The Complex Case of Stoicism and Its Reading by M. Foucault
Valéry Laurand
My chapter was born from a difficulty that I encountered in my study of Foucauldian parrhēsia—a difficulty I still experience today. I must confess that I am at a loss to understand the notion of “veridiction,” especially in its relation to parrhēsia, which constitutes less a problem of truth, than truth-telling as a problem of shame, or concealment of thoughts. I fear that this obstacle in understanding is not ready to be overcome any time soon. Nevertheless, this chapter provides me with the opportunity to try and shed light on my problem, since I have rather intrepidly decided to undertake a reading of the extremely scarce occurrences of the word parrhēsia in Stoic writings in order to consider the Foucauldian notion of “veridiction.” The challenge I have set myself requires that I follow the Foucauldian meaning of parrhēsia, in an attempt to find some residual echoes within Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Musonius Rufus (there is just one occurrence of the word in Epictetus, which refers to the ideal Cynic, and my reading of Seneca will be based on the problem of the congruence between speech and acts).
I must admit something else: I have been surprised to see that these ancient Stoic texts were not altogether oblivious to a Foucauldian meaning of parrhēsia. Moreover, I believe that, more than a Platonic parrhēsia, or a Philodemian one, or a Plutarchian one, or even a Cynic one, Stoic parrhēsia fits rather well with Foucault’s theory, and one might even argue that the echo-phenomenon could find its basis in a possible, however incomplete, legacy. I begin with a reading of Marcus Aurelius’s uses of the notion of parrhēsia (I). Then, I try to apply the famous distinction between what is true and the truth to Foucauldian parrhēsia (II). This hypothesis leads me to an analysis of the meaning of the Foucauldian notion of the “Reality of Philosophy” (III).
I
Do not waste the balance of your life in impressions about other people, when you’re not referring to some advantage of your fellows—for why do you rob yourself of something else which you might do? . . . I mean if you imagine what so and so is doing, and why; what he is saying or hiding in his heart or engineering, and every thought of the kind which leads you away from watching closely over your own hegemonic part? Rather you must, in the train of your thoughts, avoid what is merely casual and without purpose, and above all curiosity and malice; you must habituate yourself only to thoughts about which if someone were suddenly to ask: “What is in your mind now?” you would at once reply, quite frankly (meta parrhēsias), this or that; and so from the answer it would immediately be plain that all was simplicity and kindness, the thoughts of a social being, who disregards pleasurable, or to speak more generally luxurious imaginings or rivalry of any kind, or envy and suspicion or anything else about which you would blush to put into words that you had it in your head. A man so minded, putting off no longer to be one of the elect, is surely a priest and minister of gods, employing aright that which is seated within him.1
Μὴ κατατρίψῃς τὸ ὑπολειπόμενον τοῦ βίου μέρος ἐν ταῖς περὶ ἑτέρων φαντασίαις, ὁπόταν μὴ τὴν ἀναφορὰν ἐπί τι κοινωφελὲς ποιῇ· τί γὰρ ἄλλου ἔργου στέρῃ . . . τουτέστι φανταζόμενος τί ὁ δεῖνα πράσσει καὶ τίνος ἕνεκεν καὶ τί λέγει καὶ τί ἐνθυμεῖται καὶ τί τεχνάζεται καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα ποιεῖ ἀπορρέμβεσθαι τῆς τοῦ ἰδίου ἡγεμονικοῦ παρατηρήσεως. χρὴ μὲν οὖν καὶ τὸ εἰκῇ καὶ μάτην ἐν τῷ εἱρμῷ τῶν φαντασιῶν περιίστασθαι, πολὺ δὲ μάλιστα τὸ περίεργον καὶ κακόηθες, καὶ ἐθιστέον ἑαυτὸν μόνα φαντάζεσθαι, περὶ ὧν εἴ τις ἄφνω ἐπανέροιτο· τί νῦν διανοῇ; μετὰ παρρησίας παραχρῆμα ἂν ἀποκρίναιο ὅτι τὸ καὶ τό· ὡς ἐξ αὐτῶν εὐθὺς δῆλα εἶναι ὅτι πάντα ἁπλᾶ καὶ εὐμενῆ καὶ ζῴου κοινωνικοῦ καὶ ἀμελοῦντος ἡδονικῶν ἢ καθάπαξ ἀπολαυστικῶν φαντασμάτων ἢ φιλονεικίας τινὸς ἢ βασκανίας καὶ ὑποψίας ἢ ἄλλου τινός ἐφ' ᾧ ἂν ἐρυθριάσειας ἐξηγούμενος, ὅτι ἐν νῷ αὐτὸ εἶχες. ὁ γάρ τοι ἀνὴρ ὁ τοιοῦτος, οὐκ ἔτι ὑπερτιθέμενος τὸ ὡς ἐν ἀρίστοις ἤδη εἶναι, ἱερεύς τίς ἐστι καὶ ὑπουργὸς θεῶν, χρώμενος καὶ τῷ ἔνδον ἱδρυμένῳ αὐτοῦ. (MA 3.4.1-3)
In one of its rare occurrences in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (there are only four), parrhēsia reveals itself more as a result than as a process. It stands as a testament to the purity of a mind that has freed itself from all vice, passions, and what one might call “bad thoughts.” For one who is able to speak “with parrhēsia” (meta parrhēsias) has already achieved the moral goal (and such an end is achievable) of focusing not on others, but on oneself, on one’s own governing faculty, and in so doing, having only simple and well-meaning or benevolent impressions.2 Such a stance involves being able to prevent all other thoughts that would not refer to the simplicity of human nature (including, if need be, all considerations of general interest).
In a sense that is absolutely in keeping with the etymology of the term parrhēsia (that is to say: “to say everything”), to answer with frankness with what comes to mind signifies, in fact, to have nothing to hide, to be able to put forward everything you have in mind without blushing, to say everything one has in mind. (In the passage above, “to put into words,” ἐξηγέομαι, means “to put forward,” “to tell at length,” “to expound in detail,” here, the very bottom of one’s thoughts, of one’s heart; it also means, echoing the word ἡγεμονικόν or “hegemonic part,” “to govern,” to show that one can lead one’s thoughts, one’s impressions.) Someone who dares “to tell” is someone who is not ashamed. What remains striking is the fact that Marcus Aurelius’s parrhēsia appears to be in contradiction with the Cynic Diogenes’s (or for that matter with Callicles’), inasmuch as such parrhēsia would have nothing shocking or indecent to tell. Diogenes would certainly not blush at what he thinks or says, and he would allow himself to think or say things that Marcus Aurelius perhaps might not dare think. It is precisely because Diogenes can come out with the obscenest things without shame at the risk of shocking—a risk that he fully assumes—that his parrhēsia transforms the value of what is said: the obscene is no longer obscene as long as it is, precisely, said. Conversely, one might argue that, for Marcus Aurelius, some things might be thinkable and utterable (without shame), whereas others might not be so.
Such speech takes root in what might be called an achieved ideal (and, to a certain extent, easy to obtain, provided that one agrees to focus on oneself), whereby an individual is not only capable of withholding from spilling or transmitting onto others his own fears and thoughts (either by curiosity, or by imputing motives to others, etc.) but has also recovered within himself the basis on which he is seated and of which can make use (χρώμενος καὶ τῷ ἔνδον ἱδρυμένῳ αὐτοῦ).
Parrhesiastic speech comes from what each of us has to rediscover in his own self, which permits the “use of impressions,” that is to say, the ability to lead a critical examination of an impression before giving to it one’s assent, before including it in our train of thoughts (in this case, a favorable one). Such a use allows for the transformation of a “luxurious imagining” (an ἀπολαυστικὸν φάντασμα) into an “impression” (a φαντασία) which might be more disillusioned but which nonetheless endeavors to “refer to” (ἀναφορά) mere reality:3
And, in matters of sexual intercourse, that it is attrition of an entrails and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus. (MA 6.13)
καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν κατὰ τὴν συνουσίαν ἐντερίου παράτριψις καὶ μετά τινος σπασμοῦ μυξαρίου ἔκκρισις.
It remains that this excerpt of a meditation testifies to Marcus Aurelius’s global strategy, which is a question of remembering, of reminiscing, of repeating to oneself constantly the goal (I daren’t say “ideal”) one has to achieve. In this text, the expression “with parrhēsia” (μετὰ παρρησίας) attests to the achievement of the goal but does not constitute the goal itself (one could indeed think that someone educated could also speak with frankness, without having in mind the same things). This transpires in another use Marcus Aurelius makes of the word parrhēsia, on two occasions. In these instances, it is not a matter of using parrhēsia, but of tolerating it. From Diognetus, who was his professor, the emperor assures us that he has received τὸ ἀνέχεσθαι παρρησίας (MA 1.6.1.4), “the faculty to bear parrhēsia.” In Meditation 6.30, the problem is to avoid being transformed into a Caesar (Ὅρα μὴ ἀποκαισαρωθῇς, 6.30.1), and Marcus gives the example of Antoninus, who “bore a frank opposition to his judgments and showed gratitude if better judgments were found” (καὶ τὸ ἀνέχεσθαι <τῶν> ἀντιβαινόντων παρρησιαστικῶς ταῖς γνώμαις αὐτοῦ καὶ χαίρειν εἴ τίς <τι> δεικνύοι κρεῖττον) (6.30.4). Both occurrences signify that one allows others to say everything they think (even if they have had no preliminary critical examination of their impressions), at the risk (that one has to assume patiently) of being put to the test of a criticism that might be opportune. Interestingly, as we note with the last occurrence of the word in the Meditations, such a parrhēsia might have pedagogical implications:
After Tragedy Old Comedy was introduced, which through its instructive frankness and its reminder by actual plainness of language to avoid vanity was not without profit. (MA 11.6.2)
μετὰ δὲ τὴν τραγῳδίαν ἡ ἀρχαία κωμῳδία παρήχθη, παιδαγωγικὴν παρρησίαν ἔχουσα καὶ τῆς ἀτυφίας οὐκ ἀχρήστως δι' αὐτῆς τῆς εὐθυρρημοσύνης ὑπομιμνῄσκουσα.
The pair of words, παρρησία (“frankness”) and εὐθυρρημοσύνη (“plainness of language”), undoubtedly refines our understanding of the former: mutatis mutandis, we encounter once again what is essential in the “use of impressions”—that is to say, getting the science of uncovering the nakedness (ἀπογυμνοῦν) of things, being capable of plainness of speech, in order to achieve the ability to say everything. Then, as Sophie Aubert-Baillot argues, “l’εὐθυρρημοσύνη is invested with a function that is simultaneously ethical and pedagogical, which relates it to παρρησία” (2015: 82–3).4 Parrhēsia gains a psychagogic power, whic h leads it close to a master’s parrhēsia, certainly similar to that which Marcus Aurelius was able to bear from Diognetus, a parrhēsia that reminds us (ὑπομιμνήσκω) of what matters most. Within that pair of words, we can understand parrhēsia, as Michel Foucault understood it in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, though his analysis bore on Epicurean parrhēsia, not only as frankness or freedom of speech (what here is implied, to a certain extent, in the word εὐθυρρημοσύνη) but also as a “a technical term—which allows the master to make a proper use, from the true things he knows, of that which is useful or effective for his disciple’s work of transformation” (Foucault 2005: 242).5
The analysis of the occurrences of the word parrhēsia in Marcus Aurelius allows one to situate the concept as both a means of achieving a goal and as the witness of this achievement. As a means, it is someone else’s speech, a master’s, which one must learn to bear in order to progress. As an aim, it is the act of a subject who is able to express his thoughts. As I have already said, we must not be unaware of the status of the Meditations. They consist in both an exercise and a thought experiment. From this point of view, we could certainly recall what Foucault says about l’Ecriture de soi (Writing the Self), because Meditations appears to be an ethopoetic exercise. “The fashioning of accepted discourses, recognized as true, into rational principles of action,” the writing of the Meditations consists in an “agent of the transformation of truth into ethos (un opérateur de la transformation de la vérité en ethos)” (Foucault 2001b: 1237). Marcus Aurelius speaks to himself as a master would speak to a disciple. What we have here is the progressor’s continuing back and forth (which Seneca theorized in his De Vita Beata) between the sage’s figure and what we could call the ethics of moral progression, where the problem is to find in oneself and use what constitutes the seat of self (to hidrumenon) and, in fact, also its basis. Marcus Aurelius’s ethics of progression obviously matches the aim that Foucault designates as hupomnēmata:
Withdrawing in to oneself, getting in touch with oneself, living with oneself, relying on oneself, benefitting from and enjoying oneself. Such is the aim of the hupomnemata: to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as possible.
Se retirer en soi, s’atteindre soi-même, vivre avec soi-même, se suffire à soi-même, profiter et jouir de soi-même. Tel est bien l’objectif des hupomnēmata : faire de la recollection du logos fragmentaire et transmis par l’enseignement, l’écoute ou la lecture, un moyen pour l’établissement d’un rapport de soi à soi aussi adéquat et achevé que possible. (Foucault 2001b: 1239)
We must, therefore, understand the nature of this hidrumenon (this “seat”) that everybody can find in himself and make use of. I would hypothesize that hidrumenon is nothing but the hegemonic part, naturally established to judge and naturally able to criticize impressions. In our text, the problem arises from recovering the use of that hegemonic part, and I would add and adapt a Foucauldian judgment about the Stoic theory of “appropriation” (oikeiōsis):6 if we have to “become again what we should have been but never were” (Foucault 2001a: 95), we have now to recover a faculty which has never been achieved and that we must elaborate via philosophical exercises.
Our question at present links with Foucault’s: that is to say both the conditions of this elaboration and its goal. Obviously, the latter could be expressed in this way: Marcus Aurelius, in our first text, encourages himself (and his reader) to equip himself with the means for critical thinking (that is to say, the means for stringing together impressions—εἱρμός—impressions suitable to be stringed together and that come from the thread—συγκλωθόμενα—of Fate). In short, parrhēsia proves a critical mind, which examines what it receives and what it elaborates from these impressions. Hence, if the goal consists in one becoming the minister of the gods, or in featuring already among the best, that goal is nothing but a correct elaboration of thought, achieved by focusing on the elaboration proper and on refocusing on the hegemonic part of the soul. The goal is involved within the progression and that progression does not involve anything new (This again echoes “Writing the Self”: the matter does not consist in revealing hidden things, neither in finding any ideal, but in making one’s own what has been already said or written by philosophers.) (Foucault 2001b: 1238; see also Luxon 2008: 381). Otherwise said, it is not a matter of achieving a transcendent ideal but of duly noting that this ideal is, in a way, already at hand, for it suffices, to achieve it, to simply look into oneself.
Such is parrhēsia: the witness of the relation between a person and his or herself, of an elaboration of the self when parrhēsia is ad dressed to others, and the agent of that elaboration when it is addressed by a master or by oneself as another to oneself. Obviously, that addressed parrhēsia poses a serious challenge (parrhēsia is mainly—historically in its political institutional functioning in Athenian democracy, as in its pedagogical functioning—a speech addressed to someone else), a challenge not entirely solved by the Stoic gap between sage’s truth versus progressor’s error, between two points of view. Marcus Aurelius addresses to himself, a progressor, thoughts of a sage who would have arrived safe and sound, who would know the truth, who would even be the truth, if we admit that a thought to which all impressions are linked has the firmness and assurance of a system—that is to say the truth, for a Stoic.
II
We must dwell upon this truth, both as something which has been achieved (since Marcus Aurelius’s speech has, for him at least, a truth value, and since we can assume that he reminds himself of Stoic systematic truth) and as something yet to be achieved. Michel Foucault, it is well known, reads in parrhēsia a problem of truth-telling, “veridiction,” and focuses his inquiry concerning parrhēsia on the notion of truth. He almost never speaks about sincerity (which could yet be a translation of the word parrhēsia, which would avoid—at least temporarily—the problem of truth), except when he says that sincerity is itself a criterion of truth (March 2, 1983, first hour),7 or when he conflates, without any commentary, truth and sincerity in Fearless Speech (Foucault 2001c: 15). This truth, nevertheless, verges on a “being in truth” as regards oneself or others. Now, here is the main problem and the philosophical task: “being in truth” makes problematic the very notion of truth (and besides, Foucault, in Fearless Speech, opposes Cartesian evidence with parrhesiastic truth, an opposition that we can find also in the discussion that follows the course of February 3, 1982) (Foucault 2001a: 182–3). Such a simple Foucauldian expression as “the true life” in fact involves a redefinition of the very nature and structure of truth. In a nutshell, telling the truth and being in the truth are phrases that do not refer to the same model of truth. Foucault has not missed this point, but he leaves a sort of grey area in his discourse concerning parrhēsia. Thus, one can discern a notable change in the paradigm of truth (which Foucault talks of in his course of January 5, 1983, to be found at the beginning of The Government of Self and Others): broadly, from truth as a process of subjection (assujetissement), producing subjects of knowledge and normalizing conduct (the example here is madness as a matrix of knowledge, or norm of behavior, that builds a “normal” subject), to truth as “alethurgy”: “the production of truth, the act by which truth is manifested” (Foucault 2011: 3, course of February 1, 1984), the act by which the subject, telling the truth, manifests himself; the act by which the subject is established by himself as himself and is recognized as telling the truth. However paradoxical in appearance, this act does not lead to normalization. To quote his cynic expression, it leads to the “scandal of the truth,” which might appear to be a call for resistance against all norms because of the irreducible alterity it implies.
Hence, Michel Foucault goes from a thought of a subjected subject, a “subject effect,” a passive subject, to a subject who forms his own relationship both with the truth and with himself—an ethical subject, a subject of ethics, an active subject of “the care of the self.”8 Beyond that change, when reading Foucault we are faced with a constant hesitation in the analysis of the problematics of alethurgy and in the definition of truth (whether it be in Foucault’s readings of Plato, the Stoics, or the Cynics). He seems to hesitate between two models of truth (Terrel 2010: 179ff.). First, a truth that precedes the subject, who constitutes himself within the truth. One could find, mutatis mutandis, such a truth in the ethical, technical, and philosophical knowledge that Marcus Aurelius refers to when addressing himself (that is the case, for instance, concerning the parrhesiastic master who dares tell the truth or/and blame the others). Here, it is a matter of complying with a constituted knowledge that would underpin the practice of the truth and the way to model oneself on a true discourse. In short, to try to match words and actions, which is a parrhēsia’s criterion. This kind of truth gives rise to a balance between philosophical conduct and philosophy as a system of values approved by the experience and practice of a master. Second, this is a truth that would invent itself, and, by which, the subject could invent himself. This truth would neither consist in a balance between a system (of values, of knowledge, etc.) and a conduct (from a perspective where parrhēsia would be an adequacy between ideals and acts), nor would it be a mere expression of the rejection of norms (even an aestheticized one) used in a city (from the perspective where parrhēsia would be the expression of an “other life”—Foucault 2011: 184, 244–6). That would be the truth of oneself that is encouraged by Marcus Aurelius and that guides his interpretation of doctrines, or the truth that Seneca obtains when, in midstream, he assures his accusers in De Vita Beata:
I am not a wise man, and I wil l not be one in order to feed your spite: so do not require me to be on a level with the best of men, but merely to be better than the worst: I am satisfied, if every day I take away something from my vices and correct my faults. I have not arrived at perfect soundness of mind, indeed, I never shall arrive at it: I compound palliatives rather than remedies for my gout, and am satisfied if it comes at rarer intervals—and does not shoot so painfully . . . I speak of virtue, not of myself, and when I blame vices, I blame my own first of all: when I have the power, I shall live as I ought to do. (17.3-4; 18.1)9
Non sum sapiens et, ut malivolentiam tuam pascam, nec ero. Exige itaque a me, non ut optimis par sim, sed ut malis melior: hoc mihi satis est cotidie aliquid ex vitiis meis demere et errores meos obiurgare. Non perveni ad sanitatem, ne perveniam quidem; delenimenta magis quam remedia podagrae meae compono, contentus, si rarius accedit et si minus verminatur . . . De virtute, non de me loquor, et cum vitiis convicium facio, in primis meis facio: cum potuero, vivam, quomodo oportet.
Where Marcus Aurelius situated himself within the realm of that which has been “already achieved,” Seneca, and without doubt because of the different status of his speech, situates himself between two nonbeings: he is not sage and, clearly, he will not be such. So, why? Is it worth continuing to philosophize? Even if Seneca admits that he does not match an ideal, it remains that he can be delighted to move progressively toward himself. What precisely matters is the delight in the process and not the sorrow of a gap between oneself and an ideal which is just a fiction (even if it is possible to become a sage, it suffices, so to speak, to return to one’s nature). To be among the best, as in Marcus Aurelius’ meditation, is not what matters. Seneca chooses to make do with the comparative form: to be better than the worst suffices to find oneself on the road of progress. Is Seneca drawing here the picture of an eternal progressor, who, despite knowing the truth, will never be able to live up to it? Far from being an abstract principle of existence, which one should be in accordance with, in an external way, philosophy is a discourse which commits the whole being of his listener. All in all, the fact that Seneca intends to achieve philosophical aims using ideas which he endorses (hence the anaphoric repetition of “I will” at 20.3-5, as many philosophical decisions which commit the progressor) leads little by little to putting them into practice (and to understanding that he is actually worth more than he thinks he is). That manipulation of ideas has implications: the trainee-philosopher makes real attempts (20.2) to fit with his discourse. The very thing consists in assuming the principles in the first person and in being the embodiment of these principles. The progression is determined by this adherence—that Foucault calls the “circle of listening” (2008: 217).10 It does not suffice to set a target; one must want to try to achieve it (20.5). That implies a crucial confidence, not first in oneself,11 but in the experience of former philosophers who have gone down that road.
If the sage practices his virtue as a permanent state, the progressor tries it out as a precarious tendency that he has always to reinforce, hence the gap between a discourse which pedagogically provides a model of virtue and the actual state of the progressor, for whom virtue is an inchoate and feeble disposition. The gap between words and actions, while being plain, cannot procure a good measure for one’s progress toward wisdom. The relevant measure, in order to appreciate the progress, consists in the awareness of the number of faults that have been avoided, thanks to philosophy. If the philosophical speech takes on the sage’s point of view, according to which every insane person is wholly blameworthy (but still improvable), a judgment about the progression of such and such a progressor requires a change of perspective in such a way that a vicious act is compared not with its opposite, a virtuous act, but with another act of a similar, vicious nature. One must not evaluate a progressor according to his program (even if that program allows for an actual progression) but according to the effective path he in fact crosses.
I would like to propose a comparison, which may at first seem slightly artificial but which could possibly shed light upon the discourses, not only of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but of Foucault as well. The comparison would be with a famous Stoic distinction between what is true and the truth. Clauses of philosophy can be true; it remains that the truth is nothing other than the absolutely stable state of a soul whose thoughts are firmly integrated in a systematic way. This comes close, I would argue, to the Marcus-Aurelian idea of a progressive integration of impressions in the train—εἱρμός—of thoughts. Additionally, such an integration will inevitably have an ethical effect in the shape of acts. Then, the formulated ideal of wisdom (as a transcendent ideal) could be equal to a set of true clauses (true, because validated by philosophy, as a system of dogmas), while the embodiment of these dogmas in a soul could be equal to the truth and differ in its ethopoetic effects. Then, the philosophical speech would not assume a legislative function, a body of doctrines that would provide a law to which one would conform. Instead, and this is not a play on words, philosophical speech would consist in a system of dogmas which could be judged and called “true,” but the “truth” of which would consist in their effective integration, through an experience, in the individual conduct of a subject transformed by this experience. As Nancy Luxon remarks, “Parrhēsia’s paideic techniques must not become an orthopaedy” (2008: 387).12 This ideal sketched by the philosopher’s words could be close to the “fictions” that Foucault refers to concerning the writing of his own books and the experience of self-reassessment they allow him to experience in his own life:
So here is a book that functions as an experience, for its writer and for its reader, much more than as the demonstration of a historical truth. In order to have such an experience through this book, it is necessary that what it asserts is somehow “true,” in terms of academic truth, historically verifiable. But what is essential is not found in the series of these true demonstrations or historically verifiable; it lies rather in the experience which the book permits us to have. And this experience is neither true nor false: it is always a fiction, something one constructs for oneself, which exists only after it has been made, not before; [it isn’t something that is “true,” but it has been a “reality”.] That is the difficult relation with truth, entirely at stake in the way in which truth is found used inside an experience, not fastened to it, and which, within certain limits, destroys it. (Foucault 2001b: 864)13
What matters for Foucault, as a philosopher, an academic, and an author, is to write, not to fix knowledge, but to grasp what he calls in French le processus du savoir by opposition to connaissance. Foucault’s clarification of his position on knowledge is important in this respect:
When I use the word “knowledge” (savoir), I do so in order to distinguish it from a knowledge (connaissance). The former is the process through which the subject finds himself modified by what he knows, or rather by the labor performed in order to know. It is what permits the modification of the subject and the construction of the object.
Connaissance, however, is the process which permits the multiplication of knowable objects, the development of their intelligibility, the understanding of their rationality, while the subject doing the investigation always remains the same. (Foucault 1991: 69–70)
Following the Stoic distinction that I referred to earlier, the Foucauldian connaissances could be equal to Stoic true clauses, while knowledge (le savoir) would aim at the truth, which could be analyzed as the Marc-Aurelian integration of critical ability. True clauses are not sufficient to modify a subject (Epictetus, for example, criticizes disciples who just “vomit” their knowledge without experiencing them and prefers those who have digested them14 —digestion could be a way of savoir, an integration of clauses in the soul), while the truth of “true” clauses does not lie in them, but in the wise soul who incorporates them—and reduces them to their contingency (Long and Sedley 1987: 202). Thus from 1980, Foucault had established the basis of his future analysis of parrhēsia; this basis would receive the appellation of “veridiction.”
III
Such a conception of truth as that which is split between a set of true statements, on the one hand, and a progressive embodiment of truth, on the other, in the shape of an exercise in critical examination of impressions, could prove fertile—first, because it makes me better understand the relationship between parrhēsia and truth, and second, because it provides elements that nourish a reflection concerning the nature of a philosophical thought experiment.
Foucault seems to deal with the significance of this experience in depth when, in the course of February 16, 1983, he speaks about “the reality of philosophy” (le réel de la philosophie). His notion enables us to proceed with distinctions concerning parrhēsia. If philosophy is “an act of veridiction which may perfectly well be mistaken and say the false moreover” (Foucault 2010: 228, 2008: 210), one must also retain that “the will to tell the truth is in its very reality,” the “activity of telling the truth,” and “this completely particular and singular act of veridiction” is philosophy proper (albeit within a formulation which could have been clearer, as it tries to bring the “will to tell the truth” closer to “truth-telling,” while defining parrhēsia as an act, something Foucault explains, besides, in the beginning of Fearless Speech).15 Parrhēsia consists in a “speech activity” which is not simply built on words (by which I mean, it is not a mere game inherent to language): it is, indeed, a logos, which produces an ergon (“work” or “task”) within a political context:
The reality, the test by which and through which philosophical veridiction will demonstrate its reality is the fact that it addresses itself, can address itself, and has the courage to address itself to whoever it is who exercises power. . . . It enters the political field in diverse ways, none of which is essential, but always marking its specific difference in relation to other discourses. (Foucault 2011: 228–9, see Foucault 2009: 2010–11)
What makes the “truth” of that veridiction is determined threefold: first, the speaker’s involvement in his own speech, second, the addressee of that speech, and third, its specificity. The first determining factor, the degree of the speaker’s involvement, finds its measure in part within t he ethopoetic function of discourse—this transforms the speaker’s ethos, which is the ergon of the discourse, and in part within the risk that the speaker takes (a risk that depends both on his own discourse and on his interlocutor). It needs noting at this point that the preferred candidate for such an approach to parrhēsia (already in 1983, but it will become plain in 1984) is the Cynic’s approach, rather than that of Socrates or Plato in the Seventh Letter. Symptomatically Foucault does not mention the noteworthy fact that parrhēsia becomes, for Philodemus, Musonius, Plutarch, and also for Philo, a way of handling that risk by minimizing it in order to maximize the impact of speech on the interlocutor: When Diogenes disregards the consequences of the violence of his words, the other philosophers try to find a way to preserve the bond with their interlocutor. So parrhēsia becomes a technē stochastikē (art of conjecture), for Philodemus, which allows truth-telling to others, but truth that others must precisely be able to hear (and understand). So, it is a truth that has been an object of reflection, not only about the circumstances of enunciation (the kairos), but also about the way of telling that truth. Here, we can question the effective conditions of the “reality of philosophy”: Is the ethopoietic a speech which is unlikely to be heard? Does the “specifity” of parrhēsia consist in the Cynic’s rashness in the name of “an other life,” which risks jeopardizing the bond with the interlocutor and to become simply a “vomited true clause” without impact and finally void? (Here, the risk is assumed not only by the speaker but also by the truth, if truth cannot be understood as truth.)
I’ll finish my chapter with an example of another view of the “reality of philosophy” from a Stoic philosopher, namely Musonius Rufus. After having quoted the famous Euripidean verses about parrhēsia, Musonius offers this analysis of a circumstantial parrhēsia:
But I should say in rejoinder: “You are right, Euripides, when you say that it is the condition of a slave not to say what one thinks, at least when one ought to speak, for it is not always, nor everywhere, nor before everyone that we should say what we think. But that one point, it seems to me, is not well-taken, that exiles do not have freedom of speech, if to you freedom of speech means not suppressing whatever one chances to think. For it is not as exiles that men fear to say what they think, but as men afraid lest from speaking pain or death or punishment or some such other thing shall befall them. Fear is the cause of this, not exile. For to many people, nay to most, even though dwelling safely in their native city, fear of what seem to them dire consequences of free speech is present. However, the courageous man, in exile no less than at home, is dauntless in the face of all such fears; for that reason also he has the courage to say what he thinks equally at home or in exile.” Such are the things one might reply to Euripides.
But tell me, my friend, when Diogenes was in exile at Athens, or when he was sold by pirates and came to Corinth, did anyone, Athenian or Corinthian, ever exhibit greater freedom of speech than he? And again, were any of his contemporaries freer than Diogenes? Why, even Xeniades, who bought him, he ruled as a master rules a slave. (Lutz 1949: 73–5)
ἐγὼ δὲ φαίην ἂν πρὸς τὸν Εὐριπίδην ὅτι, ὦ Εὐριπίδη, τοῦτο μὲν ὀρθῶς ὑπολαμβάνεις, ὡς δούλου ἐστίν, ἃ φρονεῖ μὴ λέγειν, ὅταν γε δέῃ λέγειν· οὐ γὰρ ἀεὶ καὶ πανταχοῦ καὶ πρὸς ὁντινοῦν λεκτέον ἃ φρονοῦμεν. ἐκεῖνο δὲ οὔ μοι δοκεῖς εὖ εἰρηκέναι, τὸ μὴ μετεῖναι τοῖς φεύγουσι παρρησίας, εἴπερ παρρησία σοι δοκεῖ τὸ μὴ σιγᾶν ἃ φρονῶν τυγχάνει τις. οὐ γὰρ οἱ φεύγοντες ὀκνοῦσι λέγειν ἃ φρονοῦσιν, ἀλλ' οἱ δεδιότες μὴ ἐκ τοῦ εἰπεῖν γένηται αὐτοῖς πόνος ἢ θάνατος ἢ ζημία ἤ τι τοιοῦτον ἕτερον. τοῦτο δὲ τὸ δέος μὰ Δία οὐχ ἡ φυγὴ ποιεῖ. πολλοῖς γὰρ ὑπάρχει καὶ τῶν ἐν τῇ πατρίδι ὄντων, μᾶλλον δὲ τοῖς πλείστοις, τὰ δοκοῦντα δεινὰ δεδιέναι. ὁ δὲ ἀνδρεῖος οὐδὲν ἧττον φυγὰς ὢν ἤπερ οἴκοι θαρρεῖ πρὸς ἅπαντα τὰ τοιαῦτα, διὸ καὶ λέγει ἃ φρονεῖ θαρρῶν οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἢ ὅταν ᾖ μὴ φυγάς, ὅταν φεύγων τύχῃ. ταῦτα μὲν πρὸς Εὐριπίδην εἴποι τις ἄν· σὺ δ' εἰπέ μοι, ὦ ἑταῖρε, ὅτε Διογένης φεύγων ἦν Ἀθήνησιν, ἢ ὅτε πραθεὶς ὑπὸ τῶν λῃστῶν ἦλθεν εἰς Κόρινθον, ἆρα τότε πλείω παρρησίαν ἄλλος τις ἐπεδείξατο Διογένους ἢ Ἀθηναῖος ἢ Κορίνθιος; τί δ'; ἐλευθεριώτερος ἄλλος τις ἢ Διογένης τῶν τότε ἀνθρώπων ἦν; ὃς καὶ Ξενιάδου τοῦ πριαμένου αὐτὸν ὡς δεσπότης δούλου ἦρχεν. (Musonius 9.48.1-49.9)
τὸ μὴ σιγᾶν ἃ φρονῶν τυγχάνει τις: “not keeping quiet about things one chances to think.” This negative definition allows a reevaluation of the problem of parrhēsia. Musonius’s parrhēsia is no longer that which appears in Euripides’s Ion (671-75), which was an attribute necessarily linked to the condition of citizen and opposed to the slave’s servitude of speech. (Foucault discusses parrhēsia in Ion at length in The Government of Self and Others, 2010: 72–147.) In Musonius’ view, parrhēsia is no longer conditioned by a political status. The opposition between a free citizen and a slave must be reevaluated (classically in Stoic thought). The wise man is the sole free man, while every insane person remains a slave, a slave to his own passions. If Musonius has shown that freedom requires a critical reevaluation of the objects of impulse and of the relationship between subject and objects and between individual and others, in this instance he puts forward that parrhēsia requires also a reinvestment of one’s own discourse. One must pay attention to its circumstances: parrhēsia must not be used at all times, in all places, and before anyone. Musonius criticizes the Cynic parrhēsia (in a way that Plutarch investigates in greater depth in his De Adulatore). The critical evaluation of the conditions of use of parrhēsia is an integral part of parrhēsia. However, this necessary management of risk depends on circumstances external to the speech only at a secondary level. No political reasons (then alienating) should hinder parrhēsia, even if they necessarily affect the way in which it is used. Musonius distinguishes parrhēsia as an inalienable attribute from the conditions of its use. In other words, the choice of free speech depends only on the subject, who knows also how to speak according to the circumstances. Hence, no one could be deprived of parrhēsia in his own city. Yet, internal obstacles can destroy parrhēsia: shame, fear, anxiety, and so on.
I have tried to show, in the first part, that Marcus Aurelius’s parrhēsia can be understood both as a critical process and as a result. As a result, it expresses a true speech and may be considered as a norm and standard of self-elaboration. According to Michel Foucault, parrhēsia can be also conceived as a critical process of self-elaboration and reflects that elaboration, which remains the key issue of what he calls “veridiction.” The gap between what could appear as an ideal (the truth of parrhēsia) and the process by which a subject fulfills it still needs to be evaluated. That was the second part of my chapter. The reading of Seneca has led me to distinguish “true” from “truth.” The former as clauses setting out an ideal, and the latter as progressive integration of this ideal in a subject (who becomes a subject through that integration): the truth of progress relies not so much on the enforcement of ideals but on the level of effort made to conform to them. That is, the philosophical experience trumps ideals, and it cannot be reduced to the mere application of ideals (as true as they are). Only the wise man, the truth embodied, knows how to use these ideals. Experience allows, according to Foucault, the digestion of true clauses thanks to the critical skills that they ensure. By experience, we move from “a knowledge” (connaissance) to the process of knowledge (savoir). Finally, the truth of a critical knowledge is expressed in the speech-acting of a philosopher facing the politician, what Foucault calls “the reality of philosophy.”
If Foucauldian “veridiction” finally seems to me quite close to Stoic truth as embodiment of the system (such an integration entailing both a self-modification and the power to use dogmas according to the circumstances), it remains for me to evaluate, from the example of Musonius, the distance between a parrhēsia which expresses the “other life” of a Cynic forged through the experience of the violence of truth (the parrhēsia favored by Foucault) and a parrhēsia whose courage is always (by concern for efficiency of the speech) associated with the cautious consideration of circumstances of its use. It appears to me that Foucault, in this respect and compared to the Stoics, claims a radicalism which disrupts even more his conception of truth by making it absolute, while the Stoics maintain anchoring in, precisely, the reality of a life dealing with circumstances and norms of a given society. The question that arises is how far the truth should extend in the transgression of norms. In a Foucauldian view, parrhēsia is that experience of truth which should run the risk of destroying the true clauses by which it has been elaborated. Stoic philosophers did not make this radical step: for them, truth could be seen as Italian sprezzatura: it is not a question of inventing new norms, but a question of having incorporated norms to such an extent that the wise man can transcend them while complying with them.16
Notes
1 All English translations are adapted from Farquharson (1968).
2 Note that, in our text and entirely in accordance with Stoic theory, the word φαντασία (“impression,” the way in which senses are impressed by things—impressors) is contradictory to φάντασμα (“imagination,” which is classically defined as “an empty attraction”—without impressor). See Long and Sedley (1987) 39B.
3 “οἷαι δὴ αὗταί εἰσιν αἱ φαντασίαι καθικνούμεναι αὐτῶν τῶν πραγμάτων καὶ διεξιοῦσαι δι' αὐτῶν—Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of thing they really are” (MA 6.13).
4 All translations from French are my own, unless otherwise noted.
5 From “cours du 10 février 1982” (Foucault 2001a: 232).
6 The Stoics maintained that all beings have an innate and natural drive to ‘appropriate,’ preserve, and nourish their own ‘constitution,’ that which makes them what they are. As human beings develop, this ‘constitution’ comes to encompass not only their bodies, but their reasoning capacity and social identity (Long and Sedley 1987: 346–54). Yet, all of them, mostly because of education, have broken early during childhood, with this natural drive.
7 Foucault 2010: 314. “Now we can obviously raise the following question. A speech without embellishment, a speech which employs the words, expressions, and phrases which come to mind, and a speech that the person who utters it believes to be true, would describe, for us at any rate, a sincere speech, but not necessarily a true speech, so how is it that, for Socrates or Plato, saying things without embellishment, as they come to mind, and while believing them to be true, is a criterion of truth?” (see Foucault 2008: 289).
8 Luxon says, “Rather than a ‘knowing subjet,’ produced in reference to a defined body of knowledge and some external order, the ‘expressive subject’ draws on the structural dynamics of parrhesiastic relationships to give ethopoetic content to her actions,” and, in opposition to a Kantian way, she adds, “Rather than being urged ‘dare to know,’ individuals are encouraged to ‘dare to act’” (2008: 379).
9 All translations from Seneca’s De Vita Beata are from Stewart 1900.
10 La philosophie ne peut s’adresser qu’à ceux qui veulent l’écouter (Foucault 2010: 235): “Philosophy can only address itself to those who want to listen.”
11 “Not to its own strength but to that of human nature” (De vita beata XX: 2).
12 “For parrhesia to provide a model of ethical self-governance, however, these practices must be able to form coherent subjects without these relationships being ones of discipline and constraint, and without objectifying the individual into a ‘body of knowledge’” (Luxon 2008: 387).
13 English (partial) translation can be found in Foucault (1991: 36), which I have used to translate.
14 Epict., Diss. 3.21.1-6.
15 Foucault: “The specific ‘speech activity’ of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: ‘I am the one who thinks this and that.’ I use the phrase ‘speech activity’ rather than John Searle’s ‘speech act’ (or Austin’s ‘performative utterance’) in order to distinguish the parrhesiastic utterance and its commitments from the usual sorts of commitment which obtain between someone and what he or she says. For, as we shall see, the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk, and so on” (2001c: 13).
16 I wish to thank warmly Prof. Catherine Lisak for her attentive and careful proofing and Janae Sholtz and Kurt Lampe for their helpful comments.
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