O corpo além da pele. Nietzsche, egoísmo e cuidado

The body beyond the skin. Nietzsche, egoism and care

Abstract

This article seeks an approximation between Nietzsche’s considerations of egoism — that is, of the selfish primacy proper to moral behaviors held by altruists — and recent studies in neuroscience that emphasize the plasticity of brain activity with regard to an expansion of the limits of the self beyond the body itself. The main hypothesis is that institutions and even personal relationships could, in general, be understood as prolongations and, ultimately, symptoms of our own impulses – whose characteristic would be that of the clash between more or less ephemeral forms of regimentation aimed at expansion – and to whose fictionalization expressed in the idea of self we attribute the notion of egoism; which would lead us, finally, to
envision an ethics of care as a phenotypic extension of self-care.

Keywords: egoism; phenotypic extension; will to power; ethics of care; care of self