A recent
reading of Michel Foucault, The
Courage of Truth,[1] reveals
the long history of Cynicism viewed on the basis of a theme of life as “scandal
of the truth”, or of “style of life as site of emergence of the truth” (bios as alethurgy[2]) (p. 180). Foucault wrote,
[In its ancient form] Cynic practice, the requirement of an
extremely distinctive form of life—with very characteristic, well defined
rules, conditions, or modes—is strongly connected to the principle of
truth-telling, of truth-telling without shame or fear, of unrestricted and
courageous truth-telling, of truth-telling which pushes its courage and
boldness to the point that it becomes intolerable insolence. The connecting up
of truth-telling [parrhêsia] and mode of life, this fundamental, essential
connection in Cynicism between living in a certain way and dedicating oneself
telling the truth us all the more noteworthy for taking place immediately as it
were, without doctrinal mediation, or at any rate within a fairly rudimentary
theoretical framework. . . Cynicism appears . . . to be a form of philosophy in
which the mode of life and truth-telling are directly and immediately linked to
each other. (pp. 165-6)
Cynicism was
a distinct shift within the locus of the parrhesiatic speech, from
the political domain to the ethical, truth-telling as part of democratic
citizenship. More than mere franc speech it is more closely associated
with the notion of ethos. The Cynics and their concerns went beyond the
traditional topics of politics and democracy, unto questions of “happiness and
unhappiness [3] Historically Foucault
traced three profound historical paths or stances that resulted in the ethical
development of the self: the confession or the Christian hermeneutics of the
self, the Greek and Roman philosophical care of the self and the Cynical
parrhêsia or fearless speech.
We could say
today, the cynic ("gentle" or otherwise) is one who publicly lives
out inconvenient truths concerning one’s daily existence, an existential
attitude and the mark of a sage (or development of); i.e., one who transforms
one’s own body in a ”theater of the scandal of truth” which ultimately
challenges ones’ fellow friends/citizens to radically revise their opinions,
institutions and common shared values. Cynicism should be viewed as
beginning with the “care of the self” in the struggle of living daily against
the normalization of injustices, violence, and uncaring modes and methods of
people and the planet. It means at some level a resistance to solitude or
estrangement, to “everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with
others, splits up community” and forces an individual back on himself and ties
him to his own identity in a constraining way.[4]
Thus in its subjective forms, truthful speech (parrhesia) is truth telling as a form of the care of
self, intended to do work, to have an effects on others and on ourselves—to
govern self and influence others.
[1] M Foucalt, The Courage of Truth(The Government of Self
and Others II) Lectures at the College De France, 1983-84.
[2] ἀληθουργής, someone who speaks the truth (a
hapax legomenon); This hapaxadjective is the result of composing the noun
meaning “truth” (alétheia, ἀλήθεια) with the noun meaning “action” or “deed”
(érgon, ἔργον). The “fictive word” forged by Foucault, alethurgy, is
decidedly defined to signify “the set of possible verbal and non-verbal
procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to
false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten,” in order to
conclude that “there is no power without something like alethurgy”. The word does not only sound like the combination of alétheia and érgon, but also like the combination of alétheia and liturgy. Liturgy,
in turn, is a civil duty that one performs at his or her own expenses (and
risks). As civil duty, it has a certain ritual, a series of forms and spaces
where it can be performed. In fact, throughout Foucault’s text, alethurgy goes
from “manifestation of truth” to mean the forms and rituals in which truth is
manifested as part of the technique of government.
[3] Foucault’s 1984 lectures on The Courage of Truth,
http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/the-thirteenth-seminar/
[4] Cristian Iftode, Foucault’s Idea of Philosophy as
‘Care of the Self:’ Critical Assessment and Conflicting Metaphorical Views. West University of
Timisoara, Romania: Elsevier Ltd., 2013
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