Abstract
The Western imaginary is haunted by a dream of transparency, whether in a philosophical, a political or moral sense. Based on his German book Transparenztraum. Literatur, Politik, Medien und das Unmögliche, Manfred Schneider recalls the first reference to the dream in the fabulous anecdote of Momus in Hesiod’s Theogony where Zeus is being blamed for not putting a window in man’s breast, through which you could see his thoughts. Schneider writes three further chapters in the history of this dream: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau and Sartre stand for the elaboration of these ideas respectively in the Middle Ages, in the Enlightenment and in the twentieth century. The author suggests a way to distinguish and connect the linguistic, political and the interpersonal aspect of the dream.
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- 1.
“When we all know that anyone can read into our brain, we will have to overcome contradictions between our thoughts and our actions; we will be as good in our thoughts as we will try to be in our actions. It is to be hoped that with the psychoscope lying will be banished from the world […]” (trans. David Jacobson; Mantegazza 2010: 190).
- 2.
“Nyx bore hateful Moros and black Ker and / Thanatos, she bore Hypnos and the tribe of Oneiroi. / Next Momos and painful Oizys were born to / the dark goddess Nyx, though she lay with no one, / and the Hesperides […]” (trans. A.S. Caldwell ; Hesiod 2015: 40).
- 3.
“Is autem [i.e. Socrates] memoratur prudenter doctissimeque dixisse, oportuisse hominum pectora fenestra et aperta esse, uti non occultos haberent sensus sed patentes ad considerandum. […] Ergo, uti Socrati placuit, si ita sensus et sentantiae scientaeque disciplinis auctae perspicuae et translucidae fuissent […].”
- 4.
- 5.
“For it is evident that neither air nor water nor anything of that sort is actually transparent unless it is luminous. Of itself the transparent is in potency to both light and darkness (the latter being a privation of light) as primary matter is in potency both to form and the privation of form. Now light is to the transparent as colour is to a body of definite dimensions: each is the act and form of that which receives it. And on this account he says that light is the colour, as it were, of the transparent, in virtue of which the transparent is made actually so by some light-giving body, such as fire, or anything else of that kind, or by a celestial body. For to be full of light and to communicate it is common to fire and to celestial bodies, just as to be diaphanous is common to air and water and the celestial bodies.” (trans. K. Foster, O.P. and S. Humphries, O.P.; Aquinas, 1951: 130).
- 6.
“Such as through polished and transparent glass, / Or waters crystalline and undisturbed, / But not so deep as that their bed be lost, / Come back again the outlines of our faces / So feeble, that a pearl on forehead white / Comes no less speedily unto our eyes; / Such saw I many faces prompt to speak, / So that I ran in error opposite / To that which kindled love ‘twixt man and fountain. / As soon as I became aware of them, / Esteeming them as mirrored semblances, / To see of whom they were, my eyes I turned, / And nothing saw, and once more turned them forward / Direct into the light of my sweet Guide, / Who smiling kindled in her holy eyes” (trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Dante 1867/2017: 554 sequ.).
- 7.
“But what then will be the object of these spectacles? What will be shown in them? Nothing, if you please. With liberty, wherever abundance reigns, well-being also reigns. Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better, yet; let the spectators become the spectacle to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united” (Modified translation by A. Bloom; Rousseau 1968, 126).
- 8.
“The people are lively, gay, and tender; their hearts are in their eyes as they are always on their lips; they seek to communicate their joy and their pleasures. They invite, importune and coerce the new arrivals and dispute over them. All the societies constitute but one, all become common to all.” (trans. A. Bloom; Rousseau 1968: 127)
- 9.
“He who willed man to be social, by a touch of a finger shifted the globe’s axis into line with the axis of the universe” (trans. J.H. Moran, A. Gode; Rousseau 1966: 39).
- 10.
“[…] that man in a state of nature, wandering up and down the forests, without industry, without speech, and without home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another; let us conclude that, being self-sufficient and subject to so few passions, he could have no feelings or knowledge but such as befitted his situation; that he felt only his actual necessities […]” (trans. G.D.H. Cole; Rousseau 2005: 57).
- 11.
“[…] the sexes united without design, as accident, opportunity or inclination brought them together, nor had they any great need of words to communicate their designs to each other; and they parted with the same indifference […]” (trans. G.D.H. Cole ; Rousseau 2005: 41).
- 12.
“I would have the first words he hears few in number, distinctly and often repeated, while the words themselves should be related to things which can first be shown to the child. That fatal facility in the use of words we do not understand begins earlier than we think. […] Let the child’s vocabulary, therefore, be limited; it is very undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he should be able to say more than he thinks. One of the reasons why peasants are generally shrewder than townsfolk is, I think, that their vocabulary is smaller. They have few ideas, but those few are thoroughly grasped” (trans. Barbara Foxley; Rousseau 2009: 80, 88).
- 13.
“In the way that I conceive of this terrible passion, its perplexity, its frenzies, its palpitations, its transports, its burning expressions, its even more energetic silence, its inexpressible looks which their timidity renders reckless and which give evidence of desires through fear, it seems to me that, after a language so vehement, if the lover only once brought himself to say, ‘I love you,’ the beloved, outraged, would say to him, ‘you do not love me anymore,’ and would never see him again in her live” (trans. Allan Bloom; Rousseau 1968: 104).
- 14.
“I think transparency should always be substituted for what is secret , and I can quite well imagine the day when two men will no longer have secrets from each other, because no one will have any more secrets from anyone […]” (trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis; Sartre 1975: 12).
- 15.
“First of all, Evil. […] This Evil makes communicating all thoughts difficult, because I do not know to what extent the principles which the other uses to form his thoughts are the same as mine. […] A man’s existence must be entirely visible to his neighbour, whose own existence must in turn be entirely visible to him, in order for true social harmony to be established. This cannot be realized today, but I think that it will be once there has been a change in the economic, cultural, and affective relations among men, beginning with the eradication of material scarcity, which, as I showed in Critique de la raison dialectique, is for me the root of the antagonisms among men, past and present” (trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis; Sartre 1975: 13).
- 16.
“My thoughts swam around in my pretty glass globe, in my soul. Everyone could follow their play. Not a shadowy corner. Yet, without words, without shape and or consistency, diluted in that innocent transparency, a transparent certainty spoiled everything: I was an impostor.” (trans. Bernard Frechtman; Sartre 1964c: 83)
- 17.
“I confused things with their names: that amounts to believing” (trans. Bernard Frechtman; Sartre 1964c: 251)
- 18.
“Adrift in nature, he lives ‘in sweet confusion with the world’. He fondles himself in the grass, in the water; he plays; the whole countryside passes through his vacant transparency. In short, he is innocent” (trans. Bernard Frechtman; Sartre 1964b: 5).
- 19.
“’I am a thief’ he cries. He listens to his voice; whereupon the relationship to language is inverted: the word ceases to be an indicator, it becomes a being. […] The word which was a means, rises to the rank of supreme reality. Silence on the other hand, is now only a means of designating language. The trick is done: We have made a poet of the doctored child” (trans. Bernard Frechtman; Sartre 1964b: 42).
- 20.
“If however, you are exiled from the universe and are attentive only to the verbal body, which is the only reality you can possess and hold between your tongue and lips, then it is the thing signified which disappears and the signification becomes a vanishing of being, a mist which, beyond the word, is in the process of being dissipated. Genet makes it his business to have eyes only for the word; the universe, captured and inserted into the statement, goes up in smoke” (trans. Bernard Frechtman; Sartre 1964b: 309).
- 21.
“So Parain , though having given up his search for what I will call l’infra-silence, a silence that coincides with I don’t know which ‘state of nature’ and that would have existed before language, did not abandon the project to remain silent. The silence he reaches right now extends to the whole field of language. It is language itself, noise of murmurs, commands, calls. This time, it does not come from an impossible destruction of the words, but from their radical depreciation” (my trans.).
- 22.
“A diversity of meaning that rank and contrast for just one sentence” (my trans.).
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Schneider, M. (2018). The Dream of Transparency: Aquinas, Rousseau, Sartre. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_5
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