Have you ever needed to give bad news to someone you knew wouldn’t take it well? Has that person ever had enough power over you to make the task especially daunting? Ideally, someone talented in rhetoric—the art of persuasion and effective communication—can find a way to tell the most inconvenient truths to those who want to hear it the least in ways they find palatable. But, sometimes, even the best orators and debaters among us cannot make bad news seem like good news. Sometimes, someone must give news so troubling or abhorrent that his or her own standing and reputation is threatened. History has seen many situations where bringers of unwelcome news paid the ultimate price for it. It is why “don’t kill the messenger” is a common maxim. In less extreme but still daunting situations, a speaker can open himself up to public degradation, a loss of a job or career, and more. The above maxim, modernized, would read, “don’t cancel the messenger.
This kind of risky rhetoric has a name of its own: parrhesia.
What is Parrhesia?
Unlike rhetoric, parrhesia is marked less by a speaker’s artful use of language and more by a speaker’s courage and willingness to risk one’s wellbeing to say, “what needs to be said.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines parrhesia as speaking “boldly and freely in things displeasing and obnoxious to envy,” while the adjective “parrhesiastic” means “Bold and open in speech; free spoken and outspoken.” However, more contemporary usages of parrhesia and its grammatical variations—e.g., “parrhesiastes” denotes a person who uses parrhesia—include the element of risk. In order for a “bold and open” speech to be parrhesiastic, the parrhesiastes’s words must put himself or herself in harm.
Parrhesia has been the topic of many scholarly works. The most cited text on the concept, comes from the prominent and influential philosopher, Michel Foucault, who is often held culpable for the postmodern theory that drives ultra-progressive activists to see everything in terms of power—who has it and who doesn’t—and how words help maintain the status quo.i, In Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, Foucault writes that a wielder of parrhesia should have a feeling, an obligation, to take a substantial risk to one’s safety to speak perceived truth, in which he criticizes a more powerful audience. Foucault writes, “Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the “game” of life or death.” What’s more, Foucault argues that parrhesia must denote criticism of a more powerful party.
Foucault continues, “Parrhesia is a form of criticism, either towards another or towards oneself, but always in a situation where the speaker or confessor is in a position of inferiority with respect to the interlocutor. The parrhesiastes is always less powerful than the one with whom he or she speaks.” What’s more, “when a philosopher criticizes a tyrant, when a citizen criticizes the majority, when a pupil criticizes his or her teacher, then such speakers may be using parrhesia.” Parrhesia is risky rhetoric in general, whether one is risking life or reputation.
Parrhesia Today
So, what does all this mean for us? Parrhesia can be seen when protestors push the envelope in ways that risk arrest and/or physical harm, but it can also be seen when a non-tenured professor says something insufficiently woke at a faculty meeting. The use of parrhesia may not completely go away, but I think a sign of a free and pluralistic society is how seldom one has to be a parrhesiastes speaking truth to power instead of a writer or speaker participating in a marketplace of ideas. Sadly, we seem to be tripping toward the former when we need to be rising to the latter.