Preface to Privacy

Abstract

This is William Ernest Hocking, near the middle of The Meaning of God in Human Experience, the first of his full-scale philosophical publications, in 1912, and, as it happens, the first full-scale philosophical work I ever read, in its fourth printing, of 1922. It has stayed with me, like many other words of the author, heard or read, for its nutritious matter, part of a searching and original treatment of our knowledge of other minds, but also for the typically sane and imaginative charm of its manner, which is always able to make flowers bloom and fruits swell on even the stiffest epistemological sticks. If I have any sense of grievance against this quality of the man it is that he gave me early a quite misleading idea of the nature and destiny of academic philosophy as a profession.

I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade, speculating on this mysterious isolation of self from self. Why are we so made that I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall, and never Thee? … How would it seem if my mind could but once be within thine; and we could meet and without barrier be with each other? And then it has fallen upon me like a shock — as when one thinking himself alone has felt a presence — But I am in thy soul. These things around me are in thy experience. They are thy own; when I touch them and move them I change thee. When I look on them I see what thou seest; when I listen, I hear what thou hearest. I am in the great Room of thy soul; and I experience thy very experience. For where art thou? Not there, behind those eyes, within that head, in darkness, fraternizing with chemical processes. Of these, in my own case, I know nothing, and will know nothing; but my existence is spent not behind my Wall, but in front of it. I am there, where I have treasures. And there art thou, also … I can imagine no contact more real and thrilling than this; that we should meet and share identity, not through ineffable inner depths (alone), but here through the foregrounds of common experience.