Interesting turn of events. I mentioned recently a post about eBook anxiety, which ended with the author Adam Robinson saying tongue-in-cheek he wanted to seclude himself in the Heimat of Heidegger somewhere online. As sometimes happens, he had a drive-by shot of lulz in the comments when someone asked why bother reading such a Nazi et al. This prompted an other post where the reasonable question was asked, should we read writers we find objectionable? How do you separate artist from their creations and influence? It’s the old problem of authorial intent, but the length and detail of the comments on that post are noteworthy.
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Historical note today with the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009). A detailed obit in the NYT helps summarize his impact on Western culture as an academic. Le Fig has a better review en francais with some video interviews. The SLOG is more succint. Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3) Claiming that privacy is about transactions and that being private is the recess of information is not immediately clear. Yet, the common logic that something is private so long as it is not published means that what we value and retain as confidential must concern what we can potentially divulge and obtain. The right to privacy and its conflicts are within this order. But to encourage another view – where being private is not tied to any one thing — allows us to consider another way of conceiving how privacy should be respected. Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3) Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and whose expectations are the most important in protecting and sharing private information, we should be able to rehabilitate privacy from its confrontational sense. Legal work needs this domain of privacy-as-discord to develop the concept publicly, but we can also improve the private sense of privacy. If what we regard as fundamentally private is information on our states of being, then describing it outside of any conflict is worthwhile pursuing. [...] Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2) It seems there are two kinds of particular private details that we value: Information on our movements and information on our states of being. Since the end game is a legal definition, there doesn’t need to be a lot of nuance as to how we understand the enactment of a right to privacy. But we should see that data on our public movements ought to be differentiated from how we feel, and from information that signifies our mental states and histories. |
 
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