The phantom of transparency

I will discuss the status of the implicit and the explicit in science, mostly in logic1. I will especially denunciate, expose a deep and pregnant unsaid of scientific activity : the subliminal idea that, beyond immediate perception, could exist a world, a layer of reading, completely intelligible, i.e., explicit and immediate. What I will call the fantasy (or phantom, as a matter of joke) of transparency. Transparency has little to do with poetical ideas (the key of dreams, etc.). It is indeed a unidimensional underside of the universe, not always monstrous, but anyway grotesque. Think of this Axis of Evil supposedly responsible of all the misery of the world, or of these unbelievable minority studies which expose the carefully concealed truths : for feminine studies Shakespeare was a woman, for african studies he was an Arab, the Cheikh Zubayr ! Nevertheless, everything starts from a correct premise, to go beyond mere apparences ; but, to do so, one imagines an A other side of the mirror B whose delimitations are neat, precise, without the slightest ambiguity : the world is seen as a rebus of which it suffices to find the key. In the transparent world, everything is so immediate, legible, that one does no longer need to ask questions, i.e., no longer need to think. This putting in question of the very idea of question leads to the worse idiocies : if answers are so easy to access, is it because God amuses Himself with presenting us an encoded world