BASC 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Filippo Brunelleschi, The Conduit, Secretum Secretorum
28 Sep 2014
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Document Summary
Social life of secrets (pleasure, enchantment, danger: psychologically secrets create a bond, intimacy, a sense of community, it is powerful to create bonds. In the early days of modern science, secrecy was important in the bonding of the community: core paradox of the secret, its exclusionary but also inclusionary. For a secret to work they must be told to some degree. It"s a matter of how and to whom the secret is told. Its hard for one social individual to hold all the secrets: secret plays a public health role when it comes to technology and science. Hospitals who have multi-resistant strains of bacteria will withhold that information for periods of time to not cause a panic. Research with dangerous viruses is sometimes kept secret. There was more exchange in these societies but they were still secret: wasn"t about politics or religion and therefore it was not a threat to the state or the church.
