Parker had a reputation for acerbic wit, occasionally descendi…

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                                      Distrust that word.
‘There is none good save God,’ said Jesus Christ.
If He once, in the first creation-week,
Called creatures good,—for ever, afterward,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs…

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book IV

I don’t know why, even before I had the relevant and requisite experi…

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Foucault’s lectures on parrhēsia give the impression of a man in determined pursuit of a butterfly. He will chase the butterfly for miles, over centuries, wielding a wispy net, until he has it pinned to the page. In his determined pursuit of a single word, building on prior work by classists and theologians alike, Foucault pierces through the contradiction at the heart of Athenian democracy, a contradiction that applies to social media and the din of online platforms today, and winds up giving a history of what it means to pursue truth and the true life, beginning with the Cynics and ending in Christian mysticism.

There are four types of true speaking in classical Greek thought, he says: that of the prophet, who speaks for the gods and not for himself; that of the teacher transmitting technical instruction or facts; that of the sage, who gives wisdom when sought out, but otherwise lives in withdrawal and silence; and that of the parrhesiast, which is something entirely different.1

The word parrhēsia, or speaking freely and boldly, is used in two senses in classical Greek, a positive and a negative one. In the negative sense, Foucault says in the Berkeley lectures, it is synonymous with athuroglossos and athurostomia, that is, having a “mouth without a door,” chattering, gossiping, or babbling anything that comes to mind without regard for rational discourse or the truth. In the positive sense, parrhēsia means courageous truth-telling. This sense has two additional requirements: in contrast to rhetoric, which is the art of speaking persuasively even if the speaker does not believe what he says, the parrhesiast must be speaking, clearly and without dodging, without covering anything up, what is genuinely his own belief and opinion, which he states as his own. Further, unlike a teacher who instructs a student in geometry, who is saying true things but without risk2, parrhēsia requires risk.

For there to be parrhēsia, you recall—I stressed this last year—the subject must be taking some kind of risk [in speaking] this truth which he signs as his opinion, his thought, his belief, a risk which concerns his relationship with the person to whom he is speaking. For there to be parrhēsia, in speaking the truth one must open up, establish, and confront the risk of offending the other person, of irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be extremely violent. So it is the truth subject to risk of violence. For example, in the First Philippic, after having said that he is speaking meta parrhēsias (with frankness), Demosthenes [adds]: I am well aware that, by employing this frankness, I do not know what the consequences will be for me of the things I have just said.3

It is possible for the parrhesiast to frame his attempt in the form of what Foucault calls “the parrhesiastic game,” by saying explicitly that he is going to engage in parrhēsia, that he will tell the truth to the Assembly or to the tyrant, knowing that it will upset them, and that he might be severely punished as a result.4 This is an appeal to either the Assembly or the tyrant to match the parrhesiast’s courage in speaking—parrhēsia being a sign of what Aristotle calls “greatness of soul” in the Nicomachean Ethics—with their own courage and greatness of soul in hearing an unpleasant truth.

The technician’s and teacher’s truth-telling brings together and binds; the parrhesiast’s truth-telling risks hostility, war, hatred, and death. And if the parrhesiast’s truth may unite and reconcile, when it is accepted and the other person agrees to the pact and plays the game of parrhēsia, this is only after it has opened up an essential, fundamental, and structurally necessary moment of the possibility of hatred and a rupture.5

As Socrates’ situation illustrates, while the philosopher was able to successfully play the parrhesiast several times in his life, including in 409 B.C. when he was prytanis,6 in the end, after accusations from Meletus that he was corrupting the Athenian youth through his questions and teaching, the Assembly voted for his death.

That accusation and vote, I think, exemplify the fundamental conflict that Foucault traces in Greek thought between parrhēsia and Athenian democracy, which is also a conflict between the two meanings of parrhēsia. On the one hand, Athens prided itself on being a democracy where anyone could say anything, even foreigners and slaves, in contrast to other cities where parrhēsia was only the birthright of citizens born to families not in disgrace. But where anyone can say anything, and everyone does in fact say everything, regardless of truth, merit, or usefulness—this is parrhēsia in its negative sense of babble—there is no way to distinguish truthful speakers worth listening to from liars, flatterers, and those jockeying for power and personal gain. (Note that this is the unsolved, likely unsolvable problem of TikTok, Twitter, and similar platforms.) To do so requires some degree of what Foucault calls “ethical differentiation,” some way of lifting the worthier speakers above the noise. But this does not exist in Athenian democracy, and in fact is opposed to it—of which more in a moment.

Worse, in a democracy, where the will of the majority prevails, more people will prefer the pleasant words of flattering orators, even if those orators lead the city into disaster, than the painful words of parrhesiasts. For this reason there is a sense, among those Greek authors writing about parrhēsia and democracy, that it is dangerous to practice the positive, courageous form of parrhēsia in a democracy, where one is likely to offend a vindictive majority of listeners who by being a majority have the power to end the speaker’s life. Paradoxically, it can be safer to practice parrhēsia in the role of a counselor to a tyrant, insofar as that tyrant is an individual who can be taught wisdom and discernment, and who may choose, as an individual, to rise to the demands of the parrhesiastic game.7

Athens had a habit of voting for the ostracization of any particularly eminent or virtuous citizen, not because of a crime or offense but “because his prestige, his excellence, and the personal qualities of which he has given proof raise him too far above other citizens.”8 Ostracization could be, and was, orchestrated by individuals to destroy political rivals; Plutarch notes that it was also generally used to vent envy and jealousy. The option to ostracize a citizen came up once a year, and if the decision received six thousand votes, recorded by writing the name of the person to be ostracized on a potsherd (ostrakon), the targeted Athenian was exiled from the city for ten years on pain of death. I am reminded of Plutarch’s account of the ostracization of Aristides, who was called “The Just” for his high degree of virtue, not mentioned by Foucault:

Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka, it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristides, whom he took to be one of the ordinary crowd, and asked him to write Aristides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristides had done him. ‘None whatever,’ was the answer, ‘I don’t even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ‘The Just’.’ On hearing this, Aristides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back. Finally, as he was departing the city, he lifted up his hands to heaven and prayed—a prayer the opposite, as it seems, of that which Achilles made—that no crisis might overtake the Athenians which should compel the people to remember Aristides.9

Ostracization was one way of solving the problem that unequal merit presented to Athenian democracy, according to Aristotle. He makes this observation in two different ways. On the one hand, ostracization could prevent an ambitious person from becoming powerful enough to seize control of the government, and thereby preserve democracy. On the other hand, if a truly virtuous person were to arise in Athens, the only reasonable thing for Athenians to do would be to make that person king and obey him, thereby destroying democracy. If Athenian democracy were to recognize and honor virtuous and worthy people rather than exiling them, creating the grounds of ethical differentiation that make it possible for courageous parrhēsia to be elevated above the babble, then Athens would no longer be a democracy. This was the fundamental inconsistency between parrhēsia and democracy.10 (Not mentioned is the counterbalancing fact that, without courageous parrhēsia and equal courage in the Assembly to hear the truth, a democracy tends to crumble and be taken over by tyrants like Pisistratus, the oligarchs of the Thirty, or invading forces. The Athenian form of democracy is, in other words, a fairly unstable structure.)

In the conflict between the individual parrhesiast and the Athenian democracy as represented by the Assembly, while the individual may succeed in making himself heard now and then, in the long run the majority drifts toward rhetoric and away from truth. Ostracism was not the worst outcome. Here is Socrates, in Benjamin Jewett’s translation of Plato, defending himself at the trial that results in his death:

How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was—such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth [alēthēs]. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me—I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence. They ought to have been ashamed of saying this, because they were sure to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and displayed my deficiency… unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth [alēthēs]; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!

He was not, of course, successful in his defense, losing his life by approximately thirty votes.

For reasons of length I will not follow Foucault on the passage of parrhēsia through the Cynics, who did not bother to write very much down, and were more written about than otherwise. They did, however, try to embody the truth, to live out parrhēsia in addition to speaking it, which is the necessary turn for what follows.

Near the end of the last lecture, the second hour of March 28, 1984, Foucault notes the final form of parrhēsia in the positive sense, in the Christian tradition. It has inherited much of the classical Greek meaning, as shown by John Chrysostom’s On the Providence of God: “Think what profit watchful men have undoubtedly drawn from these examples, seeing an invincible soul, a wisdom which refuses to be enslaved, a tongue full of courageous boldness [parrhēsia].”11 He says of this passage from Chrysostom: “You see that the word parrhēsia refers to one’s courage in the face of persecutors, a courage one exercises for oneself, but also for others, and those one wishes to persuade, convince, or strengthen in their faith.” But Christian parrhēsia also involves, in addition to courage in the face of persecution, “a confidence in God… which enables an apostle or a martyr to speak the truth with which he has been entrusted.”12

This confidence brings verticality, what Foucault describes as “a kind of ascending impulse of this pure soul which lifts it up to the Almighty,” to what had previously been a horizontal relationship. “So parrhēsia will no longer be situated, if you like, on the [horizontal] axis of the individual’s relations to others, of the person with courage vis-à-vis those who are mistaken. It is now situated on the vertical axis of a relation to God.”13 He cites Philo and the Septuagint’s use of the word in translating the Old Testament, specifically תִּתְעַנָּ֑ג in Job 22:26, הוֹפִֽיַע in Psa 94:1, and תִּתֵּ֥ן קֹולָֽהּ (my best guess) in Proverbs 1:20.14

I think he misses a tiny thing here, which is that the change is not so much a temporal one, a gradual shift in usage, as an abrupt hybridization of the coexistent Hebraic and Hellenic traditions, which Erich Auerbach described four decades earlier in “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis. Looking at the Homeric and Old Testament epics, Auerbach observes of Homer that the narrative is continuous, foregrounded, horizontal, while “[t]he greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories [of the Old Testament]… in relation to each other, the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection.”15 I suspect that the vertical change in parrhēsia at the point of the Septuagint, somewhere in the second century B.C., is entirely due to its use to translate incommensurable Hebrew words, in addition to what I am guessing are interpolations in Psalm 12:6 and Proverbs 20:9 and probably other instances, and that all subsequent shifts in meaning refer back to those extremely specific translation choices in that specific text.16

At any rate, Foucault suggests that this modified sense of parrhēsia is at the root of the Christian mystical tradition, summarizing the vertical relationship expressed by the word in this way:

To whoever has sufficient confidence in God, to whoever has a heart pure enough to open itself to God, God will respond with a movement which will assure that person’s salvation and allow them access to an eternal face-to-face relationship with [Him]…. Only by deciphering the truth of self in this world, deciphering oneself with mistrust of oneself and the world, and in fear and trembling before God, will enable us to have access to the true life. It was by this reversal, which put the truth of life before the true life that Christian asceticism fundamentally modified an ancient asceticism which always aspired to live both the true life and the life of truth at the same time, and which, in Cynicism at least, affirmed the possibility of leading this true life of truth.17

He then concludes his lecture with the last words he will ever speak in public:

There you are, listen, I had things to say to you about the general framework of these analyses. But, well, it is too late. So, thank you.18

At this point I should emphasize that Foucault’s accounts of the word’s usage have been descriptive, with no unscholarly endorsement either of the Cynics’ approval of incest or of what he writes here, and no insertion of personal views.19 This is simply where the butterfly has led him. All he has done is follow. It is nevertheless a surprise to find him directing his attention to such a place, at the end of his life: the living of a true life and the discernment of truth; the Socratic origins of philosophy in the care of the soul; and the Catholicism that he was raised in, that he rejected, yet never stopped exploring.

It is pure speculation on my part, but the original drift of the work seems to be to present Socrates, the father of philosophy, and to a lesser extent others, like Diogenes, as a figure in the pre-Christian era embodying most of the characteristics attributed to Christ, supplanting the usefulness of Christ as a model of virtue. (The latter is, whether for reasons of historicity or superfluity, notably absent from the text, referred to only once in a description of the Cynic Peregrinus, who followed “the person Lucian calls the sophist crucified in Palestine.”20 ) And yet the final impression given by the lecture series is that of the Christian mystic as the culmination and perfection of the philosophical tradition of pursuing truth and the true life, which is so uncharacteristic of the author that I am doubtful that the impression I have received is correct.

Although it was the path taken, I am not persuaded that the word parrhēsia, even in all its meanings, is sufficient to describe the path to the true life. There is something essential missing. To put the pin in the butterfly, so to speak, here is Simone Weil:

Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul…. The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to love. There is nothing impossible in that, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty. For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause the soul to faint, does not touch the acquiescent part of the soul, consenting to a right direction.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul….

He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe…. It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the arms of the Cross.21

Socrates expresses care and concern for others in the last moments of his life, and a wise resignation to death, expecting to be cared for by the gods and to find friends in the other life hereafter; but he does not go this far. To apply Weil, and to make present what was absent in Foucault, it is not enough to walk around saying “Truly, truly,” and speaking of God. It is not enough to suffer, which any animal can do. To live the kind of true life that can renew the world, that has an excess and overflow of true life, it is necessary but not sufficient to reject both the political authorities who laugh at the idea of truth and wash their hands of the violence they permit, and the religious authorities who delight in stoning women and persecuting others. It is necessary but not sufficient to bear the penalty for that rejection.

What is essential22 is the love that, hearing a friend deny you as you are taken to be spat on and scourged, persists in loving; the love that will, days later, after intense suffering, after a death, prepare breakfast for that friend; the love that wills God’s forgiveness for the hand that drives the nail into one’s own. Weil thinks this is easy. I think this is nearly impossible.

But the provocation of Christianity is its assertion that this is not only possible but in fact has already been done, and that one person has lived a true life in this way, with such a surplus (John 10:10) that that life has become accessible to all. Recall what Aristotle says in Book III, 1288 of Politics should be done to such a man, who surpasses everyone else in virtue and merit: “Hence it only remains for the community to obey such a man, and for him to be sovereign not in turn but absolutely.”

And so that is one answer to the problem of governing self and others, one way of attending to and caring for the psuche—butterfly and soul.

Apologies to paid subscribers for the delay on the February essay. It required about a thousand pages of reading, of which I have two hundred left. There will be two paid essays in March. January’s essay was On publishing nonfiction.

Stylistically, The Age of Anxiety lies halfway between Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) or possibly The Four Quartets (1936-1942) and Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning (1948), but unlike the latter was never meant to be staged. Describing what passes is the poorest way to treat the poem: four lonely characters, Emble, Quant, Malin, and Rosetta, meet in a bar in New York City, muse on the stages of life, wind up dancing in Rosetta’s apartment, stage a mock wedding between Rosetta and Emble, then straggle into their solitary existences again. I would call the characters four projected aspects of the poet himself, acting out archetype and absurdity, oddly united in their view of life. They are knight, fool, sage, and damsel, each one a foil to the rest.

What Auden’s poem and his own symphony both did, Bernstein said, was trace out “our difficult and problematical search for faith.”3 Such a theme is, of course, like oil to the water of the present zeitgeist, immiscible, but for the very same reason able to float above the world. That said, Bernstein’s description is not quite right, since Malin alone wrestles with angels at the close of the poem, fighting to a draw before limping back to the real world. It also does not account for why the poem is so compelling to the present. Despite having been written in 1947, the poem is bitingly prescient: it depicts a world unstructured by faith, bombed into meaninglessness by war, human cruelty, and advances in technology, where love is both a hoped-for, almost achievable longing and a fleshly farce, and reality militates against miracles.

Malin, the wise old man of the poem, mourns what society has become, a gladiatorial arena ruled by mobs, where every person must be a fanatic and every deed must be clearly liveried in either “Heretic green or orthodox blue, / Safe and certain.”4

Rosetta’s opinion of this “tawdry age” is no higher:

…Life after life lapses out of
Its essential self and sinks into
One press-applauded public untruth…

Only the poet who chooses solitude, she says, can escape

…this stupid world where
Gadgets are gods and we go on talking,
Many about much, but remain alone...5

Emble watches “Nieces of millionaires / Twitter on terraces”6 while others stoop to their day’s work, all of them fitting into the world somehow, he alone without a home, out of place, out of time, questing for something outside of time—unless, of course, they all see themselves just as he does.7

The poem’s most-quoted lines come near the end, in a meditation by Malin:

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry—“Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.8

Say, rather, the noble despair of the young and sensitive. The section recalls to me Baldwin’s “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,”9 for what is described here is the hard, sore, amused work of maturation. To grow up, to mature, to love and to steadily love better, none of which is inevitable, one must willingly release each stage of life and each worldview as it fails to deal with the world as it is, in order to take on a larger and more adequate view, and all this while doing the work that has been given to us to do. But in a time when people earn $18 for every 1,000 views on a YouTube video, it’s been profitable to stand in place and cry “Miserable wicked me! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and click the notification bell,” or even to seek out new ways to be miserable, always filmed, of course. The older one gets, the more regrettable this is.

Dark and bitter though it is, the ending of Anxiety gestures toward the hopeful close of “September 1, 1939,” Auden’s famously repudiated poem, with its steel-cable tension between “points of light” and “negation and despair.”10 But Anxiety is more tired than its predecessor of a decade prior; the fighter is bruised and weary from his bouts, with more to come and no end in sight. The train Malin is riding upon rattles into a Manhattan morning, the poem ends, and we are no closer to an outcome in the match between human hope and despair.

Published in 1952, five years after Auden’s poem, Martin Buber’s Good and Evil describes the same decision point that Malin despairs of (ruined or changed; death or disillusionment) as a problem of direction against indecisiveness, which, while drier and less dramatic, makes the matter appear more manageable without diminishing the inherent difficulty of the choice.

Drawing on the Avesta, the Vedas, and the Old Testament, the second half of Buber’s book proposes that in human life, “good and evil are not, as they are usually thought to be, two structurally similar qualities situated at opposite poles, but two qualities of totally different structure.”11 Flooded and overwhelmed by possible actions, the human soul can “clutch at any object, past which the vortex happens to carry it, and cast its passion upon it,” and thereby “exchang[e] an undirected possibility for an undirected reality.”12 This is a recurring temptation. In this, the first stage of evil, “man does not choose, he merely acts,” not making a full and committed decision but sliding into the misdeed. However, once the soul recognizes and willingly “affirms” that which ought instead to be “negated,” solely “because it is his,” the previously chaotic, indecisive, almost hapless sliding into and out of evil stiffens into rigidity. It is here that radical evil becomes possible.13

The alternative to grasping at every passing fashion, mania, sexual partner, handbag, or fad is to attend to the mysterious impulse within the soul to become integrated and unified. This, like temptation, is a recurring possibility, such that one may choose evil, evil, evil, then good, and then evil again. In becoming integrated, the soul “becomes aware of direction, becomes aware of itself as sent in quest of it. It comes into the service of good or into service for good.”14 Unified, the soul has “only One direction,” only one decision, though it must be repeated over and over in its different disguises. The whirlwind of possibilities narrows down to a single one. One way to describe that direction is as “the direction towards the person purposed for me,” the person one is meant to become. Another is as “the direction toward God.”15 These are, Buber says, different aspects of the same thing.

Vortex, chaos, whirlwind, infinite possibility—or decisive service, given out of and with the whole soul. Malin’s tart meditation is on precisely that moment of choice, that crux, and the repeated failure of human beings to choose good. It is very hard, after all, to give up an infinity of possibilities. But that moment, that ever-returning, recurrent moment, Buber tells us, is the point at which the individual human being can and does intervene in the world-conflict. By choosing the truth over the lie, or by choosing the lie over the truth, one becomes true, or one becomes false, in that moment, either strengthening or desecrating being “at the point of one’s own existence.”16 One becomes a firefly flash of light for that moment, or else one diminishes in reality. The war is won, or lost, in one’s person, at that time.

Always the soul’s motion toward integrity, toward integration, toward becoming-that-which-I-was-created-to-be, however early it is on that path, however small the motion, is a victory. Always the soul’s false glorification of itself as its own creator, Yima’s (Jamshid’s) fatal error, which involves the rejection of self-knowledge in favor of self-will, is a defeat. What Buber suggests is that these battles are fought in and with and upon one’s whole being, moment by moment, and simultaneously on the battlefield of the universe, and that only in victory does any human being, in a meaningful way, come into existence.17

And then you have to do it all over again.

Contractually obligatory note(s)18

• Break, Blow, Burn & Make comes out next Tuesday, June 11. It contains what I know about writing, reading, art, and faith. Karen Russell (Orange World), who is gracious beyond belief, has called the book a masterpiece. Makoto Fujimura (Art + Faith) describes it as “an invitation to hope, to persevere, to recalibrate through despair, to pray and ultimately to love.” For those interested, if you can afford to preorder the book through a physical bookstore, that helps the bookstore and increases the likelihood of copies making it onto shelves19; if you cannot, you can usually suggest a purchase of a recently-published title to your library, and they may either buy it or place an inter-library loan on your behalf.

• Jewel Box is, for whatever reason (see ft. 19), is almost half off at Amazon right now.

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