He knew the thoughts of men, were they neuer so secret
Sept 9, 2014 0:51:53 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Sept 9, 2014 0:51:53 GMT -5
This week one of our newest members, M. Luc Boltanski, admits us to the following:
The passion for secrecy was widely shared at the end of the nineteenth century. Faced with increasingly active revolutionary forces on the one hand, and increasingly inquisititve newspapers on the other, European "nations" began to legislate on the security of information, inventing a new concept of the "official secret" and defining the state as the ultimate gate-keeper. At the same time, new approaches in the social sciences were beginning to emphasize the role played by secrets in the life of the community and the life of the mind. Unconscious memories and ideological mystifications became the focus of serious philosophical inquiry, as the fin-de-siècle debunkers - Marx and Freud most influentially - sought to demonstrate that the most powerful and dangerous secrets were the ones we had contrived to keep even from ourselves. . . . A new kind of "political metaphysics" was developed, according to which reality itself came to be understood as a kind of competition between narratives.
Do any members now feel ready to confess or even narrate their inmost secrets? And would some one on the other side of the veil care to let us in on what "reality itself" was is might or ever shall be?
The passion for secrecy was widely shared at the end of the nineteenth century. Faced with increasingly active revolutionary forces on the one hand, and increasingly inquisititve newspapers on the other, European "nations" began to legislate on the security of information, inventing a new concept of the "official secret" and defining the state as the ultimate gate-keeper. At the same time, new approaches in the social sciences were beginning to emphasize the role played by secrets in the life of the community and the life of the mind. Unconscious memories and ideological mystifications became the focus of serious philosophical inquiry, as the fin-de-siècle debunkers - Marx and Freud most influentially - sought to demonstrate that the most powerful and dangerous secrets were the ones we had contrived to keep even from ourselves. . . . A new kind of "political metaphysics" was developed, according to which reality itself came to be understood as a kind of competition between narratives.
Do any members now feel ready to confess or even narrate their inmost secrets? And would some one on the other side of the veil care to let us in on what "reality itself" was is might or ever shall be?