five top things i’ve been reading (forty-third edition)
the latest in a regular 'top 5' series
Concealment and Exposure, Thomas Nagel
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
John Searle, Colin McGinn
Amy Coney Barrett’s brand of originalism irritates some people. Good! George Will
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, MoMA
This is the forty-third in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end. But I’ll try to keep things relatively brief today, as I posted something substantial here yesterday: the fourth episode of my new philosophy podcast, Working Definition!
1) As I might have already mentioned, I just released the latest episode of my new philosophy podcast, Working Definition. In each episode, I discuss a different philosophical concept with a different philosophical guest, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition. For this latest episode, I was joined by Ignacio Cofone, Professor of Law and Regulation of AI at Oxford, to discuss privacy. You can listen to it — and read the transcript — here.
In preparation for this episode, I read a load of classic papers on privacy. My favourites were Thomas Nagel’s Concealment and Exposure (2002), Richard Posner’s The Right of Privacy (1977), and Tim Scanlon’s Thomson on Privacy (1975). The final of these is a reply to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s The Right to Privacy (1975), which I’d read a while back. Among other things, I also reread Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), and, of course, some of Ignacio’s own writing, which spans law and economics, and includes his interesting recent book The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy (2023).
Ignacio and I talked about all of these works during the episode, so I won’t say much more here. But the Nagel paper, in particular, is still on my mind.
Here’s a quick summary of some of its ideas, as I described them in the episode:
So there’s this great paper by Thomas Nagel, and he says in it something like, privacy enables us to keep us out of each other’s faces. He says something like, we learn when we’re kids not to say everything that’s going on in our mind. And he has this view — which actually I think is quite conservative in the paper — but he says something like, look, the liberal societal order requires us to keep some stuff in our heads. Even if we kind of know that the person over there holds these awful views, we kind of don’t acknowledge it, and that enables us to keep the peace.
He also has this point, though, where he says something like, look, as we’ve got more tolerant as a society, the kinds of taboos which enabled us to do that stuff — to have those kind of “conventions of reticence”, I think he calls them — have died away, and this is part of why society’s collapsing. I mean, he wrote this in 1998 before society maybe really did collapse [laughter].
As always with Nagel, the writing and argumentational structure of this paper are great. But the more of it I read, the more it felt depressing and defeatist to the liberal cause.
Nagel wants us to conclude that, generally, liberals should focus attention on trying to win “important battles” about matters of obligation, institutional design, and resource allocation — rather than spending time on divisive public fights over “cultural” matters of value. But, of course, apart from anything else, such an approach tends to conservatism on that first set of matters. As seen in the part of this paper where Nagel discusses gay marriage…
Sad!
2) As mentioned above, I also reread A Room of One’s Own in preparation for the episode with Ignacio. Here’s some of our conversation about it:
REBECCA
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. And at the end, she sort of ties together having a room of one’s own with having, I wrote it down, “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think”…
IGNACIO
Can you say that again?
REBECCA
Having “the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think.”
So I think you can take from that she’s saying something like privacy is essential to developing as a fully autonomous member of society. This comes back, I think, to some of the stuff you were saying earlier around privacy being necessary for intimacy. Being necessary in terms of determining different relations with other people.
But she’s saying something deeper, I think. I think she’s also saying in terms of us developing as individuals. So, for her to be able to be in her room reading the Shakespeare, thinking through the thoughts… That maybe if we didn’t have private spaces, and the protection of our own privacy, we would in some sense be limited in our personal development. Is that fair?
IGNACIO
I think that’s very fair.
There’s really interesting work being done about children’s privacy, with regards to their parents. And how difficult to trace the line is. Because a reasonable person would say that a five-year-old has a certain sphere of privacy towards a parent that’s very small. Maybe an 18-year-old has a complete sphere of privacy with regards to their parents, as they would have during the rest of their adulthood. And a 15-year-old has something in between, and it’s hard to trace the line as to what reasonably should the 15-year-old have.
If we treat the 15-year-old like a five-year-old, then that would stunt their self-development, because that’s important to develop their own ideas, important to develop their own identity. And a lot of adolescence is forming bonds of intimacy with friends through information sharing, from which we exclude parents.
And the same goes for adulthood. Having that sphere of privacy is important, I think, for forming one’s identity, for testing ideas, for thinking things through.
I have to admit that I’ve always wished I liked Virginia Woolf’s writing more, particularly in the novels. I can see that it’s clever and ground-breaking and even beautiful, but, for me, it just gets in the way too much.
This is a shame especially because I’m really grateful to Woolf for influencing the style of the twentieth-century American novelists I love so much — from Salinger through to Roth through to Franzen. The episodic contextual digressions that give those guys’ novels so much colour surely hark back to Woolf’s particular stream of consciousness, but allow for neat overall direction, too.
3) I was sorry to learn the other day of the death of John Searle. Best known, at least outside of philosophy, for his ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment, Searle was an extremely talented philosopher who — on my understanding — entirely disappeared from public life a few years ago, after Berkeley removed his emeritus status.
I don’t know the truths about what went on at Berkeley, but I valued reading this recent blog post by Colin McGinn, which attempts to balance the one-sided public narrative that has arisen about Searle.
My general philosophical view on all of these kinds of matters is: 1) it’s bad when people miss out on reading great philosophy owing to beliefs they hold (correctly or not) about the actions of the philosophers who wrote it; 2) it’s bad and wrong when universities take on ‘extra-judicial’ roles trying to adjudicate and sanction what should be treated as interpersonal or legal matters.
Last year, I read some of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality. In this book, Searle’s goal is to explain and justify his position that “language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality”, and he does this by arguing that language is necessary for certain thoughts and facts. I’ll return to it soon.
I should probably add that I also don’t know anything about the truths of the situation which led to McGinn, himself, resigning from an academic post, a while back. But I wrote here recently about how much I enjoyed reading his classic paper Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?.
4) I read some pieces by George Will the other day, after a friend recommended his writing to me. I particularly liked this point Will made in a recent Washington Post op-ed about originalism: “Judges need their discretion constrained by fidelity to the normal public meanings of the words used by those who wrote the texts of the Constitution and statutes.”
This made me think about the way in which non-philosophers are often bemused — or even annoyed — by the vast amounts of time we philosophers spend arguing about the meanings of words. Sometimes, these people make the sensible point that, really, philosophers should be thinking about the concepts underlying the words… which, of course, is indeed what we’re trying to do!
But one reason why the level of the word, itself, matters relates to the point Will is making. As members of groups, there are crucial concepts about which we must be able to talk together clearly, and as such depend upon commonly-understood words, or we would struggle to coordinate procedurally, never mind work together for the common good.
These obviously include concepts referred to by specific terminology within constitutional documents. That such terminology is commonly understood by the members of the nations these documents bind is crucial not least to the persistence of the rule of law. But there are also many everyday concepts for which we require commonly-understood words, as in the case, as I’ve written previously, of the word ‘woman’:
…meeting all of these particular needs requires widespread and formal awareness of the realities of biological sex – and that requires words, so we can discuss these things. Using the words “woman” and “man” for these purposes is simply reflective of the development of the English language.
Yes, we could begin to use other words for these purposes. Instead of “woman”, for instance, we could use “female-person”, or “womxn”, or “shwoman”, or “abc”. But we would come to the same place, and that is a place in which this particular word would refer to what it is to be a natal member of one particular biological sex.
Using “woman” to mean a natal member of one particular biological sex is, therefore, exclusionary. But it is not exclusionary for hateful reasons; it is not a value judgement. It is a functional term, and it is required for the meeting of sex-specific needs.
5) On Sunday, I went to a very nice Hilda af Klint exhibition at MoMA. The majority of her works on display depicted flowers, but I particularly liked the mushrooms and this apple.
