On Secrets

A confession: I've been looking at porn on the Internet. Smut. Naughty stuff ... what used to be called, quaintly, "French postcards." Yet I've found that what you can see if you enter the right words in the Google Images search box goes way beyond naughty. And it isn't really all that much fun to look at, truth be told. The question is, why not?

An answer crossed my mind today as I pondered the nature of secrets.

Secrets are things we don't want to tell others, don't want them to see or know about. That much is unremarkable. What seems to me to be more remarkable about secrets is that each one is unique.

That's a big deal if you are like me and tend to agree with the protagonist of Muriel Barbery's award-winning novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Renée Michel is the concierge in a Parisian hôtel particulier who ponders thoughts above her station. At one point she glimpses the master's thesis of one of her tenants' daughters and is set to musing about the philosophy of William of Ockham.

Ockham held that there are no universals, just unique and particular entities that only seem to participate in a universal form or ideal. There is no such thing as the quintessence of table-ness, only this table, that table, this other table. The notion that the abstract idea of the table is real is a trick of the human capacity to use language, thereby to invent (non-existent) general categories.

But Renée Michel disagrees:

As far as Will of Ockham is concerned, things are singular, and the realism of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities, generality is merely in the mind and to presume that generic realities exist is merely to make what is simple complicated. But can we be so sure? Was I not seeking congruence between Raphael and Vermeer only yesterday? The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty. And I daresay there must be reality in that form, it cannot be a simple expedient of the human mind classifying in order to understand, and discerning in order to apprehend: for you cannot classify something that is not classifiable, you cannot put things together that cannot be together in a group, or gather those that cannot be gathered. A table cannot be a View of Delft: the human mind cannot create this dissimilarity, any more than it can invent the deep solidarity connecting a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. In every table there is an essence that gives it its form and, similarly, every work of art belongs to a universal form that alone confers its seal upon the work. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have balked at considering essences to be real, for I will only ever see the table that is before me, and not the universal "table" form; only the painting, and not the very essence of Beauty. And yet ... and yet it is there, before our eyes: every painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation of Beauty; a dazzling apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.

Yet, it seems to me, we can never gaze upon the essence of a secret, for a secret has no essence. A secret is what it is only by virtue of the intentions of the person who is keeping it.

Suppose you are gay, but keeping it a secret. Suppose also that you have a friend — not a lover — who is also in the closet. It may seem that you share the same secret, and that therefore secrets have universal essences.

But now imagine that your friend tells someone else that you and he (let's say your friend is male) are both gay. What will be your reaction? Isn't it apt to be that it's well and good for him to part with his own secret if he bloody well wants to, but he has no right whatsoever to betray your confidence?

Secrets belong only to their originators. Even if the gist of a secret is identical between two secret-keepers, each person's secret is an entirely separate entity. Ergo, secrets (though they have gists) have no essences.


It all has to do with consciousness. Animals don't have secrets, because they are not conscious. (Or, if they do possess consciousness at some level, it is only to that extent that they are capable of secrecy.)

Jung had it that human consciousness lies along an arc from the pre-conscious "participation mystique" of infancy to the advanced awareness of a guru on a mountaintop — which amounts to the same oceanic, all-is-one immersion, now at a fully conscious level.

If you are a pre-conscious infant, there can be no hiddenness, no secrecy. The same is true of the mountaintop guru, to whom all secrets are revealed. And the same goes for God, from whom no secrets can be kept. In fact, Jung spoke of the advanced stages of consciousness as the realization of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God.

But most of us spend our days at stages of consciousness that are somewhere in between these endpoints. Everyday consciousness is secret-keeping consciousness. If our lives were open books to everyone who is not a baby or a guru, and their interior lives were equally open to our own view, life would be impossible to deal with.

I have often fantasized about what it would be like if one could see each innermost thought of another individual, blazoned on his or her forehead: "I don't really like Alice, but I have to pretend to since her husband is my husband's boss"; "I don't want the buddies I hang around with to know I like medieval French poetry"; "I'm planning to dump my girlfriend, but I'm not ready to tell her yet."

Those pieces of inner dialogue would be bad enough, if revealed to one and all. Far worse, though, would be thoughts about sex: "I'm sure horny today"; "I'm not horny, but would like to be — where can I score some Viagra?"; "I'm sleeping with my secretary and don't want my wife to find out"; "I can't keep my eyes off her breasts/his behind"; and so on.

Well, then ... why are thoughts about sex more secret than other thoughts? I think the answer is that secrecy is the essence of sex.


If not secrecy per se, then intimacy. Confidentiality. What goes on between us is nobody else's business. That sort of thing. Otherwise, it's just friction and heat, spanning and delving, pumping and orgasm.

The eternal essence of sex retches at the thought. The eternal essence of sex knows that sex involves holding, and being held, close. You aren't really holding someone close if you know that what the two of you are doing is being filmed and will wind up on the Internet.

So, from something without an essence — the secrets of the bedroom, as kept separately by those who share the bed — comes something with an essence and a universality: the beauty of real sex. Go figure.