SOCRATES AND THE COURAGE OF VERIDICTION ACCORDING TO FOUCAULT

Norman K. Swazo

ABSTRACT

Foucault’s lectures on “the courage of truth” include a discussion of Plato’s Laches, in which the master-craftsman/apprentice mode of teaching and learning is examined as a way of learning virtue (arête). Thus, it seems virtue can be taught and learned according to the model of poiēsis, despite the discussion in Plato’s Meno questioning this claim. Socrates’s elenchus apparently leads to the one option that virtue is acquired through practice, i.e., phronēsis. ‘Poiēsis’ is, of course, not equivalent in concept to ‘phronēsis’, in which case the option presented in the Laches and that considered in the Meno leave ample room for further examination.  Foucault recognized as much. Thus, for Foucault, Socrates is exemplar of what he calls the “ethical formation” or “making” of the self, i.e., ēthopoiēsis, thus seemingly linking the practice of ethics to poiēsis rather than to phronēsis. But, is this a correct formulation? Foucault denominates Socrates “the parrhesiast” (speaker of truth) par excellence, yet Socrates claims he lacks knowledge (epistemē). What “truth” about virtue might Socrates speak if spoken in complete ignorance (ágnoia) while believing (thus, not knowing) that “knowledge is virtue” and “virtue is knowledge”? Here I engage Foucault’s interpretation with a view to answering whether he is correct to think of virtue as ēthopoiēsis rather than as phronēsis, and what this entails for self-governance.