ABSTRACT:
Starting from a reading of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the present text will seek to define the free thinker as one who opposes the dominant thinking or thoughts, daring to think for himself. In doing so, the free thinker sacrifices himself, committing a kind of suicide (material and moral) out of his unconditional love for his community. Based on Ibsen's definition, the article seeks examples in the history of thought that corroborate this idea, as in the cases of Socrates, Galileo and Spinoza. The text will make some considerations about the transposition of this condition of the freethinker to the theater, as in Brecht's Galileo and Hölderlin's The Death of Empedocles. At the end of the article, we pretend to show that Nietzsche also had a conception of the free thinker as one who must become timeless and posthumous.
KEYWORDS:
Free thinking; Suicide; Self-sacrifice; Romanticism