About parrhesia and dialectic

About parrhesia and dialectic

Source: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence/

There is only one English word you may not be familiar with and needs to be explained at the outset: parrhesia (παρρησία). It is borrowed from Greek.

Parrhesia literally means “all that is being said” or “all that is put into words”. In practical usage, parrhesia refers to the disposition of speaking in earnest, of telling things as they are. No tricks, no gimmicks.

We can see the connection between “saying everything that can be said” and being honest. With parrhesia, honesty acquires a meaning where telling the truth is a sign of standing up to the authority of conventions. To have parrhesia is to prioritise the pursuit of truthfulness over any given arrangement that may grant power, social status, popularity, and so on.

In terms of our selfhood, which I covered in the previous entry to this series, parrhesia is what we need to recognise who we are in the moment; who we are as that subjective narrative of self that draws linkages between different contexts and evolving states of affairs.

We best understand our self amidst the totality of the world with parrhesia. Whenever we hold back on “what is being said”, whenever we deem some words ineffable or consider certain aspects of our selfhood off limits, we necessarily distort or foreshadow our perception of self.

What does honesty about one’s selfhood have to do with the broad theme of accumulating knowledge? How does it relate to the particular topic of learning by writing notes?

It is relevant because it determines how you, the subject who seeks knowledge, interprets the phenomena. If you cannot be honest with yourself, if you cannot discern the truth in that which is most intimate, what makes you believe you can reliably find any other truth?

Parrhesia is a matter of disposition: how we conduct ourselves. When we make a habit out of speaking the truth, we necessarily acknowledge the need to seek the truth, remain open to it, and be ready to revise our views in the face of compelling evidence and/or cogent counter-arguments to those of our own. In other words, we do not stand for our truth but the truth, even if it runs contrary to our beliefs, which we must promptly and blithely revise. This means that we are not attached to the narrative of our selfhood we have hitherto developed. We admit to our variability, to the potential of change or evolution.

Parrhesia is the other side of inquisitiveness and dubitativeness. We cannot be genuinely inquisitive if we are afraid to elucidate the truth. We may not be dubitative if we only ever provide assent to that which is expedient or which happens to find currency in our milieu. Sometimes our comfort zone is nothing but the prison we have rationalised as cosy.

Parrhesia, then, involves a special brand of courage: that which has the capacity to challenge the cult of personality we develop about our own self. When we are honest, we know how to contain our cockiness, escape from our egoism, remain grounded, and see our self as yet another node in this distributed network of universal life that is the Cosmos.

Parrhesia is not about recklessness. One must recognise the specifics of the case to know where the virtuous balance is which, ipso facto, is a matter of understanding how things stand. Furthermore, parrhesia is not a dogma of truthfulness, a holy war of sorts, where we take it upon ourselves to demonstrate to others how they are wrong. No!

We must understand that values are ideals. They are analytical constructs which exist in a perfect world. In our actuality though, we must exercise practical reason, “common sense” as we say. The truth is an ideal as well. As with all ideals, it has no instantiation that is equivalent to its absolute form. What we have in practice are approximations of the ideal, which is the case for everything. I cannot offer you harmony, for example, but only instances of it such as a melody or a shape. Even if I put together all melodies and shapes I am still giving you instances of harmony, not the ideal of it.

Parrhesia thus requires that we acknowledge the actuality of our subjectivity; the truth that what we learn is a function of factors whose interplay contributes to states of affairs. We do not deal in absolutes. Our methods are imperfect and our judgement fallible. To speak in earnest, then, requires that we recognise our limits. The most practical way to do so is to be dialectical.

Dialectic, in its original meaning, is about discourse, dialogue, what happens “through words”: an exchange of views. Because of parrhesia, because of its concomitant inquisitiveness and dubitativeness, engaging in dialectic means that we admit to the possibility of changing our thesis (position) either to an opposite one, an anti-thesis, or a new view that might blend the two, a syn-thesis, or simply a new thesis that supersedes all previous ones.

In summary, we have four connatural qualities of character which underpin this truth-seeking view of the world and disposition thereof.

parrhesia is sincerity in elucidation; to be dubitative is to doubt, which manifests through the recognition that the truth remains elusive; to be inquisitive is the attitude of questioning and seeking the truth; dialectic is encapsulated in the spirit of openness and selflessness with which we carry out the above. When we have these, or at least work towards making them part of our everyday life, we start perceiving things differently. For example, someone at some point in the distant past insulted you. By being honest, you understand that the insult is inconsequential and that your past self does not necessarily determine your current self. Matters such as pride are ephemeral and situational. You then realise that by letting go, by no longer attaching value to something that has none and which is not pertinent, you free yourself from its grip.

Ideas can create robust constraints. When we are in the mindset of pursuing the truth, we are neither attached to—nor bound by—any given arrangement of concepts. There is a lightness to it, as we always emancipate ourselves from falsehood; falsehood which may appear as obsession for something unattainable, the pettiness of “winning the argument” for the sake of winning, and all those desires to play a role in order to accommodate social expectations, often to our detriment.