CARE OF THE SELF AS LIMIT-EXPERIENCE

Abstract

In the article there was made the analysis of Foucault’s concept of experience within contemporary anthropological crisis. It was emphasised that European humankind and culture have got hazardously growing distance between knowledge (truth) and human’s life (experience), and this situation necessitates searching for life practices based only on knowledge which is really required for the human one. Foucault uses experience in multi-dimensional mode referring to knowledge, experiment, attempt, practice, etc. Experience is considered to be something human that comes out of the changed, and such comprehension of experience is asserted to be the core one. There assesses experience as a crucial fundamental condition for human one to be the self, to be fulfilled, and also there validates the limit-experience as the required one. This kind of experience transgresses the limits of coherent subjectivity as it functions in everyday life, indeed threatens the very possibility of individual’s life itself, and tears the subject from itself. Both experience and limit-experience are aimed at personal self-transformation which obviously questions current conceptions of the boundaries of possible experience, and they are the only condition for the one to attain truth and live according to it. Since life and truth compose indivisible unity, there emerges obviously the problem of those mechanisms and techniques which could be the route for achieving harmonic human being. Antique care of the self is considered to be the most suitable and productive form of human experience and the most essential kind of limit-experience yet. All the technics which form care of the self eventually aimed at teaching humans to find themselves via the refutation of everything which is not its own. All these laborious efforts of self building are focused on working out human’s ability to choose what is close and to deny what is alien, and it is the most challenging point in care of self implementation. For the moment there is no uncrossable boundary between subject and object, self and the world. Human becomes the only relevant boundary and the only reachable limit for oneself. One is doomed to the continuous process of getting each time new experience, to the endless conducting of new limits not out but inside the self. So human has come to real marginalisation – not via social or cultural prohibitions but via paving limit, margin though the subject and by itself only.