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April 26, 2007
Michel Foucault's lecture course, "Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia, given at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983 has a lecture on parrhesia (free speech as truth telling) and democratic institutions.
It briefly explores the antinomy between parrhesia as freedom of speech and democracy, which inaugurated a long impassioned debate amongst the classical Greeks concerning the precise nature of the dangerous relations which seemed to exist between democracy, logos, freedom, and truth. He says that what we know of the discussion is limited. Most of the texts which have been preserved from this period come from writers who were either more or less directly affiliated with the aristocratic party, or at least distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.
This is what Foucault says about Plato' s argument in The Republic:
What is interesting about this text is that Plato does not blame parrhesia for endowing everyone with the possibility of influencing the city, including the worst citizens. For Plato, the primary danger of parrhesia is not that it leads to bad decisions in government, or provides the means for some ignorant or corrupt leader to gain power, to become a tyrant. The primary danger of liberty and free speech in a democracy is what results when everyone has his own manner of life, his own style of life. For then there can be no common logos, no possible unity, for the city. Following the Platonic principle that there is an analogous relation between the way a human being behaves and the way a city is ruled, between the hierarchical organization of the faculties of a human being and the constitutional make-up of the polis, you can see very well that if everyone in the city behaves just as he or she wishes, with each person following his own opinion, his own will or desire, then there are in the city as many constitutions, as many small autonomous cities, as there are citizens doing whatever they please. And you can see that Plato also considers parrhesia not only as the freedom to say whatever one wishes, but as linked with the freedom to do whatever one wants. It is a kind of anarchy involving the freedom to choose one's own style of life without limit.
This conservative argument about no common logos, no possible unity, for the polis resonates today, as conservatives talk in terms of social cohesion, order and the political integrity of the state that is threatened by liberal self-expression of the 1960s.
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