Parrhesia
In the autumn of 1983 Michel Foucault gave six lectures in English at Berkeley under the title Discourse and Truth. Their subject was one Greek word, parrhesia. English usually renders it as free speech or frank speech. French has franc-parler.
The lectures reached print twice. Joseph Pearson transcribed them from the recordings, and his edition came out in 2001 as Fearless Speech. In 2019 the University of Chicago Press published a corrected text, supplemented from Foucault's manuscripts, as "Discourse and Truth" and "Parresia". The first lecture begins with what the word means.
Saying everything
The word is built from pan, everything, and rhema, what is said. The one who uses it hides nothing and chooses the most direct words he can find. Foucault sets it against rhetoric. Rhetoric gives a speaker devices for winning over an audience, whatever he himself believes. Parrhesia shows the audience what he actually thinks.
Frankness alone is not enough. Foucault names five features: frankness, truth, danger, criticism and duty. The third is the least obvious.
Why risk belongs to it
A grammar teacher who tells children something true is not a parrhesiastes, however certain he is. Nothing happens to him for saying it. A philosopher who tells a tyrant that tyranny is unjust is one, because the tyrant can exile him or kill him. The risk need not be that large. Telling a friend he is wrong, and putting the friendship at stake, counts as well.
"the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk."
— Michel Foucault, Berkeley lectures, 1983, first lecture, in Joseph Pearson's transcript
It follows that a king cannot use parrhesia, since he risks nothing. Frank speech runs upward: citizen to assembly, pupil to teacher.
The criticism can be turned on the speaker himself. One form Foucault describes is an admission of one's own wrong, made to someone who has the power to censure it. Here duty, the fifth feature, draws the line. A criminal whom the judges force to confess is not practicing parrhesia. The same confession, made freely to someone else because he feels he owes it, is.
The other side of the conversation
The lecture keeps coming back to the listener. In the Hellenistic courts, Foucault says, historians judged a king by how he treated his advisers. A good king accepted what a genuine parrhesiastes told him, even when it was unpleasant to hear. A tyrant was the one who punished honest advisers for what they had said. The speaker brings the courage. Whether anything comes of it depends on the one who hears.
The setting mattered too. In Plato the long continuous speech belongs to rhetoric, and dialogue by question and answer belongs to parrhesia. In Seneca, Foucault finds the view that private conversation suits frank speech best, because it has no need of ornament. By the time of the Epicureans, parrhesia had become a technique of guidance, practiced within a community whose members helped one another. Foucault ties this line to the care of the self.
The danger never leaves frank speech. What changes from one setting to another is who is listening.
Who would I need to be talking to before I could say aloud what I have never said?
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