Abstract
This chapter revisits Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, as well as my earlier disagreement with Mulhall on how to read those remarks, but its focus is on Wittgenstein’s general approach—as exemplified in his remarks on aspects—to the elucidation and dissolution of philosophical difficulties. In the second part of the chapter, I apply that approach, as I understand it, to Mulhall’s proposed ‘dissolution’ of the ‘paradox’ of aspect-dawning. This critical engagement with Mulhall was my first sustained attempt to practice what I then thought of as Wittgensteinian therapy, and later also came to think of as a form of ordinary language philosophy.
Note added 2019: As noted in the Introduction, this paper was originally published together with a response from Stephen Mulhall (‘The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words—A Reply to Baz’, in Day, W. and Krebs, V. (eds) , Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). In preparing the paper for the present collection, I have decided not to add to it specific responses to Mulhall’s response, beyond what I say in the Introduction about how I presently see our original disagreements. I will only add that I regret the somewhat overly-combative tone of my original paper. If I were to write it today, its tone would be different.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Mulhall, ‘Seeing Aspects’, in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, ed. Hans-Johann Glock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 246–67. Mulhall’s account in this article is a somewhat abridged version of the account that he gives in Inheritance and Originality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Without denying the interest of some of the ideas that appear in the book but not in the article, I have not found substantive differences between the two texts on the issues that concern me in this paper—namely, how Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception are supposed to work and what sort of understanding they pursue.
- 2.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 253–4.
- 3.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 254.
- 4.
Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)
- 5.
Chapter One in this collection.
- 6.
‘Seeing Aspects,’ 246--7.
- 7.
I should actually have said ‘ten pages’, because for the sake of clarity and simplicity I am going to focus almost exclusively on the first part of Mulhall’s article. The other two parts address the connection between ‘seeing aspects’ and ‘experiencing the meaning of a word’, and the ‘seeing of aspects’ in human beings. In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ I say what I find problematic in Mulhall’s idea that ‘psychological’ concepts are ‘aspect concepts’; and the idea that our normal perceptual relation to familiar words may aptly be characterized as ‘continuous aspect perception’ seems to me problematic for essentially the same reasons. At the same time, however, and as noted in the introduction, though I still think that Mulhall’s account of aspect perception does not accomplish what it sets out to accomplish—namely, ‘dissolving’ the ‘paradox’ of aspect perception—I now also think that he was onto something true (even if not true of, or to, Wittgenstein) in his Heideggerian interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects.
- 8.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 254.
- 9.
At least when it comes to pictures and drawings, to human expression, and to words—though, following what he takes to be a lead from Heidegger, Mulhall has wanted to extend the term ‘aspects’ to refer to basically everything we see.
- 10.
Part of my contention in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, against some prominent readers of the remarks on aspects, including Mulhall, is that while they heed Wittgenstein’s repeated urging and take the peculiar forms of expression with which we give voice to the experience of noticing an aspect as the outward criteria of the ‘inner’ experience, they then neglect almost entirely the situation(s) of speech, the context(s), the language-game(s), within which those expressions have their life, or meaning. To attain clarity with respect to one of our concepts of experience requires more than merely reminding ourselves of a particular isolated form of words that we use to give voice to our experience. We need also to remind ourselves of ‘the occasion and purpose’ of these phrases (PPF, 311). ‘It is necessary to get down to the application’ (PPF, 165), to ask oneself ‘What does anyone tell me by saying “Now I see it as…”? What consequences has this information? What can I do with it?’ (PPF, 176).
- 11.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 246.
- 12.
Note added 2019: As I’ve already indicated in the Introduction, though I still believe, and try to show in the papers collected here, that commentators on Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect have gotten themselves into various types of confusion because they have been insufficiently attentive to the Wittgensteinian grammar of what he calls ‘aspects’, I now think that Wittgenstein’s—and, at the time, my own—mistrust of phenomenology may also be philosophically problematic. This is the main topic of ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’. I now believe that the two approaches should complement and inform each other.
- 13.
And yet I should say that the commentaries I’m familiar with, including Mulhall’s, feature very few of the above ‘concepts of experience’, and tend to overlook, or downplay, important differences between the concepts they do discuss.
- 14.
In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ I say what I understand Wittgenstein to be talking about in the one place in the Investigations in which he talks about ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’. Wittgenstein, I there propose, is using ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ to refer to something far more specific, and far less central for him, than what Mulhall has made it out to be—namely, to the state of someone who sees an ambiguous figure—the duck-rabbit, for example—but is unaware of its ambiguity. If we then asked him, ‘What’s that?’, he would simply say ‘a duck’ (say); and then it would make sense for us, who know that the picture can be seen in more than one way, to say about him that he is continuously seeing the duck aspect of the duck-rabbit. Such a person, Wittgenstein says, would simply be describing, or reporting, his perception (PPF, 121 and 128), whereas about what he calls ‘seeing-as’ he says that it is ‘not part of perception’ (PPF, 137). I make this point in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ by saying that even the ‘aspect-blind’—defined by Wittgenstein as those who lack the capacity to see something as something—should be perfectly capable of ‘continuously seeing an aspect’, thus understood.
- 15.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 253.
- 16.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 255.
- 17.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 253–4.
- 18.
Note added 2019: in the discussion that follows, I rely on Wittgenstein’s distinction between a conceptual treatment of a (conceptual) difficulty and a causal explanation of a particular sort of experience (PPF 114–15). I still find that pressing Mulhall on this issue was both useful—since it still seems to me that he was unclear on the sort of account he was offering—and fair, given that he saw and presented himself as interpreting Wittgenstein. But, as noted in the introduction to this book, I now believe that to the extent that Mulhall was moving toward a phenomenological understanding of aspect dawning—which is neither (primarily) conceptual nor (primarily) causal—he was moving in what I now regard as the right direction.
- 19.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 254.
- 20.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 251.
- 21.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 253.
- 22.
Wittgenstein does distinguish between seeing (in the sense in which we see an aspect when it strikes us) and merely knowing—that is, knowing without seeing (cf. PPF, 169, 175, 180, and 192). Unlike Mulhall, however, I don’t take such distinctions that Wittgenstein makes in the course of his investigation to be ‘technical’ (‘Seeing Aspects’, 246; see also ‘The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words’, 257). Here, as elsewhere, Wittgenstein seems to me to be eliciting our everyday, ordinary criteria, as a way of attaining a perspicuous representation of part of our conceptual landscape.
- 23.
This second description of an aspect is taken from BB, 162. The first description is mine. I invite the reader to look at that drawing and see the two aspects. It should be noted that I’m not saying, nor meaning to suggest, that every time we see a face—whether drawn or flesh and blood—we see it as having some particular, determinate, expression. As already indicated the Sect. 3.2, I actually think that this widespread idea makes no clear sense; and in ‘Aspects of Perception’ and ‘Motivational Indeterminacy ’, I will propose that the picture underlying the idea is phenomenologically false.
- 24.
Note added 2019: see also ‘The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words’, 265.
- 25.
Note added 2019: The point I’m making here seems to me now to be related to Merleau-Ponty’s basic objection to empiricist, mechanistic accounts of how particular perceived sense, or physiognomy, arises in our perception, on the empiricist assumption that what we really perceive are ‘sensations’, or atoms of sensation, that may only relate to each other externally. (I will elaborate on the distinction between internal and external relations in ‘Aspects of Perception’.) The empiricist proposes that ‘memories’, or previously formed ‘associations’, mechanistically cause us to unify what’s given to us ‘through the senses’ in one way rather than another. Merleau-Ponty’s objection to this is that if we weren’t already perceiving some particular significant whole, or physiognomy, there would be nothing to invoke, or prompt, one set of associations—the ones, namely, that are supposed to explain why we unified the sensibly given this rather than that way—rather than some other. So the empiricist appeal to memory and association ends up presupposing the very thing it was meant to explain (see PP, 15–21/15–22).
- 26.
‘Seeing Aspects’, 254.
- 27.
Note added 2019: This is essentially the view that in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, I attribute to the person I’m calling ‘the aspect denier’.
- 28.
They are also, by Mulhall’s own light, nothing like the criteria that the Wittgensteinian investigation is designed to elicit. For they are criteria for the application of (what according to Mulhall are) technical terms (‘Seeing Aspects’, 248), which means that rather than articulating and bringing out what has already, tacitly, been guiding us in the use of a word we have already mastered, they are supposed to help us see what Wittgenstein means by that word in giving his account of aspects.
- 29.
Having said that, I should add that the phenomenon of aspect-dawning does reveal a most intimate connection between how we see things and how we, as it were, bodily take them up into our field of potential engagement. This connection will be explored in chapters Five through Eight. My point here is just that the connection between our (embodied) attitude to things and the aspects under which we see them is not conceptual, and that overlooking or obscuring the conceptual distinction between the two is bound to send us in wrong directions when we search for a phenomenological understanding of their connection.
- 30.
See ‘Seeing Aspects’, 262.
- 31.
Note added 2019: In ‘Aspects of Perception’ and ‘Motivational Indeterminacy ’ I will propose that the dawning of an aspect is best understood as the necessarily passing introduction of (relative) perceptual determinacy—a momentary, more or less creative, more or less willed, perceptual taking hold of something in a particular way.
- 32.
I say ‘some cases’, because Mulhall’s account appears to be particularly tailored to pictures and drawings, and possibly to representational objects more generally, whereas it should be quite clear (even if we went just by Wittgenstein’s own examples) that aspect-dawning—roughly characterized as the experience expressible by ‘I see that the thing has not changed and yet I see it differently’—can happen virtually anywhere and with anything, and specifically also in contexts where no relation of depiction or representation between one (sort of) thing and another holds. Consider just the case of seeing—being perceptually struck by—the likeness of one face (or place or situation) to another. How are we to fit Mulhall’s ‘dissolution of the paradox of aspect-dawning’ to that case? I really do not know.
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Baz, A. (2020). On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_3
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