Abstract

This essay examines the question of Aufklärung, which opens the Course of 1983, called "The government of self and others," given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. According to Foucault, the philosophical speech in the Occident has built a part of its identity in this issue of the government of self and others, which was in Kantian question about the Lights. For Foucault, the Aufklärung develops the following ideas: thinking about the "public" concept referred by Kant; defining modernity as the ethics of the present time; thinking also about the relations between government of self and government of others, going by an entire analysis of the relationship between obedience and absence of reasoning, private and public, until defining what is freedom of thinking