Reexamining Political Responsibility through Foucault's Cynic Parrhesia

Michael Rivera 05/05/16 Essay 3 Topic 2

In this essay I argue that it is Michel Foucault Cynic parrhesia that is more adept or able to create an atmosphere where we are only forced to ask ourselves to reexamine our political responsibility within our society. In Foucault’s Freedom of Speech given at the University of California he discusses this topic of parrhesia in great length describing what it meant to the Greeks and how they interpreted it using examples from them when used in such little texts. After describing this in detail with examples Foucault later describes that it can lead to more than just that that we can see two forms of parrhesia in Cynic and Socratic the second coming from excerpts in Socrates however it is the Cynic for me that is more interesting and riskier form that can help us understand this further. Michel Foucault really picks up on what it means to be a parrhesiates a truth teller which broadly was used in the classical Greece era as a person who told the truth in a world with so much politics and whether or not this person was needed

In discourse 18 we see a brief summary and a couple versus greatly explain perhaps the point of trying to relinquish the mind from the actions “Renunciation of actions springing from selfish desire is known as sannyassa by the seers; abandonment of the fruit of all action is called tyaga by the wise. 3. Some thoughtful persons say: “All action should be abandoned as an evil.”” Pg.72 In the excerpt there this is being spoken to others from what the lord Krishna has presented which almost presents the entire case here strongly. So abandoning all duties does not mean relinquish all the actions you might have and this removal of the mind can be achieved to look at the bigger picture of the politics going on around them in the battles that they must