Abstract
The Introduction describes the main respects in which my thinking about aspect perception, and about Wittgenstein’s remarks on the subject, has changed over the years. What has changed most significantly is not my reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks, but rather the extent to which I find the treatment of aspect perception in those remarks satisfying. While I still find useful and fecund Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation of what he calls ‘aspects’, I have come to think that the experience of aspect perception also calls for a phenomenological understanding that situates that experience within the broader context of our essentially-embodied, pre-reflective and pre-conceptual perceptual experience of the world. And the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation, I now believe, suffers from significant limitations in this respect.
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Notes
- 1.
Mulhall, I should note, did not think of himself as offering a theory of aspect dawning (and aspect perception). He took himself to be offering a Wittgensteinian dissolution of an apparent puzzle by way of the deliberate assembling of ‘reminders’. For reasons discussed in ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, I believe he was unclear about the nature of his own account.
- 2.
Note that the ‘as’ here is not the ‘as’ of ‘seeing x as y’! The phenomenal world is not an aspect, but rather is the home of all aspects, and the background against which they dawn on us.
- 3.
Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.) (Routledge, 1996), 189/195. References to the Phenomenology of Perception will henceforth be given by ‘PP’, with the page number of the pre-2002 editions of the Smith translation, followed (as in the present case) by the page number of the 2012 Donald Landes translation. I have chosen to primarily use the pre-2002 Routledge edition of Smith’s translation, while consulting, and sometimes following, the Landes translation, because the 2002 edition has many typos, and because, despite occasional imprecisions, I find the Smith translation superior to Landes’s in three important respects: it better preserves the poetic qualities of Merleau-Ponty’s French; it does not break Merleau-Ponty’s long paragraphs into shorter ones (which sometimes results in real distortion of meaning); and, in faithfulness to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of language, it translates the French ‘sens’ context-sensitively, rather than always translating it by the English ‘sense’. Another important advantage of the Smith translation is that it uses footnotes, rather than endnotes, thereby making it easier not to miss those of Merleau-Ponty’s notes that are substantive, as quite a few of them are.
- 4.
Compare Merleau-Ponty: ‘It is in terms of its intrinsic meaning and structure that the sensible world is “older” than the universe of thought […] [I]t is by borrowing from the [sensible] world structure that the universe of truth and of thought is constructed for us’ (The Visible and the Invisible, Lefort, C. (ed.), Lingis, A. (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, 12–13). The issue of how the phenomenal world relates to the objective world, or, more precisely, how the world as pre-reflectively perceived and responded to relates to the world as thought (and talked) about and understood objectively, is extremely complex and intricate, and I don’t presume to be able to give anything like a full and fully satisfying account of it. But it’s an important issue, and in papers five through eight I do what I can, at this point, to elucidate it.
- 5.
Those attempts culminated in When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 6.
The ‘much’ here is meant to allow for the possibility of ‘full-blown’ Kantian ‘actions’ that are based on objective knowledge and on reasoning. But even then, there is the question of what, at the end of the day, grounds the knowledge and motivates the reasoning; and here, I submit, we come once again to the phenomenal world and to our pre-reflective response to it.
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Baz, A. (2020). Introduction. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_1
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