June 14, 2021 | Reflections
Wang Jinzhu is Professor and Vice Dean of School of Philosophy of Inner Mongolia University (China). He was awarded as the first-level “Young Science and Technology Leading Talents” of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and the first-level candidate of “321 New Century Talents Project”. He is also member of the Chinese Society of Nature Dialectics and the Chinese Professional Committee of Philosophy of Complexity and Systems Science. As one of the leading researchers on privacy and risk, he has published extensively on topics such as a review on the “Difficulty” of Privacy, the philosophical dimensions of privacy,and analysis of risk technology from the perspective of complexity. In this post, Xu interviews Prof. Jinzhu on related topics.
Could you please share your views of contemporary research on privacy issues?
Discussion on Privacy is not only a central concept in Law and Culture, which affects and regulates society deeply and subtly, but it has also been treated philosophically in the past (C Wright 1991). Research on privacy first appeared in J. F. Stephen’s book Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (1874). Later, Warren and Brandeis (1890) advanced privacy research from concerning about “sphere of private life” to “right to solitude”, where, “right” is consistent with Aristotle’s idea of private space. Warren and Brandeis elevate the private space of the individual to a right with inviolability. Since then, scholars have carried out comprehensive and in-depth studies on privacy.
In the study of privacy, the past tradition focused on private domain which is separated from the public. Precisely speaking, they focused on the value and type of privacy which can be seen as an onion nested model —I use this description to assume privacy range from disembody to embody. Obviously, this understanding is a narrow view which will lose the psychological and socio-cultural understanding of privacy.
Therefore, unfortunately, researchers shed little attention on the nature of privacy which leads to the lack of deep grasp of privacy devoid of historical clues and development logic. Therefore, we try to explore the nature of privacy, classify the basic types of privacy, and reveal the modern value of it through practice or activity theory about privacy. Considering the manifestation of privacy on the psychological, physical, and social levels, we have a preliminary plan to understand privacy from the perspective of activity (practice), thus establishing an activity-based understanding of privacy.
In modern society, most of our information can be saved or spread by machines. Do you believe these machines are part of privacy within the information they recorded?
In fact, what you are talking about is that the state of a person is distributed in other ways, that is, the “other” carried my privacy. There are two paradigms of analysis of this question, one is the analysis of language, and the other is the analysis of the way of being.
From the aspect of the way of being, it is obvious that the way of existence of human beings at this time, including animals and machines themselves, it had some unity with the existence of human beings. On the word-formation, the word “私”(privacy) originated from “禾”(grain). It’s image not only a symbol of a plant, but also a symbol of female genitalia. On this perspective, privacy has two meanings in Chinese condition: One is belonging, and the other is production activities.
The semantic understanding of “privacy” in Chinese, especially the understanding of individual activities, is basically consistent with the understanding of the meaning of “privacy” in Latin English and German. People “hide” their “privacy” in order to protect their own special “individual life (activities)”. Through the etymological and semantic analysis of “privacy”, “privacy” can be understood as an individual’s (self) special (value) related activities (practice). In this way, the understanding of complex privacy phenomenon may get some progress. We can examine the essence of privacy from the three dimensions of individual (self), “special” (value) and “activity” (practice).
On privacy, it consists meaning of concealment which means to keep something hidden specially. As practical animals, our activities can be divided into three levels: psychological, physical, and social. However, many activities are valuable to us, but they can still be made public. Therefore, based on the intrinsic value of the will, privacy comes to be a practice of protecting, it is an axiological problem, but in what way hidden is a technical problem. (If understood broadly, legislation is also a technical solution for social program).
Is privacy a uniquely human value? If so, does privacy pass away with body?
Actually, physical body may disappear in real world, but “I” still existed in the Internet as data. On the one hand, it can be discussed from perspective of post-humanism, and on the other, Marx believed that an individual is the sum total of social relations, so he understood that “I” should not only stand in the perspective of the individual, but also stand in the perspective of the community. Therefore, my value is closely related to the value of the community. In this sense, the death of body does not mean the death of privacy.
It means how to understand “me” and then we continue to explore the issue of “belonging to me”. “I” mean the same thing with “private” in ancient Chinese prose. After several researches, we actually found that “I” and “private” hold the same meaning in Chinese, for instance, we usually speak of “私以为”(I conceit) which referring to I could working on outside through intention.
However, compare to other being in the world, for the general inanimate being, like stone or grass, their existence is confined by their own physical state; In the ordinary animal except human-being, their action is passive which derived by the environment. Even if some animals show “territorial rules” on the behavioral level, it is generally understood as spontaneous and instinctive phenomenon of animals.
Apparently, human beings are not merely material beings, but can also carry out purposeful practical activities. People’s self-consciousness of their own activities and their intrinsic value is the core point of understanding privacy activities, which is the particularity of privacy for human beings. At the same time, the existence of private activities (fields) does not mean privacy. When we talk about privacy, we should protect the aspects with special intrinsic value: spiritual activities, physical activities, and communication activities.
What do you think about the ontological turn in STS, compared with privacy ontological approach you mentioned above?
The theory of privacy activities is based on the investigation of human activities, which leads to the particularity of privacy activities by distinguishing different activities. The ontological understanding of human privacy activities is different from the ontological understanding of STS by Latour or Haraway. I list two major differences. First of all, the different understanding of actors. Privacy activities are the unique activities of only people, while Latour’s actions are not exclusive to people. He attributes other elements, like nature, technology, to the actor.
Secondly, the different understanding of things. Latour put forward the action explanation of things, things are not unchanged entities, depends on the relationship and action, is “the name of action” to replace the “name of things”, action precedes essence, the status of things is constructivist. We propose the activity explanation of privacy, aiming to reveal that the object is not privacy, but has privacy value because of its association with action. The privacy of “the name of the object” should be restored to the privacy of “the name of the action”, and the status of the object is hermeneutical.
Xu Xu is a lecturer of Inner Mongolia University. His research interests include Technology Risk Perception and Philosophy of Technology.
Published: 06/14/2021