Hermeneutics and Ontology: the subject and the truth or self care and parrhesia

Abstract

The questions on which we are going to devote this reflection came from Michel Foucault. The relation between the concept of “subject” and that of “truth” is not simple a relation of contraposition, but there is a mutual interference at play. The hermeneutic exercise will bring us closer to the understanding of the words that are here in question. We propose to dialogue with the writings of Foucault, specifically with the problematization of the question in which history engages the relations between the elements of the subject and of the truth, top of the ontology, which is reached and demolished by the new subjects and the new truths, that is, by the new ways of being and our ways relations. Truth is concretely, history of truth. The history of being is a history of subjectivation, the history of discourse about subjectivation, the history of the “said” of and about the subject. The hermeneutics will show that the constitution of self and sense correspond in different epochs. Foucault’s commitment to combine the two concepts starts from the idea that truth is not accuracy and that it is precisely for this reason that truth does not need the tinsel of rhetoric, as Socrates said, to tell the truth little eloquence suffices. The relationship between truth and one’s own life style, or between truth and ethics and an aesthetic of itself, is for Foucault, very palpable in the Socratic-Platonic tradition. Foucault sees in Parrhesia a political mechanism of great interest from an ethical perspective, and strives to traverse with great thoroughness the whole history of the term populated by semantic variations. Parrhesia is for a long time the nexus of union between self care and caring for others, between self-government and the government of others, the border on which ethics and politics coincide.