about "The Courage of Truth" by Michel Foucault

This is another installment in the newly published series of lectures (and lecture notes) given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. This one, however, was the last one he gave there before dying. These lectures were recorded during February and March, 1984. He died June 25, 1984.

This book is subtitled "The Government of Self and Others II" because it picks up where his previous string of lectures, "The Government of Self and Others" (published in this same series by Picador), left off. So we begin again with the concept of parrhesia: free-spokeness, or, defined more emphatically, truth-telling. A few high-profile truth-tellers, just to give you an idea, might include Americans Mark Twain or Will Rogers (more recently, some people might include Jon Stewart). But rather than seeing parrhesia in merely the presence of a few pop culture figures, Foucault drills the concept of parrhesia to mine for its broader, deeper significance and implications.

In Foucault's late lectures, he is imparting an ontology of true discourses. First, "The Government of Self and Others" established parrhesia as originally a political notion. But here, through Foucault's reading of Plato (on Socrates) and his study of Cynicism, it expands into philosophy.

Foucault established parrhesia as a necessary component in effective democracies; the best political system will be the one run by virtuous men. In "The Courage of Truth," parrhesia differentiates the man, the leader, from the masses. A leader's truth-telling not only shows his moral/ethical worth, it also is part of the speaker's self conception. So, as established in ancient philosophy, the best political system is run by virtuous men who can uncork the discourse of truth. In this analysis, Foucault is running the technologies of power (and government), knowledge, and subject formation through the gauntlet. These things are intertwined in ancient philosophy, and so they are in most of Foucault's texts.

This lecture's opening focuses on Plato's "Apology," the story of Socrates death, and "Leches," a work exploring courage. With these works, we first find that parrhesia and indeed all of ancient ethics revolve around the care of the self (i.e., self development, self government, self discipline, etc.). Furthermore, parrhesia is bound up in one's existence and formation of self. The latter portions of "The Courage of Truth" examine the Cynics--a people who denied themselves even basic comforts to strip away any artifice that might stand in the way of Truth. This drastic lifestyle eventually showed people that there was another life: an other life, or, the other life (varies by interpreted experience).

Christianity blended the Platonic concept of care of self--the work of purifying the soul ahead of its eventually authentic existence in another world--with the Cynics' quest to defy "temporal customs" in search of basic values.

So you take the two parts of "The Courage of Truth"--the way truth-telling separates the speaker from the masses and the philsophic introduction of the possibility of the other (better) life promised by the Cynics and their successors--and you find that, since the dawn of Western philosophy with the Ancients, the hallmark of the True is Otherness: that which makes a difference and opens the possibility of another reality. This, according to Michael Foucault, is what philosophy is, what it does. There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life.

This is a poignant book; the editor's notes go to lengths to drive this home; Foucault, knowing death would come soon, like Socrates, practiced philosophy and kept his eye on Truth until the end.

something about Michel Foucault, "The Government of Self and Others"

These lectures, delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982 and 1983, meditate on the concept of truth-telling known as parresia. The bulk of these lectures have Foucault tracing the use, exercise, and implications of parresia through ancient Greek texts.

Foucault starts, however, in the Enlightenment.

What is Enlightenment? Kant asked, and Foucault restates the question: What is this present?* Foucault finds here not only the beginning of contemporary philosophy but the seed of his own brand of inquiry: a discursive practice of philosophy that collides with its own present reality. The speaker--first, Kant, now, Foucault--is no longer speaking as a member of a philosophical tradition or community, but as a part of the present. And, ever since, philosophy has continued questioning its own present reality.

In his reflections on the Enlightenment, Kant speculated that the human race was making progress. He figured that popular support abroad for the ideals propelling the French Revolution symbolized this progress. Man was leaving an era in which he was unwilling to use his reason. Now, he would reason; and, once free to exercise his reason, he could be obedient. More freedom of thought, more obedience. And this obedience requires a kind of self-governance that Foucault interrogates in much of his work.

After a brief visit with the Enlightenment, Foucault starts to dwell in the ancient texts, starting with the myth of Ion and rounding the final corner with Plato's Phaedrus. In these stories he identifies the roles and implications of courage, politics, rhetoric, and philsosophy in the practice and concept of truth-telling known as parresia.

To my mind, this was so far the least compelling of these newly published Foucault lectures. But my mind is somewhere else now, maybe.

Notes:
* Prior to the Enlightenment, people spoke of the present in terms of periods of prosperity or decadence.