According to Foucault, the ancient Greeks were mostly interested in a conception of public and political parrhesia that obliged them (and accorded them the privilege) of speaking the truth to others (including those in authority), in order to guide them and help facilitate wise government.
The early Christians, on the other hand, were more concerned with a personal-psychological form of parrhesia (eventually institutionalized as a system of penitence); the moral obligation of each individual to confess the truth about themselves, in order to be freed from the burden of sin and thereby saved.
This, as Foucault says, is a significant moment of transformation in the long history of parrhesiastic practice; a history that he goes to great pains within his late lectures to reconstruct in order that he may better analyze the relations between subjectivity, language, and power - this essentially being his philosophical project in a nutshell.
Now, fascinating as this project is - and one has to invariably return to politics and psychagogy (or questions concerning the governance of self and others) sooner or later - I have to admit that one of the great attractions of object-oriented ontology and other related forms of what Bill Brown terms thing theory, is that they allow one to be seduced by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the asking of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject, final solution, or great point of correlation.
In other words, the beauty and the truth of things is they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.
Note: The lyric quoted in the final paragraph is - as I'm sure everybody knows - from the song 'My Favourite Things', from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music (1959).
In other words, the beauty and the truth of things is they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.
Note: The lyric quoted in the final paragraph is - as I'm sure everybody knows - from the song 'My Favourite Things', from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music (1959).
