Secrets And Openness

One person might be fully comfortable sharing a very personal or unusual part of themselves that another person might be terrified of ever verbalizing to others.  Whether or not you yourself are naturally transparent or reluctant to open up, or any more complicated mixture of the two, it could have been the case that you would have had a different disposition towards secrets and openness.  A person might even wish they were prone to openness while finding it challenging to share especially secret or precise things about themselves, while someone else might long to be prone to restraint even as they continue to share things they regret disclosing.  The way someone feels about this is subjective, though of course the deepest of relationships require some sort of openness no matter how the participants feel about it.

Indeed, despite the obvious personal and relational power of openness, there is little control a person might have over which of these psychological tendencies regarding honesty, vulnerability, and transparency they gravitate more to.  Again, some people might even wish they had a different level of willingness to share their souls with others, even with their closest friends or their romantic partners.  What non-rationalists will likely never discover about this issue is that the most sincere openness still cannot permit the other party to know a truth about their psychology or past.  It is the epistemological disconnect between minds, rooted in the metaphysical distinction between one's own mind and whatever other minds exist, that prevents this kind of knowledge.  Unless someone was omniscient or telepathic and able to know their telepathy is not an illusion, the only mind they can know is their own.

All one person can offer another to share their secrets is words, and as far as bringing actual proof to mind, the most those words can appeal to the logical fact that a given secret about someone's personality or past does not contradict logical axioms and is thus possible.  There is no amount of words that could prove what specific events did or did not happen in someone else's life, and even an emotion or desire they have in the present cannot be proven to an outside mind by making the claim that it is there.  Someone else could share a relatively secret part of himself or herself with you, yet you cannot know if they are indeed telling the truth.  One's own secrets, at least as far as mental characteristics and memories of events go, are directly knowable through rationalistic introspection, but that is all.  Does this remove all basis for human communication of such things?

No, for the rational way to go about this neither disregards any truth nor deters relational closeness.  Communication about such things can be about the pursuit of intimacy between people who cannot actually see into each other's minds to verify secrets yet, without making any assumptions one way or another, still care about each other enough to seek as much openness as can be expressed with words.  In this context, sharing very personal and perhaps painful or abnormal things is by no means pointless.  It is an empowering, bonding, or cathartic thing, something that the other person does not need to be able to prove in order to understand what is being conveyed and to reciprocate openness.  Openness can reveal a lot about a person whether or not they have taken it seriously enough to understand it and pursue it anyway.  For rationalists, it can be about the absolute certainty of logic and introspection even as it brings emotional relief--or emotional challenges.