"When one makes an inquiry one may do so 'just casually' or one may formulate the question explicitly. The latter case is peculiar in that the inquiry does not become transparent to itself until all these constitutive factors of the question have themselves become transparent."

"Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity--the inquirer--transparent in his own Being."

"The real 'movement' of the sciences takes place when their basic concepts undergo a more less radical revision which is transparent to itself."

Being and Time, Heidegger

The list goes on and on.
I also keep coming across this word in my perusals of Sartre (which I really need to finish one of these days...)

What the hell does it mean?

Transparent?
Seems to indicate that it vanishes so it no longer influences that which it becomes transparent to.
But how is this done practically?
As a metaphor, fine. But as a metaphor, isn't it useless?
When Heidegger starts going on about science becoming transparent to itself... I find that I can't allow the fuzzy nature of the metaphor to slide anymore.
I have to know what this madman is talking about.

Glaucon. Prince. I'm sure you can explain, yes?

SEE THROUGH....

LIKE POLYETHELINE.

-mt

Why would you even bother to post that?
Do you feel better now? I usually feel better after taking a shit.

POLYETHELINE... is the only truely transparent substance...

everything else... is not....

as you have said.

-MT

FOR ALONG TIME... people said glass of transparent... but not anymore.

Invert Nexus:

I take this passage to be about Philosophy as Clarification. That is to say, philosophy is rather like cleaning a window. When a window needs cleaning, it is initially rather clouded and one cannot see through it well at all - these are concepts half-thought and ill conceived. Now, when one begins to clean it, gradually the dirt and the grime is lifted away and the closer one gets to the end, the clearer the view is - this is the process of philosophy rubbing out the inconsistancies, half-thought out notions, et cetera, of unphilosophic thought. Finally, when it is all clear, the window might as well not be there - just as the truth is utterly clear once the process of philosophy has done its Windex work.

In essence: Transparency is knowledge.

The process can be involved in that usually philosophy shows us that our assumptions right off the bat are generally EXTREMELY unfounded. Philosophy can truly throw one for a loop in this regard and lead us on a path that diverts us from the main question until we can clarify a host of lesser questions which lead to the later elaboration of the big one. "The Republic" by Plato is an excellent example of the sort of quest one may be forced to accept in order to gain transparency.

I dont get it :/

OK - I'll be upfront and say I have little academic knowledge about Heidegger and Sartre but do have an interest in phenomenology, so I hope my comments are relevant to this interesting topic:

"When one makes an inquiry one may do so 'just casually' or one may formulate the question explicitly. The latter case is peculiar in that the inquiry does not become transparent to itself until all these constitutive factors of the question have themselves become transparent."

I use a quote regarding Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism (from Tim Ingold ‘The Perception of the Environment’): “Heidegger begins by distinguishing two ways in which the world may ‘show up’ to a being who is active within it: availableness and occurrentness. The former is evident in our everyday use of the most familiar things around us, which, absorbed into the current of our activity (as indeed, we are ourselves), become in a sense transparent, wholly subordinate to the ‘in-order-to’ of the task at hand. The latter refers to the way in which things are revealed in their essential nature to an observer who self-consciously stands back from the action, assuming a stance of contemplative detachment or disinterested reflection.

Cartesian ontology, which takes as its starting point the self-contained subject confronting a domain of isolable objects, assumes that things are initially encountered in their pure occurrentness, or brute facticity. The perceiver has first to make sense of these occurrent entities – to render them intelligible – by categorising them, and assigning them to meaningful functions, before they can be made available for use.

Heidegger, however, reverses this order of priority. For a being whose primary condition of existence is that of dwelling in the world, things are initially encountered by their availableness, as already integrated into a set of practices for ‘coping’ or getting by. To reveal their occurrent properties, things have to be rendered unintelligible by stripping away the significance they derive from contexts of ordinary use.”

"The real 'movement' of the sciences takes place when their basic concepts undergo a more less radical revision which is transparent to itself."

“This, of course, is the explicit object of the natural science, which seeks to describe and explain a world which the rest of use are preoccupied with living in. Yet the scientist, like everyone else, is a being-in-the-world, and scientific practice, as any other skilled activity, draws unselfconsciously on the available. Thus even science, however detached and theoretical it may be, takes place against a background of involved activity. The total disengagement of the subject from the world, from which Cartesianism charts a process of building up from the occurrent to the available, is therefore a pure fiction which can only be reached by extrapolating to the point of absurdity a progressive reduction from the available to the occurrent.”

My interpretation is that ‘transparency’ is when things in the world don’t stand out as ‘other’ but are homologous to our sense of being. Regarding science I assume ‘transparency to itself’ refers to the realization that objective science is only appropriate to its own context and transparency is reached through realization of this fact. So a movement is made when, for example, science compares and contrasts itself with arts.
Sorry about the long quote – Ingold explains it far better than I ever could.
I welcome your criticisms and the ability to learn:

Kant (I think?!) said that we see the world as we expect it. The metaphor used was "a smoky glass". Taking PJs notion of "clearing the glass", it seems sensible to me that the passage means "A question cannot be answered until we no longer blind ourselves with our presumptions of neither the question, nor the answer".

Transparency in the sense that we do not presume to see an answer, which in reality hides the real question.

(just in case this is of any help..)

Haven't had the opportunity to respond to this thread yet. Fleeting time and all that.

However, with the latest post, an opportunity presents itself to briefly interject some small portions of my own ruminations upon the subject.


Existentialism/phenomenalism bears a line of descent which travels from Descartes through Kant to Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, etc...

I have begun to think that transparency does relate to Kant's noumenal reality in some fashion.

Ironic in that phenomenalism rejects the noumenal world in favor of the phenomenal. And yet, the philosophies are inextricably intertwined in many ways.

The thing in itself.
Transparency must relate to this in some fashion.


I hate how ambiguous certain philosophies are.

YES.... like governments... we need more transparency in philosophy... hehe