Everything you’ve heard about cynism is wrong. You don’t have to live in a barrel, like Diogenes. You don’t have to give up everything. There is only one goal: live happily. And two rules, respectively one virtue, to achieve it. Parrhesia is your path to eudaimonia.
Parrhesia is Greek and means, “Just tell the truth about yourself and live it.”
Telling the truth about oneself does not mean a moral demand not to lie. Rather, parrhesia is about self-realization. If you don’t show your self to yourself and to the world, then you are living past yourself, you are missing out on your life. This blog is about learning to find yourself first. Already this is not easy because we were taught as children that there are forbidden thoughts, forbidden feelings, forbidden desires etc.
In a second step, we recommend a protected setting, such as an encounter group, where you can show others what you have learned to accept about yourself. The third step, the political step, is to show as little consideration as possible for how you (german “man”) should be, even in public, but simply to show who you are.
Parrhesia is not something you can just do, but, like any virtue, it is a process that requires constant learning.
Nietzsche’s famous will to power or better will to might, means exactly this “will to truth” in an extra-moral sense. And “will” in contrast to hope, to mere wish, to “would like to” is just another word for virtue. It means the exercise of bringing forth my actual self and neither as a dressage forced by dominant values to something alien to me. It does not mean to dream of a merely utopian hero, as in the blockbuster or computer game. In the utopia, you dream to be someone you would like to be but never will be.
Parrhesia, thus understood as a virtue, is not an externally imposed duty. Rather, it is our whole natural courage to live. The truth about us wants to go out into the world. It is only suppressed, condemned, destroyed by the coercive society. Nietzsche formulates beautifully and succinctly that virtue is not a laborious duty: “Virtue is the joy of resistance.”
The therapy towards parrhesia is therefore by no means dressage, learning of something foreign, unnatural, but, speaking with Socrates, maeeutics, midwifery, birth understood as a lifelong process.
In another article I go deeper into Nietzsche’s will to might, show that it is based on parrhesia and why cynics need just this one virtue. The Platonic four cardinal virtues, for example, are consequences of parrhesia. The revaluation of all values is, by the way, also with Nietzsche, expression and consequence of the will to power.
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