Parrhesia

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Parrhesia

Michel Foucault developed the concept of parrhesia as a mode of discourse in which one speaks openly and truthfully about one's opinions and ideas without the use of rhetoric, manipulation, or generalization (Foucault, 1983). Parrhesia, or truth-telling, implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.

Galien (in Traité des passions de l’âme et des erreurs) devoted a text to parrhesia and to the choice of the person who is rightly qualified as being able and having to use this free-spokenness. In that way the individual can tell the truth about himself and constitute himself as subject telling the truth about himself (Galien, in Foucault, 1984, p 5). Foucault (1984) responded; “So this is how I was led to focus on this notion of parrhesia as a constitutive component of truth-telling about self or, more precisely, as the element which qualifies the other person who is necessary in the game and obligation of speaking the truth about self.”

Parrhesia is the activity in which a person says everything: pan re–ma. Parrhesiazesthai is “telling all.” The parrhesiastes is the person who says everything. Thus, as an example, in his discourse On the Embassy, Demosthenes (in Foucault, 1984, p 9) says in 1972: It is necessary to speak with parrhesia, without holding back at anything, without concealing anything. The parrhesiast is the person who tells all. “Telling all” is then: telling the truth without hiding any part of it, without hiding it behind anything (Foucault, 1984).

Explained concise by Foucault (1984): “In short, parrhesia, the act of truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the person who spoke it; [second], a challenge to the bond between the two interlocutors (the person who speaks the truth and the person to whom this truth is addressed). Hence this new feature of parrhesia: it involves some form of courage, the minimal form of which consists in the parrhesiast taking the risk of breaking and ending the relationship to the other person which was precisely what made his discourse possible.”

Summarizing this, parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks. Even if this might be hurtful that has to be accepted. Parrhesia involves ways of acting, means brought together with a view to an end, and in this respect it has, something to do with technique.

In practice parrhesia will constantly find opposition between useless knowledge and the parrhesiast’s truth-telling, to tell individuals the truth of themselves hidden from their own eyes, to reveal to them their present situation, their character, failings, the value of their conduct, and the possible consequences of their decisions (Foucault, 1984).

References

• Foucault, M. (1984) The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984, pp. 1-22.

• Foucault, M. (1983) Fearless Speech. Dutch translation: Parresia (Amsterdam: Krisis, 1989). Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia. six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983.

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