ABSTRACT
‘Problematization’ denotes “the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and the false and constitutes it an object of thought. Sexual temperance was a form of freedom from slavery to the passions. For the Greeks self-mastery was important not for its own sake as in the Hellenistic period, but in order to be a good citizen and effective master of others. Michel Foucault’s histories are accounts of transformations and displacements. In the present case he notes a change from the aesthetic of existence, the “stylistic of freedom” just described, to the Socrato-Platonic erotic. Foucault has distinguished moralities of “techniques of the self” from those which favor universally binding codes and is really concerned with the former. Parrhesia was originally a political virtue; one praised the courageous individual who spoke frankly to the prince.
