Michel Foucault--Fearles Speech

parrhesia: speaking what's on your mind. The speaker uses NO rhetorical flourish in conveying what he believes to be true. The truth is presented to the audience plainly and the speaker presents him/herself as the holder of the opinion/truth as well as the opinion/truth itself.

Two meanings of parrhesia:

1. pejorative: meaningless talk or chatter, which could be found in mob-rule democracy. It's also listed in Christian literature as the kind of empty talk that keeps one from contemplating God.

2. postive: to say what one thinks. To simultaneously tell an opinion that is a truth. One knows it is the truth because one believes it. This epistemological model doesn't work with our Cartesian desire for evidence since we desire mental evidence beyond the feeling of something being true. Rather than doubting until evidence supports the feeling (Cartesian), parrhesia requires that the speaker have the moral qualities necessary to first know the truth and then tell the truth to an audience.

Since engaging in parrhesia requires an act of courage, a turning away from self-preservation in order to speak the truth because the truth the speaker utters is dangerous, the truth teller can be seen in his allegiance to the truth despite potential harm. The risk in telling the truth is not always a life-threatening risk. It could be telling the truth when it may hurt a friend's feelings.

Since parrhesia involves risk, a king or tyrant cannot use it because they risk nothing. A parrhesiastes prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than "a living being who is false to himself"

Parrhesia is a form of criticism, either toward another or oneself. It can, however, only come from below. Therefore when criticizing oneself, the parrhesiastes must be under the interlocutor. A teacher cannot use parrhesia with his students. Parrhesia flows uphill.

Parrhesiatic acts are performed out of a sense of duty. The parrhesiastes is free to remain silent but his duty to the truth compels him. "Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to the truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people" (19).

"the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy" (20).

--Foucault then begins to discuss the evolution of the parrhesiatic game over time and how the word shifted in meaning.

Rhetoric

"In the Socratic-Platonic tradition, parrhesia and rhetoric stand in strong opposition (Gorgias & Phaedrus)...This opposition between parrhesia and rhetoric, which is so clear-cut in the Fourth Century B.C. throughout Plato's writing, will last for centuries in the philosophical tradition" (20-21).

Quintillian, however, incorporates parrhesia into rhetoric as an artless exclamation: "it is without any figure since it is completely natural. Parrhesia is the zero degree of those rhetorical figures which intensify the emotions of the audience" (21).


Politics

Parrhesia is embedded in Athenian democracy and takes place in the agora. However, in the Hellenic monarchies advisors embody parrhesia. Kings cannot be parrhesiastes but they should be adept players of the parrhesiatic game, and he therefore accepts whatever his parrhesiastes says. The king's parrhesiastes represent the silent majority in their advice.

Philosophy

Socrates embodies, though he isn't termed one by Plato, the parrhesiastes, roaming the streets telling the truth and encouraging others to perfect their souls. "Philosophical parrhesia is thus associated with the theme of the care of oneself" (24).

When the age of Epicureans comes around, parrhesia has become a techne.

PART TWO PARRHESIA IN EURIPIDES 

In this section, Foucault analyzes the use of parrhesia in Euripides' plays.

THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN

In the play, exile helps define parrhesia. In exile one loses their citizen right to free speech, the freedom to criticize, which results in unrestrained power, aka madness, for those who act without critique, operate without parrhesia.

HIPPOLYTUS

Parrhesia is linked to honor and free speech, without which one becomes a slave.

THE BACCHAE

In this play, parrhesia comes from a servant, who has the truth but no power, to a king, who has the power but not the truth. The servant enters into a parrhesiatic contract so that no harm may come to him when delivering bad news. The contract limits the risk of the speaker.

ELECTRA

This offers another example of the parrhesiatic contract, but in this example the contract is used as a subversive trap.

ION

Ion is a parrhesiatic play. This play signals a shift in truth-telling away from the oracle at Delphi to the Athenian principle of parrhesia. Truth switched from god to man to man to man. The play reverses Oedipus Rex's Apollo as revealer of the truth narrative. In Ion Apollo conceals the truth. The gods assume the role of silence and guilt in Ion instead of mortals.

"For despite the fact that it is in the nature of his character to be a parrhesiastes, he cannot legally or institutionally use this natural parrhesia with which he is endowed if his mother is not Athenian. Parrhesia is thus not a right given equally to all Athenian citizens, but only to those who are especially prestigious through their family and their birth. And Ion appears as a man who is, by nature, a parrhesiastic individual, yet who is, at the same time, deprived of the right of free speech" (51).

Ion is separated from his parrhesiastic nature through Apollo's inability to use parrhesia, so he will rely on the other parrhesiastes, his mother Creusa, to unite him with his nature. Creusa's parrhesia is directed at her more powerful rapist, Apollo, and herself.

ORESTES

In this play, parrhesia assumes the pejorative "babbler" denotation as embodied by a citizen who speaks at a trial but who cannot control what comes out of his mouth. He cannot distinguish "that which should be said from that which should be kept silent" (64). The speaker also displays a strength wrought in arrogance, not abilities of reason or eloquence. The man is a strong speaker only in that he has a loud voice. The speaker, though he has parrhesia as a citizen, cannot use it well because he lacks wisdom/learning. Therefore, a precursor for use of parrhesia is paideia or mathesis.

Diomedes, however, offers a counter-example for the proper uses of parrhesia. He is courageous. He is not a career politician; he only takes part in important political debates. He is a landowner who works with his hands (he has a vested interest in the preservation of Athenian land and property; this characteristic also means that he's good at making decisions because he has to do it in his business life). He's also a man of moral integrity.

PROBLEMATIZING PARRHESIA

Who then gets parrhesia? Unlike isonomia (equality under the law) and isogoria (equality in speaking opinion), parrhesia lacked institutional constraints and definitional restrictions.

What is the relationship between parrhesia and education? If parrhesia isn't simply frankness or courage, how then is it related to training?

The problem then is concerned with truth. Who can speak truth when everyone is given an equal voice?

Here Foucault describes his aim as inspecting the history of thought, how things that aren't problematic become problematic.

PART THREE: PARRHESIA in the CRISIS of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS

As a history of thought, the Greeks have discovered that equality in speech makes problematic the idea of parrhesia. If everyone has a right to speak, then those immoral speakers could help create tyranny. In this way, parrhesia could be bad for democracy.

The Oligarch asserts that Athenian democracy is an uneducated mob-rule that will never result in the perfection of the state.

Isocrates criticizes democracy because good orators are essentially demagogues who lack the courage to tell the truth and stand up to the demos.

"Hence, real parrhesia, parrhesia in its positive, critical sense, does not exist where democracy exists" (83).

For Plato, parrhesia's danger lies in its creation of varying "manners of life" and "styles of living." They become autonomous cities in and of themselves. They are their own constitutions.

Problem #1: parrhesia as a use of speech becomes a personal choice in a way of life. It is non-institutional and contingent upon the individual.

Problem #2: parrhesia transitions into a check on a king's power, a personal choice or attitude.

Aristotle: parrhesia "is either a moral ethical quality, or pertains to free speech as addressed to a monarch" (87).

PART FOUR: PARRHESIA in the CARE of the SELF

Foucault uses Plato's dialogue Laches in examining how parrhesia absorbs the "care of the self."

When Socrates asks his interlocutors to give an account of their lives, he's not asking for a confession of sin or wrongdoing. He's asking for them to juxtapose their bios with their logos. Do they practice what they preach?

Socrates can act as a touchstone or measurer of others bios-logos relationship because his actions in public life denote that he is a man that acts according to his words. They are in harmony, a Dorian courageous harmony.

"Socrates is able to use rational, ethically valuable, fine, and beautiful discourse; but unlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords exactly with what he thinks, and what he thinks accords exactly with what he does. And so Socrates--who is truly free and courageous--can therefore function as parrhesiastic figure" (101).

For an overview of the word's evolution see p. 102.

The Greco-Roman parrhesia is (106)

1) Philosophical: epistemic; critical; and practices what it preaches
2) emphasizes conversion and changing one's life so that he takes care of himself and others
3) Knowing oneself creates a knowledge of truth
4) It's utility stretches beyond the political realm and can be employed in many places

THE PRACTICE of PARRHESIA

Its practice occurs in small groups, human relationships in public life, and individual personal relationships.

Cynical parrhesia emphasized "critical preaching, scandalous behavior, and...'provacative dialogue'" (119).

The cynical parrhesiastic game pushes to the edge of the parrhesiastic contract by provoking the interlocutor to injured pride. Whereas the Socratic parrhesiastic game focused on revealing one's ignorance of their own ignorance, the cynics used parrhesia to reveal false pride, you aren't what you claim to be instead of you don't know that you don't know what you proclaim to know.


Techniques of examination

-------Class Notes----------

Foucault has two periods:

1) Archaeology: He performs research and then forms a methodology out of it. Focused on periods and institutions, normalizations and how people become the same kinds of people through institutions, discourse, etc. How do people become certain kinds of subjects.
2) Genealogy: Not about how people become the same, but how does power work when people act the same. How does power work when people can choose their own subjectivities? (Post WWII). This is about the norm (a statistical norm). Difference can proliferate because we deal with percentages/probablility. Statistics that skew from the norm calls for state intervention. They intervene by incentivizing different kinds of practices. The health of a state exists in a normed statistic range. The practices don't try to eliminate aberration they try to keep it in a statistical range, a manageable range.

His main interests are power, subjectivity, and discourse and how they all work together.

"Wherever there is power there is resistance." Genealogy is about the invisibility of power, people's not knowing that they're being acted upon.

Three kinds of power:

Sovereign power: The right to kill
Disciplinary power: The power to make a human being a subject (psychology, prisons, education) Creating docile bodies.
Biopower: Power that acts on the population, the statistical norm. It allows for freedom but intervenes when the state of institution becomes vulnerable.

The three kinds of power emerge historically but they don't replace the other. They exist simultaneously but the emphasis emerges historically.

The Cynics are, to Foucault, a Golden Age for parrhesia.






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