Abstract
This chapter proposes that Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’ belongs in a region of his thought that gave him real trouble in his final years, and concerns what may generally be described as the background conditions of sense. It proposes that the main challenge, for Wittgenstein, is doing justice to our perceptual relation to those background conditions, and that what he needs, but is barred by his general approach and method of grammatical investigation from properly appreciating and utilizing, are the insights afforded by phenomenology, as glimpsed, but sometimes also occluded, in his remarks on aspects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Must We Mean What We Say?, 52, my emphasis.
- 2.
This is one central lesson of ‘The Cogito’ chapter in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
- 3.
I elaborate on this difference in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’.
- 4.
It should be noted that in the third Critique , Kant clearly recognizes the possibility, and reality, of non-conceptual but nonetheless inter-subjectively sharable, perceivable unity and sense. It’s the possibility, and reality, of what he calls ‘beauty’.
- 5.
A similar idea may be found in Frege (cf. ‘The Thought’, Mind 65 (1956): 309).
- 6.
Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 249.
- 7.
This last passage strikingly echoes Emerson who wrote, almost a hundred years earlier, in a passage that also seems to be responding critically to Kant, ‘I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms is not the world I think’ (‘Experience’, in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 491).
- 8.
In Selected Writings. Baldwin, T. (ed.). (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- 9.
A recent expression of this empiricist presupposition may be found in Block’s ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’. In response to the question whether we can see New College (for example), Block proposes that there is ‘primary seeing’, in which what we see must be a ‘“visual object”, i.e. an object that is picked out by a demonstrative element in a percept’, and ‘secondary seeing’, which ‘involves hybrids of visual attributives and concepts applied to objects of primary seeing and complexes of them in states that put together perception with perceptual judgment’ (566, my emphasis). The implied claim seems to be that only judgment, or the application of concepts, allows us to move beyond what causally impinges on our perceptual system.
- 10.
As argued in ‘Aspects of Perception’.
- 11.
Creators of comics know that it is possible to change dramatically the perceived expression of a drawn face—however realistically it is drawn—just by changing what the character is given to say, or think.
- 12.
The following passage from The Visible and the Invisible is perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s boldest expression of this idea:
[T]his red is what it is only by connecting up with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of Professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red is literally not the same as it appears in one constellation or in another, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned 25 years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées (132).
- 13.
See Lewis, D., ‘Index, Context, and Content’, in Philosophy and Grammar , Kanger, S. and Öhman, S. (eds.), (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), and ‘Elusive Knowledge’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74: 549-67; Travis, C., The Uses of Sense (New York: Oxford, 1989), and ‘Pragmatics’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Hale, B. and Wright, C. (eds.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Carston, R., Thoughts and Utterances (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); and Recanati, F., Literal Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 14.
See in particular Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.
- 15.
I argue for this in Chapters Four and Five of When Words are Called For and Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method.
- 16.
Compare Merleau-Ponty: ‘Even if I knew nothing of rods and cones, I should realize that it is necessary to put the surroundings in abeyance the better to see the object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure, because to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it, and because objects form a system in which one cannot show itself without concealing others. More precisely, the inner horizon of an object cannot become an object without the surrounding objects becoming a horizon…’ (PP, 67-8/70). And in a working note for The Visible and the Invisible he writes this: ‘To be conscious=to have a figure on a ground—one cannot go back any further’ (191).
- 17.
I discuss that tendency, and give examples, in Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method. This way of thinking about the context of an utterance is perhaps most explicit in Lewis and his followers. Though Lewis came to despair of the possibility of actually being able to list all of the features of the context of every utterance that affect its sense—he called such features ‘indices’—and to say how each of them contributes to the utterance’s sense, he never doubted that such a list may in principle be had (see his ‘Index, Context, and Content’, in Kanger, S. and Öhman, S. (eds.), Philosophy and Grammar (Dordrecht: Reidel (1980), 79–100).
- 18.
This is also how Sperber and Wilson propose we should think about the relation between the understanding of an utterance and the context of that understanding (Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986/1995)).
- 19.
For a compelling argument that some level of creativity is necessary for the acquisition and use of a natural language, see Stanley Cavell, ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language’, in The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
- 20.
See Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 52.
- 21.
See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 32.
- 22.
The Claim of Reason, 183.
- 23.
This basic point and its significance have recently been emphasized by Travis, as against the wide-spread tendency to attribute to perceptual experience conceptual ‘content’ (cf. Perception: 187 and 269).
- 24.
The Paris Lectures. Koestenbaum, P. (trans.) (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 14, my emphasis.
- 25.
The Paris Lectures, 15, my emphasis; and see also The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Carr. D. (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 119 and 144.
- 26.
In a working note for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty similarly remarks that ‘the temptation to construct perception out of the perceived, to construct our contact with the world out of what it has taught us about the world, is quasi-irresistible’ (156). And then he adds that ‘It is the inverse route we have to follow; it is starting from perception and its variants, described as they present themselves, that we shall try to understand how the universe of knowledge could be constructed’ (157).
- 27.
Nomy Eilan has recently proposed, and has on good evidence taken Wittgenstein to propose, that seeing in the first sense comes first in the order of perception as well—that the Wittgensteinian aspect merely ‘overlays the physical object, as seen, and its apparent shape and colours’ (‘On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler’. Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy 2 (2013): 9).
- 28.
See Gestalt Psychology : An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1947), 100-1, and 108. My aim here is not to defend Köhler—I might be reading him too charitably (by my lights)—but to underscore the limitations of Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation.
- 29.
Köhler gives evidence for that in Gestalt Psychology , 108. For more recent empirical evidence, see Baylis, G. C. and Driver, J., ‘One-sided edge assignments in vision: figure-ground segmentation and attention to objects’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 4 (1995): 140–146; and Ned Block, ‘Attention and Mental Paint’, Philosophical Issues 20 (2010): 23-63.
- 30.
See also Gestalt Psychology, 107.
- 31.
Cf. Gestalt Psychology, 55. In the Appendix to The Crisis of Method, I argue that while the first use of ‘see’ Wittgenstein describes is, grammatically, primary, in the sense that it is acquired first and that you couldn’t acquire the second use Wittgenstein describes—that is, the ‘seeing’ of aspects—if you didn’t already master the first, the second use of ‘see’ refers us to what is phenomenologically primary, primary in the order of perception.
- 32.
Must We Mean What We Say?, 91.
- 33.
See Perception, 102 and 411; see also ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, in Wittgenstein and Perception. Campbell, M. and O’Sullivan, M. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2015), 47.
- 34.
The Phenomenology of Perception is full of such descriptions: for example, when Merleau-Ponty describes the human subject as sustaining round about her ‘a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships, and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be exploited’ (PP, 129/131), or when he talks of the phenomenal body as ‘rising toward the world’ (PP, 75/78), or talks of the hand when used for touching something as ‘shoot[ing] across space to reveal the external object…’ (PP, 92/94), or talks of our phenomenal body, when we lean with our hands against a desk, as trailing behind our hands ‘like the tail of a comet’ (PP, 100/102). As I go on to note in the text, it is of the essence of phenomenology that the phenomenologist will need to use his or her words creatively, as Merleau-Ponty does in such passages.
- 35.
I say more about Merleau-Ponty’s method of investigation in the Appendix to The Crisis of Method. Importantly, Merleau-Ponty’s investigation proceeds on the basis of careful examination of a wealth of empirical findings concerning normal and abnormal perception and behavior—the sort of examination that is almost entirely absent from Wittgenstein’s later work.
- 36.
The Claim of Reason , 189.
- 37.
Köhler , it should be noted in this connection, proposes that in order to do justice to our perception we would need new concepts, such as the phenomenal concepts of ‘belonging together’ and ‘organization’ (cf. Gestalt Psychology , 80). And Merleau-Ponty, whose creative use of words in the Phenomenology of Perception I have already noted, speaks in The Visible and the Invisible of the phenomenological ‘effort that uses the significations of words to express, beyond themselves, our mute contact with the things, when they are not yet things said’ (38).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baz, A. (2020). Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38624-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38625-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)