A Comparative Study of Rorty’s Irony and Foucault’s Parrhesia

Irony is one of the constitutive concepts in Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The ironist is his ideal type of the person: self-creative and self-conscious, aware of his own contingency, anti-foundationalist, and always ready to revise his account of the self and the world radically. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, is concerned with the concept parrhesia. Parrhesiastes is a type of person comparable to the ironist. Hence, the main question in this paper is: what are the similarities and differences between the Rorty’s ironist and Foucault’s parrhesiastes. We will see that while the ironist is keen to confine irony to the private realm, in order not to humiliate anybody, the parrhesiastes has no reluctance to go beyond the limits of the private, and to speak the truth. He does not avoid the risk of saying the truth to those in power even at the cost of his life, while the former is more cautious. Self-creation and autonomy is shared between the two types of personalities. Socrates is the embodiment of both personalities. He is praised as an ironist as well as a parrhesiastes.