7
Fear you see – [said Zarathustra] is our exception. But courage and adventure and pleasure in uncertainty, in what is undared – courage seems to me humanity’s whole prehistory.
He envied and robbed the wildest, most courageous animals of all their virtues: only thus did he become – human.
This courage, refined at last, made spiritual, intellectual, this human courage with eagle’s wings and snake’s cleverness: it, it seems to me, today is called – ’
‘Zarathustra!’ cried everyone sitting together, as if with one mouth . . .
(Nietzsche 2006: 246)
In the last two years of his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault recapitulates his entire oeuvre under the heading ‘The Courage of Truth’. In a remarkable study of ancient παρρησία (parrhēsia), Foucault implicitly identifies himself with a long-forgotten branch of philosophy which, running from the Greek polis to the early Christian era, and exemplified in the life of the ancient Cynics, seeks the true life.1 The true life is not founded on knowledge of the cosmos and does not consist in imitating it. What one orients oneself towards in parrhēsia is not the unchanging totality but the inexhaustible singularity of souls and situations. In place of the passively adaptive stance of wisdom, truth as a form of life, as a bios, is Foucault’s great theme in these lectures.
By his own account, Foucault (2010: 309) had always been interested in forms of truth-telling (veridiction), but here he encounters a form of truth-telling that seeks to make that truth-telling itself the form that it gives to life. Although this theme was partially a development of Pierre Hadot’s historical thesis on philosophy as a way of life in Antiquity, Foucault develops it in a much more ethical register, as we shall see.
Foucault first stumbles upon parrhēsia in his lectures (1981–82) on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, a study of practices of the care of the self in Antiquity. In these lectures, where parrhēsia is first noted for its importance to the philosophical relationship between guide (hegemon) and pupil in the Epicurean School, Foucault translates parrhēsia with ‘plain-spokenness’ (franc-parler) (Foucault 2005: 137). Taken up fully in the last lectures (1982–84), this translation becomes the ‘courage of truth’ (le courage de la verite).
Although Foucault had long been concerned with practices of veridiction, with the study of the parrhēsia of Socrates and the Cynics truth is no longer only a telling but, more fundamentally, a living – a being-true. The subject of metaphysical veridiction seeks the truth of being; the parrhesiast rather makes of truth an existence. With his earlier studies of ancient and Christian veridiction, Foucault was already interested in truth as something that is manifested as opposed to the sense of truth as scientific or objective knowledge. In On the Government of the Living (the lectures of 1979–80), for example, Foucault singles out what he nominates ‘alethurgy’ (from the Greek adjective alethourges: someone who speaks the truth) as that which makes truth appear against a backdrop of the ‘false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten’ (2014: 6–7). At this stage, however, ‘alethurgy’ is still identified with power, even to the extent that Foucault claims that ‘there is no exercise of power without something like an alethurgy’ (2014: 7; indeed he makes this point three times in quick succession). There is as yet little sense that truth could ever confront power, and, inasmuch as Foucault is still concerned here with articulating truth-power, he remains within the Nietzschean problematic that had shaped his work to this point.
Nonetheless, unlike Nietzsche, Foucault believes that truth need not lie. Thus in these same lectures of 1979–80 Foucault is interested in truth-telling as that which speaks of change, rather than as that which always says the same. For example, he highlights that it is ‘the path and work of the truth’ (2014: 24) that leads to the reversal of the characters’ fortunes in Oedipus the King, and implicitly contrasts this, later on, with oracular or religious truth-telling, which, in complicity with metaphysical truth, is a form of ‘veridiction that nothing escapes, that dominates time and pronounces eternal decrees from afar’ (2014: 48). In fact, Foucault implicitly identifies his own work with the former of these modes of truth-telling when making the aside that the only theoretical work he feels capable of is to leave a trace ‘of the movements by which I am no longer at the place where I was earlier’. Also describing this trace as a ‘line of displacement’, he argues that it tracks how his ‘theoretical positions continually change’ (2014: 76).
Foucault’s interest in parrhēsia is pricked partly by his search for something outside of the relationship of self to self characteristic of modern (govern)mentality and its antecedents in Christian confession (the subject of the lectures On the Government of the Living). Ancient parrhēsia constituted a very different mode of relation to self in which the subject did not confess his own truth (which makes the subject’s access to truth something that cuts him off from others) but rather challenged others and himself with the truth. Contrary to modern governmentality, which, given its point of emergence in the Christian pastorate, is a government of souls founded in a lack of confidence in them, Foucault finds in parrhēsia a form of the government of self and others that begins with confidence in self, others and what we can do together.2 The parrhesiast seeks to govern others through the care of their souls so that they might learn to govern or care for themselves; the pastorate, by contrast, sees the care of souls as a task that always requires a confessor and that is never brought to completion. From within the pastorate, if one is to have faith then one must be uncertain of what one is. ‘Fear, for the first time in history – well, fear in the sense of fear about oneself, of what one is ... and not fear of destiny, not fear of the gods’ decrees ...’ (2014: 127).
The Christian subject, confessing the uncertain truth of himself, complicates the ancient link between salvation and truth. In Platonic recollection, what is recalled is the subject’s primordial knowledge of the divine, namely the truth of the world. This subject, in recollection, is identified with the world, and world with the subject of recollection. In Gnosis, which goes far beyond Neoplatonism, what is known (recalling that gnosis means knowledge) is that the world is entirely foreign to the divine pnuema within each soul; but this remains a truth of the world. The subject of that truth, as in Platonism more broadly, is saved by this knowledge, which is at once its own truth. Christianity shatters this intimate connection between the truth of the subject and the truth of the world by making the truth that matters (at least for the Christian subject) his own truth.
Christianity is a real break with Platonism in the sense that the truth of the subject is no longer the truth of the world. For Foucault (2014), this rupture with Platonism is largely negative: as in Socratism, the truth of the world becomes largely a matter of indifference, but unlike Socratism, the new subject of truth can in no way be confident in the truth he tells, since this truth is, obscurely, the truth of himself. At this point, Foucault has not yet found a subject of truth whose truth is neither the sage truth of the totality nor the guilty truth of the soul. Later, by which time he has discovered the Cynics, Foucault will say that by putting ‘the truth of life before the true life’, Christian asceticism effected a great reversal of ‘an ancient asceticism which always aspired to lead both the true life and the life of truth at the same time and which, in Cynicism at least, affirmed the possibility of leading this true life of truth’ (2011: 338). These, indeed, were the very last lines that Foucault ever uttered at the Collège de France. They express the difference, which Foucault clearly felt to be very significant, between Christian truth-telling as condition of access to the true life (elsewhere) and the identity of truth-telling and the true life in Cynicism, where the true life, as bios, is right here. The former, seeing truth as a means of access to another world is a passive nihilism; the latter, as that by which battle is done in this world against the world, is an active nihilism (2011: 340).
But if parrhēsia is attractive for not being a timeless-metaphysical or uncertain-confessional truth, it is also, positively, a mode of subjectivation by truth that develops the Socratic idea of the care of self (epimeleia heautou). The link between care of self and the courage of truth is in fact all that Foucault claims to be interested in with his study of Cynicism (2011: 339). The Platonic form of this care by truth is ultimately less interesting to him because it tends towards the metaphysical question of what the self is in its truth (and the practices of purification associated with this turn inward). In Cynicism, meanwhile, the outward manifestation of the truth through struggle is what is significant.
Foucault is no doubt fascinated by this truth in part because he finds there a practice of the care of the self that takes the form of the sacrifice of self – a very Nietzschean theme that Foucault, so indebted to Nietzsche, could not have missed. ‘In the man who wants to perish, the man who wants to be overcome, negation changes sense, it becomes a power of affirming’, as Deleuze’s Nietzsche has it (1983: 176).3 Just as Nietzsche’s answer to the self-sacrifice of the crucified one was the eternal death and rebirth of his god Dionysus, so Foucault finds in ancient parrhēsia a care of self that resists the metaphysical temptation to essentialize or fix self. The subject of parrhēsia ‘is’ only in his courageous disregard for his being; his being is merely having the courage of truth of his situation, with all the risks that this involves. In one sense, then, Foucault’s courage of truth is an echo of Nietzsche’s claim that what is required is ‘To impress upon becoming the character of being’ (Note 617 of The Will to Power). What lets becoming be is the courage to affirm it as true.
Yet Foucault finds in parrhēsia something that is absent in Nietzsche’s Dionysianism. The affirmation of the suffering of existence in Nietzsche relates to truth at the ontological level, namely the truth of becoming, or of eternal recurrence. The Dionysian is the one who affirms this ultimate truth of the world (becoming) in his way of being. The Dionysian, conforming himself to the way of the world, is still a sage.4 In Foucault, however, the love of fate retains nothing of wisdom, with its temptation of retreat from the world of men (a temptation that Zarathustra, by contrast, has to struggle to the utmost to overcome). For the parrhesiast has the courage of the truth, not of being, but of being-with. Foucault’s subject of truth is thereby brought into an entirely positive relation with the other, a relation this subject lacks in Nietzsche. The self-sacrifice of parrhēsia is not an affirmation of a world of becoming but a care for the becoming-other of souls. It is ethical rather than ontological.
The courage of truth is thus founded in confidence rather than knowledge.5 The Dionysian one joyously affirms the eternal game of chance because he knows that this is the (dis)order of things, that this is how the world is. The parrhesiast takes no such comfort in fate; his self-confidence is rooted not in the way of the world but in the capacity of the soul for truth, which is the source of real change.
Parrhēsia in the polis
In his lectures on The Government of Self and Others from 1982 to 1983, Foucault carries out a genealogy of parrhēsia through an analysis of the use of the term in classical texts, in particular as it appears in Euripides’s Ion (c. 413 BCE). Foucault shows how parrhēsia first appears as a political virtue, as the virtue by which the foremost citizens might influence the demos through triumphing in the agonistic game of politics (2010: 104–5). In this sense parrhēsia seems to have been viewed as a necessary accompaniment of isegoria, the citizen’s right of speech before the Assembly, though it was not codified as isegoria was. Parrhēsia was not a matter of law because not just anybody was capable of using his right of free speech in order to persuade by the truth. Democracy gives to all citizens equally the right to rule, but only the best will be able to govern through truth; parrhēsia introduces a difference to the sameness of democracy – contra isegoria it is a principle of differentiation (2010: 183, 200).
Parrhēsia as a political practice involves the recognition that the problem of truth-telling in a democracy is a fundamental one given that the city cannot have an immobile relationship to truth (2010: 155, 195). Democracy gives decision-making powers to all citizens but it must also ensure that the demos takes the right decisions, and parrhēsia is necessary for this. Parrhēsia is the only way by which the demos might be brought into a relation with truth, in this case with the general interest, rather than giving way to the powers of rhetoric and the special interests that rhetoricians mask. So parrhēsia allows for the ascendency of some citizens over others in the general field of political equality (isegoria) in order that truth might emerge in a democracy which would otherwise be mastered, not by a tyrant, but by madness (2010: 161).
Parrhēsia is the difference that makes democracy governable and Pericles is the embodiment of this mutually reinforcing structure of excellence and equality, which seeks to utilize ascendency for the good of the demos by indexing it to truth-telling. As recorded in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles argues in the Assembly that the Athenians reject the punitive terms given to them by the Spartans, and this discourse carries the day. Pericles tells the Assembly that he is happy to be reproached if the course he advocates turns out badly, so long as he receives due honour if Athens prevails. Pericles takes a risk; he seeks to govern Athens, to be its foremost citizen, by having the courage of a dangerous plain-spokenness (2010: 175–8).
If citizenship (isegoria) is contrasted to slavery, then parrhēsia enables the best citizens to mark their difference even from free men, who, though they have the right of speaking, dare not express their thoughts in the Assembly. The parrhesiast, by contrast, is not such a slave as to silence his thoughts publicly (2010: 160). Due to its connection to a political agonism engaged in only by those who would be the foremost citizens, parrhēsia is marked from the beginning by a certain freedom. Through parrhēsia, the ambitious and bold citizen seeks to command others only in the context of a political game of persuasion where others have the same chance to command and may, indeed, prevail. Beyond the risk of being prevailed over rather than prevailing there is also the threat that, instead of commanding the general body of citizenry, the parrhesiast might antagonize it (2010: 105). And the exile that may result is a kind of death, perhaps worse than death if Euripides’s Electra (1361–2) is any guide: ‘What greater sorrow than being forced/ to leave behind my native earth?’
But political parrhēsia has a built-in weakness, and, with the execution of Socrates, reveals itself to be effectively dead even before the eclipse of democratic politics by the Macedonian Empire (from which point parrhēsia is exemplified in the courage of the Prince’s advisor when telling him the truth, as Plato did to the tyrant of Syracuse – nearly paying with his life for it). Democracy requires parrhēsia (just as political parrhēsia requires democracy), but constantly threatens it and, indeed, basically cannot handle it (2010: 184). The demos needs to be confronted with the truth but wants to be flattered by demagogues. Telling the truth to the demos is a risky business, as Socrates’s Apology exemplifies. By his own account (recounts Plato in the Phaedo), Socrates only lasted as long as he did because he took parrhēsia out from the Assembly into the Agora.
Plato follows his master’s lead and does not seek to practice an impossible political parrhēsia (2010: 214–15). For Plato, if truth-telling is to have any impact on the polis, then it will only be by way of philosophy. This is why kings will need to become philosophers if philosophers cannot be kings. Foucault (2010: 197) thinks that we could read all of Plato’s works as stemming from the realization, brought to a head with the death of Socrates, that democracy and truth can have no relation, hence the need for philosophy to take up the question of political truth (something that pre-Socratic wisdom had nothing to say about) in opposition to rhetoric, which rather takes up the question of how to prevail in politics. Plato infuses philosophy with the parrhēsia that had proved short-lived in the democratic polis itself. Indeed, we could even see philosophy as constituted by this offer of hospitality to a now homeless parrhēsia.
Parrhēsia gives to philosophy its reality, which is not some external reality to which it must compare itself but rather an internal principle, namely its will to tell the truth (2010: 228). Philosophy may be mistaken about the truth it tells but it is the compulsion to tell the truth that gives it being. And to whom does it tell the truth? To power. This is its courage. The shift in Socrates from a political parrhēsia to a philosophical parrhēsia therefore does not take parrhēsia away from the political field as such. Though philosophy does not tell the truth about politics, of what politics is or should be, it confronts the polity with the truth. While Socratic parrhēsia becomes impossible in the polis, it remains a truth-telling for politics, even if this political reality is now embodied in the person of the Prince. Indeed, this parrhesiastic role in relation to the Prince marks philosophy’s ongoing difference from rhetoric, the success of which is only measured, can only be measured, by its success. Philosophy’s reality, however, is not its political effectiveness and hence it enters the political field in its difference from that field, a difference which rhetoric cannot maintain (2010: 229). Socratic philosophy is a parrhesiastic intervention in the field of politics and, in this sense, it does not tell the truth about truth but rather speaks truth to power (2010: 230, 286). Philosophy’s point of contact with the real is thus not the cosmos but politics. And because politics is its touchstone, philosophy will have real effects, it will be constitutive, rather than merely reflective, of reality (2010: 278–9).
In all of this Foucault is interested also in redeeming Plato, as the child of Socratic parrhēsia, from the reduction of his philosophy to metaphysics. While acknowledging that dialogues such as the Alcibiades and Republic point in this direction, Foucault is keen to show how other dialogues and letters in the Platonic oeuvre lead somewhere else entirely. For Foucault, Plato is the philosopher not only of conversion in the face of the Absolute but also the philosopher of practices; not the philosopher with a fixed bearing towards eternal realities but the philosopher following a path. And this way is marked by an initial choice, a choice of a way of life that then must be followed assiduously from day to day throughout life. Rather than the gaze directed elsewhere, upwards, here the focus is on everyday activity as the site of application of an ascesis (2010: 241). Rather than contemplate himself, the philosopher as a practitioner must work on himself. The reality of philosophy is not eternity but, with both feet on the ground, ‘this work of self on self’ (2010: 242; see also 255).
At this point in his lectures Foucault gets back to his long-standing argument with Derrida: as Letter VII makes clear, Plato disavows writing not because of his metaphysical logocentrism, as Derrida (1976) had argued,6 but, quite the opposite, because writing down philosophy might give the one who seeks philosophy the misleading idea that it is only logos when in fact it is a way of life. Contra Derrida, that ‘philosophy has no other reality than its own practices’ is the lesson to be drawn from Plato’s exclusion of writing (2010: 249; see also 254), especially as this would be taken up in Cynicism, which sought to equip people for life rather than to pass on teachings (2011: 204).7 Instead of marking the advent of logocentrism, the Platonic prohibition on writing is the advent of philosophy itself, ‘of a philosophy whose very reality would be the practice of self on self. It is something like the Western subject which is at stake in this simultaneous and conjoint refusal of writing and logos’ (2010: 254).
Yet this emergence of the Western subject in its work of self on self only itself comes to pass because of the test of philosophy in politics (2010: 255). In risking his life, indeed in losing his life, through telling the truth to the Assembly, Socrates establishes for Plato, and for all Western philosophy, the singularity of the subject as the one who binds himself to himself through the courage of truth. Parrhēsia as a radical work of self on self, one which manages to overcome even the desire to live on, founds philosophy. And philosophy will continue to find its task and its reality in this government of self and others by and for the truth (ibid.).
Philia
Philosophy as a form of life in Foucault’s account has its site of emergence not in the sagacity of natural philosophy but in the political experience of truth-telling, an experience which pointed to the necessity for, but also the difficulty of, bringing the democratic city into a relation with truth. Political parrhēsia is not itself philosophy but is constitutive of philosophy because it involves a truth-telling that does not speak of the timeless being of the world, as pre-Socratic wisdom did (‘the theme of sophia is in a preeminent sense what always is’, Heidegger 2003: 40), but of the good government, first of the city and, then, with Socrates, of self and others.
Socrates, who is the point at which parrhēsia founds the philosophical life (Foucault 2010: 340, 342), does not pretend to know, only to put his and his interlocutor’s discourse to the test. In the Phaedrus, Socrates dismisses the idea that the true discourse could know the truth in advance, since then discourse would be nothing other than the dissimulation of what is already known, namely rhetoric. Indeed, for the true discourse to be other than rhetoric it is not even enough that the true discourse seeks the truth. Philosophical discourse refers to truth neither as something known in advance nor as something arrived at as a result, but at every moment – hence the centrality of the dialectic to philosophical discourse. The logos of philosophy does not have the truth but rather stands in a constant relation to truth – it is truth-telling as ontology, as a way of being, before any epistemology. In seeking the truth as something external to the soul, we would be reproducing the claim of sophistry that the truth can be had, merely displacing this having of the truth from the beginning to the end of our discourse. True discourse is marked not by any knowing at all but by its capacity, via the dialectic, to modify the soul (Foucault 2010: 330–1, 352). Only the soul can accede to truth; is this capacity for truth. Truth can only recognize itself in the soul which it modifies (Foucault 2010: 335).
Plato’s Protagoras can also be read in this way. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates and the sophist Protagoras are each arguing what the other had argued at the beginning of the dialogue. They have switched places. Although Socrates says that this would make people laugh at the strangeness of it all, surely Plato’s point is that the philosopher, unlike the sophist, is capable of – indeed must – be transformed by the dialectic. Unlike rhetoric, the dialectic modifies not only the other’s soul but also one’s own. By contrast, if the sophist is seen to change his position then he loses; he is bad at the rhetoric that he is supposed to be able to teach and which should enable him to prevail. The true philosopher, by contrast, must on no account finish where he started, and for this he needs interlocutors rather than competitors, fellow-friends of truth. The dialectic, in contrast to rhetoric, is the movement of thought that philosophical friendship makes possible and, in turn, is established by.
In the interests of this movement, which is the very being of care for self and others, Socratic parrhēsia renounced power over others, that agonistic struggle for ascendency characteristic of political parrhēsia. Socrates avoided politics as best he could, and his parrhēsia was negative and personal rather than positive and political, seeking to avoid doing injustice through its exteriority to power (2010: 319). If the political arena is one where the truth cannot function, then the life of truth must keep its distance from power. To fail in this would be to fail to care for oneself, for that essential capacity for truth which is the soul. To live by practising philosophy one must be a just subject at all costs. This is why rhetoric is literally useless, since if doing justice is everything then escaping the injustices of others is nothing (2010: 363; Plato 1987).
Yet the examination of self and others that this will require will also be of great service to the city. As Socrates reminds his jurors in the course of his apology, he alone has prevented the city from sleeping and, in choosing his death, they also choose to spend the rest of their lives asleep (2010: 327). This keeping watch over the lives of men without attempting in any way to govern them politically is a way of philosophy that the Cynics will inherit from Socrates. Taking care of others, governing their souls, is nothing more or less than getting them to take care of, or govern, themselves. Socratic parrhēsia will replace political parrhēsia by renouncing an agonistic relationship between souls in which each seeks to prevail over the other in favour of a relationship in which one soul tests another and itself at the same time (2010: 370). This ‘test relationship’ established by plain and courageous speech replaces aristocratic competition (a competition that had to lead, by contrast, to rhetoric) with the natural affinity of friendship. The aim of the true discourse is no longer to win but, through love, to establish a homology between two souls such that both can accede to the same truth (2010: 335, 371, 374): ‘to agree, to say the same as the other, to mean the same as the other’ (Plato, Sophist 218c5). The identity of a discourse between friends’ souls is here the measure of truth, not the identity of a solipsistic discourse with an external world.
In establishing philosophical friendship as the ground of ethical parrhēsia and parrhēsia as constitutive of such friendship, Foucault introduces a distinction (if not a division) between the will to truth and the will to power which goes much further than his earlier work, where truth-power had often seemed entirely undifferentiated.8 In friendship, the parrhesiast relates to the other not in the political sense of seeking supremacy but in the ethical sense of the test. By way of the test, namely telling the truth to the other, but also accepting the challenge of truth for oneself, the parrhesiastic pact establishes a measure of equality between the parties in which the will to truth remains irreducible to the will to power. Though there is still struggle, it is struggle for the truth, not by the truth, and it is a struggle that unites, rather than dividing. The parrhesiastic relationship is one in which the truth is put to work not over against the other but for him, and for oneself too. This is the dual structure of care for self, which is also care for others. The test of truth with the other is a collaborative rather than a competitive endeavour because establishing a relationship to the truth is not something that one can do alone. Just as the other requires my challenge, so also I need his. My care for myself and for the other in parrhesiastic friendship is inextricably intertwined. This is still the will to power, but it is a power of self-overcoming, a collective power, rather than a power that feeds off identity and the separateness from others that self-sameness implies.
This is also why parrhēsia, alone among the forms of truth-telling in Antiquity (wisdom, prophecy and technical knowledge), refuses the nomos. The parrhesiast refrains from using his truth to reinforce the justice of a right distribution of places and orders in the city. Far from supporting the conventional social bond as inscribed in the laws of the polis (in the manner of the sage or teacher), the parrhesiast, especially the Cynic, risks going to war with others (Foucault 2011: 25). Yet this going to war with others is actually the sign of a confidence in them, in their ability to change, to stop doing the customary things and instead to join the enterprise of the true life. Parrhēsia alone continues to place its trust in self, others, and what we can do together. Parrhēsia is true philia.
Socrates’s last words
In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche (2005: 162) derides Socrates for letting slip on his deathbed that he was really a nihilist after all. Socrates’s last request for the sacrifice of a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, indicated, argued Nietzsche, that even Socrates was tired of life and thankful for his impending death. Foucault contests this account, not only of Socrates’s last words (though he disputes the meaning of these, too), but of the general picture of Socrates as the first nihilist with his head in the other world.
Foucault starts out by noting that, taking the Platonic dialogues as a whole, life is clearly not an evil for Socrates. Turning to the Phaedo, Plato’s account of Socrates’s death, Foucault draws attention to the discussion towards the end of the dialogue in which Socrates recalls a Pythagorean maxim that ‘we are in the phroura [enclosure]’. Rather than giving this saying a pejorative sense (as prison), however, Plato makes Socrates say that he understands it to mean that the gods are concerned with and take care (epimeleisthai) of us since we are their flock. In the Greek,
epimeleia, epimeleisthai always designates positive activities. Epimeleia is not a warder’s supervision of his slaves; it is not the prison guard’s supervision of his prisoners. It is the positive concern of a father for his children, of a shepherd for his flock [. . .] It is the concern of the gods for men. We are in the gods’ care, and this is why, Plato says, we should not kill ourselves. (Foucault 2011: 99–100)
Though the care of the gods will also be a feature of the world beyond death, hence the futility of fearing death, the same gods, and the same care, exist in this life as in the next. In this case, and here Foucault makes a crucial point in passing, Socrates ‘does not renounce life; he renounces, in life, his body, which is obviously something completely different’ (2011: 101, emphasis added). Socratic care for existence is care also that life not be reduced to care exclusively for the body. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the Cynics especially, the courage of truth rather subordinated the body to truth (without in any way denying life).
Socrates’s discussion of care in the Crito, of how we must not care for opinion,9 but only for truth, is linked not to the soul as an immortal element but only to the part of us that is concerned with justice, which remains otherwise undefined and unnamed (2011: 104). Just as a gymnast must care for his body, says Socrates, so we also should attend to that part of ourselves that distinguishes between good and bad and that can be corrupted through neglect. But the fact that this care is not yet care of the soul suggests that the care that should be taken is a care for oneself in this life and not for the sake of the next: ‘well before the soul is founded metaphysically [in the Phaedo], it is the relation of self to self that is questioned here’ (ibid.).
Foucault demonstrates that care for self and others is in fact the overarching theme of the three dialogues dealing with Socrates’s death (The Apology, Crito and Phaedo) and that this care is what concerns Socrates even unto his cryptic last words. The curing that Socrates celebrates by calling for the sacrifice of a cock to Asclepius is symbolic of all that care for others which consists in encouraging them to some actions and dissuading them from others, in aiding them to come to true opinions and to avoid false ones. And the abiding aim of this curative care for others and the bold truth-telling that it requires? ‘To teach men to take care of themselves’. Socrates ‘wants to take care of them so that they learn to take care of themselves’. ‘What is it that Socrates always says, which is nothing new, and which is his last wish that he will convey to his children, his circle, and his friends? “Take care of yourselves” [. . .] This is Socrates’ testament, his final wish’ (2011: 110–12).
Foucault lingers over the care of self in Socrates because he wants to show that the Socratic tradition of philosophy was not initially linked to otherworldliness. Yes, a concern of philosophy since the Pythagoreans had been the subject’s purity as the condition of access to truth. And this purification of the subject was consistently understood in terms of the passage from an impure sensory world of error to a pure world of eternal truth in which there is nothing obscure or fleeting (2010: 125). No doubt this cathartics of the subject was influential for Plato, but as the student of Socrates Plato was concerned as much with care as catharsis: ‘There is another aspect which is that of the courage of truth’, and this way of truth is not the path of purification but of struggle and sacrifice: what ‘battle is one able to face in order to arrive at the truth?’ (2010: 125).
Contrasting the Laches with the Alcibiades, Foucault shows that Plato’s dialogues do not reduce care of the self to concern for the immortal soul (psukhē) as a reality ontologically distinct from the body, as in the latter text. The Laches rather identifies the object of care as life (bios), or form of life. This is care not for the being of the soul but for Being, for the ‘practice of existence’ or the style that one gives to life (2010: 127, 144, 159–61):
When we compare the Laches and the Alcibiades, we have the starting point for two great lines of development of philosophical reflection and practice: on the one hand, philosophy as that which, by prompting and encouraging men to take care of themselves, leads them to the metaphysical reality of the soul, and, on the other, philosophy as a test of life, a test of existence, and the elaboration of a particular kind of form and modality of life. (2010: 127; see also 161 for a restatement of this point)
Although these two ways of philosophy are linked up in Plato, Foucault’s point is that they begin to diverge thereafter, with the result that the ontology of the self becomes the main road of Western philosophy (and thereafter Christianity) while the way of the aesthetics of existence becomes increasingly overgrown. Bios as a beautiful work is forgotten (2010: 162).
With Socrates, this traditional theme of Greek culture that life should be beautified through a brilliant and memorable existence is brought together with the concern for truth-telling (2010: 163). So while the domain of application of Socratic parrhēsia is the mode of life, this mode of life should exhibit the courage of truth. Hence the proof of parrhēsia is the harmony between Socrates’s life and his truthful discourse (2010: 146, 148). The Socratic moment was not only the point when the traditional theme of the unforgettable life was allied to truth-telling. It was also the occasion for the binding of truth-telling to the ancient injunction to care for oneself (epimeleia heautou). If the beautiful life and the care of self predated Socrates, then the idea that these twinned aspects of existence should be placed under the banner of truth-telling is what constitutes the singularity of Socrates.
Care for self is not something that political or technical expertise can guide from the outside. Socratic parrhēsia is ethical not political: concerned with self-formation rather than external legislation. And since this form is a taking care of oneself, the parrhesiast, unlike the sage or technician, is in the same position as those that he practices his parrhēsia on. Socrates must also take care of himself, must question his way of life, and this is the real principle of equality at the heart of parrhēsia since it is a task that never ceases, not even when one is old (2010: 152, 153). If Socrates nonetheless holds a unique position with regard to those he encourages to care for themselves, this principle of differentiation is only the knowledge of his ignorance, which the others lack.
Philaletheia
Quite independently of Foucault, it seems, Alain Badiou has developed an account of truth that is in many ways a systematic philosophical statement of Foucault’s more fragmentary genealogy of parrhēsia, a genealogy that Foucault never got the chance to develop beyond his lecture notes. Of course, Foucault’s suspicion of universals was such that he would never have treated parrhēsia as a concept, but, as we have seen, Foucault certainly saw parrhēsia as playing a significant role in the history of the Western subject – and especially in the history of his own subjectivity. Although he does not work by way of genealogies, it is also the case for Badiou that philosophy does not itself provide the criterion of truth but rather draws out the implications of truth procedures in the various domains of human existence where truth can take place.
Badiou’s conception of truth (2007a), like the practice of parrhēsia, has nothing to do with being; there is no true world. Truth is entirely subjective, being of the order of what happens rather than what stays the same. A truth is always new. It testifies to the conviction linked to an event and it does not describe the objective order of the world. That Badiou consigns ontological truth to the realm of mathematics means that we can get on to the business of the truths that involve us. And these truths for Badiou, as in parrhēsia, are always in process, a process that requires our active and ongoing creation as the subjects of a truth. Truth is not an illumination. We must care for truth because the true cannot be without us, without our subjective fidelity to it. To be sure, any such truth procedure in Badiou is dependent initially on an event, which does not rely on us. But inasmuch as the event is always something that breaks with the transcendental of a world (that which regulates appearing in that world), it is manifestly not a truth of that world but rather what enables the reconfiguration of its truth – what allows something new to appear in it. So the subject of the truth of the event binds itself to a truth’s singularity and to its transformative effects just as the one who has the courage of truth.
This affirmative aspect of Badiou’s idea of truth is in one sense the only real difference with Heidegger’s sense of truth, which is much more pessimistic in tone. Badiou (2001a: 247–8) does not dispute Heidegger’s insight that truth is always a matter of the negative. As much as for Heidegger, truth for Badiou is of the order of the undecidable, the indiscernible, the not-all and the unnameable. As for Heidegger, the event is the giving of being as the nothing. But for Badiou, our relation to the nothing in any truth procedure involves taking the measure of the negative rather than passively hearing its call. The event in Badiou requires the active elaboration of its consequences rather than, as in Heidegger, the mere contemplation of what is given (which is why, for Badiou, Heideggerian truth leaves no recourse other than the poem, since only the poem can speak of being as if calling on it for the first time, outside of all established knowledge).
Badiou also agrees with Heidegger’s diagnosis that the sense of truth is lost when it is reduced to the proposition, namely to a judgement of those things that are already presented. For Badiou, too, if (propositional) knowledge repeats, then truth creates (or ‘gives’, as Heidegger would put it). But if truth is always new, then Heidegger is right that the real philosophical question of truth relates not to its being but to its becoming, to its appearing: ‘a truth must be submitted to thought, not as a judgement [the proposition] but as a process in the real’, as Badiou (2001a: 249) puts it. However, while Badiou’s analysis of the loss of the sense of truth overlaps with Heidegger’s, the implications of this reading are treated very differently. Heidegger’s melancholy is that he sees the consequences of the hiddenness of the sense of truth as determining an entire history of (abandonment by) Being. Badiou, meanwhile, is intent on showing that although every world, precisely in its constitution as a world, is incapable of accounting for a new truth, truth happens nonetheless. There is a grace in Badiou that is lacking in Heidegger’s account of the fall.10
Also at work in Badiou’s notion of truth is that least Heideggerian of notions – infinity. Badiou counters Heideggerian finitude, ‘the central ideological fetish of our times’ (Badiou’s notes for his forthcoming The Immanence of Truths), with the infinity of truths. In Badiou’s view, the finite is simply what there is. But what ‘is’, and here Badiou plays Heidegger against himself, is not all. To assume finitude is to assume along with ‘democratic materialism’ more broadly that there are only beings and languages (bodies and cultures), when in fact there are also truths. Truths are not reducible to either term. To assume finitude is therefore the operation of a reality principle that is a principle of obedience: ‘we must submit to the realistic constraints of finitude’ (ibid.). The absolutization of finitude, far from being the way out of metaphysics, is only a new form of metaphysical timelessness. In the place of finitude, argues Badiou, it will be necessary to posit that the finite is not. The finite has no being, not only in the negative sense of being only becoming, but in the positive sense that it is only ever the result of operations in the infinite. These operations can take two forms, and it is the active form (e.g. the work of art; new forms of political organization; love) that we need. Alternatively, we have only the passive result of the infinite play of the world – the very flux of time. The only way out of nihilism, for Badiou, is neither the changeless world nor the becoming world but only the trans-worldliness of truths – the eternity of truths is that something of them is out of time; a truth is therefore eternity in time. There is, in short, no contradiction between time and eternity.
The eternity of truths should not be confused with the metaphysical eternity of truth. Badiou’s truths, as precisely truth procedures, are created and they change; but they can forever begin again, and this is what is infinite (or trans-worldly) about them – hence the Greek tragedies that can always be restaged, or the truth of communism from Spartacus to the Arab Spring. Although a truth, as a human creation, must take finite form, its inexhaustibility is what makes it infinite. A truth procedure is, in this sense, an active operation in the infinite. Subject to one of these infinite truths, by which we affirm a new possibility with infinite consequences, we too can be immortals.
The infinity of truths is an important aspect of the distinctiveness of Badiou’s thought of truth. The active-creative aspect of truth, by contrast, is already found in Nietzsche, as is the notion of truth as the subjective declaration of an event: ‘A good wind? Indeed, only the one who knows where he’s sailing knows also which wind is good and which is his favourable wind’ (Nietzsche 2006: 222). But while the infinity of truths would be alien to Nietzsche, Heidegger, indeed to almost all modern philosophy, it is not foreign to parrhēsia. Foucault’s Cynics have the air of immortals about them, too. For while parrhesiastic truth can be told only in relation to a particular world (the courage of truth cannot take an abstract form because truth is always that of a situation), the courage that parrhēsia expresses is trans-worldly – applicable to other, potentially all, situations or ‘worlds’. This is why Foucault’s genealogy of parrhēsia (tracking it through diffuse political, ethical and early Christian modes) is feasible in the first place – the content of parrhesiastic truth is never the same, but having the courage to tell it remains recognizable. The courage to live truth, rather than the knowing of truth, is what remains the same in this truth, and, since this precisely changes the world, the truth it tells changes too. Rather than truth being identical with itself, it is the life that lives truth that provides the principle of identity (infinity, in Badiou’s sense), even if the form that this life takes must always begin again.
Parrhēsia requires confidence as well as courage. And confidence is uppermost in Badiou’s thought of truth, too. A truth requires our fidelity to it across the changing situations in which we find ourselves, point by point. But because a truth is not, because it has no being other than the vanishing event, by the lights of existing knowledge it is nothing and the event it announces is simply a passing disturbance in the order of things (as the event of 1917 from the standpoint of the bourgeois powers, for example). So remaining faithful to the truth of the event is exceedingly difficult and will not be possible without the confidence to say that what was previously nothing is now all. Badiou’s Paul is an exemplary figure of this confidence of truth, as we have seen.
It is important to grasp that, for Badiou (2001a), the event that makes possible any truth procedure is radically undecidable to the extent that nothing in the world in which it takes place can give us an answer to the question: did something new happen here? Aeschylus’s contemporaries no doubt protested that his theatrical tragedies, while undoubtedly strange to them, were in no way a new beginning, as do the parents of many a young couple who declare their undying love. Since nothing initially permits anyone in a world (neither Aeschylus nor our young lovers) to declare that a truth has been born, then a wager is necessary. Truth begins with a decision, not with the passive adaptation of wisdom. A truth must first be announced and only then can the consequences of this announcement be lived out, as Paul well understood. Thereafter, a truth is an ongoing exercise, ‘a course without a concept’ (2001a: 250).
If in the initial moment of the decision-proclamation the birth of truth is inseparable from confidence, then on the long march of fidelity to the truth, a march undertaken without any guarantees of success, confidence is just as necessary. Since invention and creation remain incalculable, not only does a truth begin in the absence of a concept but it must continue without one, too. A truth must remain something that no predicate can unify – remain non-totalizable or generic (which is why truth is essentially for all: as generic it is open and as open it has universal address). To return to one of Badiou’s examples: after the event of Aeschylus, tragedy remains an open field. Tragedy is not a set that can be unified but one that continues to be infinite in its possibilities – uncompletable. Badiou calls the fiction of a completed truth ‘forcing’ (forçage). To be sure, forcing, though fictitious, lends a truth its potency, as when a lover says: I will always love you. This amorous declaration anticipates a never reachable completion of the truth of a love affair, forcing a new experience of that affair in the process.
But in providing potency forcing also opens the possibility of what Badiou terms evil (2001a: 253). For there is always a point at which forcing runs up against resistance in the real of the situation – an unenforceable term that limits the potency of any truth so that it can never become all. ‘Evil’ in Badiou is the desire to overrun this limit, a desire for a truth to achieve omnipotence (whence totalitarianism in politics, for example). In this way, evil in Badiou becomes a properly secular idea linked solely to the destructive possibilities of truth’s positive, creative power, rather than to the usual privation of ignorance, lies and ‘sin’ generally. Truth requires confidence but is destroyed by the hubris that confidence is always capable of.
Parrhēsia in Foucault’s genealogy is similarly tied to a confidence that is in no way hubristic: ‘Parrhēsia as confidence is foreign to the principle of the fear of God. It is contrary to the necessary feeling of distance with regard to the world and the things of the world’ (Foucault, 2011: 334). When the will to truth is turned into one’s mode of existence, it becomes a principle of life’s movement (kinesis) rather than of stasis. It is for this very reason, argues Foucault (contra Derrida), that writing is excluded by Plato. The true life must be lived, and cannot be codified – fixed – in a written doctrine. Writing, in relation to philosophy at least, is what is metaphysical here. The subject of parrhēsia has the confidence that he and those around him can be transformed by their submitting together to truth-telling, which is the dialectic.
Parrhēsia gives its subjects something to do. Unlike the truth of being, which can only be passively acceded to, parrhēsia is an active and ongoing practice, an ethos or a vocation. Quite other than Heideggerian Dasein, however, which similarly finds itself decisively consigned to a task (‘the earnestness of thrownness’ [Heidegger 2002b: 127]), there is nothing of anguish or guilt in the parrhesiastic vocation. We should recall that, in Being and Time (1996: 315), Dasein, as thrown, only arrives at an understanding of its thrown-ness, its being-in-the-world, by way of Angst. Similarly, the guilty pang of conscience in Dasein is the silent call away from inauthenticity back to mortal existence. Differently from Dasein, the subject of parrhēsia is borne along by, rather than consigned to, his task. Like Spinoza’s free man, and unlike Dasein, he thinks of nothing less than of death.
Badiou’s subject of truth, like Foucault’s Cynic, does not pre-exist the truth he declares – there is no doer behind the deed (Nietzsche: 2014: 236). Badiou’s subject is a subject only by being subject to truth, subject to its event: ‘A subject is the throw of the dice which does not abolish chance, but which accomplishes it as a verification of the axiom which founds it’ (Badiou 2001a: 251). This is not the Subject of History, not an essence or a transcendental. It is not a metaphysical subject at all – indeed it is not far from the figure of Zarathustra as the one who first blesses chance. Contrary to the subject of humanism, which has always been an animal with an all-important additional capacity for reason, Badiou’s subject of truth has nothing proper to it. It is only a body that can be seized by an unnatural event.
Prior to its being taken up in a truth procedure, Badiou’s ‘man’ is only Plato’s biped without feathers, with the addition that the charms of this biped are not obvious (Badiou 2001b: 12). But is not this separation between ‘mere’ animal existence and a higher truth of the subject humanism itself? No, because what is at stake here is not a final truth of the subject but that to be a subject at all requires a relation to, indeed an incorporation in, a truth procedure. This is why Paul is exemplary for Badiou, even if the truth event Paul subjects himself to (the resurrection) is for Badiou a fable.
But if Badiou remains confident that the subject of truth, as subject to the event, is an ever-present possibility, Foucault, given his genealogical method, is not so sure. If not the forgetting of Being, then certainly the forgetting of parrhēsia is something that Foucault clearly regrets in the history of the West.11Metaphysics has bequeathed to modern science the truth of the world given to a solipsistic subject. Parrhēsia, meanwhile, as a truth told about souls so that, together, we might change, has been largely colonized by Christianity in the West.
For all this, Foucault’s genealogy of parrhēsia displaces Nietzsche’s identification of Pauline Christianity with metaphysical otherworldliness. Things are more complicated than this, and Foucault’s lament for a lost parrhēsia, when it comes (and he devotes only one, but his very last, lecture to it), is aimed more precisely at the rise of the Christian pastorate, from around the fourth and fifth centuries, in short at the growing ecclesiastical power of the Church. What is lost in the pastoral care for souls is precisely the confidence without which parrhēsia cannot be. Where classical parrhēsia had been a care of others intended to get them to care for themselves, pastoral care is a care for others that can never let them go. Pastoral care has no confidence in the capacity for truth of the souls it cares for, indeed they are cared for precisely because they are not capable of truth, the very inversion of the classical schema. The Church thereby requires obedience, which is as foreign to parrhesiastic care for souls as can be. The very institution of the Christian pastoral is of course incompatible with parrhēsia, which rather leaves pastoral care to the gods, or in early Christianity to God, in whose enclosure we find ourselves.
The human pastorate not only lacks confidence in others but also discourages confidence in self, which now becomes impious arrogance. The Christian must turn his suspicious gaze upon himself, distrusting himself as much as the others. This is another refinement of the Nietzschean thesis – this time of Nietzsche’s attribution of this loss of confidence to the decline of the aristocratic values of Antiquity, starting with Socratic questioning and coming to a head with the great slave revolt that was Christianity. Foucault shows that confidence was lost much later, or rather that confidence and the ‘Platonism’ that would eventually undermine it cohabited for much longer. But in one sense Nietzsche is decisively corrected: truth did not kill off confidence (the aristocratic virtues Nietzsche loves), but the loss of confidence killed off truth (parrhēsia).
This modification of Nietzsche’s thesis had already surfaced in Foucault’s lecture, On the Government of the Living (1979–80), where a genealogy of self-overcoming is taken back to the first Christian subjects. Foucault notes (2014: 213–14) that in the early Church’s exomologesis (public confession of sins) the Christian, dying to this world, really dies to death, and hence is reborn. In confessing what one is – namely a sinner – one becomes other than one was – namely one who has died to sin. In other notes for the lectures over that year, Foucault (1999) thus draws a distinction between early Christian hermeneutics of the self, where it was a matter of the sacrifice of self as the condition of access to any truth of the self, and all those subsequent attempts – which, Foucault implies, are doomed to failure – in Western culture to found the truth of the self on something positive (e.g. in judicial institutions, medical and psychiatric practices, and indeed in political theory and philosophy generally). These attempts at a positive knowledge – rather than a sacrificial practice – of the self, argues Foucault, are part of a wider, indeed a permanent, ‘anthropologism of Western thought’ that is forever seeking some ground for the subject in the universal figure of ‘man’ rather than grasping that the subject is only the sacrifice of self. Early Christian practice, by contrast with humanism, opened the self as ‘a field of indefinite interpretation’. If this opening led to the possibility of ceaseless self-doubt, then the ‘great richness’ of this field was nonetheless its insight that there can be ‘no truth about the self without a sacrifice of the self’ (Foucault 1999: 179–80). Although Foucault is including the first Christians in his Dionysian vision of the subject in a way that would horrify Nietzsche, we can see that the idea of the subject as Dionysian is a much deeper debt that he owes Nietzsche.
***
How does the parrhesiast tell the truth, exactly? Foucault shifts the subject of truth from its Cartesian link to knowledge to its ancient link to ethics – the subject as care of self, not as a subject that knows. This is an understanding of truth not as true propositions about some external world but rather concerns the relation of a subject to truth. What is decisive here is an isomorphism of logos and action, in which there is harmony between the parrhesiast’s speech and his behaviour. By staking his life, sometimes literally, on the truth, the parrhesiast places himself in a relation to truth in a way that comes to define him. He cannot but tell the truth since truth is his way of life. So the question is not: does this or that enunciation conform to the way the world is? but rather: is the enunciator defined by truth-telling? Parrhēsia, as Foucault (2011: 52–6) clarifies, is not defined by the content of the truth told so much as by the way in which it is told.
This accounts for the only seemingly odd fact that, as Foucault reports (in unauthorized notes on Foucault’s six parrhēsia lectures given at Berkeley in 1983), he did not come across even one parrhesiast in Antiquity who expressed any doubt that he was telling the truth of the situation. By being a subject bound to truth-telling as a vocation, the parrhesiast speaks out of truth rather than his truth being a matter of the correspondence of his discourse with some outside. Cynic parrhēsia ‘finds its point of emergence in the very life of the person who must thus manifest or speak the truth in the form of a manifestation of existence’ (Foucault 2011: 217; see also 234). The parrhesiast does not ‘have’ the truth but rather lives it, throwing down the gauntlet of the truth as a test for himself and others. Contrary to metaphysical truth that must be in accordance with the world it re-presents, parrhēsia is a truth that can thereby change the world it intervenes in.
Parrhēsia is not a demonstration of the truth. Nor is it a strategy for persuasion, a rhetorical art, being too violent for that. As we have seen, parrhēsia is on the side of philosophy in its ancient struggle with rhetoric. Neither is parrhēsia a teaching of the truth, a pedagogy, since it is an irruption of truth rather than truth’s gradual progression. Parrhēsia is much closer to an agonistic conception of truth, one in which, through dialogue, one confronts one’s adversary with the truth. Parrhēsia is the risk of this confrontation, since the challenge of the truth may end a friendship, a public standing, or even one’s life. Parrhēsia takes a chance on the truth and binds the parrhesiast to the consequences. But these consequences are precisely undetermined – parrhēsia opens a situation and therefore opens on to a future which, by definition, cannot be known. Parrhēsia is a truth that frees the elements it refers to rather than fixing them in place, and this is its uniqueness. Opposite to the performative speech act that constitutes only known effects (‘the meeting is now open’), parrhēsia creates a rupture in the known (‘this meeting is a farce!’) (Foucault 2010: 62). Parrhēsia is an event of truth.
Parrhēsia is also different from truth as we have come to know it for being anything but disinterested. The parrhesiastic utterance not only claims to be true in what it says about a situation but, more than this, claims really to be what the parrhesiast believes, hence the risk he takes in stating it (2010: 64). There is a pact that the parrhesiast makes with himself in which, by binding himself both to his statement and to the act of stating it, he brings the ‘I’ of enunciation dramatically to the fore: ‘I am the person who has spoken the truth.’ This ‘I’ of parrhesiastic enunciation is not determined by any identity (by contrast, the Chair of the meeting alone can declare the meeting open in the case of the performative utterance), but only by the act of tying his fate to his truth-telling (2010: 65). The parrhesiast is defined not by his status but by his courage. The mark of this courage is that he chooses to tell his risky truth, even if he experiences this choice as a compulsion to speak the truth despite the consequences. He says what he must from out of his freedom rather than his servitude (2010: 66). Indeed, in binding himself to the truth, does not the parrhesiast exercise the highest form of freedom? For Foucault (2010: 67), ‘the whole analysis of parrhēsia should basically be developed around this question’. The parrhesiast constitutes himself as a subject of truth through the retroactive effects of an enunciation that both determines and changes his very being. He will be the one who took the risk of telling the truth, but what that risk will make of him is still to be seen. Foucault finds in this free relation to becoming the living of Nietzsche’s sense of truth (2010: 66).
In parrhēsia the courage of truth powerfully subjectivates. The subject finds itself as an after-effect of its plain-spokenness. Something like the opposite of this confident, concentrated subjectivity is outlined in Being and Time in an analysis of the dispersion of the self that accompanies fear. Heidegger (1996: 314) argues that ‘the existential and temporal meaning of fear is constituted by self-forgetting: the confused backing away from one’s factical potentiality-of-being’. Fear forces us back on to our thrownness, the radical contingency of our being, but in such a way that we no longer experience that contingency as something we can use – it is closed off to us, as Heidegger says. Fearfulness is then like the man in a burning house who grabs, randomly, whatever is closest to him. Fear forgets human possibility itself and so cannot grasp any definite possibility at all, flailing about and no longer knowing the way around in the world. Fear is a loss of orientation and a loss of confidence, indeed thereby the loss of the present. By contrast, ‘he who is resolute knows no fear’ (1996: 316).
Heidegger helps us to understand the subjectifying structure of parrhēsia more clearly by sketching out its opposite. Just as it is resolve that drives out fear, and not the lack of fear that creates resolve, the courage of truth is courage occasioned by truth.
1See Foucault (2011: 30) for his claim that parrhēsia has disappeared from the earth (a claim he repeats in these lectures). See also Foucault’s last remark from his lecture of 8th February 1984 (2011: 68) for a clear indication of how he saw his work as belonging to this lost line of parrhesiastic philosophy.
2By contrast, being separated from what it can do – Spinoza’s sadness – our active force is turned back inside and against itself. It becomes self-loathing or bad conscience. Eventually, even re-active force is stymied in this way: ‘Ressentiment said: “it’s your fault”, bad conscience says: “it’s my fault”’ (Deleuze 1983: 128 and 132). Deleuze argues elsewhere (1994: 37) that this condition of not being separated from what we can do is also the condition of equality of being, of the smallest becoming equivalent to the largest.
3The Neoplatonism implicit in Deleuze’s reading should be noted. Hadot (1993: 22) has this to say in his famous study of Plotinus: ‘It is the only desire in which he would have recognised himself, and the only desire which defines him: no longer to be Plotinus; to lose himself in contemplation and in ecstasy.’
4The cave-dwelling Zarathustra also has sage-like properties. Yet the significance of Zarathustra leaving his cave in the very last line of Nietzsche’s work should also be noted.
5In Book 2, chapter 5, of his Rhetoric, Aristotle too finds confidence, not courage, to be the opposite of fear.
6Derrida (1976) focuses on Plato’s exclusion of writing in the Phaedrus (274c–275b): with writing men call ‘things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks’. Derrida sees this as a key statement of the ‘logocentric’ sense of language that characterizes metaphysics, whereby the full presence of the subject of speech is manifest only in the immediacy of speech, never in a writing that is only secondary or derivative – fallen. Speech, then, is the originally speaking subject present to, or identical with, itself, whereas writing is present only in the absence of this origin-subject. In this sense, writing is representative, for Derrida, of the trace (his alternative to the metaphysical sense of being as presence).
7It is worth noting that Heidegger (2003: 236–7) gives a compatible reading of the Platonic exclusion of writing here. The making public in writing of what has been said will create a forgetting of what has been learned. Logos as communicated in writing promotes a lack of concern with the matters spoken of in their substantive content. With writing, knowledge is retained only on the outside, so to speak, and remembering is thereby cut off from internal resources, in short from possibility. The written word risks becoming a dead letter. Heidegger is also on the same track as Foucault in understanding this Platonic exclusion as an exclusion of logos itself, that is of speech also and not just of writing. What is said, just as much as what is written, ‘can by itself deliver nothing’ (2003: 237–8). To take up the logos, whether as speech or writing, the individual must already see what is spoken of or written about. He must ‘see’ matters for himself in his soul, and this requires that his soul is well formed. In sum: ‘There is a double [logos], the living, i.e. the one that takes its life from a relation to the matters themselves, from [dialogue], and the written one, in the broadest sense the communicated one [i.e. including speech], which is a mere [image] of the other, living [logos]’ (2003: 239).
8In the Will to Know (2013), the Collège de France lectures from 1971, Foucault is by contrast entirely true to the Nietzschean schema, as can be seen from his lecture summary (2013: 197–8) in particular, where he sees truth as only a fictitious outcome of the will to power. This echoes Zarathustra (2006: 90): ‘And even you, seeker of knowledge, are only a path and footstep of my will; indeed my will to power follows also on the heels of your will to truth.’
9For all Nietzsche’s ambivalence about Socrates and his anti-sophistry, Zarathustra (2006: 141) continues to reject opinion: ‘they are all sick and addicted to public opinion’.
10Given the influence of Plato on Badiou we should perhaps not be surprised at this. Plotinus, a much earlier disciple of Plato, also found that, in the final analysis, life is grace (Hadot 1993: 50).
11‘Western philosophy – and such was its history and perhaps its destiny – progressively eliminated, or at least neglected and marginalized the problem of the philosophical life, which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice. It has increasingly neglected and marginalized the problem of life in its essential connection with the practice of truth-telling’ (2011: 235). If Foucault disagrees with Heidegger as to what has been forgotten in Western philosophy, he nonetheless agrees that the effect of this is that the only conceivable relation to truth is now that of scientific knowledge and its epistemological sense of truth as the conditions under which statements can be recognized as true (2011: 237).