Private Thoughts: Ideas on the Privacy of the Mind as Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Have you often heard people say things like, “We could never know what she’s really thinking,” or, “Only he knows for himself,” perpetuating the belief that all thoughts are somehow private?  In some strange way, this is not true.  In a kind of manner of speaking we can be using the word ‘private’ here in another way.  We could, for example, be saying meaning that thoughts are private in a way that we might not outwardly share them. In this sense, we might just keep thoughts to ourselves. 

However, this sounds too simple and not the way philosophers like Wittgenstein meant it when challenged. We sometimes believe that thoughts are private, much like sensations like pain, as if no one else can have access to them, as if cordoned off from other people.  But even this is just metaphorical.  The fact is that a thought is no more accessible to yourself never mind anyone else.  We believe a thought is ‘inside’ us the way a brain is inside us but this is actually mistaking two categories.  Let me bring it back to a sensation like pain for a minute.  If I say I believe P has a gold tooth but I do not know it, this could become hidden from view. If I then say P has a toothache but I can never know it, this is not because it is inaccessible.  I can open his mouth and not ‘find’ toothache’ because there is nothing to find.  He is just having a sensation.  I am privy to it because he has told me or has exhibited pain behavior.  Whether he fakes it or not has nothing to do with whether the pain is private or not.  He does not own it, he merely has it.  But, what of these thoughts?

We very often think that our thoughts reside in the head or behind the eyes, or at least somewhere potentially private as if they could be locked away for our own consumption. It becomes like a private attic where you, and only you, have a magic access. These modes of thinking, as I stated above, are just figures of speech.  They are metaphors for something not literate.  If we open up someone’s head, we find no thoughts any more than we’d be expected to find a miniature city.  It is the same when we say we ‘hold’ someone in our heart or something is ‘buried’ deep down in the bosom of a heart (As a side note, and to highlight this metaphorical speak, we’ll compare it to a literate example; If two people have a cherished object that each wants to keep a secret from other people they might want to bury it as a way of preserving their object.  One person might bury it just six inches under the ground.  The other person might cherish his object so much so that he may go to the trouble of digging a hole twenty feet underground.  We could then say of the latter person that they really went to the greater lengths to keep his object a secret.  May be this is why we then go to great lengths with our metaphor when we say something is ‘buried’ deep down.) So we think thoughts are private things that, when desired, can be privy only to the person thinking them.   

However, this is a problem in a few ways one of which I’ll highlight here.  Often, as I said above, we think we can’t have access to a person’s mind which often lets a person off the hook when they play the personal card by saying things like, “You can never really know my real feelings” or, “Only I know how I really feel.”  But my contention is that we can and do in fact ‘know’ a person’s feelings if we are using the word ‘know’ as I think we’re using it.  To say we ‘know’ something on the way we normally use it does more than highlight a positive proposition.  To say we ‘know’ something also pertains to the possibility of not knowing something.  Can we say that of ourselves?  Can I speak of knowing something about myself like a pain or sensation while at the same time holding the corollary possibility of not knowing it?  These questions create a small but significant crack within our own minds as to the difference between ‘knowing’ our own feelings and simply ‘having’ them.

Imagine for a moment you just got your haircut and you meet a very good friend who knows you better than anyone.  Your friend then tells you she really like your new haircut.  It makes your face look nice.  Now, knowing this person as well as you do, imagine that though you were happy to hear these words from her, you are skeptical.  You seem to have an intuitive knowledge, through years of intimacy, of when your friend is lying.  It may be that their nose always wrinkled up at the moment or that they immediately look at the ground as a tell-tale sign, or it may just be a feeling.   You seem to instinctively know, may be through years sub-conscious practice, when they are not telling the truth.  In this case it is difficult because liking a haircut is just a matter of an opinion though one could still be lying about the opinion.  However, in a situation like this you may fall back on the notion that, in the end, your friend is really only the one who knows if  she is lying or not.  You cannot know her innermost feelings (remember, this is just a metaphor). But let’s try to jump the hurdle. 

Let’s further imagine that someone comes down from on high and grants you the possibility to get ‘inside’ your friends head so as to hear every thought that goes on inside it.  Of course, this would mean that you still have your own thoughts as a way of comprehending things, in this case hearing her thoughts and deciphering them.  So you have been granted access to her deepest thoughts (Again, deepest?).  May be weeks go by and you’ve been relegated to listening to all the gibberish and incomprehensible thoughts we all have just about every waking hour.  This person has had to deal with the torrent of white noise that seems to take place in seemingly every one’s head (never mind the embarrassing things that we do prefer to keep secret).  Yet weeks go by when finally your friend ‘thinks’ in her mind, “I really did like that haircut.”  You think that this, finally, is the proof you were waiting for all this time!  It must be true!  What then, if in another five minutes, you hear her ‘think’ the phrase,” No, I didn’t like the haircut.”  You are now witness to a cerebral tennis match.  Imagine this volleying goes on for days and days.  In this case, one might then be tempted to just wait to hear her say “I did like the haircut,” one last time then hastily  leave her thoughts and only then decide you have your answer.  But is this honest? What then are your criteria?  Is it that you think you finally have the truth?  Or is this just a case that you decided to take what you heard last and call that a truth?  Is this a case of now truly knowing what your friend was thinking? In the end, even with the ability to hear someone else’s thoughts, as in this case, the criteria you are left with is, “It is the last thing she said.” And even then you abandoned things at a certain point.

The above scenario is no different than thinking you’ve got to the truth if your friend said these things out loud.  It is still criteria you’ve had to base on an outward sense of knowing but not in some ‘inner’ sense, as if you went deep down to get your answer.  Remember, that to understand—or ‘know’—her mind, you still needed yours to comprehend what you were hearing in order to know. You still required your own cognitive process to understand what she was thinking.  It seems this leaves us with the notion that in order to know her inner most thoughts the way we would like we would then have to become our friend, meaning everything from atoms on up, in which case, as I mentioned above, you could no longer speak of ‘knowing’ but rather of having sensations.  You would just be having those thoughts without the benefit of what we might deem knowing or not knowing. You would become your friend, no longer comprehending in a third person kind of way, but you would be her. This is what I mean by knowing.  We always need outward criteria or proof (no matter how wrong) to know something in the world.  But we cannot do that with ourselves because we cannot then speak of knowing things but rather just having thoughts.  It’s almost as if someone asked if we were in pain and we told them we were not sure and we had to check:  “Wait a moment. Let me see. One minute, please. Ah! No, I was mistaken.  I’m not in pain.”  We don’t do this kind of thing in any meaningful way.  

If these ideas do anything, they may highlight the fact that we know things in the world about other people in a meaningful way by inferring outward appearances as a way of being right or wrong. In this way, we can meaningfully speak of knowing and not knowing in the world. It also reminds me of something said by the man that inspired all these thoughts, Ludwig Wittgenstein, when he surmised that the best picture of the human soul is the body.  It’s not as airy-fairy as some would like, but it speaks to something more intellectually honest than thinking it is two separate things.  At least we can be right or wrong.