Remember a time when speaking plainly was a confrontational, dangerous act. This may have been telling a friend or a superior about their bad behaviour. In these moments, you may have witnessed parrhesia.

Parrhesia currently is most commonly translated as “speaking truth to power” and generally only used – somewhat obnoxiously – by philosophy professors publishing op-ed criticisms about higher education policy or the like. Properly understood, parrhesia is not just criticism, but a way of truth-finding and expressing that can helpfully complement other such forms. In short, parrhesia is speaking the truth and placing the proof for that truth not in evidence, but in the personal risk one takes.

More elaborately, a person can be a parrhesiastes if they fulfill five conditions

1. they are speaking frankly, without clouding their words in niceties or defenses
2. they are speaking truthfully
3. they are taking a personal risk in speaking like this (this is what distinguishes the parrhesiastes from the aforementioned philosophy professors)
4. they are speaking critically
5. they are speaking out of a sense of moral duty

A modern-day parrhesisastes might be someone telling their boss to stop with his sexist hiring practices. The parrhesiastes would be speaking frankly, truthfully, critically, out of a sense of moral duty (presumably they aren’t directly affected by the hiring practices) and, most importantly, taking an immediate personal risk because the person they are addressing – their boss – has the power to hurt them.

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy. [1]

What makes parrhesia interesting to us is both how it lets us come at truth in a different way and what we can learn in making ourselves into the kind of person that can speak parrhesia. The historical Greek examples of parrhesiastes are remarkable insofar as they never doubt or explain that they are speaking the truth. The five conditions above suffice for them to be speaking truthfully. While there is more subtlety to this (in our example, the worker might still be factually wrong about the hiring practices because they’re unaware of the six new hires in the pipeline), it suffices to give us a shot at applying it. Most importantly, look for the personal risk people take and the sense of moral duty- When evaluating a claim, don’t just look for what evidence is presented, but also for whether the above criteria are met. A common instance would be women publicly calling out a superior’s sexual harassment.

“Plato saw [Diogenes of Sinope] washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, ‘Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t now be washing lettuces,’ and [Diogenes] with equal calmness answered, ‘If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn’t have paid court to Dionysius’”

A necessary step to becoming a parrhesiastes is becoming the kind of person that can take the personal risks associated with it. In this exchange featuring a Cynic, he makes clear that he sees the poverty implied in washing lettuces as a liberation from the pressures to speak circumspectly. And while the Greek examples tend to focus on speaking truth to state-power in the form of kings, power relations today abound and still limit. Consider the person who cannot criticise a racist joke at a dinner party because it would be impolite or the minister for the environment who cannot say that her government’s climate policy will lead to catastrophe.

Also think about whether you, in your current relationships and positions, are capable of receiving parrhesia. Maybe think of moments where you received it and how you reacted – did you ask for clear-cut evidence? Did you doubt the person’s sincerity? The Greeks considered the capacity to receive frank criticism without killing the messenger one of the differences between a good king and a tyrant, and we are all kings in some of our relationships.

References

Most of this understanding of parrhesia draws on Michel Foucault’s lecture series “Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia” (https://foucault.info/parrhesia/foucault.DT1.wordParrhesia.en/)

[1] (https://foucault.info/parrhesia/ 1.5, page 5/67)