique of western metaphysics in which Platonism, Christianity and Cartesianism are implicated. The "Absolute Values", whether they be God or Reason, are undermined by the German thinker and transformed by others in favor of the body, life and earth. Thanks to this radical criticism of metaphysics made by Nietzsche, new studies are opened later about different knowledge and from different fields of social and cultural research that vindicate the body and life, while keeping alive the critique to the mechanistic model, to the "Machinic logic" and to the Cartesian dualism and its consequent and instrumentalist vision of the world and of man. In the end, we outline as a conclusion some consequences and possibilities of these perspectives about the body in the field of education and culture.