*In short, parrhesia, the act of truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the perso who spoke it; [second], a challenge to the bond between the two interlocutors (the person who speaks the truth and the person to whom this truth is addressed). Hence this new feature of parrhesia: it involves some form of courage, the minimal form of which consists in the parrhesiast taking the risk of breaking and ending the relationship to the other person which was precisely what made his discourse possible. In a way, the parrhesiast always risks undermining that relationship which is the condition of the possibility of his discourse. This is very clear in parrhesia as spiritual guidance, for example, which can only exist if there is friendship, and where the employment of truth in this spiritual guidance is precisely in danger of bringing into question and breaking the relationship which made this discourse of truth possible.
But in some cases this courage may also take a maximal form when one has to accept that, if one is to tell the truth, not only may one's personal, friendly relationship with the person to whom one is speaking be brought into question, but one may even be risking one's life. When Plato goes to see Dionysius the Elder -- this is recounted in Plutarch -- he tells him truths which so offend the tyrant that he conceives the plan, which in fact he does not put into execution, of killing Plato. But Plato fundamentally knew and accepted this risk. Parrhesia therefore not only puts the relationship between the person who speaks and the person to whom he addresses the truth at risk, but it may go so far as to put the very life of the person who speaks at risk, at least if his interlocutor has power over him and cannot bear being told the truth.
Thus the true game of parrhesia will be established on the basis of this kind of pact which means that if the parrhesiast demonstrates his courage by telling the truth despite and regardless of everything, the person to whom this parrhesia is addressed will have to demonstrate his greatness of soul by accepting being told the truth. This kind of pact, between the person who takes the risk of telling the truth and the person who agrees to listen to it, is at the heart of what could be called the parrhesiastic game. So, in two words, parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor's courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.
Now parrhesia contrasts with these different characteristics of prophetic truth-telling in each of these prcise respects. You can see then that the parrhesiast is the opposite of the prophet in that the prophet does not speak for himself, but in the name of someone else, and he articulates a voice which is not his own. In contrast, the parrhesiast, by definition, speaks in his own name. It is essential that he expresses his own opinion, thought and conviction. He must put his name to his words; this is the price of his frankness. The prophet does not have to be frank, even when he tells the truth. Second, the parrhesiast does not foretell the future. Certainly, he reveals and discloses what people's blindness prevents them from seeing, but he does not unveil the future. He unveils what is. The parrhesiast does not help people somehow to step beyond some threshold in the ontological structure of the human being and of time which separates them from their future. He helps them in their blindness, but their blindness about what they are, about themselves, and so not the blindness due to an ontological structure, but due to some moral fault, distraction, or lack of discipline, the consequence of inattention, laxity, or weakness. It is in this interplay between human beings and their blindness due to inattention, complacency, weakness, and moral distraction that the parrhesiast performs his role, which, as you can see, is consequently a revelatory role very different from that of the prophet, who stands at the point where human finitude and the structure of time are conjoined. Third, the parrhesiast, again by definition, and unlike the prophet, does not speak in riddles. On the contrary, he says things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or rhetorical embellishment, so that his words may immediately be given their prescriptive value. The parrhesiast leaves nothing to interpretation. Certainly, he leaves something to be done: he leaves the person he addresses with the tough task of having the courage to accept this truth, to recognize it, and to make it a principle of conduct. He leaves this moral task, but, unlike the prophet, he does not leave the difficult duty of interpretation.
--Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth
/////
So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.
To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.
19.2.09
17.2.09
the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal
I have posted this essay in other forums, but I just wanted to repost it here because I like it. It's the spiel I was going to give prior to introducing Dr. Kwasi Wiredu at the African Philosophy talk I organized; at Dr. Edidin's suggestion I cut it down to a paragraph or so. But the full version is reprinted here.
Something which is becoming significant to me, which is also becoming significant to others in the pursuit of philosophy -- it could be called an issue in linguistics or philosophy of language, but in fact, I think it has roots to which those titles confer nothing except a technical gloss. This issue is one of personhood, but first and foremost, it is a question. The question is -- what is language? Letting the many other questions encapsulated there flake away -- is language first an alphabet, a grammar, a syntactic structure? Is it first a context-specific language, so that French and Japanese, as soon as they come into existence, change the very definition of what a language can be? Is language a symbol, a tool, a weapon, an anesthetic, a lesson, a game, a home, a gesture? Yes.
Language in some situations is a weapon -- albeit a symbolic one, still a weapon which causes very real bloodshed, which even gives us a certain power in constructing and destructing what is real at all. Language becomes a weapon, for one, by systematically distributing itself to controlled populations. Language can do this this by forcing certain kinds of vocabularies on some groups of people, denying that vocabulary to others, privileging still more with another kind of language altogether. Language can do this by erasing parts of itself -- erasing entire languages, cultures, and thus the people who speak it.
For example -- the English we speak is not the English you will hear in low-income neighborhoods down the street. It can sound completely different, be used completely differently, serve a completely different purpose and have a completely different level of priority in life -- and yet they are both called English. In both cases the language provides listeners with a sign to interpret, a password -- but in each case, the password provides, or forces, access to a different society. Whereas some dialects signify entrance into certain types of poverty, ours happens to appeal to a certain elite, academic, liberal-democratic demographic of people -- and thus gives us an entry into an extremely privileged society.
Upward mobility is the work of language as much as of anything. So say that we were entirely selfish and, rather than worry about those folks who are excluded by our language, we were to simply congratulate ourselves on learning it. Even in this case, there would still be a valid criticism of the scenario as it exists. Because -- isn't there still something missing? Isn't this specific language, the academic language, so dry and arcane, so fluffy and cumbersome -- completely unintelligible to most people -- isn't it lacking something? bell hooks, a prominent African-American writer and radical feminist, says that a great secret white supremacist capitalist patriarchy keeps from those who can't or don't read much is that all of the really powerful information is kept hidden away, in books. If you watch television instead -- well, pray to the gods that you will be able to afford cable if you hope to find anything worth talking about at all.
But does this have to be? Why should encode all of our most valuable information solely into written languages? Does this have to be the authority? Although I couldn't possibly memorize what the New College library contains, I could certainly spend some time telling you about things in there which are most relevant to my life. Why do we trust the internet more than our own memory, and how much sheer information do we really need? How do we ourselves benefit? Isn't this, at worst, suffocating more relevant experiences we could have here? Isn't this, at best, just boring?
Nietzsche said he knew of few things worse than rising early in the morning, when the light and air are bright and electric, only to go hide in a dusty room and squint at the yellowed pages of some book. So how did we come to think that language works best when it is written out? Maybe we were really proud of our ability to use tools, like the hallowed calligraphy pen. Maybe we were afraid of public speaking. Maybe we were really ugly, or had ugly shoes, and thought that people would take us more seriously if they never had to be in the same room with us. This is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. Armed with this excuse, we can now employ our dusty paper weapons against the uncivilized world. And anything which we hear, which we don't like, we can simply mistranslate, or refuse to write down. Which is what "anthropologists" visiting Ghana in the 1850's did with the entirety of Akan culture and philosophy.
Yet if we are quiet for a moment -- and ask ourselves why we use language, in any form, to begin with -- the meaning language has in our lives is not itself written down. I think language justify itself almost entirely in our desire to remember and give ecstatic descriptions of the world, of ourselves, of others -- to others. Don't the roots of language itself run straight under our skin, deeper than any book? Don't these roots spring from the desire to affirm everything that exists in this world, and not in books? Language can be a weapon, but it can also be a gift, which gathers together everything in the world, and gives everything, named, back to that world. Books help with all this, certainly -- but so do crutches, if your legs are broken. This distinction -- between written language and speech -- is what is becoming significant.
I am irreverent because I think what is at stake when writing, which originated out of speech and gesture, tyrannizes them, is the very way we inhabit our own bodies, our own mouths, our own voices. Also, our relationship to the bodies, mouths, and voices of the world we encounter. This prioritizing goes right along with a Cartesian mind-body dualism which subordinates the body to a supra-natural mind. Why have we inherited a tradition which mistrusts the respectability of any language that first explodes outward, like dynamite, from a tongue between two lips, or in the gestures of two hands? It seems that such a mistrust amounts to nothing more profound than a mistrust of the body and, to again defer to Nietzsche -- maybe all of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. Maybe historically, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -- forming the writers and readers of most canonical Western science and literature -- has endeavoured quite nerdily to use writing in order to free a certain privileged population from the terrible burden that is having a body. Hence the body is labeled the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal -- and history's wives, slaves, and serfs are burdened --not with bodies, which they had always already had -- but with that rejection of the body, and those labels.
What was the goal behind this trend? To leave our bodies and go to heaven? We simply wanted to die? A question for the audience -- how do you feel about that? I, for one, don't dislike myself nearly that much. For to free someone from the body would be, I think, to free them from themselves. Admittedly, there is ultimately something uncanny about the way language, as speech, possesses the space around it like lightning. It strikes and individualizes the speaker, illuminating his world, and illuminating he, himself, to the world. If you don't like the sound of your own voice, the anonymity of the page will be preferable. However -- if you find you can sing --
"All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking entered into literature. And literature has decided the fate of Western science."
-- Martin Heidegger, What Calls For Thinking?
Something which is becoming significant to me, which is also becoming significant to others in the pursuit of philosophy -- it could be called an issue in linguistics or philosophy of language, but in fact, I think it has roots to which those titles confer nothing except a technical gloss. This issue is one of personhood, but first and foremost, it is a question. The question is -- what is language? Letting the many other questions encapsulated there flake away -- is language first an alphabet, a grammar, a syntactic structure? Is it first a context-specific language, so that French and Japanese, as soon as they come into existence, change the very definition of what a language can be? Is language a symbol, a tool, a weapon, an anesthetic, a lesson, a game, a home, a gesture? Yes.
Language in some situations is a weapon -- albeit a symbolic one, still a weapon which causes very real bloodshed, which even gives us a certain power in constructing and destructing what is real at all. Language becomes a weapon, for one, by systematically distributing itself to controlled populations. Language can do this this by forcing certain kinds of vocabularies on some groups of people, denying that vocabulary to others, privileging still more with another kind of language altogether. Language can do this by erasing parts of itself -- erasing entire languages, cultures, and thus the people who speak it.
For example -- the English we speak is not the English you will hear in low-income neighborhoods down the street. It can sound completely different, be used completely differently, serve a completely different purpose and have a completely different level of priority in life -- and yet they are both called English. In both cases the language provides listeners with a sign to interpret, a password -- but in each case, the password provides, or forces, access to a different society. Whereas some dialects signify entrance into certain types of poverty, ours happens to appeal to a certain elite, academic, liberal-democratic demographic of people -- and thus gives us an entry into an extremely privileged society.
Upward mobility is the work of language as much as of anything. So say that we were entirely selfish and, rather than worry about those folks who are excluded by our language, we were to simply congratulate ourselves on learning it. Even in this case, there would still be a valid criticism of the scenario as it exists. Because -- isn't there still something missing? Isn't this specific language, the academic language, so dry and arcane, so fluffy and cumbersome -- completely unintelligible to most people -- isn't it lacking something? bell hooks, a prominent African-American writer and radical feminist, says that a great secret white supremacist capitalist patriarchy keeps from those who can't or don't read much is that all of the really powerful information is kept hidden away, in books. If you watch television instead -- well, pray to the gods that you will be able to afford cable if you hope to find anything worth talking about at all.
But does this have to be? Why should encode all of our most valuable information solely into written languages? Does this have to be the authority? Although I couldn't possibly memorize what the New College library contains, I could certainly spend some time telling you about things in there which are most relevant to my life. Why do we trust the internet more than our own memory, and how much sheer information do we really need? How do we ourselves benefit? Isn't this, at worst, suffocating more relevant experiences we could have here? Isn't this, at best, just boring?
Nietzsche said he knew of few things worse than rising early in the morning, when the light and air are bright and electric, only to go hide in a dusty room and squint at the yellowed pages of some book. So how did we come to think that language works best when it is written out? Maybe we were really proud of our ability to use tools, like the hallowed calligraphy pen. Maybe we were afraid of public speaking. Maybe we were really ugly, or had ugly shoes, and thought that people would take us more seriously if they never had to be in the same room with us. This is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. Armed with this excuse, we can now employ our dusty paper weapons against the uncivilized world. And anything which we hear, which we don't like, we can simply mistranslate, or refuse to write down. Which is what "anthropologists" visiting Ghana in the 1850's did with the entirety of Akan culture and philosophy.
Yet if we are quiet for a moment -- and ask ourselves why we use language, in any form, to begin with -- the meaning language has in our lives is not itself written down. I think language justify itself almost entirely in our desire to remember and give ecstatic descriptions of the world, of ourselves, of others -- to others. Don't the roots of language itself run straight under our skin, deeper than any book? Don't these roots spring from the desire to affirm everything that exists in this world, and not in books? Language can be a weapon, but it can also be a gift, which gathers together everything in the world, and gives everything, named, back to that world. Books help with all this, certainly -- but so do crutches, if your legs are broken. This distinction -- between written language and speech -- is what is becoming significant.
I am irreverent because I think what is at stake when writing, which originated out of speech and gesture, tyrannizes them, is the very way we inhabit our own bodies, our own mouths, our own voices. Also, our relationship to the bodies, mouths, and voices of the world we encounter. This prioritizing goes right along with a Cartesian mind-body dualism which subordinates the body to a supra-natural mind. Why have we inherited a tradition which mistrusts the respectability of any language that first explodes outward, like dynamite, from a tongue between two lips, or in the gestures of two hands? It seems that such a mistrust amounts to nothing more profound than a mistrust of the body and, to again defer to Nietzsche -- maybe all of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. Maybe historically, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -- forming the writers and readers of most canonical Western science and literature -- has endeavoured quite nerdily to use writing in order to free a certain privileged population from the terrible burden that is having a body. Hence the body is labeled the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal -- and history's wives, slaves, and serfs are burdened --not with bodies, which they had always already had -- but with that rejection of the body, and those labels.
What was the goal behind this trend? To leave our bodies and go to heaven? We simply wanted to die? A question for the audience -- how do you feel about that? I, for one, don't dislike myself nearly that much. For to free someone from the body would be, I think, to free them from themselves. Admittedly, there is ultimately something uncanny about the way language, as speech, possesses the space around it like lightning. It strikes and individualizes the speaker, illuminating his world, and illuminating he, himself, to the world. If you don't like the sound of your own voice, the anonymity of the page will be preferable. However -- if you find you can sing --
"All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking entered into literature. And literature has decided the fate of Western science."
-- Martin Heidegger, What Calls For Thinking?
5.2.09
2.2.09
Dream Log
I am standing in a health food store, filled for some occasion by New College students -- Lea, Zachariah. Everybody European cheek-kissing. Wandering the aisles. A male in a hooded sweatshirt begins bordering the crowd, quiet. I somehow become aware that his plan is to leave the gathering for a while, then reappear, taking the group hostage, going on a shooting spree. Somehow he makes this obvious, somehow we all know, but no one moves to lift a finger. He leaves.
He returns, wrapped in cellophane, standing next to me. I consult a few guys who are leaving the party -- fraternity boys, not who I have any desire to spend my time with, except out of desperation. They live high up, high above the store, almost in the mountains, but they allow me to flee with them. We climb a tree-ladder, almost like the bamboo rungs that took me once to the roof of Pei. Then I go upstairs in their house, which is full of mahogany wooden paneling -- and the boys are gone. Only downstairs, the lumbering of wide grizzly bears, the same color as the mahogany. Rummaging in the fridge, on the kitchen counter.
Somehow I escape through the roof -- but there was no roof, only an opening. To a fenced area, where I can look down to see a procession of people leaving the store, in single file. Everyone was safe, but I don't think the killer was arrested. Lea was there. Then we are driving away, I am following he down a hill, but I can't drive. I am only keeping my car in the lane by leaping up intermittently and holding onto the traffic-lights until the car is re-aligned. But Lea turns on the highway and I know that I can't be carried by momentum in the same way there, so I tumble out the side door before the car hits the highway.
Suddenly I am barefoot and half-dressed on the side of the road, clamoring for help. A man in something like a UPS truck stops. He speaks English, but it is not my language. He doesn't understand, but takes me to the yard of a church, where an older blond woman with leathery skin and powder-blue eye make-up stands in the fading light. She tells me I am in trouble, that I had better stick my chest out and pull my stomach in for The Lord, "not sexually or anything, but, you know."
He returns, wrapped in cellophane, standing next to me. I consult a few guys who are leaving the party -- fraternity boys, not who I have any desire to spend my time with, except out of desperation. They live high up, high above the store, almost in the mountains, but they allow me to flee with them. We climb a tree-ladder, almost like the bamboo rungs that took me once to the roof of Pei. Then I go upstairs in their house, which is full of mahogany wooden paneling -- and the boys are gone. Only downstairs, the lumbering of wide grizzly bears, the same color as the mahogany. Rummaging in the fridge, on the kitchen counter.
Somehow I escape through the roof -- but there was no roof, only an opening. To a fenced area, where I can look down to see a procession of people leaving the store, in single file. Everyone was safe, but I don't think the killer was arrested. Lea was there. Then we are driving away, I am following he down a hill, but I can't drive. I am only keeping my car in the lane by leaping up intermittently and holding onto the traffic-lights until the car is re-aligned. But Lea turns on the highway and I know that I can't be carried by momentum in the same way there, so I tumble out the side door before the car hits the highway.
Suddenly I am barefoot and half-dressed on the side of the road, clamoring for help. A man in something like a UPS truck stops. He speaks English, but it is not my language. He doesn't understand, but takes me to the yard of a church, where an older blond woman with leathery skin and powder-blue eye make-up stands in the fading light. She tells me I am in trouble, that I had better stick my chest out and pull my stomach in for The Lord, "not sexually or anything, but, you know."
The New World
In his first TV interview with al-Arabiya, President Obama suggested, by way of reconciliation, that the Muslim world remember that "America was not born as a colonial power," that the war in Iraq was an exception to the 'rule' of the Revolutionary United States. Ultimately, this amounts to the same defense as McCain's of himself: that America was the underdog. Indeed, we were fleeing an oppressive regime in Great Britain. Could Obama have forgotten that as we fled one regime, we instituted our own?
The most effective ethnic cleansing is the one that is totally forgotten.
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