Courage and Passion in the Reading of the Late Foucault of Cynics

Abstract

In her article “Courage and Passion in the Reading of the Later Foucault on the Cynics” Inmaculada Hoyos Sánchez aims to determine what role the passions played in the courage of the truth of ancient Cynicism, for which purpose she analyses the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in 1984. The hypothesis put forward in this article is that what makes Cynic courage different from other manifestations of the courage of the truth, such as Socratic courage, is that it specifically involves the eradication of shame, a passion that is social and public in character, rather than an overcoming of the fear of dying. Thus, Cynical askesis, on which courage is based, entails work not only on the passions themselves but on all the passions of humanity, so that Cynic courage points to another world. In the final part of the study, the author poses an open question as to whether the courage of the truth can or cannot be an active affective force.