Episode 09 - Speaking Truth to Power (Parrhesia)
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
who who are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
Ellie: 0:21
Hi, welcome back to our podcast.
David: 0:24
Hello, everyone.
Ellie: 0:25
David, have you seen The Social Dilemma?
David: 0:27
I have not.
Ellie: 0:29
Okay. Everybody was hyping it up and I have to say, I actually ended up being disappointed. It was just like a bunch of people, mostly white dudes, being like, "We had no idea what we were doing. We were all starting a company from nothing with absolutely no sense of the potential ethical ramifications around the globe." And I was like, okay, I get it. Maybe you guys should have taken an ethics class at some point.
David: 0:56
But that's the thing about it. So I've known about The Social Dilemma, because as I've mentioned before, I live in San Francisco, where tech is just the bread and butter of the city.
Ellie: 1:05
Or it's the- it's the soylent of the city because nobody eats bread and butter in San Francisco.
David: 1:10
Okay! But there is a sense in which the exclusion of ethics education out of the curriculum for technology is producing the situation where techies often are finding down the road, what they should have seen coming from a mile away. And so I know that The Social Dilemma is now being touted as this example of ethical behavior on the part of people inside the industry, speaking out against the industry, even though as you say, it might be a little too late.
Ellie: 1:38
At least it's happening though. For instance, there was that Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, and he's featured pretty prominently in the documentary. And he created this slide deck in 2013 that went viral internally at Google, talking about how the company has eschewed responsibility and how we need to be really worried about the growing reliance on the attention economy. And so he was speaking out, at least within the team.
David: 2:01
Yeah, that this is getting so much attention is because it's a case of people inside the industry, speaking out against the powers that be, from within, and essentially putting themselves on the line personally, maybe professionally as well. And it makes me think of Timnit Gebru, who is the Google AI ethicist who made a national news this past week after being fired. She spoke out against a specific language recognition algorithm that's in the works, and, uh, you know, she was sacked.
Ellie: 2:35
Yeah, absolutely. I actually just finished the book Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble, and it talks about how these algorithms are so biased. And so it's on the one hand great to see that somebody within Google was actually working on that, and then of course, it's awful to see that the outcome of that is that it's like, "Ah, bye we actually don't want to deal with this.
David: 2:53
Yeah. And I think what this draws our attention to is the fact that even for people who are relatively high profile, speaking against the man or against the algorithm, can come at a relatively high price. And so speaking truth to power is not something that is done lightly or without consideration for the consequences.
Ellie: 3:13
And here, there's such a long history of philosophers speaking truth to power. There's famously Socrates who was killed on charges of corrupting the youth in Athens.
David: 3:24
There's also Spinoza, who was ex-communicated, uh, for, uh, semi-atheistic writings and his, pantheism.
Ellie: 3:31
And then meanwhile, Descartes' over here like, "No, no, no. Trust me. I actually believe in God. Like I know there might be some potentially atheist consequences, but you guys, I don't want to be like Galileo."
David: 3:42
Or like Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for claiming that the universe was infinite and there was no beginning or end and therefore no creation.
Ellie: 3:49
Oh my God, Bruno's so bad-ass.
David: 3:51
Yeah. And so you have the philosophers who arguably speak truth to power, and then you have the figures like Descartes who speak power to truth. Just like, dude, you got it all backwards.
Ellie: 4:01
Oh my God. And there's this ancient Greek word here that we'll be talking about a lot today, which is the word parrhesia, and parrhesia sometimes translated as frank speech or fearless speech is precisely this mode of speaking truth to power.
David: 4:16
So I have difficulties pronouncing this word. So let's just get that out in the open from the very beginning. So our listeners should be aware that I am going to butcher this and pronounce it in probably a thousand ways. But one of the things that's really important about this term is precisely the ambiguity of its translation, that it's very difficult to translate into modern day English, because we don't have a term that really captures this thing. For example, some people translate it as courageous speech. There's something about it that goes beyond just truth-telling.
Ellie: 4:47
Yeah. And as we'll see, in our episode today, the translation of it as free speech is potentially somewhat misleading, given the baggage with which the term free speech comes in the context of the US at least.
David: 4:58
Maybe speaking truth to power is not a terrible translation, it's just not very pretty.
Ellie: 5:04
Well, today we will be doing precisely that. Not speaking truth to power, but talking about speaking truth to power.
David: 5:11
I thought you were going to say not speaking truth to power, we're going to be speaking power to truth, likeDescartes. That's who we are! We'll be talking about the Greek concept of parrhesia in particular.
Ellie: 5:21
What does parrhesia mean, and how does it differ from other modes of truth-telling?
David: 5:25
What are the limits of parrhesiastic discourse?
Ellie: 5:29
Let's get into it . Parrhesia is a form of truth-telling So it was actually one of two kinds of freedom of speech that was protected by the constitution of ancient Athens. There was on the one hand isegoria, which protects the equal rights of citizens to participate in public debate. So this is sort of like we're at a town hall meeting together and you get to see what you want to say, and I get to say what I want to say. And then there was on the other hand parrhesia, which is the license to say what one pleases, when and how one pleases, and to whomever one pleases. This is different from the kind of speech that one might have as a specialist or as a teacher, because the teacher teaches truth and teaches skills, but they don't actually run any risk for themselves in doing so. There is a kind of protection of the identity of the teacher in relation to the content of what they're teaching. Those two things are taken to be separate. That is not the case for the parrhesiastes. The parrhesiastes puts themselves on the line, runs a risk in speaking.
David: 6:28
And that's why it's called speaking truth to power. Most of the examples that we will find in the literature.
Ellie: 6:37
Speak that truth, David.
David: 6:38
Sorry. I'm choking on this truth. It's just so hard to swallow. Um, so if you look at most of the examples that are floated around in the literature, they include people who speak up to a person in a position of power, and in doing so, tell them at truth that it's likely to provoke ire or anger. So you have those places, in which somebody in a position of marginality dares to speak the truth to somebody at the center of the social matrix.
Ellie: 7:08
Yeah. In a way then,parrhesia is a form of punching up, right? There's an asymmetrical distribution of power and you're in a position of less power as a parrhesiastes to what you're speaking out against. I'm wondering if we can think about modern day candidates of parrhesiastes. Is it possible to be a genuine parrhesiastes in today's age?
David: 7:26
I think there are some pretty clear candidates, and one of them is sexual harassment victims who speak out against powerful men, and put themselves on the line in the process of doing so because they become targets, not just from those people, but from society in general.
Ellie: 7:43
Yeah, I think also about Christine Blasey Ford speaking up against Brett Kavanaugh, right? She, as the survivor of sexual assault, as a teenager initially brought her story anonymously to Senator Dianne Feinstein and then ultimately decided, "No, I actually need to speak out about this in my own name, because my testimony will not only mean more, but I'll also be more in control of the narrative if I'm able to speak about it." And so Christine Blasey Ford strikes me as a major candidate for parrhesiastes. And I sort of just Googled this, wondering if anyone else had thought about the same thing, and it turns out that there's literally an article in a law review making this exact same connection and-
David: 8:26
Wait, between Ford and parrhesia?
Ellie: 8:28
Yes, Marianne Frank, who's a University of Miami law professor talks about how Blasey Ford exemplifies parrhesia precisely because she puts herself on the line in making her testimony and her whole subjectivity, her whole personhood is risked. Her life is literally risked, right? She received tons of death threats after coming out about this.
David: 8:48
Yeah. And when we think about having your life on the line, in the context of speaking truth or the truth about your life, we can also think about queer people in the act of coming out as possible candidates for parrhesiastic status because in coming out, you're speaking a truth for which you might be punished.
Ellie: 9:07
Yeah. And I think there, it depends on what the threat is, right? What the risk is, because there are many queer people who are coming out in environments that are extraordinarily hostile and where they are risking themselves and risking their lives, even, in coming out. Whereas for others, the stakes might not be so high if say, you know, you're working in the fashion industry in New York City.
David: 9:28
But I think even in those cases where people come out, let's say, in the context of a liberal family in New York, uh, having grown up around queer people all their lives, there is still a fundamental fear that I think is very difficult to, to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through the process of coming out, where even if you think that it will be okay, deep down, you know, that there is a risk that your life will collapse, whether it's well-founded or ill-founded is secondary. It's still a courageous act because you don't know what the future holds and everything-
Ellie: 10:00
Yeah.
David: 10:01
is on the balance.
Ellie: 10:03
And I think with, too, with coming out, there is a sense in which you're not simply speaking a truth about yourself. You're also speaking a truth that by virtue of speaking it, is in tension with the heteronormative assumptions of society. So anything that's resisting a particular hegemony is maybe not itself a parrhesiastic act, but is on the way to becoming or has the ingredients of it.
David: 10:25
Yeah. And I think a lot of other speech acts would fall in that category. So we've talked primarily about sexual ones, things having to do with sexual harassment, sexual violence, coming out. But think about something like the figure of the whistleblower. I'm thinking here about Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information about the NSA program effectively spying on American citizens and, you-
Ellie: 10:46
Yeah. Was he anonymous at first? I'm forgetting.
David: 10:51
I don't really remember.
Ellie: 10:52
Okay. Because I don't think the parrhesiastes can be anonymous because you have to be speaking in your own name. So obviously Edward Snowden, we know who he is, but I'm trying to remember if he initially was anonymous, whether he came out in his own name or not.
David: 11:06
Yeah. And so then we can have a discussion about to what extent is the visibility of the proper name an essential component of a parrhesiastic speech act. Cause I think it's a very good candidate, even if it violates that condition.
Ellie: 11:21
Yeah. Because parrhesia is really about a relationship between the speaker and their society. And so, I think you need to have both of those components. The speaker is putting themselves on the line in order to undertake this kind of activity. I'm thinking here too, about social media influencers, especially anti-racist social media influencers. There's a very influential one named Rachel Cargle, who's a black woman who writes a lot on Instagram and posts a lot on Instagram about things like black self-care. She deconstructs various racist comments that she gets on Instagram. She has a lot of book recommendations for people who are trying to do anti-racist work. And she's very popular among white audiences, but she's also sort of like a no bullshit, I'm not going to do a bunch of emotional labor for you, especially you white women, up in my comments threads saying like, "Be nicer as you deliver this information!" I think her sort of courage in speaking up about racism and in deconstructing racist comments is a potential candidate for parrhesia for sure. And I think there, you see the absolute opposite of anonymity. In being an influencer, in being visible on Instagram, Rachel Cargle is really involving the public in her private life. She sometimes shares excerpts from her journals and that type of thing. I remember when she like moved home to take care of her mother, right. I feel like I know this person, even though I've never met her.
David: 12:46
Yeah. Most of our examples have been high profile cases. But there is nothing in the definition, in the classical concept of parrhesia, that requires that. So for example, I think of the case in which somebody might have to have a very uncomfortable discussion with a close friend of them, calling them out on the things that they're doing that is either going to ruin the relationship, that's going to spoil the friendship, that is going to lead to their own demise, like, "Hey, you're my friend. And I care for you, but your drinking is really getting out of control." There is a very real possibility of loss that is built into that act of speaking out. And so even something like that is a perfect example of speaking truth to a kind of power.
Ellie: 13:28
Totally. I think in these individual, private relationships parrhesia can really emerge, provided that there is some sense of not just risking oneself, but also remember there is that asymmetrical power distribution that is traditionally associated with parrhesia inasmuch as it's speaking truth to power, right. But I mean, I guess you could see friends as people in positions of power in a way.
David: 13:51
Yeah, certainly.
Ellie: 13:52
Antagonistic friendships!
David: 13:53
I like that, Ellie, this is actually an intervention where I have to tell you a certain truth that you don't want to hear.
Ellie: 14:01
I've been buying too many shoes!
David: 14:04
But you know, one thing that this makes me think about when you mentioned private relationships between individuals is something that happened to me recently. So most of the time, we want to think that we will be the parrhesiastes, we will be speaking truth to power, like Gebru or like Ford.
Ellie: 14:21
Hero of our own stories.
David: 14:23
But in many cases, it might be that we are the center of power against which somebody speaks a certain truth. Two years ago, I was walking home from work in San Francisco and there is a woman experiencing homelessness who lives around the corner from my apartment. And I walked by her all the time. We look at each other, we sort of know each other just through protracted exposure to one another that we've had. And one day she looked at me and she just said, "You're just like the rest of them."
Ellie: 14:57
Oh, wow.
David: 14:59
And. I remember that it stopped me on my tracks. And my first instinct was to say, "No, I am one of the good ones." I mean, I didn't say this, but in my head, I thought it. And as I walked away, I had to face some demons and yes, I'm some young professional in San Francisco who walks by her all the time and doesn't really do anything. And so this was a case in which I found myself on the other side of that equation.
Ellie: 15:26
And how did you respond?
David: 15:27
In the moment, I just got worked up internally and I kept walking, but it unsettled me in a- in a very deep way. And I think a lot of what is sometimes read as aggression on the part of people experiencing homelessness is a kind of truth-telling.
Ellie: 15:45
Hmm.
David: 15:45
That is a perfect example of modern day parrhesia.
Ellie: 15:48
Yeah. And as we'll see, one of the most famous examples of a parrhesiastes in ancient Greece, Diogenes, chose to live in homelessness for much of his life. So we have a lot of examples here of potential candidates for parrhesiastes in the present day. And I think, you know, we might, as we think about them more, come to see some of them as genuinely parrhesiastic and others as perhaps not. In order to do so, let's get clear about the concept. What does it actually mean to speak truth to power?
David: 16:15
I think, hands down, the best figure for thinking about the meaning of parrhesia is Michel Foucault, who became very interested in the subject toward the end of his life. There are these books that he published, where he talks about parrhesia at length. One of them is entitled The Courage of Truth, which is one way of translating that Greek term and another one based on a series of lectures that he gave in 1983 at the University of Berkeley, so just down the street from me has a title Fearless Speech, which again is just another way of translating that same term.
Ellie: 16:46
Yeah. And of course we need to talk about Foucault since he's every millennial and gen Z-ers favorite philosopher. My students like literally dress up as Foucault for Halloween, they are obsessed with him.
David: 16:59
When else are you going to get a philosopher who is openly queer, wearing leather jackets, having sex, dropping LSD in California.
Ellie: 17:09
Yeah he actually dropped LSD in California in the 1970s, with a professor at Claremont Graduate University, which is in the same consortium where I teach. They went to Death Valley together.
David: 17:19
I've decided that if I ever want to become really famous, there are two things I have to do. One is I have to go to all the sex baths in the Bay area. And the second one is that I need to meet somebody from the consortium that you're talking about and drop LSD with them. So let me know when.
Ellie: 17:36
Uh, yeah, I can't promise drop LSD with you, but I can promise to introduce you to someone from the consortium and maybe they will.
David: 17:43
Yes, I will rise to fame without you just like Foucault rose without that guy that nobody remembers that did LSD with him.
Ellie: 17:52
Oh my God. He was like already famous at that point, okay.
David: 17:55
That's true. Um, but yeah, so he's the wet dream of a lot of millennials and gen Z-ers, and I want to add for good reason.
Ellie: 18:05
You say as a completely unbiased person who wrote a dissertation on Foucault and is a Foucault scholar.
David: 18:09
Fair enough. But the point here is that at the end of his life, Foucault became obsessed with the concept of parrhesia and wrote two books about it, and he's really interested in this act of speaking courageously speaking, frankly, without restraint.
Ellie: 18:26
Yeah. And in these works, Foucault lays out certain features of parrhesia. So it's not a skill, or a technique, it's different from rhetoric, right? It doesn't involve being able to say things in the most beautiful fashion possible. It is instead a stance. It's a modality of truth-telling. If I'm speaking truth to power, I'm involved in a particular way of being, it involves me in my very embodiment. Second, I have to tell all. I have to tell the truth without concealing anything. So there's this sort of like bare-it-all approach in parrhesia.
David: 19:00
Bare-it-all!
Ellie: 19:02
And third, the parrhesiastes must believe what they say, right? And so I'm not just like reporting something another person told me, I am actually reporting only something that I truly, truly believe. Finally, probably the most important feature of parrhesia is that the person doing it is taking a risk in saying it right. As we said earlier, sometimes it involves risking one's life. Sometimes it involves risking one's relationship with the interlocutor, whether it's a friend or somebody else, and very important, it might involve risking one's reputation, which as we've seen is what happens with people like Christine Blasey Ford or Timnit Gebru.
David: 19:38
Yeah. And I think this danger piece is absolutely essential because punching down is not parrhesia, punching up is. And so one of the ways in which Foucault talks about this danger is he says, when you enter into a linguistic game of parrhesia, you are entering into a game of life and death.
Ellie: 19:56
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can get a little bit but more into what it means to say that the parrhesiastes puts themselves on the line. On the one hand, it might seem that this is a kind of positive way of recognizing the way our character is involved in our discourse. And so I don't get to hide behind my speech and say, "Well, I didn't really mean that, or that's not true to who I am." I have to be accountable for it, right. So it involves character. I'm thinking here about the way that Patricia Hill Collins talks about a black feminist epistemology, or a theory of knowledge, where she says, you know, in contrast with the kind of white quote, western, Eurocentric approach that discourse exists on its own, outside of people's individual characters, a black feminist approach appreciates that I am not independent from the things that I say, and that I have to be accountable as a whole person when I'm talking. And so there's this kind of great component of recognizing the way that our whole being is implicated in our various speech acts. So an anonymous internet troll, for instance, cannot be a parrhesiastes because they're not risking themselves in their speech acts, right? There's no courage involved there. On the other hand, I do worry a little bit about this expectation that we be the same person, at all times, over time, and the way that accountability can quickly translate or slip into this idea that I'm just a commodity and I have to be the same Ellie at home, the same Ellie at work, the same Ellie when I'm out with friends, and that co-optation by capitalism.
David: 21:30
I actually disagree with that because I take the concern about believing what you say to be not so much a requirement that you believe the same thing over time, but that you remain committed to truth-telling over the course of your life and that you practice truth-telling as a virtue. And so I'm less worried about the commodification, I do think it has this revolutionary potential to upset social expectations by playing with language.
Ellie: 21:56
Yeah. I just think sometimes it's easy for people to hide behind the cool concept of parrhesia and be like, "I'm speaking truth to power," when actually what they might just be doing is reifying the self, turning the self into a commodity by being like, "This is who I am, this is what I believe. I'm putting it all out there," rather than recognizing more complex dynamic between the public and private spheres and the way that identity plays into that.
David: 22:23
This would then depend on the specifics of the parrhesiastic speech act, right? Because I good parrhesia or proper parrhesia to not really be a commitment to any kind of conception about the self, it's always about the Other. It's telling the Other the truth about them that they don't see on their own.
Ellie: 22:41
Well, this is a little bit of a different tack, but one thing I find really interesting in Foucault's writings on parrhesia is the notion that there are two essential models that we find in ancient Greece for the parrhesiastic lifestyle. The first is based on Socrates, and the second is based on Diogenes. So these are both two ancient Greek philosophers, but they have extraordinarily different ways of living. So David, tell us a little bit about Socrates as the parrhesiastes.
David: 23:09
I think extraordinarily different is a subtle way of putting it, uh, because they're very similar because they're both parrhesiastes, but they're also fundamentally opposed in the way they go about this. And at some point Plato says Diogenes is just like Socrates, but he is a Socrates gone mad.
Ellie: 23:27
Hmm.
David: 23:28
So when you think about Socrates, who do we have here? We have a man,, who has committed himself to a philosophical life, and who goes around ancient Athens, for those of our listeners who have read any of the Platonic dialogues in college or on their own-
Ellie: 23:43
And if not, that's fine too. You should. I would recommend starting with the Phaedrus.
David: 23:48
I recommend starting with the Republic. It's a really short read.
Ellie: 23:52
Wow. Oh my God. That's like the last one. No, that's not- the- the Sophist is the last one to read, or the Laws maybe.
David: 23:58
The Laws is the worst, yes. And so here we have a man who goes around Athens, constantly questioning people, right? So the classic move that Socrates makes, and it's essential to his method of Elenchus, is he will encounter somebody in the public square and then he'll be like, "What are you doing?" And then the person will say what they're doing. Like I'm going to the court to sue somebody, or I am going to meet my lover. And then Socrates, will ask them " What's justice?" or "What's love?" since you're using the concept. And then through a back and forth dialectic, the very famous Socratic method of question and answering, Socrates will expose the interlocutor as not really knowing what they're talking about. And so the process reveals as certain truth that humiliates the interlocutor. And so in a very sly way, Socrates speaks truth to power by showing the Athenians that they, in fact, don't know what they think they know.
Ellie: 25:01
Yeah. And so he's speaking truth to power by disrupting accepted common sense, right? Whether it's accepted common sense among, you know, just your average Joe in the marketplace, or among those who actually wield significant power-- landowners-- in ancient Greece.
David: 25:20
And one of the features of the Socratic approach to parrhesia is that it's rooted in argumentation. So Socrates is a great debater. He's the first great debater in the West, insofar as he is able to get his interlocutor always into a really uncomfortable position by getting them to agree to a series of premises and then drawing the rational conclusion from them. And so it's an argumentative, largely rationalistic approach to parrhesia where you-
Ellie: 25:48
Yeah.
David: 25:48
expose the truth through the force of argument.
Ellie: 25:52
That's already pretty bad-ass, right. Socrates was sentenced to death for doing this. He had to drink hemlock because he was accused of corrupting the youth by engaging in this practice of dialogue with them. But, the Cynics are even more badass. So let's talk a little bit about the alternative mode of parrhesia because the Cynics are much less about speaking truth to power in the sense of actually speaking, and much more about expressing the truth through shameless activities.
David: 26:25
So moment of confession and truth-telling for me, uh, this is blasphemy for most philosophical ears, but I actually really dislike Socrates and I don't think he's that bad-ass, um-
Ellie: 26:35
You and Nietzsche! You guys- you guys just over-
David: 26:37
I-
Ellie: 26:37
there hating on Socrates.
David: 26:39
really don't like Socrates. He's, I mean, he's a mansplainer and kind of annoying and he-
Ellie: 26:43
Yeah, yeah, my students always get pretty annoyed with him.
David: 26:45
Yes, I think that's reasonable. So when it comes to the question of whether he should be put to death or not, I'm kind of like a moderate on that. But if somebody asked me to list who I think, let's say my top five, most radical, truly radical philosophers of old times, certainly Diogenes of Sinope, the Father of cynicism would unquestionably make the list.
Ellie: 27:11
Okay. Wow. That is a pretty bold claim for somebody whose writings you can't really read. Cause he was just out there, in the square, doing weird stuff.
David: 27:21
Well, there are some reports that he wrote a little bit.
Ellie: 27:23
Hm,
David: 27:24
So if you read his biography, uh, written by Diogenes Lartius, uh-
Ellie: 27:28
Which is confusing because Diogenes of Lartius wrote a biography about Diogenes of Sinope.
David: 27:35
Yes, Diogenes was a very popular name. It was like the Kyle of 2000 years ago, or, I mean, technically the most popular name in the world is Mohammad. So it was the Mohammad before Mohammad.
Ellie: 27:47
Okay. Okay. Well, we'll get a historian to back that up for us.
David: 27:51
Yeah. And so Diogenes of Sinope was this figure, again a historical figure in Athens, who lived a very peculiar life and as you point out Ellie, his way of doing philosophy was not so much rooted in giving arguments and trying to persuade people through carefully constructed syllogisms. His way of doing philosophy was largely through the body, through acts of shamelessness, through acts of aggression, through a kind of hyper-visibility. It's almost like performance art, to be honest. Um, and so I think there's a very radical dimension to his thinking, precisely because impossible to reduce it just to language.
Ellie: 28:33
Yeah. I mean, let's think a little bit about the stuff that Diogenes was known for. He masturbated in the public square. He told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunlight. And Alexander famously said that, "If I were not Alexander, I would want to be Diogenes."
David: 28:50
Diogenes did not say that about Alexander, interestingly enough.
Ellie: 28:54
Uh, no Diogenes just wanted to be Diogenes. He lived in a bathtub.
David: 28:58
Part of his thinking is that the person who lives truthfully has nothing to hide. And if you have nothing to hide, then you should live as visibly as possible. Everything should be in the public. And so he reproduces in public. He masturbates in public, he eats in public. And so the Athenians really hated him. He would eat public spaces where he was not supposed to eat. And it-
Ellie: 29:23
He was like shitting on all of their social conventions, literally.
David: 29:27
Well, here are a couple of excerpts from the biography written by Diogenes Lartius.
Ellie: 29:32
Oh, hell yes. Give us the tea from ancient Greece.
David: 29:36
So just listen to these amazing pieces of insight into the kind of person that Diogenes was. So I'm just going to read five sentences. Each one is what in Greek is called a chreia which captures the quick wit of Diogenes and the way in which he would essentially dish out these acts of aggression whenever anybody tried to come for him.
Here are a couple: 29:57
When Lysias the druggist asked them if he believed in the gods, "How can I help believing in them," said Diogenes, "when I see a godforsaken wretch like you?" Number two. A eunuch of bad character had inscribed on his door the words, "Let nothing evil enter." "How then," Diogenes asked, "is the master of the house to get in?" Number then- number three. When Plato called him a dog, "Quite true," he said, "for I come back again and again, to those who have sold me."
Ellie: 30:37
Whoa.
David: 30:38
That's harsh.
Ellie: 30:39
Yeah, that was a little awkward.
David: 30:41
Yeah. And he did believe that Plato sold him out.
Ellie: 30:45
Wow.
David: 30:46
It's just like, jugular, open blood on the ground.
Ellie: 30:50
Wow. Yeah, because, Plato was also a student of Socrates, and took it in a totally different direction, created a school. He's like the bougie Socrates. Well, did Diogenes actually study with Socrates? I mean, Cynicism is a lineage that comes from Socrates, but I don't know how close they were.
David: 31:06
So Antisthenes is an intermediary figure. So I haven't actually traced the teacher-student relationships, but ultimately one of the things that really differentiates these two is that Diogenes refused to have pupils. He was just like, "I'm going to do my thing. And if you want to be a Cynic, a true Cynic, you don't need a teacher, go be a Cynic," um-
Ellie: 31:26
He was too busy masturbating in the public square.
David: 31:29
Yeah. It's like, what kind of training are they gonna do?
Ellie: 31:33
All the ancient Athenian parents are like, "Ah, yeah, you can't be tutored by Diogenes. You got to go to Plato, honey."
David: 31:40
And again, Plato did say Diogenes is a Socrates gone mad. Okay, so just two more, uh, little chreias. At a feast, certain people kept throwing all the bones to Diogenes as they would have done to a dog. Thereupon, he played a dog's trick and drenched them.
Ellie: 32:01
So Diogenes is giving golden showers.
David: 32:06
Yes. Yes. And this, again, it is both a critical commentary on the fact that they're treating him like a dog. So if you want to treat me like a dog, I'll be a dog. And the second is that he was associated with being a dog because of his public visibility, that did everything outside, kind of like an animal.
Ellie: 32:25
And for the record, that's where the word Cynic comes from. Cynic means dog-like in ancient Greek.
David: 32:29
Yes, that's exactly right. And so the etymology has these layers of meaning with animality, with public, with bodily functions, and with bite, because one of the things that Diogenes always said is that if you come for me, I'm the kind of dog that bites.
Ellie: 32:46
Ouch.
David: 32:48
And- and then the last one.
Ellie: 32:51
Oh yeah, tell us the last one.
David: 32:52
This one is less fun and it's just more to wrap things up.
Ellie: 32:55
Don't lead with that!
David: 32:56
No, because I have a- I have a reputation to protect. Okay, being asked, "What was the most beautiful thing in the world?" He replied, "Parrhesia, freedom of speech."
Ellie: 33:09
Oh, that's my favorite one.
David: 33:12
This was his fundamental commitment, that the best thing one can have, and the worst thing one can lose, the ability to say do and what one wants.
Ellie: 33:23
And that fits in really well with the theory of Cynicism. Cynicism is, at the end of the day, a philosophy about living in accordance with nature. And so to be accused of being dog-like for Diogenes, it's not even an insult because he's like, "Look, what's so great about humans." Plato famously defined humans as featherless bipeds and Diogenes responded to that by plucking all the feathers off of a rooster and bringing it in to Plato's academy and saying, "Look, here's your human, you defined it as a featherless biped. Here's a featherless biped as well."
David: 33:58
Well, and then there's the followup to that story is that then Plato was like, " Oh, guess I'll that the nails have to be flat." And that was his solution.
Ellie: 34:08
Also David, I think we should come clean and share with our listeners that one of our early options for the podcast name was Featherless Bipeds. Instead of Overthink, we almost went with Featherless Bipeds.
David: 34:21
Not everything needs to be made public!
Ellie: 34:25
I'm just trying to be parrhesiastic, okay. I'm speaking truth to power, which is you and myself.
David: 34:30
Hi, I'm Ellie and I'm David. Welcome to Two Featherless Bipeds. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 34:54
So let's think about these two forms of parrhesia, namely the one we find in Socrates, which is more about dialogue. And the one we find in Diogenes, which more about, um, public bodily functions. Rather, let's say, shameless actions. How do we see these two playing out in the present day?
David: 35:12
Well, I think you could easily identify a modern day parrhesiastes who turn on the use of arguments. So, for example, I would say that victims of sexual harassment and people who have been subjected to sexual violence, their mode of being parrhesiastes is discursive in this Socratic way, in speaking of truth and persuading, and essentially creating a logical narrative.
Ellie: 35:37
So like Tristan Harris, Timnit Gebru, and Christine Blasey Ford would be Socratic parrhesiastes.
David: 35:43
Yeah. And even most whistleblowers, I think they would say something like, "Oh, this has been happening and I think I am ethically obliged to reveal this information because these are my commitments and this violates these laws, et cetera." So there's, again, a kind of syllogistic structure to the reasoning that leads to the act of disclosure. But I do think there are more Cynic forms of parrhesia. I think that when that woman told me, "You're just like the rest of them." That is a Cynic approach to parrhesia. There's no argument. There's no dialogue. There is no focus on logical form. It's just like, "This is a truth that you have to swallow on your own time and I'm going to dish it." A long time ago, Theodor Adorno, this German social theorist, who wrote about art and-
Ellie: 36:36
I love Adorno.
David: 36:37
Dialectics. Yes, but he's like- you know, for all his Marxist commitments, his style is really inaccessible and very bougie.
Ellie: 36:44
I'm actually reading a really good book about this right now called Grand Hotel Abyss, which is a group biography of the Frankfurt School. And they talk a lot about that. They talk about how there was a Soviet spy in the Frankfurt school, spying on Adorno and all his peeps, but then the Soviet spy just ended up leaving because he was like, "Nothing to see here folks. It's just a bunch of dudes like reading books. There's no danger. There's no imminent revolution happening in Frankfurt."
David: 37:09
Yeah. I love that, in the grand scheme of things, all these radical academics are actually really not a worry for the state.
Ellie: 37:16
Anyway, sorry you were saying Adorno...
David: 37:18
Yeah. So Andreas Huyssen tells a story of one time when Adorno was giving a public speech, a bunch of Marxist young women showed up, walked on stage, and flashed him.
Ellie: 37:32
I remember that story!
David: 37:33
You do? Okay. And so she interprets this as a feminist Cynic moment, where it's through this kind of shamelessness, this disclosure, this unconcealmeant, especially of the body, in a way that is read as indecent and insolent that these women stage a modern day Dio- how would you say that?
Ellie: 37:54
Die- die, Diogenic? No, that sounds like diarrhetic.
David: 37:58
Well, that also sounds like eugenic, I don't like- let's just say they stage a modern day Cynic critique.
Ellie: 38:04
Uh huh.
David: 38:05
In this case, a symbol of power, academic power, which is Theodor Adorno.
Ellie: 38:11
Oh, good ole Theo.
David: 38:12
Yeah. So I- I liked the performative as, as a candidate for the cynic approach.
Ellie: 38:17
And there's a lot of feminist performance art that achieves the same objective, right. You know, whether it's like popping an egg out of one's vagina on the street, or the Gorilla Girls who famously talked about lack of representation of women artists by, you know, a series of billboards and different sorts of performances and publicity stunts, you know, to- to other like more established forms of feminist artwork.
David: 38:39
Oh that's so good. it's making me think of the piece by Emma Sulkowicz, student at Columbia university,
Ellie: 38:46
A good example!
David: 38:48
She's a survivor of rape and her thesis, her art thesis, in her senior year at Columbia University was to carry the mattress where the rape happened, on her back, wherever she went. And so she was just walking around, carrying a mattress, and to draw a more explicit connection here, in the biography of Diogenes of Sinope written by Diogenes Lartius, um, there's a story in which two young men gave Diogenes of Sinope a beating because they treated him like a person who didn't have a home. And so they just walked up to him and kick the shit out of him, basically. And so what Diogenes of Sinope did is he wrote their name on a tablet and put that tablet over his neck and just walked around, with their names hanging so that they, their names would be associated with what they did. So no argument, no syllogism, just the performance, and what a powerful way of disclosing a truth.
Ellie: 39:55
Oh my gosh. Yeah so Emma Sulkowicz is an example of a modern day Diogenes when it comes to her form of parrhesia.
David: 40:02
Yeah. That's exactly right. And, um, you know, maybe one could even read Diogenes as, uh, as a proto, weakly, feminist.
Ellie: 40:12
No, no, no no.
David: 40:13
Weakly, uh, only insofar as he was anti-marriage. He believed that all sex had to be consensual.
Ellie: 40:20
Oh, he did?
David: 40:21
And he believed that women should be philosophers.
Ellie: 40:23
Okay. I'm eating my words then. I thought he was just like, "I wrapped dog-like into a masculinist narrative of, you know, what that might mean for sexual ethics."
David: 40:32
Well, that's also kind of true because there are some problematic passages in the biography, where he would sometimes do this kind of clap back attack against women along sexual lines in ways that are and were problematic. So are true-
Ellie: 40:48
Diogenes is canceled.
David: 40:51
But part of it is still okay.
Ellie: 40:55
So it seems like parrhesia is a pretty bad-ass thing to do, right? Like we all just want to get out there and be parrhesiastes now. But of course as philosophers, we want to take things with a measured approach. So like what might not be so great about parrhesia?
David: 41:09
Or what might be the limits? That's another way of putting it.
Ellie: 41:12
Touch.
David: 41:12
Right? But I do think there are things that might not be great about it.
Ellie: 41:15
Yeah. I mentioned, for instance, like this expectation that we be accountable for everything as a single self over time.
David: 41:21
And I mentioned the question of feminism through the writings of Andreas Huyssen. If you look at the kind of aggression that is built into the Cynic school, she wonders to what extent that's really, in principle, accessible to women because men and women are not punished equally, or rewarded equally, for those acts of aggression. So I wonder how Alexander the Great would have responded if that person telling him to get the fuck out of the way was a woman. I do wonder.
Ellie: 41:53
Diogenes Lartius definitely wouldn't have been writing about her. That's for sure.
David: 41:56
And so there is a way in which this kind of violence, and even the figure of Diogenes, like, pissing against like all the people at the feast, you know, she writes about this because she says, "I can't do that."
Ellie: 42:09
Physically, it's pretty- pretty challenging, for most women-
David: 42:12
Yes, physically, she means physically. Yeah. But she also means symbolically, of course, because it stands for a way of interacting with others that we cannot assume applies equally to men and women under conditions of patriarchy. It just can't.
Ellie: 42:25
And I'm also thinking about the way that, you know, a lot of people who tout alternative facts, or like alt-right folks who protect freedom of speech. Like Jordan Peterson probably thinks he's a parrhesiastes and I'm worried about the way that this ideal could seem appealing, you know, to a certain kind of knee jerk, what I take to be a misunderstanding of free speech, rather than a genuinely courageous act of parrhesia.
David: 42:54
That's exactly right. And especially for people like Peterson, who have a persecution complex-
Ellie: 43:00
Yes.
David: 43:00
they might confuse their own mediocrity with, you know, radicality, which for people in that position, it's a- it's very to do.
Ellie: 43:08
Punching down feels like punching up.
David: 43:10
That's exactly right. I think here, for instance, about people who believe that there's a war against Christians, you know. There was persecution against Christians historically, and in fact, Foucault says that, in its earliest stages, christianity had two arms, there was a parrhesiastic Christianity where you just speak out the truth of your beliefs, even if you're killed for it.
Ellie: 43:33
Like Jesus, Jesus is a great parrhesiastes.
David: 43:35
Of course, of course. And so this gives rise to the proselytizing mission of the church, where you then go and try to speak the truth to as many people as possible.
Ellie: 43:44
Oh my God. You know, you know, I used to do that?
David: 43:47
Who?
Ellie: 43:47
Me.
David: 43:48
You were a proselytizer?
Ellie: 43:49
Yes. I was like a Christian teen who proselytized. We'll save that for another episode. Yeah.
David: 43:59
That's why you hate the continuity of the self.
Ellie: 44:07
Exactly! All of my research defending a post-structuralist conception of the fragmented and multiplicitous self is an attempt to disavow my past.
David: 44:15
Well, somebody once told me everybody writes about the thing that they don't have, you know? So what you feel like you're missing in your life, that becomes your dissertation basically. Every research agenda is a biography, deep down.
Ellie: 44:28
I have lots of thoughts on that given a lot of folks that, well, no, I'm gonna leave that-
David: 44:32
Well, but back to this, uh, Christianity point, there is this original parrhesiastic form of Christianity that is, again, courageous and aggressive and taking a step forward into the public eye. And then it gets replaced by this more ascetic Christianity that, uh, recedes into the private, into the monasteries. And so on, and Foucault says, originally there were Christian parrhesiastes. Now that Christianity is not persecuted, it's a category mistake. And so the importance of thinking about historical context, because you know, those alt-right people, those conservative Trumpers, they think themselves as modern day Diogenes'. Yeah, today has been the episode of how Ellie and David mispronounce every Greek term that comes.
Ellie: 45:22
Okay. I don't think we did that bad. I think- I think we're fine. I think we're fine. But yes. Um, yeah, I mean, one last thing to put into play here too, is whether or not speaking out on social media is a form of parrhesia, can be a form of parrhesia, is never a form of parrhesia, because of the structure of social media, and the way that any radical speech act is going to get co-opted.
David: 45:48
That's right. And earlier you mentioned the Instagram influencers, who put a lot of their personal life and of their private life in the public eye, and to be honest, my intuition, or at least my knee jerk reaction, is that that's not really parrhesia because it's not dangerous. It's not really speaking any truth to really any kind of power in a direct way. And I'm here thinking about the philosopher Gordon Hull, who has written about the way in which social media creates already a pressure for everybody to bare it all out at all times, that it really makes parrhesia banal. That's the word that he uses-
Ellie: 46:30
Yeah.
David: 46:30
banal, and this is a quote. "The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speechwhich presents itself as parrhesiastic."
Ellie: 46:54
Huh. So is the idea there that the problem is the focus on visibility or the availability of visibility? It seems like he's saying, you know, parrhesia is always visible and we can think back to Socrates and Diogenes, that's obvious, but it's the idea that like, everything is so visible all the time that sheer visibility is no longer parrhesiastic?
David: 47:16
That's exactly right. So sheer visibility's no longer parrhesiastic because we live in a culture that is effectively what Emerson calls an invisible eye, this eye that sees everything at all times. And so he writes, for example, about the rise of surveillance in the 1970s, the rise of Big Data, the fact that we don't have any privacy anymore, people willingly give the most private details of their lives in exchange for a $2.99 rebate.
Ellie: 47:43
Yeah.
David: 47:43
And so his point is that we no longer have the possibility of what he calls Cynic scandal.
Ellie: 47:50
I think that's really interesting to think about, in light of the blowing up on social media over the summer of comments about racial injustice, and especially like the infamous black box, right? Like the idea that first, everybody had to post a black box and posting a black box was perhaps seen as a form of parrhesia, right. It was very clear within like, hours that it was not at all a form of parrhesia and it was just like this ineffectual ridiculous gesture. So everybody took down the black boxes, but then I was seeing people post things like, "If you haven't spoken up on your Instagram about Black Lives Matter, unfriend me now or unfollow me now." And, you know, I feel kind of weird about because on the one hand, it's really important for us to be clear about anti-racist commitments and to speak out about those, and then on the other hand, like, I just wasn't inclined to judge people who didn't post anything because a lot of the posts were just sort of adding to the idle talk. They weren't adding anything new. They were just a way of saying and showing like, see, I'm in the right here, and that was particularly ineffective, I think, among fellow white people.
David: 48:57
I am a person of color and I didn't really post anything on social media, in part because I'm a dinosaur and I don't really use social media. It's not, I'm not very savvy about that, even though I'm in my early thirties and I should be, but I also dislike the fact that it's compelled, socially, and Foucault is very clear about this.
Ellie: 49:16
Hmm.
David: 49:16
Parrhesiastic speech must be free speech. It cannot be compelled. And so he writes about the extreme case of compelling speech, which is the case of torture when you try to get it out of somebody, but even a more subtle form of forcing, this kind of social pressure to post a particular thing, would already mean that it's not parrhesia because the person maybe doesn't really believe it.
Ellie: 49:38
Ah, yeah. Yeah. And then not risking- in fact-
David: 49:42
Yeah.
Ellie: 49:42
They're risking by not saying something. They're not risking by posting, right? It's like proof I'm a good person.
David: 49:48
Well, that's really fascinating Ellie, because Gordon Hull makes the argument that, if anything, nowadays silence might be more parrhesiastic.
Ellie: 49:57
Oh. Oh.
David: 49:57
Because think about the ways in which we think of somebody who doesn't have Facebook, who doesn't have Instagram, as like, "They're probably creeps," you know, like, there's this suspicion.
Ellie: 50:08
Yeah. Um.
David: 50:08
The scandal, now, is to not be visible.
Ellie: 50:11
Wow. Well, with that maybe I should shut up and be silent. Thanks to all of our listeners for joining us!
David: 50:21
That is the best way to end an episode. On silence.
Ellie: 50:33
We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 50:41
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 50:49
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.