Author Topic: The One Who Uses Parrhesia  (Read 371 times)

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The One Who Uses Parrhesia
« on: December 22, 2018, 06:47:41 am »
Quote from: Holden
The Parrhesiastes:The person who speaks   truth to Power.

The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse.   In parrhesia, the speaker is supposed to give a complete and exact account of what he has in mind so that the audience is able to comprehend exactly what the speaker thinks.

~ Michel Foucault

In parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion.  Think of the direct contrast between parrhesia and the policies of world powers, world religions, or the machismo ethics of gangs and cartels.  For instance, a saying in the Quran:  "O ye who believe! Ask not questions about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble."


In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell recreates the mood and attitude he experienced in those cities: “I am angered when people propagate the idea that work such as washing dishes or digging ditches is “honest work” simply because it is hard and disagreeable. We see a man cutting down a tree and say he is filling a social need simply because he is using his muscle. It doesn’t occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue.”

“A dishwasher is a slave to a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants?”

“I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work, is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob.”

(See Dead End: Chapter 12. The Steppenwolf Rediscovers Downtown Freehold (El Barrio)The bosses and rulers prefer to have the mob kept too busy to think!
No quiero meterme en las problemas.
I don’t want to get into trouble.
)


"An honest man is always in trouble, Simon. Remember that."   (Henry Fool)

Quote from: John Taylor Gatto
People who know who they are make trouble for schools.

One method people use to find out who they are becoming, before others do, is to keep a journal, where they log what attracts their attention, along with some commentary. In this way, you get to listen to ­yourself instead of listening only to others.

The specific "speech activity" of the parrhesiastic enunciation thus takes the form: “I am the one who thinks this and that."

The commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk.

More notes:

The fact that a speaker says something dangerous — different from what the majority believes— is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.

Holden is on point, I believe, when he says that this is "speaking truth to power," since the parrhesiastes is always less powerful than the one with whom he or she speaks. The parrhesia comes from “below”, as it were, and is directed towards “above”.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2018, 09:27:42 am by Kaspar the Jaded »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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On Propositions and Grief and Sad Santa Hats
« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2018, 11:51:37 pm »
Herr Kaspar,

I recently came across  the following:

Quote
The reader  of Euclid does not really understand a proposition until he understands  how that proposition was derived from the earlier propositions (and ultimately from the definitions and axioms at the basis of the system)

Now, I find this is important because, while I have always been a reader, you have   helped  me to become  a diarist.It helps me to understand how and why I have  come to grief. "Weather Watching"-I read this phrase somewhere.The idea is to observe  once own  mood,now its stormy and inclement,and yesterday it was   balmy.

The moods come and the  moods  go. When   something bad happens,like,   for  example, I   get rebuked by  a superior,  I can  literally feel   myself wither away  and shrivel up. When some one compliments me( despite  the fact that I may know very well  that the compliment is  fake), I ,generally,end up  getting  giddy. Its really like   I am an automaton and one only needs to push a certain button in order to get a particular response out of me.

Sometimes I feel terribly afraid,like, I find it very difficult to even so much as breathe properly.You want to know where  I disagree with the garden variety anti-natalist? Its when they expound their faith that there is someway in which the   whole of conscious life can be turned off deliberately. It might happen. But the  key word here is "happen". I am fairly certain that  such an occurrence  cannot be deliberately induced.

In  the  city  the  atmosphere is  very  Christmassy.Quite a few  non-christians   also celebrate christmas  here.Yesterday   I saw a street hawker selling  some Santa Hats. They hats were sort of   dirty  because  of the  dust  and  the air  pollution.  They  made  me feel  sad.
And when  I   started  to feel terribly   sad,    I  ,unconscious  ,  began to  hum  this song:


I remember  listening  to it   during my ,rather brief,   but very serious encounter with alcohol,which left me hospitalised and  in  terrible pain in  this very city.
But  that ,my friend, is another story for another time.

PS:I rather like the country side, I am not the one for malls and shopping sprees but the  country side is   as cruel  as the city and I certainly do not romanticise it.I once  read a little known Scandinavian novel called Suicide narrated by a boy who is sitting in a restaurant with his father after  an unsuccessful suicide  attempt  and he  is brooding. In the winter, I somehow end up feeling like that.

Keep warm.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2018, 11:57:47 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: The One Who Uses Parrhesia
« Reply #2 on: December 24, 2018, 09:05:00 pm »
Quote from: Holden
while I have always been a reader, you have   helped  me to become  a diarist.  It helps me to understand how and why I have  come to grief.

For most of my life, I had practiced this "Weather Watching" you mention.   I think that feeling I had to burn my lifetime collection of "diaries of a madman" simply to make room for books and my current project of organizing my "old school boy" working through exercises may have impacted me.  I don't ramble on writing about petty aggravations anymore.  What I mean is that I write very little these days that is not related to something "technical".   Trust me, though, if something dramatic were to occur in my personal life, I surely would try to work through it by articulating my experiences.   

Maybe part has to do with being able to converse here, meaning that this message board is a kind of diary where you and raul and a few others may be the audience, whereas with my "diaries," there was no audience.

I still keep a notebook separate from the math notebooks, but I rarerly jot in it.  I still do, since eventually it gets filled up, but so much of it is some kind of technical revelation, some kind of insight that seems very special and significant to me.   For instance, if I made an important change to a header file for a Fraction class, I make a note in my "Mind Shiftings" notebook.   Why is it worthy of being discussed in a "diary"?   Well, I first created a simple Fraction class (C++) in 1998 during a course at a community college.  I still remember the name of the professor/instructor, Patricia Hines, who is now since retired.   She was very proud of me for what I had accomplished.  My genuine love for mathematics gave me a special kind of enthusiasm for the "project," which was to create a C++ class to represent an object called a Fraction, that is, a rational number with members: numerator and denominator, both integers.

1998, Holden!   Over 20 years ago ... And I had returned to college as an "old man" - Hell, I was over 31 years old.  I already felt old.  Now I know I am old, no matter what the elderly say about me being "still a young man".  I know better.  I'm fuucking old.  Too old to be getting "giddy" over a Fraction class.  And yet!

And so, while some might be disappointed to discover that the contents of my "secret diary" are just a series of entries where I am continuing a conversation with myself about where I am at, it is what it is.   I still remeber back in 1996 or so, writing in my "notebook" how I did not want to go out for another "blast" of rock co-caine ... and then succumbing anyway ... and then trying to write myself through it even though I could barely scribble for days afterward.

Yes, as one has has been a compulsive diarist throughout his life, those periods where my organism became the host, held hostage to the demons craving intoxication, euphoria, and oblivion, the part of me that longed to keep track of "the psychological and emotional weather" would experience a kind of panic and remorse witnessing that all "the I" could do is watch and experience, but unable to articulate nor verbalize.   That animal is still here.  He ( It ) appreciates these conversations in this medium.   I feel much better about typing my thoughts here than scribbling on paper ... I am saving paper and "space" for mathematical work.

Maybe I use my diaries for writing down some technical revelation, sharing the enthusiasm with no one other than myself because, for me, now this is my private inner life.   Yep, it is almost too private to share in public, a certain kind of enthusiasm over such things as rational numbers would appear to be "unmanly" at best, and downright "corny" at worst.

I am glad you have declared yourself a diarist, and I am honored that you claim I had this influence on you.  Keeping records of my "mood weather" has been a huge part of my life.   That I happen to fill notebooks with school mathematics these days is more than a little weird, but, to me, such is the nature of my private life these days.   That is what my weather looks like now.   You will not find any pining away for unattainable brown-eyed bronze-skinned women in these pages.  No, they may still swirl around in my imagination deep inside my head, but such fantasies no longer have any kind of grip on my conscious attention. 

At last, now I really am becoming older, and I am not at all sad about this situation.  I am glad to age, and as I lose my marbles, so be it.   

I no longer find a need to write too many "forbidden thoughts," but keeping private notebooks has helped me come to terms with many issues which are not worth discussing with family members, such as my rejection of particular religious ideas.    It doesn't make sense to argue about such things, but I think it was important for me to be able to express my doubts in the privacy of my diaries without being harrassed or raising my blood pressure.

I tend to ramble here, so I am keeping it short as possible.

The important thing is to become your own confidant.   This is where you will be able to discover that you may not be as miserable as you think you are (or how miserable others think you are).  You may discover just how much you resent rushing out the door to report to your employer, making a quick note, such as, "It's 6AM and I have to leave in 10 minutes.  How I wish I could crack open the math book!"

Of course, when you do not have access to an actual notebook to jot your thoughts, just practicing this ritual may trigger an unwritten diary which you carry around in your heart and mind at all times, where you keep track of your inner observations.   You may develop what the ancients may have considered to be their "spirit guide," and this spirit guide is your own connection to reality.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2018, 11:27:06 pm by Kaspar the Jaded »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~