Parrhesia

"Parrhesia", loosely defined, can mean "free speech," or "to speak everything." The term is borrowed from the Greek and fleshed out by Michel Foucault as a conceptual manner of discourse in which one speaks openly and truthfully about her or his opinions and ideas without the use of rhetoric, manipulation, or generalization.

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Foucault's use of "parrhesia," he tells us, is troubled by our modern day Cartesian model of evidential necessity. For Descartes, truth is the same as the undeniable. Whatever can be doubted must be, and, thus, speech that is not examined or criticized does not necessarily have a valid relation to truth.

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There are several conditions upon which the traditional Ancient Greek notion of parrhesia relies. One who uses parrhesia is only recognized as doing so if he (and it is "he" when we consider Greek teachings) holds a credible relationship to the truth, if he serves as critic to either himself or popular opinion or culture, if the revelation of this truth places him in a position of danger and he persists in speaking the truth, nevertheless, as he feels it is his moral, social, and/or political obligation. Further, a user of parrhesia must be in a social position less empowered than those to whom he is revealing. For instance, a pupil speaking the truth to an instructor would be an accurate example of parrhesia, whereas an instructor revealing the truth to his or her pupils would not.

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Foucault sums up the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia as such:

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"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."

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(Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia.

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(six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983))

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http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/Lecture-01/

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Greek: The noun Greek refers to:...

Michel Foucault: Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher and held a chair at the Coll?ge de France, a chair to which he gave the title "The History of Systems of Thought". His writings have had an enormous impact on other scholarly work: Foucault's influence extends across t...

Discourse: In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences ? in other words, conversations, arguments or speeches. Conventional phraseology often characterises a discourse as 'learned', as in: 'The Professor delivered a learned discourse on the obscure art of Orange peeling.'...