The New Athens?

I was browsing in the book store — the local, physical store, the one with paper and floors and smells and everything — when I randomly opened a book by Michel Foucault and saw that it was about a Greek word I don’t remembering having heard before, parrhesia, which he translates as “fearless speech” (the title of the book). The next book I picked up was by Thomas Merton, and guess what word was on the first page I turned to: “the.” But also “parrhesia.” So, I bought the Foucault book.

To my surprise, it isn’t his usual proof of his own cleverness. It’s instead an immersion in Greek culture, using a change in the meaning of “parrhesia” as a way of showing shifts in the contexts in which the word was important. It moved from meaning the speech of a citizen that fearlessly “tells it like it is” to an authority to a sometimes negative term for rabble-rousing. Foucault wonders how this change could have happened. It’s as if a crack opened up in the word. For example, originally there simply was no question about how the truth-teller knows the truth. But in the 5th century BCE, the question of the justification of belief was indeed beginning to arise. Likewise, Foucault looks at how the socio-political situation had changed so that parrhesia no longer was a simple virtue. He’s brilliant at his exploration of the context within which this word had sense.

This is a bit like a shift in a scientific paradigm, except the old paradigm isn’t abandoned because of the accretion of anomolies that it cannot explain. Rather, there is a dense human context that alters and a concept that made sense becomes problematic. The bits of the old context that no longer make that much sense provide clues to the larger tectonic movements of thought.

So, what are the concepts today that no longer make as much sense as they once did? Privacy. Friendship. Employee. Politeness. Sincerity. The Web’s knocking each of these for a loop.

Not all the terms are Web-related. For example, courage in an age of high-altitude bombing no longer means what it used to. Maybe civilian doesn’t either. But a whole bunch of these terms spring out of the Net. That may be the biggest clue that important, and potentially scary, changes are afoot.

Here’s the question that excites me so much: Are we in an time that could rival the golden age of Athens in its capacity for reinventing ourselves?

Categories: Uncategorized dw