Pre-Coffee Hospital Philosophy

Rain break today, and we go home

A series of observations over 23 days from my wife's admission for brain surgery is pending shortly. Probably not until safely home. To prepare the writing road without food or coffee (MLK day closures evidently and no coffee vending machine) one hour after rising from my painful hospital reclining chair bed I browse philosophy and scroll through Substack.

Beyond fed up with Healthcare, their absurd user unfriendly facilities, the security guard who in an entirely empty lobby orders me to leave the staff only lobby (no signs saying so on a Sunday morning) and go the utilitarian vending machine guarded cafeteria, the overall atmosphere is bizzare.

Let us be straightforward and say that our age is not that of secrets, but of their opposite, transparency. There is even, more or less confusedly, an ideology of transparency that implicitly assimilates transparency to truth, to rectitude and even to innocence, while conversely secrets would entail, with respect to what they hide or do not confess, something shameful and sinful. The ideology of transparency supposes that all can be exposed, become public so as to be submitted to the scrutiny of others, to even be the object of procedures of surveillance and of control. What is most disturbing is that the ideology of transparency is today often tied to the idea of democracy. As if the progress of democracy were correlative to the extension of transparency and to the retreating of secrets. But who does not see that this democracy would resemble a dungeon without walls or locks, a dungeon extended to the whole of society, as the life of democratic man would be to a hell?” (Yves Charles Zarka, “Ce secret qui nous tient,” Cités 26, 2006; reprinted in La destitution des intellectuels)