I. System as modality of knowledge in Hegel

In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel presents us with a true methodological propaedeutic, as an essential preamble in order to understand his thought. The truth reveals itself only in the totality, which manifests itself in the form of a system. The modus is dialectical, which allows for the acknowledgement of the present, based on the historical conditions by which it is determined, and through the mutual inclusion of the parts of an organic whole that incorporates it.

The truth for Hegel manifests itself in history, starting from the negation of empty formal possibility and leading to the determination of particular possibilities that will also be negated in the active reality in which they occur (WL: 609–16). It is implicit that the knowledge of this process necessarily entails a knowledge of actuality, which is—seen from a dialectical point of view—a determination of the laws that regulate the necessity of the real.

Hegel is widely considered to stand at the peak of modern philosophy, the philosophy that was born with Descartes, in which the human being, the subject, is the centre of the world and relates to that same world through the perceptio that gives him back the ens objectivum—the crop of his subjective impressions. Hegel, in his philosophy of history, establishes a strong connection with Descartes by saying: ‘we can now say that we find ourselves with [the Cartesian philosophy] at home and, like the navigator after long wandering on the furious sea, we can shout “land!”’ (VGP: 120). The primacy of the I, the Cartesian reconstruction of a new episteme (incontrovertible knowledge that manifests as self-transparency of thought), put the human being, as we said before, in the centre of the world. This I is the philosophical heir of two necessarily connected episodes: the renaissance, with the conception of the homo faber sui, and the scientific revolution (instauratio magna) started by Francis Bacon. The Hegelian system puts the characteristics of the human spirit in a historical process. In this sense, knowledge becomes power that reveals historical actuality. Hegel’s knowledge does not have a contemplative root; instead it must be considered as the foundation for a properly historical practice that is oriented towards the awareness of given conditions, which in turn is based on an awareness of the past. It is not a disembodied knowledge.

This is how the concrete universal is realized: through the universality of the dialectical method, i.e., the authentic episteme which overcomes the ‘negative’ unilaterality of the philosophy of Descartes and Kant.Footnote ³ For Hegel, knowledge resides in subject-object identity: the unity of the categories of being and the categories of thought. From his point of view, both the ingenious realism of Aristotle and the negative reflexivity of modern philosophy (empiricism, rationalism and criticism) are being outperformed. Absolute knowledge, which is reached by the relation that has emerged from the sublimation of the principle of non-contradiction, represents knowledge of the whole.

‘According to my understanding, which has to justify itself through the representation of the system, it is about considering and expressing the truth not as a substance, but also as a subject’ (PhG: 13–14, o.t.). In this passage we can see that there is a dynamic truth in the form of the system in which knowledge is manifested. According to this interpretation, the truth manifests through the subject as power (that is, the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way), which is now realized as a kinetic autonomy that has transformed the unilaterality of previous forms (particularly Spinoza’s) into the power of becoming, which always corresponds to the system of dialectics. The form and content of the Sache des Denkens now coincide with the development of absolute knowledge, which becomes free and is manifested, on a phenomenological level, as a becoming that researches itself. Becoming becomes clear and, by investigating itself, it is transformed.

Knowledge is in its essence, in that sense, power: the power on the basis of which reality is being transformed. This power as onto-gnoseological dynamicity—because it has to do both with the acknowledgement of the subject-object and with its constitution—is the modality in which the λόγος is reflected by itself. The power of dialectics is set free by the change from previous conditions, within a relation of opposition-inclusion, in which the phenomena are intertwined. As the dialectic is for Hegel scientific knowledge—here we are recalling the expression Knowledge is Power, which is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon—it is characterized on the one hand by an endless restlessness, and on the other hand by the coincidence of actual reality and the rational, in which every opposition is harmonized through a synchronic and reciprocal movement. The dialectic is constituted by its three instances as a supreme law of actuality.

Furthermore, the Hegelian dialectic’s intent is to overcome the antinomies that were exposed by the older Plato in the Parmenides, and particularly the antinomy between being and non-being which Plato detects and solves in the Sophist (Sophist: §237b7, 98) by distinguishing absolute non-being and relative non-being. Absolute idealism thus annuls the problem of absolute non-being, in so far as every thesis, which is negated by the antithesis, is conserved in the synthesis. The formal scheme of the dialectic thus allows Hegel to identify being and nothing within becoming, in which the negativity of the previous moments is conserved. Negativity, though, is understood as a reflection. It is no coincidence that the German term aufheben has the triple meaning of conserving, annulling and elevating. This leads to the dynamic transparency of the real and to the character of its development, which excludes absolute non-being. Every error, negativity and contradiction, every ontological vertigo, is overrun by the self-dominance that leads sense-certainty to self-consciousness. The formation of the human being (Bildung) leads to the objectification of spirit within right, morality, ethical life and finally absolute knowledge. In Hegel nothing disappears (in the absolute), nothing stands still, but all is transformed.

II. System as modality of power in Foucault

If we talk about philosophy in the twentieth century, Foucault stands out as one who broached the issue of power in an assiduous and polyphonic way, in relation to the different forms of knowledge. He followed a process of research, on the one hand reconsidering the origins of the humanistic sciences in a philosophical way, and on the other hand considering penal and corrective systems as well as the forms of knowledge that are related to them. Foucault, who had studied under Hyppolite and deepened the topics which are presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, deduced from the Hegelian view the plexus that makes knowledge and reality coincide, because for Hegel knowledge always concerns reality (Catucci Reference Catucci2008: 18). Foucault’s knowledge of Hegel’s thought appears in many places to be mediated by a profound study of Marx. To rethink history philosophically however, according to Foucault, means looking at philosophical traditions not only from a retrospective view—starting from the concepts that mark its history and looking at them within a process of exclusion and assimilation—but also through empirical and archive research.

Foucault’s first work, published in 1961, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique starts with centres devoted to the cure of leprosy in which, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, individuals who were earlier classified as antisocial and abnormal were studied following the contraposition of ‘normality’ and ‘insanity’, and ‘health’ and ‘mental insanity’. This work is based on references and documents discoverable in archives. Foucault’s thesis is that the ‘species’ of the insane is defined as the object of knowledge, which is based on methods that define it as such. The subject, with its dualisms, is defined in a relation with the practice that stabilizes its integration or estrangement from society (Foucault will extend this theory in his course on La société punitive, in which he traces the history of insanity). The work charts documents on the basis of which the medical staff use their power to decide the patient’s eligibility to be included in, or excluded from, society. On this basis we can study the evolution of penal processes that characterize society from the beginning of the middle ages. In that period the sovereign authority legally stabilizes its own possibility of deciding over the life, death or imprisonment of the diverted individuals, according to processes like stigmatisation.

From the eighteenth century, with the French revolution, death was transformed into an institutionalized practice:

We have to look at Foucault’s research program synoptically. Besides the study of insanity considered from a cultural point of view and in connection with juridical and other organs that determine the procedures of the penal system, in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975) Foucault investigates the procedures of imprisonment from the eighteenth century onwards and, in addition, describes its subordinating function in terms of its effects. He thus clarifies a phenomenology of penal power in relation to convicts. They are inserted in a true ‘system’, in Foucault’s words:

It is thus clear that in that condition in which the penal system, its procedures and the mechanisms of its practice of power are articulated, the penal system is exercised in an impersonal way, as its adherents recall a common good, a punishment that serves the improvement of the system itself, which is co-extensive with society. Human error cannot be corrected by reason but through the practice of force. Every abnormal condition can be brought back to normality through the mobilization of corrective faculties within a certain system. That system, as a totality of rules which holds together the collective network of human relations, and which is continuously threatened in its stability, has to make rationality win over irrationality. Thus every irregularity needs to be eliminated by means of processes of forced rationalisation. The individual that is outside of the framework of conventional social relations must be classified as object of knowledge, as he or she needs to be controlled by the system, in a ‘steel cage’ that encloses the danger of irrational mechanisms in its regularity.

Society is thus formally a visible system, like a body (picking up the organic metaphor of functionalism), which is held together by repressive manoeuvres that determine at the same time the inseparable relations in which every part has to be—or has to be brought back—into harmony with the totality. The primary relation that regulates the functioning of this big body has to be identified in the mutual relation between power, as the repressive faculty apt to maintain order, and knowledge, as the eminent modality in which power is exercised according to a continuous redefinition of society by the power organ, starting from an impersonal and omnipresent system in which everything is defined.

It is not hard to see that in those conjunctions of power that Foucault describes, we circumvent the spectre of the Hegelian system because, according to our interpretation, for Hegel knowledge is actualized in its modalities as power, through which the subject is manifested in a constant self-overcoming. Foucault affirms clearly that juridical power recalls another kind of power—that is to say the capacity of society for improvement—with the help of which it overcomes its own limits. By analogy to Hegelian dialectics, power for Foucault, as with knowledge for both, is a dynamic and all-embracing reality in a never-ending movement. Because power—as is implied in the text by Foucault we quoted earlier—has in essence the characteristic of overcoming its own limits, it, on the one hand, as we will see, is self-regulated in relation to its mechanisms of functioning, and on the other hand, always tends beyond itself in a complex dialectic of conservation and extension. The dialectic that regulates itself based on the formal scheme we have already mentioned (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) thus conserves form and content without ever being tamed by itself.

Foucault deepens the topic of super-power as the essence of power in a lecture of 24 January 1979 within the course Naissance de la biopolitique. While exposing the dualism in which the power of the modern state is articulated (particularly the United States), which is based on liberalism and thus on economic penetration, and while referring to the previous course, Foucault affirms:

The connection between system and power appears again and is understood in terms of the agonism between the reason of state, which defends the borders of a nation, and the police state. This internal-external opposition, which Foucault inherits from structuralism (the philosophical and literary movement from which he distances himself more and more during his later years), is nothing more than a re-formulation of Hegelian dialectics, despite the attempt to overcome it. Indeed, Foucault seems to be unable to leave dialectics behind, even if he denies it.Footnote ⁴ Actuality is once again studied based on the relations of force that characterise it, even if there is a fragmentation of the topics regarding phenomenologically considered power, starting from the multiple strategies of the latter.

What is missing in Foucault is the moment of the synthesis, where the conflicts of opposed determinations are resolved. This lack of a centre characterizes the distance that Foucault took from the Phenomenology of Spirit (in regard to its idealistic, epistemological-intentional and ontological-fundamental visions).Footnote ⁵ The latter was concerned with the unity of inconsistent appearances within actuality, while Foucault depicts the fundamental phenomenon, which is constituted by fragmentations and conflicts in its manifestation, as the central point of human freedom and its expression. Furthermore, there is no personal hierarchical leader in the exercise of power, for Foucault. Power is constituted as an omnipresent reality and at the same time it is without time, space and centre. The form that was foregrounded in the Phenomenology, in order to define the environment and therefore a condition of the manifestation of phenomena, is incompatible with the fragmented strategies that regulate power through the mechanisms of subjugation that Foucault highlights. Foucault does not wish to define a centre, but offers a peripheral analysis of the battles between institutions and social structures, while rejecting the traditional concept of totality that characterizes Western thought.

During the lectures at the Collège de France of 1975–76, for the first time the Foucauldian definition of biopolitique emerges, with the aim of determining the connection between power, its form and forms of life. The questions Foucault asks with regard to the essence of power and its mechanisms of functioning are in line with research that is based once again on historical-empirical data. So-called subjugated knowledge, or what Foucault calls ‘knowledge of the people’, is a knowledge that owes its essence to the classification and rigidity that is in opposition to those who surround it, i.e., a set of concealed knowledges: knowledge of the individuals, knowledge that comes from common sense, local and singular knowledge, and knowledge that is disqualified by society.

Foucault here wants to pursue research directly based on concrete fields of knowledge, while rejecting the traditional counter-position between general and particular, between unity and multiplicity; an approach that has been crystallized within the scientific forms of theories, be they philosophical—Hegelism and Marxism—or be they scientific. The connection between concealed knowledge and subjugated knowledge is constituted once again by their connection with power. To crystallize forms of knowledge means to form them under the aegis of power.

In the methodological affirmations which will open his discourse later on, Foucault asks himself whether it is possible to take a distance from the Marxist interpretation of society which understands the superstructure, and therefore all religious and political institutions, to be conditioned by economic structures.

Referring implicitly to a reflection by Hegel which is present in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Foucault sees in Hegel modern reflections on the structures of power, from which the reflections of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich were born. It is clear that the re-examination of this problem, in which Hegel’s model is to be overcome, is what is found in Foucault, who considers Hegel the initiator of a radical reflection on the continuing topic of Foucault’s own philosophy. This radical reflection embraces, as we have seen, the question based on which we ask ourselves about the individual, about population, territory, safety and society: the question ‘what is power?’.

Towards the end of the aforementioned course, Foucault tries to concentrate on the dynamics which have led him to a ‘nationalisation of the biological’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2009a: 106), after having analysed the concept of sovereignty. With reference to classical theory, he concentrates on the leading function of the latter, namely the right of life and death that the sovereign exercises when he orders to kill and let live:

The sovereign holder of power, whose wish corresponds to the expression of law, has the possibility of ‘making die and letting live’ unconditionally, because he is not subordinate to any other condition but is the highest expression of the state, in its peculiar role as the regulator of inner order. The wish of the sovereign agent thus appears to be absolute and unconditioned. In the same sense, in Hegel, according to the definition we have exposed, in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ‘reason is the faculty of the unconditioned, which catches sight of the conditioned nature of the knowledge of experiences’ (E: §45, 54). The sovereign, in order to exercise his power, needs a living being on which he can exercise and determine the possibility of life and death, i.e., a subject, a slave that infringes the given system.

III. Master and slave—confrontation, parresia and Bildung

The Phenomenology of Spirit consists in a Bildungsroman of human knowledge, which leads knowledge to coincide with self-consciousness, i.e., a knowledge that one knows. This process of formation is articulated within a precise method that leads from the perception of phenomena to unconditioned thought.

Hegel studied theology in Tübingen when he was young (Schnädelbach Reference Schnädelbach2002: 44) and this first phase of his thought remains an inexhaustible source from which we can draw. The theological roots that we find in the Phenomenology of Spirit are also expressed through the concept of figure, which was launched in medieval theological thought according to a metaphorical interpretation that assigned a particular value to every character, whose destiny it is to disappear and leave space to another. Hegel, who picks up this topos, attempts to develop a description of the conflictual relation that characterizes life in its movement, while moving on a level where philosophy, theology, abstract and concrete are in constant dialogue. One of Hegel’s most influential figures in continental philosophy is the master-slave dialectic (Herr und Knecht). ‘The “slave” first of all submits to the master, as he recognizes him as essence and truth’ (Wesen and Wahrheit) (PhG: 134).

The Phenomenology of Spirit is presented as a polysemic structure of internal cross references which appear in the philosophical history of human thought and actual world history. The oppositions become stratified through a dialectical movement that co-implicates them. It is not difficult to notice the French state beneath Hegel’s allegory, given that the state was headed by Louis XIV, the monarch who proclaimed: ‘L'état, c’est moi’, a sovereign tyrant to a subordinated people. At the same time, though, one can notice here the philosophical crash of the Fichtean dualism between I and not-I, inactivity and movement, activity and passivity, all starting from the eighteenth century, a junction of revolutions in which the I is affirmed with a new strength. What all these clashes within that phenomenological-historical-philosophical duality have in common is the fact that in a clash between forces, one of them has to raise itself to a level of absolute certainty.

The slave is, at first sight, a passive entity compared to the master, who seems to be—being the authority—the key to the dialectical movement. On second view, however, the slave does not only produce (for the consumption of the master), but is also aware of their production. Thus the negative moment, which coincides with reflection, inverts the relations of force, as now the master is in the hands of the slave. The dialectic of slave and master is thus shown in its reversibility. This agonistic relation has at its centre the concept of desire, which for Hegel is primarily the desire for life.

In Hegel, the dialectics of recognition (An-erkennung) present two levels of relationship: the reflected relation between the I and the self (the self-consciousness within its twofold essence reflects itself) and the relation between the I and another I (two self-consciousnesses that confront each other). In this latter moment the I not only recognizes the other as an ‘object’ outside itself, but also as an autonomous life:

In the moment of recognition, the relation between the two self-consciousnesses is constituted horizontally. The (formal) relation between power-forces is not yet hierarchical, as the I recognizes the other as an other, but at the same time, as similar to itself.

In the master-slave dialectic, however, the relationship and recognition are characterized by a hierarchy, in which the master is an expression of authority and power (Macht) over the slave, who is the one who has to submit himself and who is dependent on the master’s wishes. The essence of mastery (Herrschaft) is the exercise of power: the abuse of power, which is executed towards the slave through a faculty (Vermögen) of restricting the decisional dimension. This exercise is now, more than before, executed within subordination, as within the clash of power-forces, the stronger one puts the other in a hierarchical order. The master sees no reality that is not determined by his consciousness. Every decisive and wilful act is the order that the slave has to follow. The Hegelian re-elaboration of the Hobbesian conflict between the natural state and the social state appears clear.

At the same time, the master’s relation with actuality is mediated through the slave, as the latter works and therefore transforms. The relation between the slave and actuality is therefore direct. While transforming actuality, the slave establishes an immediate relation with it, and this is the dialectical counterpoint through which the master can relate to actuality and benefit from it, i.e., satisfy his desire (Begierde) in this way. It is clear however that the relation of activity, which at first sight seemed to be owned by the master, has now been transformed into a passive relationship. The slave works and this work makes not only actuality change but also the slave himself, who, as he confronts actuality, learns and shapes himself. This self-shaping happens as well because the slave, as part of the movement of negativity and finitude, recognizes himself as a mortal being, destined for death, and contrary to the master, he is aware of his limits, thanks to the confrontation with his fear of death.

Here Hegel appears close to the Delphic maxim that characterized Socrates’s philosophy: know thyself. The knowledge of oneself can be obtained through a process of formation-education (Bildung): ‘Through work [the servile consciousness] reaches itself […]. Work is stunted desire, retarded disappearing, or it shapes and transforms’ (PhG: 135, o.t.). The slave, inasmuch as he is a worker, thus performs a dual process of formation and shaping. On the one hand, he defines the objectivity that is produced to satisfy authority; on the other hand, he rejects that authority, as he shapes himself as an independent individual. At this point it is therefore the master who is in a position of inferiority. The dialectical relation is now reversed. As Kojève points out in his critical interpretation, the slave, who is connected to the authority of the master on a material level, discovers a higher freedom, while comparing his own freedom to the freedom of others; through the awareness of his independence, he discovers his own freedom of thought. In this sense, he can be free ‘both on the throne and in chains’ (Pöggeler Reference Pöggeler2006: 138). Once the chains are broken, the slave becomes a free, autonomous individuality. Such freedom is a power that allows the slave to shatter the previous relations of force, fight against authority and finally win over it. It is thus not only freedom but also awareness, i.e., knowledge, of freedom, which in Hegel implies power. In this sense, power and knowledge coincide.

During the course at the Collège de France in 1982–83 which has the title Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Foucault deepens the topic he had already discussed during the previous year, when, under the title L´herméneutique du sujet, he had discussed the concept of parresia. This expression of Greek origin was translated by Foucault as ‘free speech’; namely speaking frankly, being sincere, i.e., speaking the truth.

Now distanced from the period when he researched the origins of the human sciences, Foucault deepens his critique of contemporary systems of power, a critique that also merges with his detailed analysis of texts from the classical tradition. In Il faut défendre la société, the course of 1975–76, Foucault asked whether an analysis of power could be possible without recourse to an understanding of socio-economic conditions. In his course Naissance de la biopolitique of 1978–79, his answer is now negative, following a detailed analysis of the protectionism of Nazism, a brief analysis of Stalinism, and a review of the free market economy of the USA and its neoliberal economy of the early 1920s. Following the traces of the genealogical approach in order to find an exit from the suffocating grid of the system, he moves to classical Greece and Hellenism. The care of oneself, in relation with one’s own autonomy and in relation to others, becomes the way of escaping from the dispositif (system). By questioning the political system of ancient Greece and Plato’s philosophical reflections in Phaedrus, as well as the connection between philosophical discourse and argumentative truth, Foucault attempts to enhance and update the message of the classical tradition.

During the course L´herméneutique du sujet, Foucault defines the central position of Descartes, on whose basis the conditions of possibility of the object came, for the first time, to be regulated by the knowing subject (which splits the subject into a dichotomy of self and I):

According to Foucault, the schism between of reality, spirit and truth determined philosophy from the nineteenth century on—from Hegel to Heidegger—a split that was the reflection of the systems of power that imprisoned the spirituality of human beings.

We have to go back to the pure word which aims to reflect the thoughts of the speaking person. Parresia has determined mechanisms of functioning that Foucault, in his course at the Collège de France in 1982–83, calls the ‘constitutive rectangle of parresia’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2009b: 168). This rectangle has four formal conditions:

1. (1) democracy understood as the equality of all citizens; there is no parresia without democracy;

2. (2) the game of superiority, i.e., the charisma of the one who is able to make himself be listened to in the assembly (Pericles);

3. (3) a good parresia does not refer to influence alone; the λόγος, which exercises power, also has to enunciate a truth;

4. (4) to have free exercise of the right of free speech, the form of rivalry and clashes has to be imposed; in this way, through the assumption of responsibility, one will have the courage to speak the truth.

These are the requirements of a parresia such as that of Pericles. Here we can see how the formal relations that regulate the mechanisms of truth, with the word as its vehicle, presume social-horizontal relations where the speaker and the interlocutor are in an equal, argumentative relationship. Parresia is thus a practice regarding the exercise of a certain knowledge. It is, according to Foucault, necessary as well as dangerous, and at the same time impotent: impotent because nothing assures its functioning, dangerous because nothing proves that it will actually work as one wishes.

Democracy, according to Foucault in his course of 1982–83, is the political place that most conforms to parresia, but it is not the only possible one:

The problem of parresia is analysed after an introductory reinterpretation, in a dualistic tone, regarding the relation of the tyrant and the follower, starting from Plato’s Epistles, particularly the seventh. After Plato went to Syracuse, following a request of Dion, the uncle of the young Dionysus, Plato thinks about actually carrying out the theoretical project of the Republic, after the disappointments due to the government of the thirty tyrants and the capital punishment of Socrates. The thirty tyrants wanted to drag Socrates illegally into a series of arbitrary detentions. Socrates refused and proved in this way his resistance to political power. For Foucault this is ‘an example of philosophical resistance to political power. An example of parresia that will be a model of philosophical behaviour in front of power for a long time: the individual resistance of the philosopher’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2009b: 209, o.t.). Dionysius is immediately interested in Plato’s proposition, which aims for the union of philosophical exercise and the exercise of power. Plato wants, according to Foucault, to put at stake the real impact of philosophy: the aim of philosophy is not to say the truth about politics, nor is it to play a normative role within the modalities of government, but it concerns the task of the philosopher. This means, on the one hand, to let the citizens hear the voice of the constitution, and on the other, to be an advisor to the tyrant. Philosophy thus consists in forms of plausibility in relation to power. The role of the philosopher is a critical role that has to lead the tyrant, and if the city is not healthy in its functioning, this role becomes that of a doctor who has to pursue the wellness of the tyrant and of the city. Foucault affirms:

Philosophy, in this moment for Foucault, in the eminent form of parresia, is released from the relation with violence, as every political system, according to his analysis—he who had considered Nietzsche his master when he was young—requires violence. Even democracy is an expression of the abuse of power by one over many. The relation has to be a logical one, if by ‘logic’ we understand a word that, as logos, comes from dialogos, i.e., the critical confrontation between two figures. A word that is a trustworthy aid of critique and confrontation, a Socratic-Platonic knowledge par excellence.

The advisor needs to have a shaping role towards the tyrant. Parresia is thus represented as an eminent modality for human formation, a technique that Foucault defines ‘psychagogical’, i.e., as a growth that the person has to realize, starting from that dialogue, where listening is the seat that guarantees growth, because that is the universal characteristic of parresia.

Parresia is therefore the way in which a true ethical exchange between the speaker and the interlocutor, the master and the scholar, occurs. The possession of power, as a faculty of repression, however, is no longer the criterion or the driving element of the relationship between the sovereign and his subordinated. It is rather the faculty of the latter to escape from relations of power and to move, in accordance with a true epidosis es autón, towards a personal growth in which he shapes and transforms himself.

During the lectures of 1984, the last Foucault gave, and which can be considered as his spiritual testimony, the topics of the previous years were revisited (particularly the seventh epistle by Plato). It appears that Foucault radicalizes the problem of parresia when he accentuates its transformative and formative character. ‘Instead we ask ourselves now why the relation with the prince could be that place, when by definition the exercised power of the prince is unlimited, often without laws and therefore capable of any kind of violence’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2016b: 68). Foucault asks himself here about the possibilities of a relationship between the tyrant and his advisor. The dialectics of master and slave come back here in a different shape, re-elaborated in a new aspect and with new figures. The recurring topics are superimposable. The problem of hierarchy and the inequality of power, i.e., the apparent relation of inferiority of the advisor towards the tyrant. The latter has once again in his hands the life of the first, and once again the red line that connects the two figures is the topic of formation and shaping (Bildung).

Contrary to the master, who was the absolute for-itself (das für sich seiende Bewusstsein) and was not able to reflect on his effective relation of dependence on the slave, which was his own structural limit, here the relationship of the two figures is direct. This is different from Hegel, where the slave, through the awareness of his own autonomy as he refused pure consumption, realized a process of Bildung from which the master (the extreme opposite) was excluded. Here the sovereign is active, as the process of formation, as we mentioned, determines his personal growth, where the advisor has the function of, as Marcus Aurelius would say, a ‘directive principle’ (Med: 51); i.e., what is important to the philosopher is his relation to the sovereign. Foucault calls this faculty ‘exetasis’. The decisional capacity of authority, when it is exercised, is independent of him, but it has to pass through an emendatio mentis, where a critical clash between the parts is exercised: the whole is verified by a parresistic saying of the truth. Here too we have a transformation in the middle, but it does not concern the actualization of the relation between the in-itself and the for-itself through work anymore, but rather through a people-oriented horizontality of truth.

For Foucault, all this determines that parresia ‘even if it is organized around the principle of the “truthful” speaking … is now taking form inside a set of operations that allow the veridical to persuade the soul with the effects of transformation’ (Foucault Reference Foucault2016b: 73, o.t.). The motor of transformation is no longer the dialectical movement that considers the relationship between the two consciousnesses as if in a laboratory, but rather the substantial identity between free thought, language and truth.

In the moment of parresistic freedom, we are joined again with the noumenon in the moment of moral action, when we overcome the connection of phenomena that appeared in our experience. In Foucault, the moment of risk, where we express parresia, represents the immediate faculty of decision-making, which every individual can exercise outside the system.