Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001)

Cover image (from amazon.com).

The title of this book is a bit misleading; it suggests a sexy collection of provocatively political manifestos but is in fact a piece of good, old-fashioned classicist scholarship, like much of the work Foucault did in his last years.

This particular study is concerned with the notion of parrhesia or "frank speech," which played an interesting role in both Athenian democracy and later Stoic self-improvement. Foucault combs meticulously through the works of Seneca, Epictetus, Plato, and others, in order to map out how the concept came to be first articulated and then problematized in the ancient and late-ancient literature.

The text is based on six tape-recorded lectures that he gave at UC Berkeley in 1983.

Although the first couple of chapters of the book treat the role of parrhesia in the context of political life, it really starts to pick up momentum as Foucault gets into the discussion of his latter-day pet topic, the care of the self.

The King Gets a Beating

As part of this discussion, he considers a dialogue by the Cynic philosopher Dio Chrysostom. This text dramatizes the alleged meeting between Diogenes (the philosopher said to live in a barrel) and Alexander the Great (pp. 124–133).

During the dialogue, Diogenes provokes Alexander by all sorts of means, including questioning his courage and his claims to the throne. This kind of deliberate provocation has some interesting parallels with the Socratic dialogue, but also some interesting differences from it:

… whereas Socrates plays with his interlocutor's ignorance, Diogenes want to hurt Alexander's pride. For example, at the beginning of the exchange, Diogenes calls Alexander a bastard and tells him that someone who claims to be a king is not so very different from a child who, after winning a game, puts a crown on his head and declares that he is king. Of course, all that is not very pleasant for Alexander to hear; But that's Diogenes' game: hitting his interlocutor's pride, forcing him to recognize that he is not what he claims to be—which is something quite different from the Socratic attempt to show someone that he is ignorant of what he claims to know. (p. 126; emphasis in original)

As the dialogue progresses, Alexander's patience and tolerance are put to increasingly harsh tests. In effect, Diogenes thus turns the conversation into a game with extreme stakes: Will Diogenes shut up out of fear for death, or will Alexander lose his temper and slaughter him because, after all, he did not have the self-confidence and fearlessness that marks a true king?

Everybody Wins?

The martial element of the dialogue is thus, in one sense, even stronger than in Plato:

Whereas the Socratic dialogue traces an intricate and winding path from an ignorant understanding to an awareness of ignorance, the Cynic dialogue is much more like a fight, a battle, or a war, with peaks of great aggressivity and moments of peaceful calm—peaceful exchanges which, of course, are additional traps for the interlocutor. (p. 130)

19th century depiction of the meeting (from Wikimedia).

The game finally ends when Alexander gets around to asking what the true mark of a king might be (now that Diogenes has disqualified practically everything that makes Alexander a king). Diogenes explains that a true king behaves like one, and is, in what I assume is Foucault's paraphrase, "noble by nature" (p. 132).

Thus:

Here the game reaches a point where Alexander does not become conscious of his lack of knowledge, as in a Socratic dialogue. He discovers, instead, that he is not in any way what he thought he was—viz., a king by royal birth, with marks of his divine status, or king because of his superior power, and so on. He is brought to a point where Diogenes tells him that the only way to be a real king is to adopt the same type of ethos as the Cynic philosopher. And at this point in the exchange there is nothing more for Alexander to say. (p. 132)

Just as in the Stoic ethos, the goal of the whole exercise thus seems to be a kind of independence from visible fame, power, and wealth. It's not that the real gratification lies in some afterlife as in the Christian tradition, but there is still a sense that one should avoid attachment to the wrong things, and to the wrong symbols.

Perceptual Hygiene

The last example in the book comes from a text by Epictetus, and describes a method for training oneself to meet impressions with the right state of mind. Inspired by sophistical question-and-answer games, Epictetus suggests that we should constantly keep an inner dialogue going regarding everything we see:

As we exercise ourselves to meet the sophistical interrogations, so we ought also to exercise ourselves daily to meet the impression of our senses, because these too put interrogations to us. So-and-so's son is dead. Answer, "That lies outside the sphere of the moral purpose, it is not an evil." […] He was grieved at all this. "That lies withing the sphere of the moral purpose, it is an evil." He has borne up under it manfully. "That lies within the sphere of the moral purpose, it is a good." Now if we acquire this habit, we shall make progress, for we shall never give our assent to anything but that of which we get a convincing sense-impression. (p. 163, cited from Epictetus: The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, III, 8)

Epictetus goes on to recommend doing this exercise constantly "from dawn till dark," interrogating your senses about everything you see. He compares this examination of one's impressions to the caution of a nightwatch — "Wait, allow me to see who you are and whence you come" (p. 161).

This is interesting for two reasons: First, it resonates a lot with contemporary notions of mindfulness as employed in New Age religions and self-help therapy. And second, it has an interesting and not completely obvious relationship with epistemological skepticism; many philosophical discussions of how one should distrust one's senses acquire a quite different ring when we put them in the context of such a clearly normative and ethical theory of perceptual hygiene.

The Dangers of Florid Prose

Just one last example: In his book On the Tranquility of Mind, Seneca reproduces a (possibly fictional) letter by a family member named Serenus. In the letter, Serenus complains that while he har largely overcome his desire for material wealth, public recognition, and an immortal legacy, he still occasionally falls back into old habits, feeling envy at "the sight of slaves bedecked with gold" and the like (p. 155, cited from Seneca: On the Tranquility of Mind, I, 4–17).

What I want to point out, however, is the way that Serenus explicitly links his desire for an eternal memory with a specific mode of writing:

And in my literary studies I think that it is surely better to fix my eyes on the theme itself, and, keeping this uppermost when I speak, to trust meanwhile to the theme to supply the words so that unstudied language may follow it wherever it leads. I say: "What need is there to compose something that will last for centuries? Will you not give up striving to keep posterity silent about you? You were born for death; a silent funeral is less troublesome! And so to pass the time, write something in simple style, for your own use, not for publication; they that study for the day have less need to labor." Then again, when my mind has been uplifted by the greatness of its thoughts, it becomes ambitious of words, and with higher aspirations it desires higher expression, and language issues forth to match the dignity of the theme; forgetful then of my rule and of my more restrained judgment, I am swept to loftier heights by an utterance that is no longer my own. (pp. 156–57)

In this way, Serenus (or Seneca) constructs a direct parallel between vain desires and ambitions to "high" writing. Apparently the assumption is that there is a kind of humbleness or honesty built into the "simple style" which at once is guaranteed to be "your own" and to keep you vigilant with respect to abiding by your (Stoic) principles of a philosophical life.

Final Remarks on Method

There is a place in the third volume of the History of Sexuality in which Foucault implicitly criticizes the Marxist conception of the dynamics of history for being to rigid, but it is quite obscure what exactly he imagines to put in its place.

This gets a little clearer in the brief remarks he makes on his project in these lectures. It's an important point, so I'll quote is quite extensively here.

During the first lecture, Foucault states:

I would like to distinguish between the "history of ideas" and the "history of thought." […] The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and "silent," out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions. The history of thought, understood this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that—for example, about madness, about crime, about sex, and themselves, or about truth. (p. 74)

In his concluding remarks at the end of the course, he elaborates:

Some people have interpreted this type of analysis as a form of "historical idealism," but I think that such an analysis is completely different. For when I say that I am studying the "problematization" of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such phenomena. One the contrary, I have tried to show that is was precisely some real existent in the world which was the target of social regulation at a given moment. The question I raise is this one: How and why were very different things in the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as, for example, "mental illness"? What are the elements which are relevant for a given "problematization"? And even if I won't say that what is characterized as "schizophrenia" corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematized and the process of problematization. The problematization is an "answer" to a concrete situation which is real. (pp. 171–72)

Homing in even more specifically on what must have been a Marxist critique, he continues:

But we have to understand very clearly, I think, that a given problematization is not an effect or consequence of a historical context or situation, but is an answer given by definite individuals (although you may find this same answer given in a series of texts, and at a certain point the answer may become so general that it also becomes anonymous). (p. 172)

These answers do not come "from any sort of collective unconscious" (p. 172):

And the fact that an answer is neither a representation nor an effect of a situation does not mean that it answers to nothing, that it is a pure dream, or an "anti-creation." A problematization is always a kind of creation; but a creation in the sense that, given a certain situation, you cannot infer that this kind of problematization will follow. Given a certain problematization, you can only understand why this kind of answer appears as a reply to some concrete and specific aspect of the world. There is the relation of thought and reality in the process of problematization. (p. 172)

I suspect this is about as clear as Foucault ever got on this issue, and about as clear as he could get.

Seneca: Letters to Lucilius (trans. E. Barker, 1932)

The letters from Seneca to Lucilius mostly contain an assorted bunch of moralistic advice on how to live a good, Stoic life. One thing in particular which struck me about them, however, was their very explicit ridiculing of superficial philosophical or logical arguments.

Bust of Seneca (from Wikimedia)

For instance, one central tenet of the Stoic creed is that one should not fear death; but Seneca rejects the notion that this change of attitude can be brought about by a kind of "logical hocus-pocus" (letter 82; p. 12). He thus writes:

Our founder Zeno uses the following syllogism:

'No evil is glorious;
Death is glorious,
Therefore death is not an evil.'

O my comforter! Dispeller of my terrors! After that I shall lay my head on the block with alacrity! Please talk more seriously, and don't make a dying man laugh. Upon my honour I should find it hard to tell you whether the man who imagines he has snuffed out the fear of death by this inference, or one who tries gravely to explode it, as if it really bore on the question, is the crazier. (letter 82, p. 11-12)

The message thus seems to be that it isn't enough to recognize the formal validity of this or that verbal argument — you have to internalize its message and learn to live by it.

"Breakfast, Lads!"

Seneca's own preferred medium for making such points is instead the short, forceful statement of fact that treats death without any special ornament or sentimentality. In another comment to the syllogism above, he thus comments:

A moving address indeed! After that who'd demur to hurl himself on the levelled spear-points and die where he stood? But what gallant words Leonidas spoke: 'Get a good breakfast, lads: there'll be no dinner till the next world.' The food didn't rise in their mouths or stick in their throats or slip from their fingers: they accepted for dinner as cheerfully as for breakfast. Once more, there's the Roman officer speaking to the men sent to pierce a huge hostile force and seize a position: 'We must get there, boys,' said he, 'but we needn't get back again.' You see how unaffected and masterful virtue is: pray is there a single soul the chicaneries of you and your friends could inspire and brace? (letter 82; pp. 17-18)

Apparently, death-talk should not only be staunch and "unaffected," but also positively folksy ("lads"). This is is a matter of style and ethics rather than logic:

What can you say to fire men's heart for a plunge into the thick of peril? With what pleading can you defeat this unanimity of dread, with what resources of genius the conviction of humanity that bars your way? Do I find you juggling with words and spinning miserable little syllogisms? (letter 82; p. 18)

In fact he does, and he has an opinion to offer on the relevance of such arguments:

Your arguments run to point. Yes, and so does an ear of barley. It's the very fineness of some points that makes them useless and ineffective. (letter 82; p. 18)

It's difficult not to read a gendered Victorian connotation into a word like "fineness," but I don't know what the Latin text said, or how it would sound to contemporary ears.

"Storm the Stronghold of the Passions"

Seneca makes a similar point when discussing the dismissive Stoic attitude towards money, and in particular, the false sense of pride and security that people may draw from their wealth. Again, he counters this notion with a syllogism in the classical form:

Good doesn't result from evils. Wealth does results from a sum of many poverties: therefore wealth is not a good. (letter 87, p. 58; italics in original)

But he has little hope that such arguments really convince anybody:

Are we likely to argue the pros and cons in syllogisms of the kind we've just seen? Are we likely by their means to succeed in making the Roman people seek poverty, the groundwork and source of their imperial power, and honour it, shrink in dismay from their own wealth, reflect that they discovered this wealth in the treasuries of the vanquished, that from it bribery, corruption, and political disorders have forced their way into the most irreproachable and austere of cities, that the spoils of other nations are too gloatingly paraded, and that what one people has wrestled from all, all may more easily wrest from one? No, it is our actions [that] must champion that law: we must storm the stronghold of the passions, not draw lines round them. Let us speak, if we can, more forcibly; if not that, more plainly. (letter 87; p. 59)

It thus seems that in Seneca's ethical idiom, there is a strong connection between (1) being a "man of action" rather than idle words; (2) having learned to live in accordance with one's ethical truth; and (3) talking in a certain "no-nonsense" style of frank, manly prose.

In a sort of roundabout way, the effect is thus that he comes to appear in line with the modern "one true sentence" philosophy of writing that we associate with Hemingway — another decidedly macho writer/soldier/moralist.

Foucault: "Writing the Self" (1984?)

This brief and very well-written text, reprinted in Foucault and His Interlocutors, is a case-study in the culture of writing and reading which, according to Foucault, emerged in the Roman Empire in the first centuries A.D.

It focuses mainly on a number of texts by the two philosopher-politicians Marcus Aurelius and Foucault's favourite, Seneca. Both of these writes also play a central role in Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality.

The hypothesis that Foucault proposes in the text is that writing and reading in this period began to be considered as a kind of spiritual or ethical exercise that could help a (male, Roman) person constitute himself as a good, ethical subject. This meant using writing and reading as tool for reflecting on one's own life and training oneself in the discipline of independence from wealth and health. The main inspiration for this approach was Pierre Hadot.

Exercise or Confession?

Apparently, a part of the function of all this ceaseless writing was a kind of benevolent self-surveillance. Foucault quotes Seneca as saying

we must regulate our lives as though the whole world were looking at them (p. 243; originally in Letter 40)

However, Foucault insists that this practice should not (yet) be taken as a kind of confession;

it is not a matter of pursuing the unsayable, nor of revealing the hidden, nor of saying the unsaid, but on the contrary of capturing the already-said, of reassembling what one could hear or read, and this for an end that is nothing less than the constitution of the self. (p. 237)

It is not completely clear that this claim is true, though. The introductory quote from the Christian writer Athanasius clearly shows that a couple of hundred years down the line, the purpose of writing had certainly become "to ensure that one does not sin" (p. 234).

The rest of Foucault's text can perhaps be read as a prolonged attempt to justify that this is not the philosophy that we find in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

Why We Write

One strand of evidence in support of Foucault's claim comes from the ancient sources themselves. At least sometimes, they seem to consider the practice of writing diaries or letters explicitly as a kind of mental exercise:

Seneca recalls that when one writes, one reads what one writes just as in saying something one hears what one says (p. 241; reference to Seneca's Letter 84)

Consequently,

Whoever teaches, educates himself. (p. 237; quoted from Letter 7)

The point of writing a letter is thus not to air your flaws, but to give a friend advice about how to live a good, philosophical life, and thus indirectly benefit yourself.

Reflections On the Day Gone By

Another argument comes from the fact that some of the exercises simply seem to be ill-suited as acts of confession. For instance, the practice of silently and privately meditating on the day gone by can hardly be construed as a kind of confession (pp. 245-47).

This is further supported by the fact that when such reflections are actually written down, they often look more like attentive descriptions of daily details than like catalogues of sins and errors. Thus, Seneca describes a day in which "nothing happened" (Foucault's words) by meticulously recording its events in a letter. Foucault lists the contents:

A bit of physical training, racing with a young slave, a bath in barely tepid water, a simple meal of bread, a very brief nap. But the essential part of the letter---and it is that which occupies the longest part of the letter---had been devoted to meditation on a theme suggested by a sophisticated syllogism of Zeno apropos drunkenness. (p. 245; he is talking about Letter 83)

Marcus Aurelius tells a similar story, equally filled with tiny details, and with reasons for happiness rather than shame. Quoting him:

Then we went to eat. On what do you think I dined? On a bit of bread, while I watched many others devouring oysters, onions, and very fat sardines. Afterwards, we set ourselves harvesting the grapes; we sweated a lot, shouted a lot. [...] Having returned home, before turning on my side to sleep, I go through my task; I make an account of my day to my sweetest of masters, whom, were I to be consumed by it [i.e., were I to die on this day?], I would love still more. (p. 247; quoted after Marcus Aurelius' Letter 6 to Fronto)

Indeed, this looks more like an account of small successes and failures than an account of good and bad deeds. If recounting such events is beneficial for the soul, it cannot be as a disinfectant.

Reading As an Spiritual Exercise

Of course, the least confession-like of all literary practices is that of reading. However, this is also considered a valuable tool for moulding and training the self (pp. 238-40). Seneca thus recommends daily reading as well as slow and careful digestion of what one reads:

From all that you have skimmed, extract one thought to digest well that day. This is also what I do. (p. 239; quoted after his Letter 2)

The fact that such study and meditation is a tool for improving the soul on a general level is suggested by a statement by Epictetus that Foucault quotes:

It is of little importance that one has or has not read all of Zeno or Chrysippus; it is of little importance that one has seized exactly what they meant, and that one is capable of reconstructing the unity of their reasoning. (p. 239; quoted from Epictetus: Entritiens (the Discourses?), 2:65)

What is of importance, presumably, is that one goes through the trouble of meditating one some edifying prose, perhaps like the many religious cultures have emphasized ritually reading and re-reading sacred texts, both in private and in public.