Foucault on Fearless Speech "Parrhesia"

In Foucault's Fearless Speech, he starts out by offering a genealogy of "parrhesia" [free speech in English] which appears in Euripides for the first time in Greek literature [c. 484-407] (11). "The one who uses parrhesia ... is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse (12). It departs from "rhetoric" which is meant to "help a speaker .. prevail upon the minds of [an] audience (regardless of the rhetorician’s own opinion)" while the "parrhesiastes acts on other people's minds by showing them as directly as possible what [s/he] actually believes" (12).

Sometimes, there is a "pejorative sense" of "parrhesia" found in Plato and Christianity in reference to the dangers of allowing anyone to say anything (12-13). But in classical texts, mostly, parrhesia is viewed in a positive light, meaning "to tell the truth." According to Foucault, the "parrhesiastes says what is true because he knows it is true; and he knows that it is true because it is really true.... There is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth" (14).

Foucault asserts that the classical sense of parrhesia can no longer happen within our current epistemological framework, post-Descartes. The "modern (Cartesian) conception of evidence" demands a coincidence of belief and truth mentally, while the Greeks sought out the coincidence of belief and truth "in a verbal activity," parrhesia (14).

There are two questions, the first classical and the second modern: 1) how can we know that someone is a truth teller, and 2) how can that individual be so sure? "Courage" is a strong indication that someone is a parrhesiastes: "If there is a kind of 'proof' of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is [his or her] courage" (15).

There are three requirements for someone to be a parrhesiastes or something to be parrhesia. Firstly, danger must be involved: “[T]here has to be a risk or danger … in telling the truth” (16). Secondly, parrhesia must function as criticism: “Parrhesia is always a game between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor” … and has to engage in “a criticism of the interlocutor or of the speaker” (17). Thirdly, “in parrhesia, telling the truth is regarded as a duty,” and maybe more importantly, “the orator who speaks the truth is free to keep silent” (19). So then, choice becomes a factor out of a sense of duty ... to the truth? The positive and classical sense of parrhesia establishes a relationship then between freedom and duty—two ideas which in the Cartesian sense are often deemed psychologically incompatible.

Parrhesia, moreover, is very specifically a verbal, not a mental, activity, through which certain relationships are formed between the speaker and—“truth through frankness [or honesty], … his [or her] own life through danger,” … and the “self through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people)” (19).

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“Dorian harmony” is courageous (100-1). We always run the risk of thinking too much as opposed to living out our political aspirations for social justice. As such, I find the concept of “epimeleia heautou,” “the care of the self,” very useful. To take into account “whether there is a harmonic relation” between one’s logos and bios as Socrates emphasized (97), is to encourage a “willing[ness] to care for the manner in which [one] lives the rest of [her] life” (98). I wonder what a contemporary test or “basanos” or “touchstone” (97) would look like?