Foucault's Use of Socrates

Abstract

Foucault's Use of Socrates Ramona Naddaff (bio) "… ce 'trip' gréco-latin qui a duré plusieurs années." —Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres The beginning of Paul Miller's Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth recalls the possible uses of Foucault in the present moment: "Michel Foucault is one of the most radical voices of the twentieth-century. … Foucault's histories uncover a fossil record of our practices of truth, of our desires, pleasures and intensities, which have been, and therefore can be, repurposed and re-elaborated from one struggle to the next" (Miller 2022, 1). One of Foucault's "histories" interests me—the history of Socrates' use of parrēsia, sketched in his fall 1983 lectures at University of California, Berkeley (Foucault 2019). Foucault's use of Socrates here, I hope to suggest, is itself a sign of his own "struggle" to "repurpose" and "re-elaborate" a Socratic practice of truth disentangled from Platonic politics, ethics, and ideology. The Use of Pleasure does indeed put Plato to good use in Foucault's reconceptualization of the history of sexuality—"And now I would like to show how, in classical antiquity, sexual activity and sexual pleasures were problematized through practices of the self, bringing into play the criteria of an 'aesthetics of existence'" (Foucault 1986, 12). So too do Foucault's Berkeley lectures repurpose and use "Socrates" for diverse, but not necessarily disconnected, ends in Foucault's critical project to provide an account of the histories of critique. Plato's "Socrates," the truth-teller, a symptom of a flat epistemology and ontology, is not the object of Foucault's concern as he neared the end of his life. Rather, the particular speech acts, the "dire-vrai," of this singular character, Socrates, whom Plato attempted to entrap, even silence, preoccupies Foucault as he seeks to contend with the problem of the truth-teller and truth-telling. Foucault is less interested in the "aesthetics of existence" than in how a certain form of radical Socratic critique may be resurrected in a culture and politics of protestation. [End Page 413] Miller reminds us that already in his 1970–71 lectures on the will to know at the Collège de France, Foucault was investigating archaic and classical Greece, where, influenced by Marcel Detienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, "he examined how the concept of truth that we recognize today became established during the fifth and fourth centuries," a "discursive event, the product of social and political struggles in archaic Greece" (Miller 2022, 5). Only in the 1980s will Foucault appear to make a radical, decisive break with his earlier work, not only moving from early modern texts and archives to ancient ones but also in terms of his philosophical preoccupations. "While truth had been a central preoccupation from the beginning," Miller argues, "his later work focuses increasingly on the individual as a speaker of truth both to himself and to others." The "ethical turn," the return to subjectivity, marks the return of a figure largely invisible from Foucault's first lectures—namely, Socrates. Miller explains further: "Radical Socratic questioning occupies Foucault for the last five years of his life, not as an antiquarian interest, but as a way of thinking in a sustained manner about how the subject comes to speak the truth, and about the courage needed to speak the truth while risking marginalization, misunderstanding, or even death" (Miller 2022, 4). I offer a hypothesis—perhaps ungrounded, even unfounded, but a necessary condition for Foucault's use of Socrates. Foucault enacts a separation of Socrates from Plato in his 1983 lectures at Berkeley, titled Discourse and Truth. This "Socrates" differs from that of The Use of Pleasure, where Foucault works on and with the dialogues canonically connected with Plato as he emerges as a singular author of Platonism. Foucault invents this 1983 Socrates in order to arrest the domination of Plato over Socrates' representation and his ideological uses of his teacher. Let us recall here Foucault's analysis of the difference between power and domination in the interview "The Ethics of the Concern for the...