The Peculiar Hiddenness of Keeping a Secret

Some Remarks on the Role of Indeterminacy as a Feature of Living our Life with Language

Abstract

With the guidance of Lars Herzberg’s view on living our life with language in his three essays “The Indeterminacy of the Mental” (1983), “The Kind of Certainty is the Kind of Language Game” (1985) and “On the Attitude of Trust” (1988), this paper discusses Jane Austen’s narration in her novel Sense and Sensibility of the existential and moral concerns involved in confidential conversations. The attempt is to consider confidentiality as a form of hiddenness in the sense that the confidant is trusted to keep silent about the secret, but also the workings of the indeterminacy or uncertainty of our judgements about other persons. Since we take up different attitudes and make different demands in different situations, different kinds of judgements play different roles, and thus no common paradigm for all our judgements can be laid down once and for all. There is accordingly no neutral position from which others can be judged, thus giving our judgements about each other a kinship with moral and aesthetic judgements. I want to draw attention to the fact that our moral sensibility is an aspect of our understanding of each other and our common world – a sensibility also needed within philosophy.