Truth and interpretation in philosophies of ethical practice

Abstract

This thesis traces the connection between interpretation and practice as they meet under a philosophical question of what it is we ought to practice, both as a question of an ethical relation to the self and to others. It does so by means of a detailed interpretation of the concept of Parrhēsia as it appears in Michel Foucault’s Government of Self and Others, I and Hermeneutics of the Subject, followed by an interpreted emergence and critique in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Stiegler, and Jacques Derrida. Parrhēsia functions as a claim whose truth is intertwined with a risk to the claimant’s reputation or life. In turn this becomes a concern intertwined with both the claimant’s character and its development, as well as that of those he encounters and practices Parrhēsia with. In each case, such a question is configured as a distinctly Platonic question. That is, the truth as the measure by which all decisions and practices (and tekhne) ought to be weighed in order that they are pre-determined to be either beneficial or detrimental. This thesis demonstrates that the philosophers discussed interpret such a question as one which risks the affirmation of a Platonic metaphysics which, due to their (post-Nietzschean and post-Heideggerian) affirmation of human finitude, they interpret as illusory, indeterminable, or the obscuration of a more appropriate Socratic or Pre-Socratic form of life (and philosophical practice). As a result, this thesis demonstrates the manner in which they frame this question as a given demand for judgement (as interpretation) between that which is inherited and what of it is to be practiced, if such a distinction is possible at all.