TEACHING LIKE A DOG (ΚΥΝΙΚΌΣ - KYNIKÓS): ANCIENT CYNICAL THOUGHT AS AN INTERCESSOR IN THE TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Abstract

This text starts from an inconvenience perceived in the experiences of the authors, in higher education, today absolutely crossed by the vector of neoliberal education, and their research on ancient philosophy and on the philosophy of education. In this context, the philosophical thinking is proposed as an intercessor element (DELEUZE, 2017) along with the genealogical backing to think about education today. At the outset, there are some questions about modern Kantian philosophy and Hanna Arendt’s thinking about education. This genealogy goes back to the philosophical movement of ancient Cynicism and Stoicism (4th century BC to 3rd AD), which had the truth about life as its main objective. In this research on cynicism and stoicism, we list the following as the main lines of analysis: 1) the cynicism/stoicism relationship and self-knowledge practices; 2) self-techniques of cynicism/stoicism and ethics aimed at education. Among the philosophers researched, we highlight: Plato, Diogenes Laertius, Epictetus, Seneca, Lucian of Samosata and Marcus Aurelius. Such a genealogy of ancient cynicism and stoicism seeks to denaturalize current normalization strategies and tactics, produced by psychological devices, by highlighting a rupture between these current psychological practices and the philosophical practice of ancient parrhesia and the search for virtue. Incontinently, it continues with the tensioning urged by the cynical, socratic, stoic philosophy and the Foucaultian thought about contemporary university education and, thereafter, the questioning of the processes of human formation, in course in the current experiences.