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The Unbridled Tongue: Plato, Parrhesia, and Philosophy7 3intention here is not to deny the importance of sincerity in political philosophy—animportance underscored repeatedly in the Gorgias (494c, 499c) andmost graphically summed up by the last words of the dialogue (527e). Whatthis section has tried to indicate, rather, is that the praise for sincerity thatis nested within the concept of parrhesia cannot easily be reconciled withSocratic irony. There is evidently a tension between these two things—and itis a tension that needs to be spelled out at length. 27Let us turn now to another aspect of Platonic philosophy that risks beingovershadowed in these discussions of parrhesia. This aspect is, in fact, alreadyneglected by students of Plato: that of silence, of introspection, and of listening.At the heart of the Foucauldian ethics of parrhesia rests an apology forthe vocalization of our thoughts—one must speak, one must say it all. Whileempty and stupid chattering is proscribed (this is correctly stressed), we arenevertheless presented with an invitation to let speech flow out. The tongueof the philosopher/parrhēsiastēs must be free, unbridled. 28 Naturally, onemust acknowledge that the practice of philosophy cannot take place withoutrecourse to words; and needless to say, Plato’s work would hardly make senseif it were divested of its celebration for the spoken word. 29 No conversation, nodialectic. That said, I believe that Plato’s celebration of a “live” logos does notentirely come at the cost of silence and patient, quiet introspection.The silence that interests me here is not the silence of Plato, the authorof dialogues who is said to hide behind his characters, never speaking in hisown name. 30 Rather, the silence that interests me is that of Socrates and thatof other characters in Plato’s dialogues—the silence captured by the dramaitself or described, in words, by some characters. By “silence,” therefore, I amreferring primarily to real silence, the absence of sounds—an absence which,I suggest, cannot be equated with an absence of thought.We have already noted above that Socrates does not say everything; thisis the intended consequence both of his philosophical humility and of hispedagogy. Socrates seeks to lead his interlocutors—via irony—to say, feel, ordo something. But some of Socrates’s silences could be said to derive fromhis conviction that there are things that simply ought not to be said, or27For a detailed and very insightful discussion of irony and its tension with parrhesia, see ElizabethMarkovitz, The Politics of Sincerity.28Saxonhouse emphasizes one concrete “bridle” put on the tongue: the length of speeches.29For a famous passage that takes into account this tension, see Phaedrus 275d–276a.30A type of silence that has been commented on extensively by Leo Strauss. See, e.g., Leo Strauss, TheCity and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 54–62.