Under the obligation of secrecy” “” “

“Our age has a taste for transparency, openness; it rejects disguises, secret rooms and half-lit salons”. “The price of democracy is alleged to be the clarity and transparency of truth, while secrecy is alleged to be a close relative of plotting and machination”. But at the same time, in order to save ourselves “from the tyranny of ‘everything on show'”, we “claim the right to intimacy and privacy”. This apparent paradox is analysed by the philosopher JEAN-PHILIPPE PIERRON in the last number of Études , the monthly journal of contemporary culture founded by the Jesuits in 1856. We present some excerpts from his reflections. RIGHT TO SECRECY. “Secrecy goes hand in hand with the intimate sphere. But what is the nature of this latter?”, asks the philosopher. “The access to intimacy, whether it be existential, bodily, spiritual, economic or legal, makes the secret necessary. The right to secrecy is the condition of trust”. “Is truth better than freedom? Since the enemy of the secret is curiosity, perhaps taken to the point of voyeurism”, continues Pierron, “how can we reconcile the defence of freedom in the protection of private life with the right to truth as the foundation for the circulation of news?”. In other words, “the right to know all, against the right not to tell all. A conflict of interest is thus posed between the interests of categories of people who find in secrecy the conditions for the exercise of their profession, and the right to information that protects the interests of society and persons”. This conflict of values is further aggravated “when the access to information is conceived in terms of the web (internet) and immediacy in real time”, as a result of which “the maintenance of a secret is experienced as intolerable”, because “truth seems ‘a revelation’ and secrecy is considered a form of manipulation that hides the truth from us”. ETHICS OF CONFIDENTIALITY. “Confidentiality, in professional ethics, appeals to conscience, to a kind of moral obligation”, Placed on the borderline between deontology and law, it oscillates between discretion, delicacy, trust and professional secrecy. These four terms are – Pierron explains – at the same time four levels of the fundamental rules at the basis of the status of the sphere of intimacy in the relation with ourselves, with others, with our profession and with society. The intimate – that of the personal conscience or that of the material realities concealed from the eyes of others – consecrates the irreducible singularity of the person. Intimacy, whose antithesis is indecency, is closely linked to inwardness”. In the view of the philosopher, “joy expresses an intimate pleasure, if not even an interior fullness, where suffering is the intimate manifestation of an attack on interior integrity. It follows that in a culture that glorifies individual success and personal strength, the individual cannot admit his own fragility in public”. BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM. “Discretion – continues Pierron – is a way of living one’s own intimacy with reserve”, by intensifying “the attention to interior life and reducing the part of oneself to reveal to the public”. “Delicacy leads imperceptibly to the dimension of a relational experience of inwardness; it is the sharing of an intimacy that hardly dares to confess itself”. It “develops a kind of elective affinity that is secret, almost clandestine”. “Familiarity – he explains – is an intimacy shared between two people who in a particular moment chose each other. It presupposes mutual trust”. “If familiarity implies the choice of two persons, confidentiality pledges a group of persons. The shift from familiarity to confidentiality implies a transition from personal to professional ethics, since confidentiality raises the protection of intimacy into a common norm”. But, Pierron argues, “the pact of confidentiality is not on a contractual basis, and it is this that distinguishes it from professional secrecy. The former is of an ethical, the latter of a legal order: the one belongs to the moral, the other to the legal domain”. “Classifying confidentiality as a value and secrecy as a law” permits “intimacy to express itself without being sacrificed to the public”. “The defence of intimacy”, however, “prompts us to ask ourselves whether there exist things that are secret by nature. Secrecy and confidentiality defend the wellsprings of invention, fragility and creativity that require separation and distance, in the defence of a free conscience”. For the philosopher they form “the bulwark against an ‘advertising power’ that confuses power and right to know”. Lastly, “if there is a democratic need to know, the same need entails the need to curb this hunger to know with a right to secrecy, the one guarantee of freedom. Only at this price are truth and freedom compatible. Truth without freedom is tyranny; freedom without truth is blind”. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1301 N.ro relativo : 41 Data pubblicazione : 02/06/04