Abstract
This chapter continues the work of ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’ of articulating an understanding of Wittgenstein’s approach to the understanding and dissolution of philosophical difficulties, and situates in that context Wittgenstein’s invocation of aspect perception, or ‘seeing as’, in the Brown Book, in connection with his discussion of the tendency to conflate the ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ uses of ‘a quite particular’. The chapter also argues for the grammatical and phenomenological inseparability of the aspect from the object that ‘has’ it, or from the object that is perceived ‘under it’, and in this way prepares the ground for the argument, in later chapters, against the tendency to identify Wittgensteinian aspects with, or in terms of, concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
I take this on the authority of Michael Nedo from the Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge.
- 2.
For the idea that Wittgenstein had ‘views’ about aspect perception which can be ‘formulated’ and ‘justified’, see Mulhall, ‘Aspect Perception’, 246. I do not mean to make a fuss about some particular choice of words; and of course ‘view’ can be used in any number of different ways, and mean any number of different things. The point, which is elaborated in ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, is rather to contest the common tendency to force on Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects (as well as on other topics) a unity that is foreign to ‘their nature’ (PI, preface), and therefore to misconstrue the philosophical work undertaken in them.
- 3.
With the exception of the essentially descriptive understanding of human perception presented in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (and the phenomenological tradition on which it draws), in which many of the above perceptual phenomena, together with many others not discussed by Wittgenstein, are recognized and elucidated within a comprehensive understanding of human perception.
- 4.
Note added 2019: As I note in the introduction, I now believe that the dawning of aspects does reveal something basic and important about (normal) human perception—though I still cannot see how what it reveals may aptly or usefully be thought of as ‘continuous aspect perception’. ‘Aspects of Perception’ is where I begin to elaborate on this issue.
- 5.
As has been proposed by Stephen Mulhall Paul Johnston. I discuss Mulhall’s and Johnston’s interpretations of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’.
- 6.
I use quotation marks here so as not to pre-judge what exactly ‘seeing’ and ‘aspect’ come to in this case.
- 7.
The idea that there is an ‘inherent paradoxicality’ which for Wittgenstein ‘defines’ the dawning of an aspect is the point of departure for Mulhall’s interpretation (see, for example, ‘Seeing Aspects’, 247ff.). Mulhall’s aim is to show us how this inherent paradoxicality can be ‘dissolved’ (by reminding ourselves of our basic and typical relation to pictures and possibly also to all of the other objects of our world). I take issue both with the details of Mulhall’s ‘dissolution of the paradox’ as well as with its general thrust in ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’.
- 8.
There may still be interesting things to become clearer about with respect to that experience phenomenologically, such as how it is affected by our bodily comportment toward the object, and more generally by our habitual ways of seeing and responding to things, or how the perception of an object under an aspect affects, and is affected by, the perception of its background, and so on.
- 9.
Witness Wittgenstein’s saying to Maurice Drury, not long before his death and after many years of thinking about aspect perception: ‘Now try and say what is involved in seeing something as something; it is not easy. These thoughts I am now having are as hard as granite’ (quoted by Ray Monk in The Duty of Genius (Vintage, 1990), p. 537). He, apparently, did not find that the remarks composing section xi, or indeed all of the remarks he had written up to that point, had laid to rest all that was puzzling and difficult to see clearly about aspect perception.
- 10.
Wittgenstein there identifies aspects with facts, and suggests that to see each of the two aspects of the Necker, is just to see a different fact. It is not entirely clear what the two facts are supposed to be in this case, and, in any case, to see (recognize) a fact—that is, I suppose, to see that such and such—is not the same as seeing an aspect. Facts do not eclipse each other as aspects normally do; and one could know all of the facts pertaining to the Necker, including even the fact that it could be seen as going one way and also another, and yet fail to see the cube as going one way or another. I’ll come back in later papers to this important piece of evidence for the difference between the world as objectively known and the world as perceived.
- 11.
A line of approach to the remarks on aspects that was first proposed by Debra Aidun in ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Method and Aspect-Seeing’ (Philosophical Investigations 5, (1982): 106–115), explored later at much greater length by Judith Jenova in Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (London: Routledge, 1995), and which later received a quite insightful twist in Steven Affeldt’s ‘On the Difficulty of Seeing Aspects and the “Therapeutic” Reading of Wittgenstein’ (in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Day, W. and Krebs, V. (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- 12.
A line of interpretation proposed by Eddy Zemach (see The Reality of Meaning and the Meaning of ‘Reality’, Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1992; and ‘Meaning, the Experience of Meaning and the Meaning-Blind in Wittgenstein’s Late Philosophy’, The Monist, 78:4, (1995), 480–495).
- 13.
In line with Rush Rhees’s preface to the Blue and Brown Books.
- 14.
In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein seems to be using these two terms interchangeably.
- 15.
See, in this connection, Cora Diamond’s masterful discussion in ‘How Long Is the Meter Stick in Paris?’ (in Wittgenstein in America, McCarthy, T. and Stidd, S. (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, esp. 109ff).
- 16.
And if we wanted to insist that there was in fact a common feature to all of the instances of ‘being guided’, and proposed that it was, say, a certain carefulness with which we attended to what guided us (PI, 173), or a certain kind of deliberation with which we were following the signs (PI, 174), then we would find ourselves running once again into the above two difficulties.
- 17.
In ‘Aspects of Perception’, I further suggest that both the duck aspect and the rabbit aspect of the duck-rabbit each have a quite particular expression, or physiognomy, that goes beyond anything that ‘duck’ or ‘rabbit’ could plausibly be taken to capture.
- 18.
What we have here, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is a perceived ‘meaning which clings to certain contents’ (PP, 147/148).
- 19.
For a refreshing move in the opposite direction—in the case of ‘meaning-blindness’—though one very different from the one I attempt in what follows, see Ed Minar’s ‘The Philosophical Significance of Meaning Blindness’, in William Day and Victor Krebs eds., Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- 20.
Note added 2019: As already noted, I now think that the best answer to this question is phenomenological, and that Schneider—the patient of Kurt Goldstein’s and Adhémar Gelb’s that Merleau-Ponty discusses extensively in the Phenomenology—is an aspect-blind, as characterized by Wittgenstein: Schneider cannot see something as something, and cannot make sense of the invitation to try to do so. But I cannot see how the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation of ‘aspect-blindness’ could, by itself, lead us to Schneider’s symptomatology, or to his abnormal way of ‘being-in-the-world’. What Schneider lacks, Merleau-Ponty says, is the ability to creatively, playfully, project perceivable sense onto a given situation (cf. PP, 109–112/111–114). Schneider perceives significant wholes, like the normal perceiver; but he cannot intentionally enact ones: the phenomenal world lacks, for him, the plasticity it has for the normal perceiver.
- 21.
Note added 2019: The position of the ‘aspect-denier’ was inspired by Dan Dennett (though I do not claim to have succeeded in capturing his considered position on this matter). It should be noted, however, that it also bears close affinity to the way in which Charles Travis has proposed that we understand aspect-perception. Travis’s account of aspect perception will be discussed in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’ and in ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’.
- 22.
One of which is that here the object is not ambiguous in the way that the duck-rabbit (or even the triangle) is, and the aspect that dawns cannot plausibly be thought of as competing with, and as having replaced, something else that may sensibly be called ‘an aspect’. This has important implications for the prevailing tendency, which I discussed in ‘What the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, and will come back to in ‘Aspects of Perception’, to propose, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that our normal (and continuous) relation to what we see is that of seeing it under some aspect or another.
- 23.
This is what led me, in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, to liken the seeing of an aspect to the seeing of beauty, especially as characterized by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment.
- 24.
This remains true when we come to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigation, and understanding, of aspects, which may still not aptly be described as proceeding on the basis of ‘introspection’ (see PP, 57/57–8).
- 25.
Kant, I., Critique of the Power of Judgment (hereafter ‘CJ’), Guyer, P. and Mathews, E. (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press (2000), academy page number 314.
- 26.
Wittgenstein says in this connection that he once looked with a friend at beds of pansies, and both he and his friend were impressed by each bed in turn. His friend then said: ‘What a variety of color patterns, and each says something’, and Wittgenstein adds that this is what he himself wished to say, without dismissing as illusory that moment and that way of expressing oneself (BB, 178). And compare things that he is reported by a student to have said in a lecture given a few years after the composition of the Brown Book:
One of the most interesting points which the question of not being able to describe is connected with, [is that] the impression which a certain verse or bar in music gives you is indescribable. “I don’t know what it is… Look at this transition. …What is it?…” I think you would say it gives you experiences which can’t be described. First of all it is, of course, not true that whenever we hear a piece of music or a line of poetry which impresses us greatly, we say: “This is indescribable”. But it is true that again and again we do feel inclined to say: I can’t describe my experience”. I have in mind a case that saying one is incapable of describing comes from [my emphasis] being intrigued and wanting to describe, asking oneself: “What is this? What’s he doing, wanting to do here?—Gosh, If I could only say what he’s doing here.” (LC, 37).
- 27.
In writing this paper I was very helpfully challenged, provoked, and informed by Dan Dennett.
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Baz, A. (2020). Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_4
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