Abstract
The relation between sight and insight poses a set of problems concerning the relation between the visible and the invisible or, between the absent and the present. The dense intertwinement between seeing and ways of seeing, as well as of sight and insight, consists in the proximity of the sense of sight to the mental: When a child sees that they have angered their parents, they do not need to decode sensible evidence, but rather they see and understand at the same time. The infant thus performs an act of sense disclosure in the very act of seeing. In order to be able to explain such phenomena, we must assume that the likeness of the two terms cannot be treated as mere metaphors but must instead be taken literally.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein knew this figure from the works of the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, who publishes his reflections on it in 1899. The double image was first printed in 1892 in the weekly ‘Fliegende Blätter.’ See Kihlstrom (2018).
- 2.
In his commentary to Wittgenstein’s reflections, Thorsten Jantschek (1997, p. 311) writes that thought involves making an assumption beyond the seen. If it were so simple, the seen would have to be susceptible to a description independent of interpretation: “When we interpret something we build an assumption, a hypothesis about something given.” However, no image exists independently of being interpreted as either a rabbit or a duck. Hence we are better served with “the insight that thinking and seeing are always already related to one-another and this relationship manifests in seeing-as” (ibid., p. 319).
- 3.
L. Wittgenstein: “How much we are doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is persuading people to change their style of thinking” (Wittgenstein 2007, p. 28).
- 4.
Judith Genova (1995) reads Wittgenstein’s whole thinking as methodically applied aspect-seeing, to the purpose of seeing otherwise than usual.
- 5.
Ralf Konersmann (1991) has played through similar notions regarding the metaphor of the mirror. The fugitiveness of the term makes it an appropriate image of the intangibility of a subjectivity that eludes itself.
- 6.
On the uninterrupted relation between understanding and interpretation, see W. Hogrebe (1996).
- 7.
I avoid this expression as far as possible in order not to fall back into the division between physical and mental seeing. The point here is, however, to refer to a term responsible for the entire tradition of the idea of the given. It is indicative of the intricacies of the problem that even authors like Sartre and McGinn use the term, although they postulate the cooperation of the mental and the visual in practice.
- 8.
See Sect. 1 in Chapter 7.
- 9.
Mike Sandbothe (2001, p. 88) argues convincingly for this when he writes, “although realistic picture-copy theories and anti-realistic constructivist theories apply different criteria of adequation and presuppose different concepts of reality they remain in the same paradigm of representation aimed at correspondence.”
- 10.
Quotes from this edition, in the following abbreviated to VI.
- 11.
Merleau-Ponty’s (1968, p. 139) meditations become speculative with the, in my opinion somewhat obscure, notion of the “chair”—flesh with which he attempts to define the common texture of the visible and the invisible. Flesh designates an “element” like water or air “between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.”
- 12.
B. Waldenfels (2000, p. 310) illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s concept as follows: “Originary seeing is like a stone thrown into water, not a light bulb getting switched on.” The image of circles cast in water is also used by Humboldt to explain the effect of speech, which seldom generates a single meaning but rather resonates in polyvalence (see Humboldt 1973, pp. 24, 58, and passim).
- 13.
For the further implications of negativity in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, see Gamm (1994).
- 14.
Peter Geimer (2002) has described this state of affairs using the example of technical errors in photography, which undermine the paradigm established for the medium by Barthes.
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Schuermann, E. (2019). In Seeing Beyond Seeing. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_5
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