The Significance of Aspect Perception : Bringing the Phenomenal World into View [1st ed.] 9783030386245, 9783030386252

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction (Avner Baz)....Pages 1-11
What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects? (Avner Baz)....Pages 13-34
On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects? (Avner Baz)....Pages 35-52
Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty (Avner Baz)....Pages 53-70
The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar Between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell (Avner Baz)....Pages 71-91
Aspects of Perception (Avner Baz)....Pages 93-122
Motivational Indeterminacy (Avner Baz)....Pages 123-146
Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying (Avner Baz)....Pages 147-167
Bringing the Phenomenal World into View (Avner Baz)....Pages 169-196
Back Matter ....Pages 197-201

Citation preview

Nordic Wittgenstein Studies Series Editor: Niklas Forsberg

Avner Baz

The Significance of Aspect Perception Bringing the Phenomenal World into View

Nordic Wittgenstein Studies Volume 5 Series Editor Niklas Forsberg, Centre for Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic Editorial Board Members Sorin Bangu, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Marin Gustafsson, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Lars Hertzberg, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Kjell S. Johannessen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Oskari Kuusela, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Yrsa Neuman, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Bernt Österman, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Alois Pichler, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Simo Säätelä, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, University of South Denmark, Odense, Denmark Thomas Wallgren, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Cato Wittusen, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway Advisory Editors Maija Aalto-Heinilä, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland Hanne Appelqvist, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Avner Baz, Tufts University, Medford, USA Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel Steen Brock, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway David Cockburn, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK James Conant, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA Cora Diamond, Professor Emeritus, Charlottesville, VA, USA Alberto Emiliani, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Juliet Floyd, Boston University, Boston, USA Gottfried Gabriel, Professor Emeritus, Jena, Germany Dinda L. Gorlée, The Hague, The Netherlands Herbert Hrachovec, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Allan Janik, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria James Klagge, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA Michael Kremer, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA Camilla Kronqvist, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland David Levy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Denis McManus, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Felix Mühlhölzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Jean Philippe Narboux, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France Joachim Schulte, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK Stephen Mulhall, Oxford, UK Antonia Soulez, Paris, France David G Stern, University of Iowa, Iowa, USA Nuno Venturinha, Lisbon, Portugal David E. Wellbery, Chicago, USA Edward Witherspoon, Colgate University, New York, USA

The series publishes high-quality studies of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work and philosophy. It is affiliated with The Nordic Wittgenstein Society, The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen and The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki. The series welcomes any first rank study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, biography or work, and contributions in the subject areas of philosophy and other human and social studies (including philology, linguistics, cognitive science and others) that draw upon Wittgenstein’s work. It also invites studies that demonstrate the philosophical relevance of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass as well as purely philological or literary studies of the Nachlass. Each submission to the series, if found eligible by the series editor, is peer reviewed by the editorial board and independent experts. The series accepts submissions in English of approximately 80 000 – 125 000 words. For further information (about how to submit a proposal, formatting etc.), please contact: [email protected]. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13863

Avner Baz

The Significance of Aspect Perception Bringing the Phenomenal World into View

Avner Baz Tufts University Medford, MA, USA

ISSN 2520-1514     ISSN 2520-1522 (electronic) Nordic Wittgenstein Studies ISBN 978-3-030-38624-5    ISBN 978-3-030-38625-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: The cover makes use of Wittgenstein Nachlass MS 115, page 118. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge and the University of Bergen have kindly permitted the use of this picture. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The eight papers collected here were written over the past 20 years. The publication of this collection is therefore an opportunity to express my gratitude for all of the philosophical friendships that have left their marks on these papers and to acknowledge philosophical debts, more or less in the order in which they were incurred. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Stanley Cavell, to whose memory I dedicate this book, for his characterization, in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” of the grammar of judgments of beauty and its affinity to the grammar of the philosophical appeal to “what we say when,” for exemplifying a way of doing philosophy that—just like judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant—is at once inseparable from its particular occasion and universal in its insights and appeal, and for much, much else; Eli Friedlander, my MA thesis advisor at Tel-Aviv University, for introducing me to Cavell’s work and for early conversations on Kant and Wittgenstein; Leonard Linsky, for leading the reading group of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations at the University of Chicago whose discussions prompted the writing of “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?”; Peter Hylton, my dissertation adviser at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who worked with me on that paper and whose unique combination of critical, analytic astuteness and encouragement was just what I needed; Bill Day and Victor Krebs, for inviting me to write what turned out to be “On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?” for a collection that became Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and for numerous conversations about aspects and other topics over the years; Bill, again, for generously reading closely a complete draft of this collection and giving me many penetrating comments and suggestions; Jim Conant, for helping me see, when that invitation from Bill and Victor came, that I had more to say about aspect perception than I had realized and for his friendship and support over the years; Stephen Mulhall, for graciously responding to my early criticisms of his reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects—a reading whose phenomenological truth I only later came to appreciate; Martin Gustafsson and Jean-Philippe Narboux, my philosophical brothers, for much needed moments of laughter during those early years at the University of Chicago and occasionally since then, and for many (but never enough) conversations over the v

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Acknowledgments

years—on aspects, philosophical method, language, and many other topics—that were always philosophically inspiring and humanly reassuring; Martin, again, for reading through the penultimate draft of this collection and pressing me to clarify important issues that needed to be clarified; Juliet Floyd, for many conversations on aspect perception and for her encouragement and support; Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela, for inviting me to contribute what became “Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty” to the Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford University Press, 2011); Dan Dennett, for playing the role of the “aspect denier” in conversations that led to “Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty”; Kelly Jolley, Keren Gorodeisky, and Arata Hamawaki, for organizing the conference on beauty at Auburn University for which “The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell” was first written and for many conversations on aspects, beauty, Kant, and Wittgenstein, during that conference and in subsequent years; Gary Kemp, for inviting me to contribute what became “Aspects of Perception” to Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation (Routledge, 2016) and for several conversations about that paper and aspect perception more generally; Craig Taylor and Andrew Gleeson for organizing the conference on Wittgenstein and Ethics for which “Motivational Indeterminacy” was written; Reshef Agam-Segal for responding critically to my work on aspects over the years, thereby prompting me to clarify and further develop key moments in that work; Christian Martin, for organizing the conference for which “Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying” was written and for helpful comments on that paper; Sebastian Sunday Gréve, for inviting me to contribute what became “Bringing the Phenomenal World into View” to Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and for helpful comments on that paper; Charles Travis for serving (without choosing to) as one of my main philosophical interlocutors over the years, both on the topics of language and philosophical therapy and on the topic of perception; the Philosophy Department at Tufts, for being a wonderful place to do philosophy; and the students in two seminars on perception and aspect-perception that I recently taught at Tufts: Shantel Blakely, Hanwen Hu, Lutai (Michelle) Ju, Jonatan Larsson, Michael Mitchell, Kiku Mizunu, Brad Pearson, Hannah Read, Jussi Silliman, Estelle Tcha, and Michael Veldman. Thank you also to Michael Mitchell, again, for going over the final version of the whole manuscript, making any number of good suggestions, and for helping me generate the index.

Contents

1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 2 What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?��������������������������������������������������������   13 2.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 2.2 Seeing and (Merely) Knowing ����������������������������������������������������������   17 2.3 The Grammar of Wittgenstein’s ‘Aspects’ ����������������������������������������   21 2.4 Can Wittgensteinian Aspects Be Seen Continuously? ����������������������   26 2.5 Aspects and Representation���������������������������������������������������������������   30 2.6 Soul Aspects? ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 2.7 Conclusion: The Scope of Aspect Perception������������������������������������   34 3 On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?��������������������������������������������������   35 3.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   35 3.2 Learning from Wittgenstein I: The Work of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Aspects ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   36 3.3 Learning from Wittgenstein: II����������������������������������������������������������   43 4 Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty��������������������������������������   53 4.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 4.2 Background����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 4.3 ‘A Quite Particular’����������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 4.4 The Intransitivity of Aspects��������������������������������������������������������������   63 4.5 Aspect Perception, Aspect Blindness, and Philosophical Difficulty��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 4.6 Aspect Perception and Things That Speak to Us ������������������������������   69 5 The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar Between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell����������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 5.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 5.2 Cavell’s Two Proposals; and an Important Methodological Difference Between Kant and Wittgenstein ��������������������������������������   72 5.3 Kantian Beauty and Wittgensteinian Aspects������������������������������������   76 vii

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5.4 Why Pleasure? The Allure of the System������������������������������������������   80 5.5 ‘Subjective Universal Validity’ Without Pleasure������������������������������   83 5.6 Kantian Beauty, Wittgensteinian Aspects, and the Application of Concepts����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   85 5.7 The Sound of Bedrock������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 6 Aspects of Perception��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 6.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 6.2 The Grammar and Phenomenology of Wittgensteinian Aspects ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96 6.3 Wollheim on Seeing-As����������������������������������������������������������������������  102 6.4 Aspects and Concepts������������������������������������������������������������������������  106 6.5 Aspects as Perceived Internal Relations��������������������������������������������  112 6.6 Perceptual Indeterminacy ������������������������������������������������������������������  117 6.7 Concluding Remark: Aspects and Beauty������������������������������������������  121 7 Motivational Indeterminacy���������������������������������������������������������������������  123 7.1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  124 7.2 The Assumption of Motivational Determinacy����������������������������������  125 7.3 Motivational Indeterminacy ��������������������������������������������������������������  133 7.4 An Illustration������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  142 7.5 Concluding Remark: Problems and Riddles��������������������������������������  145 8 Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  147 8.1 Introduction: ‘Form of Life’ and the Conditions of Sense����������������  147 8.2 Stage Setting: Kant and the Difficulty of Understanding Our Relation to the Worldly Conditions of Sense������������������������������  150 8.3 Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of Doing Justice to Our Relation to the Background����������������������������������������������������  153 8.4 Bringing the Phenomenal World into View by Way of Aspect Perception��������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 8.5 The Natural Attitude and the Limitations of the Wittgensteinian Grammatical Investigation ����������������������������������������������������������������  161 9 Bringing the Phenomenal World into View ��������������������������������������������  169 9.1 Introduction: Travis’s ‘Fundamental Question of Perception’ and the Repression of the Phenomenal World������������������������������������  169 9.2 Travis’s (Kantian) Answer to the ‘Fundamental’ Question����������������  175 9.3 The Difficulty Posed by Wittgensteinian Aspects to Travis’s Account of Perception������������������������������������������������������������������������  179 9.4 Sense Perception��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  187 9.5 Travis, McDowell, and Two Ways of Missing a Hole in the Wall������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  190 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197

Abbreviations for Works of Wittgenstein Cited

BB PR

The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Philosophical Grammar. R.  Rhees (ed.), A.  Kenny (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell. RPPI Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. E. M. Anscombe and G.  H. von Wright (eds.), tr. G.  E. M.  Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). RPPII Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. E. M. Anscombe and G.  H. von Wright (eds.), tr. C.  G. Luckhardt and M.  A. E.  Aue (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). CV Culture and Value, G. H. von Wright (ed.), Winch, P. (tr.) (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). Z Zettel, Anscombe, G.  E. M. and von Wright, G.  H. (eds.). Anscombe, G. E. M. (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. LWI Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). LCAPR Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett (ed.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. LWII Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). PI Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (trans.) (Malden, MA: Basil-Blackwell, 2009).1 RPMI Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, G.  H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe (eds.), G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). PPF Part II of the Philosophical Investigations.

1  The early papers in this collection, and occasionally the later papers too, use the original Anscombe translation of Parts I and II of the Investigations, as opposed to the more recent Hacker and Schulte revision of that translation. Where I saw no reason to update Anscombe’s original translation, I didn’t.

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Introduction

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. Keywords  Aspect perception · Grammatical investigation · Phenomenology

The eight papers collected here, more or less significantly revised and in some cases expanded from their originally published version, were written over a period of roughly 20 years, but in no way consecutively: in some cases, several years elapsed, and a significant amount of philosophical writing on other topics was done, between the writing of one of them and the writing of the next. They are unified by the fact that they each concern, or else draw upon in one way or another, Wittgenstein’s remarks on the perception of what he called ‘aspects’. With the exception of the first paper, the writing of each of the papers was prompted by an invitation to contribute to some conference or edited collection of papers; and each of those papers was written under the assumption that it would be my last on the subject of aspect perception. Though I was retrospectively grateful in each case for the opportunity to come back to the topic of aspect perception, in each case I came to it from a different perspective and with a different underlying concern. I had not thought of myself at the time as having, or developing, a comprehensive and unified view on aspect perception. Nor, I should hasten to add, do I believe, or have ever believed, that Wittgenstein had a comprehensive and unified view on the subject. What Wittgenstein did have is a general approach to the understanding © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_1

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and dissolution of philosophical difficulties—an approach that he sought to apply to the case of aspect perception. And what unifies the first four papers in this volume is that they were all written in (what I took to be) faithfulness to that approach and with the aim of elucidating and defending it. By contrast, in the last three papers, and largely under the inspiration of Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenology, I am moving away from Wittgenstein—both in the sense of finding less use for his remarks on aspects and sometimes finding them mistaken, and in the sense of no longer abiding by, and at certain points stressing the limitations of, (what I take to be) his general approach. The fifth paper marks a transition in this respect between the first four papers and the final three. To the still-rather-­ limited extent that I now have something like a comprehensive view of aspect perception and its significance, it is to be found in papers five through eight. And, in certain critical respects, that view goes beyond anything I have found in Wittgenstein. I still find my early interpretation of what Wittgenstein means by ‘(seeing an) aspect’, as broached in the first paper collected here and elaborated and refined in later papers, to be broadly correct; and I find my early understanding of Wittgenstein’s general philosophical approach, as broached in the second and third papers and elaborated and refined in subsequent papers, to be broadly correct as well. What has changed most significantly over the years is that I no longer find fully satisfying Wittgenstein’s understanding of aspect perception. Even more significantly, I now see certain important limitations in Wittgenstein’s general approach to the understanding and dissolution of philosophical difficulties, in particular when it comes to aspect perception and to perceptual experience more generally. By way of introduction to this collection, let me describe in some detail what I see as the most significant transformations in my thinking about aspects since I began writing on the subject almost two decades ago. One disagreement with my earlier self that encapsulates, in a way, the arc of my thinking about aspect perception over the years, has to do with the philosophical significance of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning (or lighting up, Aufleuchten) of an aspect’—the striking, momentary experience that is expressible by saying that what we see has wholly changed, even though we know (and, in another common sense of ‘see’, see) that it has not changed. More specifically, it has to do with what, if anything, the dawning of aspects may teach us about (normal) human perception in general. On this issue, I now find that I did a certain injustice in my early papers to other interpreters of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects—primarily Stephen Mulhall, but also Paul Johnston. These philosophers were arguing that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects was philosophically interesting, and interested Wittgenstein, first and foremost because it was a manifestation of some other, more basic and pervasive, perceptual relation that we have to pictures, words, stretches of human behavior, and arguably (on Mulhall’s view) to other things as well—but, at any rate, to anything that can be perceived under this or that aspect. They argued that this other perceptual relation is what Wittgenstein refers to by ‘continuous aspect perception’. The dawning of an aspect, Mulhall and Johnston proposed, may only properly be understood—its apparent ‘paradoxality’ ‘dissolved’, as Mulhall has put it—against the background of what Wittgenstein calls ‘continuous aspect perception’.

1 Introduction

3

I thought then, and still think today, that Mulhall’s and Johnston’s interpretation of Wittgenstein was forced (I argue this in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’). I also thought, and still think today, that their proposed understanding of aspect dawning—and more precisely the kind of understanding they were offering—was foreign to Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach (this is argued in the first part of ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’). And, finally, I thought then, and still think today, that even apart from whether it is faithful to Wittgenstein, their proposed understanding of aspect dawning does not work—it only gives us the illusion of understanding that experience (this is argued in the second part of ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’). I leave the detailed presentation of Mulhall’s and Johnston’s accounts, and the details of my criticisms of those accounts, to the first two papers in this volume. But, for all that, I now find that Mulhall and Johnston were onto something true, and important, in their (forced) reading of Wittgenstein. In my first serious engagement with Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, and similarly to Mulhall and Johnston, I found in those remarks more than just a ‘therapeutic’, merely ‘negative’ response to various conceptual confusions and entanglements. The experience of noticing, or being struck by, an aspect, and the ‘language-game’ of giving voice to that experience and inviting others to share it, seemed to me humanly significant and philosophically interesting; and with a certain undeniable youthful, romanticist naiveté, I tried, in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, to bring out and elucidate those significance and interest. But my Wittgensteinian skepticism of anything that has the form of a theory in philosophy, together with my—again, Wittgensteinian-inspired—failure to appreciate the depth of insight attainable by properly-carried-out phenomenology, had kept me for quite some time from recognizing the way in which the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects does reveal something about (normal) human perception.1 In a word, I now think it reveals the role we play in bringing about and maintaining, ‘constituting’ as phenomenologists like to say, the unity and sense, which in turn need to be understood in terms of motor and affective significance, of the phenomenal world—the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought (or talked!) about.2 And it also reveals our capacity for more or less playful, more or less creative, projection of perceivable sense onto some given object, or situation—the capacity that Merleau-Ponty refers to as the human being’s ‘genius for ambiguity’ and takes to be essential to normal human perception and behavior.3 So even though I still believe 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

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1 Introduction

that Mulhall was forcing Heidegger’s phenomenology onto Wittgenstein’s remarks, and still believe that Mulhall’s Heidegger-inspired ‘dissolution’ of the ‘paradox’ of aspect dawning does not work, I have now come to think that Mulhall was right in sensing that a phenomenological understanding was called for in the case of aspect dawning, and also right in sensing that aspect dawning reveals something important about normal human (and quite possibly not just human) perception. ‘Aspects of Perception’—a more recent paper in which I respond critically to Richard Wollheim, who also proposes that seeing aspects, or ‘seeing as’, as discussed by Wittgenstein, characterizes all (normal) human perception—is where I first present, and begin to reflect upon, that important change in my thinking about aspect perception. This brings me to another important change in my thinking about aspect perception. Part of the peculiarity, and source of philosophical difficulty, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspect dawning’ (or the ‘lighting up’ of an aspect) is that it is a particular kind of perceptual experience. This particular kind of experience may be identified and investigated phenomenologically; but it may also be identified and investigated grammatically—in Wittgenstein’s sense of that term. A grammatical investigation of aspect dawning—of the experience of ‘noticing an aspect’ (PPF, 113)—would seek to elucidate ‘the concept [of noticing an aspect] and its place among the concepts of experience (Erfahrungsbegriffen)’ (PPF, 115); and, as I emphasize at various points in the papers collected here, it primarily proceeds from a third person perspective, and by way of the elicitation of (Wittgensteinian) criteria: asking such questions as, ‘When would we say (=by what criteria would we tell, in this or that sort of context) that someone (else) was struck by an aspect, or was seeing something as something?’, or ‘When would we say that someone was (merely) interpreting what she saw one way or another, or treating it one way or another, as opposed to seeing it one way or another?’. And it’s important that these sorts of questions are meant to bring into view not just particular utterances (or other ways of expressing the experience of having been struck by an aspect) but the broader contexts in which those utterances have their sense and would (normally) be criterial for certain mental states, processes, and activities. The later Wittgenstein, as I read him, though sometimes moved to give phenomenological descriptions in his reflections on aspects, was generally suspicious of phenomenology, and skeptical of its capacity to lead to philosophical enlightenment. As I point out in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, these suspicion and skepticism come out clearly and explicitly in his remarks on aspects. In my early papers on aspect perception, I followed

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.

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5

Wittgenstein in focusing on grammar and leaving phenomenology more or less to the side—though without ever denying that the dawning of an aspect is, grammatically, a perceptual experience. I thought then, and still think today, that quite a few readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects have gotten themselves confused, and into trouble, by failing to attend properly to the grammar of what he calls ‘aspects’. As I argue in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, Wittgenstein’s suspicion of phenomenology, and the shift to the third person perspective, are well motivated, and serve him well, when it comes to the sorts of concepts, and phenomena, on which he focuses in the first part of the Investigations: understanding, learning, meaning (one’s words one way or another), thinking, naming, reading, following a rule, intending, and so on; and they are also useful in elucidating the concept of ‘(noticing an) aspect’ and its place among our concepts of experience. But I now believe that Wittgenstein’s general approach serves him less well, and sometimes leads him astray, when it comes to the experience of aspect dawning and its relation to other moments, features, and dimensions of human perceptual experience. The philosophical danger of being misled, or handicapped, by confining oneself to Wittgensteinian grammar is no less real, I now believe, than the danger of getting confused, and lost, as result of its neglect. I now believe that, at least when it comes to aspect perception and to perception more generally, the Wittgensteinian grammatical-­ conceptual investigation should be complemented by properly-­ executed phenomenology, and vice versa. A striking feature of the majority of the commentaries with which I am familiar on Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects is that they shirk at once both the Wittgensteinian work of grammatical investigation—which aims at placing the concept of ‘noticing an aspect’ (and thereby the concept of ‘aspect’) in relation to other concepts of experience—and the difficult work of phenomenology, which, as I’ve already noted, Wittgenstein himself also for the most part shirked. As a result, the insights afforded by a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation are missed, the conceptual confusions and entanglements it is designed to help us dissolve remain undissolved, and at the same time claims are made in those commentaries about ‘human perception’ or ‘normal human perception’—of pictures, stretches of human behavior, stretches of human discourse, everyday mid-size objects, or what have you—where it is entirely unclear what is supposed to be the basis of those claims, and where little reflection often suffices for revealing their phenomenological crudeness and implausibility. Is it plausible to think that (normal) human beings have some one, particular sort of perceptual relation, or attitude, toward cutlery, for example—a relation that, contrary to what Wittgenstein seems to be saying (PPF, 122), may aptly be described as ‘the continuous seeing of an aspect’, and which holds irrespective of whether the perceiver is using the knife and fork for eating (while focusing on her food or on the conversation around the table), or is using them creatively for some other purpose, or is setting the table, or is observing the setting of the table, or is setting the knife and fork aside, perhaps together with a bunch of other things, in order to make space for something else, or is examining the knife and fork for rust, or is having one’s glance momentarily fall on the knife and fork, or is merely having them lie somewhere within one’s field of vision while

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1 Introduction

focusing on something else altogether? I think it is not plausible. And yet claims have been made by Wittgenstein’s i­nterpreters (just as claims have been made by analytic philosophers who are not Wittgensteinian), about what happens when(ever) one sees midsize everyday objects such as a knife and a fork, or what constitutes such a seeing. The Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation could help us appreciate the sorts of difficulties and confusions philosophers may get themselves into by staring, or imagining themselves staring, at a red cube that lies on the desk in front of them, and trying to say what happens to them, or in them, in such moments. But it can only do so much to elucidate perception, and the world as perceived. As I propose in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, a basic problem with the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation vis á vis phenomenology is that our ordinary and normal use of words tends to partake in what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, calls ‘the natural attitude’—very roughly, our tendency to overlook or bypass our perceptual experience in favor of its objects, and ultimately in favor of an objective world, or the world as objectively understood, that we construct, together, on the basis of that experience and into which we fit those objects. This means that leading the words of our philosophizing—including words (and concepts) that might be thought to refer us to perceptual experience, such as ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘feel’, ‘notice’, and so on—back to the language-games in which they have their natural home (PI, 116) will only take us so far when it comes to elucidating our perceptual experience(s). And it might in fact lead us astray by encouraging what phenomenologists have called ‘the experience error’—the error, that is, of giving ontological and (therefore) explanatory primacy to the world as objectively known (or taken to be known) relative to the phenomenal world, or the world as perceived: taking the former to (causally) determine the latter, whereas in reality it is only in, and against the background of, the latter that we ‘constitute’ the former (establish objective causal relations, for example, or otherwise attribute objectively establishable properties to objectively (re)identifiable objects, in judgments assessable in terms of truth and falsity, against the background of shared practices of measurement, experimentation, calibration, and so on).4 In ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, I argue that both Wittgenstein and some of those following him have committed the experience error, and misconstrued aspect perception, and normal perception more generally, as a result. One manifestation of the experience error has been the tendency to identify aspects with (or in terms of) empirical concepts. This identification of aspects with 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.

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7

empirical concepts goes back to Peter Strawson, is central to Richard Wollheim’s account of ‘seeing as’, and manifests itself, as we will see, in more recent accounts of aspect perception as well. Wittgenstein himself, as far as I can tell, was not altogether clear on this issue. Though some of his remarks suggest that, and why, it would be a mistake to identify aspects with empirical concepts, other remarks encourage that idea. At some point, for example, he proposes that in the dawning of an aspect, ‘it is as if one had brought a concept to what one sees, and one now sees the concept along with the thing’ (RPPI, 961). I think it matters that Wittgenstein is being quite tentative and metaphorical in this and similar remarks, whereas the tendency among commentators, as we will see, has been to take what he says here quite literally. And while I think I know what sort of experience Wittgenstein is trying to express in remarks such as this one, and though I myself found such remarks useful for certain purposes in my early writings on aspect perception, they now seem to me problematic. I now believe that it is actually unclear what taking such remarks literally could possibly mean, or come to; and even when taken metaphorically, it is not altogether clear what they are inviting us to imagine, or whether they truly elucidate the seeing of aspects, as opposed to only giving us the illusion of understanding it. In ‘Aspects of Perception’, I argue that on two common and plausible ways of understanding ‘concept’—a narrower, traditional one in which concepts are thought of as constituents of possible judgments, and a broader, Wittgensteinian one in which ‘our concept of X’ refers to whatever it is that ultimately guides us in our competent employment of ‘x’ (since the competent employment of ‘x’ in a wide enough range of contexts is our ordinary criterion for ‘possessing the concept of X’)—the identification of aspects with (or in terms of) concepts makes no clear sense. Now, there might be an understanding of ‘concept’ on which the identification would make sense and be illuminating; but, to the best of my knowledge, no such understanding of the word has been offered by those who have proposed the identification. Instead, what Wittgenstein would call ‘a picture’ of concepts has been relied on—a picture that conflates concepts and what Wittgenstein describes as ‘physiognomies’ that stand in ‘internal relations’ to each other, and which covers up and distorts, at once, both the Wittgensteinian grammar of ‘concept’ and the phenomenology of perception. In addition to partaking in the experience error, the identification of aspects with, or in terms of, concepts also partakes in the tendency in Western philosophy to over-­ intellectualize human perception—a tendency that has also manifested itself in John McDowell’s influential account of perception, in Mind and World and subsequent writings, on which all (normal, adult) human perception is ‘conceptualized’. One of the main tasks of papers Four through Eight is to provide reasons for resisting that intellectualist-objectivist tendency, as it manifests itself in different ways in Strawson, Wollheim, McDowell, and others, while at the same time recognizing, and elucidating, the sort of sense (or intelligibility) that the phenomenal world has for us, and apart from which our empirical, objective judgments—or, if you will, our applications of concepts—would not have had their sense for us. In this way, Sellars’s ‘myth of the given’ is avoided—that is, the myth of the senseless given is avoided; for the un-conceptualized given is not a myth. But it is avoided—as I pro-

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pose in ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’, in response to Charles Travis’s recent critique of McDowell—not by way of a Travisian (Wittgenstein-inspired) quietism that avoids any attempt to describe the world as perceived prior to becoming the object of true-or-false judgments, nor by way of a McDowellian (Kant-­ inspired) transcendental story about what perceptual experience must be (like) if a certain philosophically construed cognitive achievement (i.e., the formation of empirically ‘justifiable’ ‘judgments’, or Kantian Erkenntnisse) is to be possible. Rather, the myth is avoided by way of true phenomenological description that attempts to bring out and elucidate what we are already, pre-reflectively familiar with. In other words, the myth is avoided not by way of what Wittgenstein calls ‘thinking’ (about what must be the case), but rather by way of what he calls ‘looking and seeing’ (what is the case) (PI, 66). This concludes what I have to say in general terms about how my thinking on aspect perception has evolved over the years. The fuller story is to be found in the eight papers collected here. All of these papers were previously published elsewhere (though five of them in edited volumes that, in my experience, tend to be read only by few). In preparing them for this volume, I tried to abide by the following principle: to revise each paper however extensively, wherever I saw a way to tighten, clarify, or otherwise improve its original line of argument (or prose) and fit it with that of the other papers, but not to alter that line of argument. This sometimes meant leaving passages—more so in the earlier papers, of course—that are not fully in line with my current thinking, or style (including what now strikes me as the youthful naiveté of the first paper). Wherever that happened and seemed to me significant enough, I added a note to register my dissatisfaction with my earlier self, and to point out places in later papers where I believe I do better. The eight papers and their original places of publication are: 1. ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, originally in Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 97–122). This paper presents a grammatical characterization of Wittgensteinian aspects that is inspired by Kant’s (grammatical) characterization of judgments of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and goes against Mulhall’s and Johnston’s influential reading of Wittgenstein remarks on aspects at various crucial junctures. And it offers a broadly romanticist understanding of the significance of aspect perception—where that includes both the experience of ‘aspect-dawning’ and our typical ways of sharing it, or trying to. 2. ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?’, originally published, together with a response from Mulhall, in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, William Day and Victor Krebs (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2010. This paper 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 paper, 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

1 Introduction

9

of as Wittgensteinian therapy, and later also came to think of as a form of ordinary language philosophy. In this respect, this paper was an important step toward subsequent attempts of mine to argue with mainstream analytic philosophers over questions of method, on behalf of ordinary language philosophy.5 3. ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, originally in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2011. This paper 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. At the same time, in arguing, following Wittgenstein, for the ‘inseparability’ of the aspect from the object that ‘has’ it, or from the object that is perceived ‘under it’, the paper prepares the ground for the argument, in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’ and ‘Aspects of Perception’, against the widespread tendency to identify Wittgensteinian aspects with, or in terms of, empirical concepts. In this way, it also prepares the ground for ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’. 4. ‘The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell’, originally in the European Journal of Philosophy 24 (2016): 607–628. This paper, which takes its bearing from Stanley Cavell’s ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, continues the work of ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ of exploring the grammatical affinity between Kant’s ‘beauty’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect’; but it then goes on to develop a Wittgensteinian critique of Kant on two fronts: first, it questions Kant’s commitment to ‘systematicity’ in philosophy, and his related tendency to treat what Wittgenstein calls ‘grammar’ as, at best, an indication of something else—namely, the workings of our cognitive ‘powers’, or faculties, in their (systematic) inter-relations; and, second, it challenges Kant’s understanding of ‘concept’—an understanding that is shared by many in contemporary analytic philosophy, and which essentially divorces concepts from our (evolving and context-sensitive) linguistic practices. 5. ‘Aspects of Perception’, originally in Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in, Gary Kemp and Gabriele Mras (eds.), (Routledge, 2016). This paper argues against the widespread tendency to identify aspects with, or in terms of, concepts. It also presents my first attempt to elucidate, and support, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that in order to understand human perception, we must recognize perceptual indeterminacy as a ‘positive phenomenon’. 6. ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’, a significantly expanded version of a paper originally published in the European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2017): 336–357. This paper questions the widespread assumption of motivational determinacy—an assumption shared by philosophers as otherwise different from each other as

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).

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Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, as well as by their contemporary followers. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception, and using moments from a couple of Alice Munro’s short stories for illustration, the paper argues that since it is the phenomenal world that solicits, or elicits, or otherwise motivates, much of what we do, say, think, and feel—including much that is morally significant6; and since we play an active role in how we perceive things, and therefore in the ‘constitution’ of the phenomenal world, so that not just judgment, but perception itself is already active or, as Kant would say, ‘spontaneous’; it follows that our motivation is more or less indeterminate as well—more so, the more what we do, say, think, or feel is ‘personal’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, or creative. 7. ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, originally in The Form of Our Life with Words, Christian Martin (ed.), (De Gruyter, 2018). This paper 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. I propose 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. 8. ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’, a significantly expanded version of a paper originally published in Wittgenstein on Objectivity, Intuition, and Meaning, James Conant and Sebastian Gréve (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2019. Using aspect perception as a point of entry, this paper argues that the phenomenal world—the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought about—is repressed in both Travis’s work on perception and McDowell’s. In focusing exclusively on perception as providing us with objects of judgments, or Fregean thoughts, both Travis and McDowell ignore altogether the world as it presents itself to us apart from any judgment or (objective) thought about it. And yet, it is that world that solicits, or elicits, movements and words from us—including what may be called ‘judgments’—and provides the background apart from which they would not have whatever sense they have for us. Let me end this introduction with a remark about the argumentative structure of the papers collected here. To some extent, each of the papers proceeds as a critical response to some particular philosopher or philosophers, and some particular text or set of texts; and it has been suggested to me that, since the points I try to make in those papers seem general, or anyway generalizable (as is partly shown in this introduction), I should not have focused, in setting up my arguments, on some particular

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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philosopher(s) or texts(s). In response let me just say that, though I always try to indicate how the words of the philosopher(s) I’m responding to are expressive, or representative, of broader philosophical tendencies, commitments, and ambitions, at the same time I have, on the whole, found it valuable to respond to concrete embodiments of those tendencies, commitments, and ambitions. This is one of the most important lessons I have learned from the work of Stanley Cavell: that one way (I’m not denying there are others) of grounding one’s words when one does philosophy, and guarding oneself (as much as one can) against what Wittgenstein refers to as the ‘metaphysical’, or ‘idle’, use of words, is to begin one’s philosophizing by attending closely to the words of particular others, and making a genuine effort to see what they mean, or could mean, or perhaps need to mean (given their express or apparent purposes and commitments), with their words. This is also the main reason why I have decided against turning the papers collected here into one, unified monograph. Doing so, I feared, would have covered up the fact that, at the end of the day, my philosophical views, such as they are, may not be separated without distortion from their occasions—from the particular texts that prompted their articulation, from the particular places from which I came to those encounters, and from the dialectical process of articulating myself in relation to others.

Chapter 2

What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?

The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point. (PI, 564)

Abstract  This chapter presents a grammatical characterization of Wittgensteinian aspects that is inspired by Kant’s (grammatical) characterization of judgments of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and offers a broadly romanticist understanding of the significance of aspect perception—where that includes both the experience of ‘aspect-dawning’ and our typical ways of sharing it, or trying to. The chapter also argues against Mulhall’s and Johnston’s influential reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, and most importantly against their idea that our normal perceptual relation to the world may aptly be characterized by what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘continuous’ aspect perception. Keywords  Aspect perception · Language-game · The point of an utterance · Being struck · Continuous aspect perception · Kant · Beauty · Stephen Mulhall · Paul Johnston

2.1  Introduction Recent years have seen several commentaries on Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘seeing aspects’, and there is a growing sense that these remarks have a significance that goes beyond the curiosities of an esoteric phenomenon. I believe, however, that something important about the seeing of aspects, as Wittgenstein saw it and insofar as it isn’t simply an isolated experience or conscious state, but one embedded in a language-game,1 has so far been missed. It has to do with the place of the seeing of 1  Much has been written about the notion of ‘language-game’ in Wittgenstein. But for the purposes of this paper, and since I will occasionally be talking about ‘the language-game of aspects’, and

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_2

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aspects—the experience and its expression—in the human form of life. I also believe that until we recognize this place and appreciate its significance, the true nature of the aspect, as a particular ‘object of sight’ (PPF, 111), is not going to come clearly to light. It is common among commentators on Wittgenstein to proceed on the basis of the assumption that his remarks all work themselves out against one philosophical confusion or another; and, no doubt, this reading of Wittgenstein is encouraged by much that he says about what his philosophy responds to and aims at. I believe, however, that more can be gained from a faithful description of the grammar of our language than just the easing of philosophical headaches. So rather than reading the remarks on aspects as all meant to dissolve some particular philosophical confusion or another, I will try to show how the seeing of aspects, as Wittgenstein presents it, answers in a particular way to what may be described as a fundamental aspect of the human condition—the one, namely, of having to articulate our experience of the world, if that experience, and hence the world, is to become ours. That we have to articulate our experience for it to become ours (true for us, and not just true of us) is a way of putting one of the main teachings of Kant’s first Critique. It is also part of that teaching that the articulation is going to be done by means of shared materials that we have inherited from others and in whose fashioning we have at most played a very limited role. What Kant’s teaching does not bring clearly into view is our being, at the same time, always susceptible to the question of value—and not just, or even primarily, when we deliberate about what action to take next—in the sense that we need to find something about our experience that makes it worth attending to, articulating, and pointing out. Our making sense, to ourselves and to others, depends on that. For the most part, our choices of what to articulate and how are guided by broadly practical considerations. And in so far as broadly practical considerations are concerned, we can afford to leave most of what we go through (or undergo perceptually) unnoted and unarticulated; and what we do hold on to, or behold, only because, and to the extent that, it bears on our practical interests, stays with us, so long as it does, only under the terms in which it thus bears.2

contrast it with what I will call, following Wittgenstein, ‘the language-game of information (or reporting)’, let me briefly say what I take `language-game’ to mean. I am using the term in the same way that Wittgenstein uses it when he talks about ‘the language-game of “lying”’ (PI, 249), or ‘the language-game of “making a prediction from the expression of a decision”’ (PI, 632), or ‘the language-game of “reporting”’ (PPF, 94). These ‘language-games’ are not well-circumscribed activities of the kind we often associate with the notion of ‘games’. In this respect, they are also different from the imaginary, ‘primitive’ language-games that appear earlier in the Investigations, and which Wittgenstein says he’s using as ‘objects of comparison’ (PI 130). Rather they are repeatable-but-plastic patterns that are woven into everyday speech. Very rarely do we play just one of those ‘games’. But we can still recognize these patterns within human communication, and understand the distinct significance(s) of each. This is how I will be using the term ‘language-game’. 2  Note added 2019: What I say here now seems to me, in retrospect, to point in the direction of what Husserl and Merleau-Ponty refer to as the ‘natural attitude’—our tendency to bypass our perceptual experience, so to speak, in favor of its objects. I will say much more about the natural attitude

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15

It is true that we may sometimes find something worth noting simply because we have not noticed or known it before; and there are those who seem to constantly look for new experiences: changing jobs or partners, trying new foods, traveling to exotic places, and so on. But, at the end of the day, most of human experience is of what tends to present itself as ordinary and familiar, and so as unremarkable. What we need, then, if that experience is not to be lost on us, and to us, is the ability to find something about the ordinary and the familiar that makes it worth noting and articulating—we need to be able to find it new. It is here, I wish to propose, that the significance of seeing aspects lies. The significance of seeing aspects, as I will present it, has to do with its being a moment in which we expand our experience of the ordinary and the familiar without, as it were, turning our backs on it—strengthening our bonds with the world by renewing them, and going beyond habitual ways and established routes of communication without giving up on intelligibility. Hence, the seeing of aspects, or rather its expression, puts our attunement with other people to a particular sort of test, which means that it can also provide the occasion for certain moments of intimacy, or disappointment, depending on how far that attunement is found to reach. One is not likely to take this to be the point of attending to aspects and giving them voice, if one takes the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings to be one’s paradigmatic examples. But then, if one takes the duck-rabbit as one’s paradigmatic example, one is not likely to think that the seeing and expressing of aspects needs to have any point at all—either you can see this or that aspect, or you can’t. As an isolated perceptual experience, or conscious state (with its outward criteria, no doubt), arrived at in the course of a philosophical or psychological investigation and in the confinements of a study or a classroom, seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck, or as a rabbit—which requires, as we will see, perceptually attending to the drawing in a particular way—needs to have no point. And as for giving expression to what you see, well, the point of doing that is provided by the rather artificial context of the (theoretical, empirical, philosophical) investigation. As long as one takes the seeing of aspects to be paradigmatically exemplified by the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings, one is likely to miss two very basic and important facts. The first is that in the course of daily life we come across numerous things that could be seen as this or that—say, triangles that could be seen as lying on their side or as pointing to the right, or M’s that could be seen as upside down W’s and vice versa—but it would never occur to us that that was a good enough reason, or intelligible motivation, for so seeing them, or trying to. The second is that the mere fact that you see something—on any of the ordinary and normal ways of understanding ‘seeing this or that’—is never enough, by itself, for giving sense to your saying that you see it, or describing what you see. For think what it would be like if we even just tried to give expression to anything and everything we (might be said to) see.

and its relation to aspect perception in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’.

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Does it matter for our understanding of aspects that it doesn’t make sense to see them, or try to see them, anywhere and anytime we can, and that giving expression to what we see cannot derive its sense just from the fact that we (may be said to) see it? I think it does. It matters for our understanding of aspects that human beings are inescapably subject to the question of sense—‘condemned to meaning’, as Merleau-­ Ponty puts it (PP, xix/lxxxiv)—not only in what they say, but also in what they pay attention to perceptually. We could perhaps try to ignore or dismiss that question, but we cannot avoid being answerable to it. And it matters for our understanding of aspects that we will recognize the particular way in which we answer that question when we see and give voice to aspects. For these reasons, the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings, which are pivotal to most accounts of seeing aspects, will not be given center stage in my discussion. Looking for the point of a language-game is asking for its place in our form of life. The ambiguous figures and schematic drawings point us—by providing a clear illustration of the perceptual experience expressible by ‘Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed’—to an interesting and arguably important grammatical distinction (in Wittgenstein’s sense of ‘grammar’) between two uses of ‘see’, to which correspond two categories of ‘objects of sight’ (PPF, 111). I don’t, however, take our seeing those figures one way or another as the place where the distinction has its natural home, or point. It is a perceptual phenomenon that we can see certain drawings this way or that. The causal explanation of this phenomenon may be of interest to psychologists (PPF, 114).3 Wittgenstein was interested in elucidating grammatically the conceptual space in which that phenomenon has its place, or sense (see PPF, 115). And that space wasn’t originally prepared, so to speak, for the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings. It is not typical of the language-game of seeing aspects that those aspects will come in pairs, and that most people will be able to see the two, and to flip back and forth between them at will. It is also not typical of aspects that they will be elicited from us as part of a psychological experiment or philosophical illustration. For one thing, as I just indicated, those artificial contexts provide us with the point of attending to something perceptually and giving voice to our seeing it under this or that aspect. To think that it is irrelevant to the nature (essence) of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’ that our noticing and giving voice to them does not ordinarily take place in the lab or classroom, and must therefore have a different point, is, I think, not to allow our words to be led back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (PI, 116). We have to remind ourselves of the ordinary contexts of the seeing of aspects, and of the significance of what normally happens—to us and between us—when aspects are seen and expressed (see PPF, 311). I will be developing my understanding of Wittgenstein’s remarks by contrasting it with other commentaries—primarily the ones offered by Stephen Mulhall and

3  Note added 2019: There is also the phenomenological understanding of the phenomenon and its significance—an understanding that I only later came to appreciate, and appreciate the need for.

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Paul Johnston.4 Like me, Mulhall and Johnston find in Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects more than just a therapeutic disentanglement of philosophical entanglements. But their understanding of the significance of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’, and therefore their understanding of what he calls ‘aspects’, seems to me forced as an interpretation of Wittgenstein, and independently problematic. I will start, in Sect 2.2, with the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, which forms the heart of Mulhall’s interpretation. I will try to show that the distinction Wittgenstein is talking about in connection with the seeing of aspects is actually the one between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ (or, often, ‘merely (or just) knowing’), where the former would typically be italicized by Wittgenstein in order to indicate that it refers to a particular state of involvement with the object—one in which the object is alive (so to speak) for the perceiver. That will prepare the ground for the fuller account of seeing aspects that I will offer in Sect. 2.3—an account that will show, among other things, why the seeing of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspect’ is a case of seeing. In the second part of the paper I will sharpen some of the main points on which my understanding of Wittgenstein’s remarks differs from the ones offered by Mulhall and Johnston. In Sect. 2.4 I will argue against the idea that ‘aspect perception’ marks for Wittgenstein a typical, or ‘characteristic’, relation that we have to things in the world (some things, according to Johnston) and that his true interest therefore lies in the notion of ‘continuous aspect seeing’. I will argue that this idea rests on a failure to see that there are two senses of ‘seeing an aspect’ at play in Wittgenstein’s remarks, and that it goes against much that Wittgenstein says about aspects: it is part of the grammatical-phenomenological character of Wittgensteinian aspects that they cannot be perceived continuously while remaining (what Wittgenstein would call) aspects. In Sect. 2.5 I will argue, pace Mulhall and Johnston, that the relation of representation is not essential to the seeing of aspects, not even when it comes to pictures. In Sect. 2.6 I will consider Mulhall’s and Johnston’s suggestion that our psychological concepts are ‘aspect concepts’. I will argue that our psychological concepts are not, as such, aspect concepts. Whether or not the words expressing those concepts express the seeing of aspects, on the other hand, depends on how, and under what circumstances, they are used.

2.2  Seeing and (Merely) Knowing I begin with Mulhall’s understanding of the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’. Mulhall, the first commentator to offer a comprehensive account of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, builds his interpretation around that distinction, as he understands it. I think Mulhall is right to suggest that something like that dis4  Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (hereafter ‘OB’), (London: Routledge, 1990); Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (hereafter ‘RI’), (London: Routledge, 1993).

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tinction is central to the remarks on aspects, but I also think that the distinction Wittgenstein is invoking and trying to elucidate is not the one Mulhall ascribes to him. To have realized this would prepare the ground for the more systematic understanding of aspect perception that will be presented in the next section. Mulhall’s idea is that Wittgenstein’s remarks play themselves against a metaphysical model of perception, ‘summed up under the label of “knowing”’ (OB, 19). The metaphysical model, according to Mulhall, makes our relation to the world a process of attaching meaning and significance to ‘dead’ sense data by means of interpretation and inference. Supposedly, Wittgenstein’s remarks aim at showing that ‘seeing’— which for Mulhall comes to be equated with ‘seeing aspects’ and basically to mean an immediate grasp of the meaning of things—and not ‘knowing’, is the correct way to describe our normal perceptual relation to the world. Wittgenstein’s aim, as Mulhall sees it, is to undermine a metaphysical view of perception by ‘reminding ourselves of an aspect of the grammar of the concepts with which we describe human life’ (OB, 150). According to Mulhall, the basic criteria that distinguish ‘seeing (aspects)’ from ‘knowing’ are the immediacy, the spontaneity, the taking for granted, and, anticipating the affinity with Heidegger that he seeks to draw, the ‘readiness-tohand’ of the expression of what we see. ‘Knowing’, by contrast, is taken to be marked by hesitancy and doubt (see, for example, OB, 18, 23–4 and 139–40).5

5  Note added 2019: Heidegger’s distinction between ‘presentness-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) and ‘readiness-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit), as I understand it, corresponds to the distinction MerleauPonty draws, following suggestions in Husserl’s latest writings, between the representational intentionality of judgments, or thoughts, and ‘operative’, or ‘motor’ (fungierende) intentionality, which is importantly not representational (see PP, xviii/lxxxii and 137–8/139–40). Understood that way, the Heideggerian distinction is certainly pertinent to an understanding of aspect-perception, in a way that I failed to appreciate properly when I wrote this paper. As I will propose in ‘Aspects of Perception’ and ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’, the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects brings out vividly the difference, and conceptual distinction, between what you know, or think, about the object and how you see it, or how it perceptually presents itself to you. But it is important to note that both ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ refer to perfectly ordinary and normal relations that we have to the things of our world, just as I argue they do in Wittgenstein’s remarks. So it is not the case that ‘knowing’, as used by Wittgenstein, refers to some misguided metaphysical picture, or theory, of perception, as Mulhall proposes. A way of bringing out my original disagreement with Mulhall’s reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects would be to say that his reading obscures the pertinence for a proper understanding of those remarks of another Heideggerian distinction—the distinction namely, between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’—and more specifically the pertinence for an understanding of aspect-perception of Heidegger’s discussion of the ‘they’ (Das Man) as a point of view, an attitude, that ‘disburdens’ Dasein of its responsibility for its way of perceiving and responding to things, by making it turn everything it encounters into ‘something that has long been known’. Heidegger calls the adoption of the point of view of ‘Das Man’ (the point of view of ‘any one’), ‘publicness (die Öffentlichkeit)’, and says that by it ‘everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone’ (Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.), Harper & Row, 1962, 165, my emphasis). The connection of all that to my reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects will emerge more clearly later in this paper. Heidegger’s distinction between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ corresponds to MerleauPonty’s distinction between the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’—a distinction that will be worked out in some detail in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’.

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As an account of the grammar of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, in any of their ordinary and normal uses, this seems misguided.6 If anyone asks me (perhaps over the phone) where I am, and I say that I am sitting in front of my computer, and I say it straight away, with no hesitation, does this mean that I am seeing my computer, as opposed to merely knowing it is here in front of me? And, on the other hand, can’t I be struck by an aspect and yet have a hard time putting it (satisfyingly) into words? Can’t I, for example, be struck by an aspect while looking at someone’s face, and only after some time realize that what struck me about it was its similarity to someone else’s face, or something else in its expression? Not once in his later writings does Wittgenstein say that the difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ is the difference between immediacy, on the one hand, and hesitancy and doubt on the other.7 He actually says explicitly that this is not where the difference lies: What does it mean to say that I ‘see the sphere floating in the air’ in a picture? Is it enough that this description is the first to hand, is the matter of course one? No, for it might be so for various reasons. This might, for instance, simply be the conventional description. What is the expression of my not merely understanding the picture in this way, for instance, (knowing what it is supposed to be), but seeing it in this way?—It is expressed by: ‘The sphere seems to float’, ‘You see it floating’, or again, in a special tone of voice, ‘It floats!’ (PPF, 169).

Another criterion Mulhall offers for distinguishing ‘knowing’ from ‘seeing’ is that when you ‘know’ what you see to be this or that, but do not ‘see’ it that way, you take your description of what you see to be one possibility among several, whereas in ‘seeing’ alternative descriptions are wholly out of play for you (OB, 20). Again there is no solid textual evidence to support the ascription of such a claim to Wittgenstein,8 and, again, it does not seem to be an apt characterization of any distinction that may exist between ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’, in any of their normal, ordinary uses. I know, for example, that the yellow circle in the sky at night is the moon, and I never take ‘moon’ to be one description among many possible ones of

6  Mulhall might respond that ‘see’ and ‘know’ (and their cognates), as used in Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, are part of a ‘technical vocabulary’ (see Mulhall, ‘Seeing Aspects’, in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, ed. Hans-Johann Glock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 246). I see no evidence for this in Wittgenstein’s remarks; and, as I argue in ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, taking these and other words Wittgenstein uses as technical terms, distorts altogether the nature, and point, of his investigation. 7  The only remark Mulhall cites to support this claim, which is central to his interpretation, is PPF, 186. ‘Knowing’ is not mentioned in that remark at all. Rather, what we have in that remark is a rather peculiar utterance (‘I saw it at once as two hexagons. And that’s the whole of what I saw’) and then an attempt to make sense of it. The person says ‘I saw it at once as …’, and Wittgenstein, who often examines claims by looking for what could possibly be the contrast that the speaker has in mind and that would give the claim its point (see, for example, PI, 183 and 481), says: ‘I think he would have given this description at once in answer to the question “What are you seeing?”’. This remark is a rather weak textual evidence on which to base a whole interpretation, especially when, as we will see, there is strong textual evidence against that interpretation. 8  Again the only evidence Mulhall cites is PPF, 186. ‘Knowing’, as I said, is not mentioned at all in that remark.

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what I see. Johnston, who appears to be following Mulhall here, says that the aspect blind—the one, as we shall see, who can ‘know’ but not ‘see’—might, in front of a ‘well executed picture of a balloon floating up in the sky […] agree that it could represent a balloon but would add that it could also represent a thousand other things’ (IR, p. 44, my emphases). This is to draw a caricature of ‘knowing’ (and to misrepresent ‘aspect-blindness’), not to describe the grammar of ‘know’. If someone points to a well-executed picture of a balloon and asks you ‘What’s that?’, and you then stand there for a while, full of hesitance and doubt, and finally say that it could represent a balloon, but many other things as well, then nobody who knows English, knows our criteria, would say that you know what you’re seeing. The distinction between ‘seeing (something as something)’ and ‘(merely) knowing (what you see to be this or that)’ is indeed essential to an understanding of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect seeing, but it is not a distinction that Wittgenstein introduces in order to discredit a misguided theory of perception. It is a distinction that already exists in our language, and of which he is reminding us. To ask for the criteria of ‘seeing’ and of ‘knowing’, without qualification, is already to set oneself on the wrong track. For the ordinary sense of ‘seeing’— Wittgenstein’s ‘first use of the word “see”’ (PPF, 111)—goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’. This is why, after the person in PPF, 169 says ‘I see the sphere floating in the air’, it still makes perfect sense for Wittgenstein to ask whether it is a case of mere knowing (or understanding) or of seeing the sphere floating in the air. The ‘seeing’ he is trying to elucidate does not refer to normal perception in general, as Mulhall makes it out to be, but to a particular perceptual relation—seeing—that we may sometimes have to things; and the ‘knowing’ he contrasts it with is better referred to as ‘merely (or just) knowing’—knowing without seeing (see PPF 175, 180, and 192). ‘Seeing’—which here refers to a state in which one not only knows what one sees, or takes it to be one thing or another, but is perceptually occupied with the object in a particular way—will turn out, as we shall see, to be the ‘seeing’ that goes together with Wittgensteinian ‘aspects’. And the ‘seeing’ of aspects will turn out to be used by Wittgenstein to refer, not to normal perception, as Mulhall has it, but rather to a perceptual relation to things that Wittgenstein distinguishes from what he calls ‘perception’. And the way to bring out the difference between ordinary ‘seeing’ and the ‘seeing’ of aspects is to look at the wider context: ‘Seeing as …’ is not part of perception. And for that reason it is like seeing and again not like (PPF, 137). Wherein lies the similarity between the seeing of an aspect and thinking? That this seeing does not have the consequences of perception… (LWI, 177). An account of a change of aspect has essentially the same form as an account of the object he saw. But its further application is different. (LWI, 447).

The difference between the senses of ‘seeing (an aspect)’ and ‘(merely) knowing’ that are centrally relevant for Wittgenstein’s investigation of what he calls ‘aspects’ is a difference between language-games. As we will see in the next section, several features combine to constitute that difference. It is not only what we

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say and how, or how fast, we say it, but also when, and in front of what, and in the company of whom, and what we would accept as a proper response on her part to what we say. It is usually fairly easy to tell whether we have a case of seeing or merely knowing. If, for example, one were to stand in front of a picture of a running horse and utter ‘It’s running’, that utterance would normally—that is, apart from some special, suitable context—be incomprehensible as meant to impart a piece of information about the picture. Normally, the utterer would be taken to have seen something (in the picture), in which case her utterance would normally have the force of exclamation (‘It’s running!’) (see RPPI, 874; see also PPF, 175).

2.3  The Grammar of Wittgenstein’s ‘Aspects’ In this section I will present an understanding of what Wittgenstein means by ‘seeing an aspect’. The reader must bear in mind, though, that this understanding, as well as the textual support for it, should not be expected to reach completion before the end of the next section. In outlining the grammar of Wittgensteinian ‘aspects’, I do not mean to suggest that ‘seeing an aspect’, as used by Wittgenstein, always refers to the same sort of perceptual state, or experience. In the next section, we will see that there are at least two different senses in which Wittgenstein talks of aspects and of seeing an aspect. But the sense of ‘seeing an aspect’ that I will be focusing on and elucidating in this section is central to his remarks on aspects, and essential to the understanding of many remarks that cannot plausibly be squared with Mulhall’s interpretation, or with Johnston’s. By the end of this section we should be able to see why the seeing of an aspect is a seeing, and not merely knowing. We should also be able to see the particular way in which the seeing and voicing of aspects—as one sort of moment in which we attend to something perceptually and give voice to what we perceive—makes sense. One key grammatical feature of the Wittgensteinian aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there, and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its (grammatical) essence, and yet another sense in which in seeing it and giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stuck to objective terms—the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’ (PPF, 94), or ‘the language-­game of information’ (RPPI, 888). Aspects, according to Wittgenstein, do not ‘teach us something about the external world’ (RPPI, 899). He puts ‘teaching about the external world’ in quotation marks (nichts über die ‘äußere Welt lehrt’) and I understand that to imply a qualification: the aspect’s not teaching us about the external world is something that we would be inclined to say, and that we would be correct to say, but only on a certain understanding of ‘world’, of ‘external’, and of ‘teaching’. Aspects don’t teach us about the external world if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving information about the objective world (see RPPI, 874). In section xi, Wittgenstein says that the aspect is ‘not a property of the object’ (PPF, 247), and

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that the expression of a change of aspect, while having the form of a report of a new perception, is not such a report (see PPF, 130 and 209). He also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense in which aspects are seen is concerned, is your representation of ‘what is seen’ (PPF, 146); and this, in contrast with what Wittgenstein sometimes just calls ‘perception’, or ‘seeing’ in its more common sense (the first sense of ‘seeing’ in PPF, 111), in which what you see, as William James Earle says, ‘is mainly a matter of where you are and what is there’.9 If I say to you that I see a resemblance between the two faces that are right in front of your eyes, and it is clear from the context that I’m giving voice to an aspect that has struck me, I could be lying (perhaps because you say you see a resemblance and I seek an intimacy with you, or wish to avoid the issue of our inability to see things the same way), but I couldn’t be mistaken, or plain wrong. In this respect, the typical expression of seeing an aspect is what Wittgenstein calls an ‘Äußerung’—a spontaneous expression of a perceptual experience, whose truth is a matter of the speaker’s truthfulness (see PPF, 319–20). And the question naturally arises: why not say, then, that the aspect is purely subjective? Why not say that in giving expression to the perception of aspects we are giving expression to our experience, without saying anything about the object, apart from the contingent fact that one person can come to have a certain experience in front of it? After all, if someone else can’t see the resemblance we see, she may still for all that know perfectly well what ‘resemblance’ means; and in fact, if she didn’t know that, it would actually make no clear sense to say she couldn’t see the resemblance. There would be no reason not to call the aspect ‘subjective’, we might say, echoing Stanley Cavell’s response to a similar question about ‘beauty’,10 if there were still a way to register our sense that ‘seeing’ seems to force itself on us here (PPF, 191–2); that what we claim to see is there, open for anybody with an open eye to see; that if another person couldn’t see it, there would be something she was blind to; that we couldn’t see what we see if the object were, perhaps even just slightly, changed; that, to the extent that the expression of seeing an aspect is an expression of an experience, the other person has no way of gaining access to that experience other than looking at the object and seeing the aspect; that ‘Now it’s a duck for me’ would not be the same statement, would not say exactly the same thing, as ‘Now it’s a duck’; and that, normally, saying ‘Well, I see the resemblance’, after crying out that one sees a resemblance without being able to get the other to see it, would be taken to be, not a stubborn repetition of the original statement, but a withdrawal of it, a withdrawal of its claim. 9  ‘Ducks and Rabbits: Visuality in Wittgenstein’, in Sites of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 303). If you tell me that you see a house in the distance, it makes perfect sense for me to respond by saying that what you actually see is an old stable. As we’ll see in ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’, this sense of ‘seeing’ is central to Charles Travis’s account of perception. 10  Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), 89, fn. 8.

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There is a grammatical affinity, which Wittgenstein notes (PPF, 209), between what we would ordinarily call aesthetic claims and the expression of the seeing of aspects. Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, or between the objective and the merely subjective; and that grammatical position is constituted by the sense that our partner should be able to see what we see, that she ought to, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making her realize that she should, or of proving her wrong if she didn’t, or couldn’t, see the aspect.11 Even more important is the fact that, in both cases, what may appear to be the giving of information about the object is not used for the purpose of giving information, but rather for seeking a certain kind of intimacy. Unlike other moments of seeking intimacy, however, in which we reveal our heart, in giving expression to aspects we seek intimacy by trying to reveal, bring out, something about the object.12 In a telling remark, Wittgenstein says that when we express the seeing of an aspect, by crying ‘It’s running!’ in front of a picture of a running horse, we do so ‘not in order to inform the other person’. Rather, Wittgenstein continues, the cry, or exclamation, is ‘a reaction in which people are in touch with each other’ (RPPI, 874). Aspects don’t teach us about the external world, and for Wittgenstein this grammatical feature ‘hangs together’ with another feature, which is that the aspect is subject to the will (RPPI, 899). Their being subject to the will distinguishes aspects from objective properties: That an aspect is subject to the will is not something that does not touch its very essence. For what would it be like, if we could see things arbitrarily as ‘red’ or ‘green’? How in that case would one be able to learn to apply the words ‘red’ and ‘green’? First of all, in that case there would be no such thing as a ‘red object’… (RPPI, 976; see also RPPII, 545).13

When Wittgenstein tells us that aspects are subject to the will, the danger is that we will run the example of the duck-rabbit through our mind, or the example of the triangle that can be seen as lying on its side, as an arrow, as a piece of glass, etc.,

11  I have deliberately been trying to echo, in what I’ve said so far about aspects, Kant’s characterization of aesthetic judgements in the Critique of the Power of Judgement. (And, of course, what Cavell says about beauty in the passage I alluded to earlier is meant to interpret Kant.) The peculiarity of aesthetic judgements, constituted by the ungrounded demand for the agreement of others, Kant describes by saying that they involve ‘a claim to subjective universality’ (Critique of the Power of Judgment (hereafter ‘CJ’), Guyer, P. (ed.). Guyer, P. and Matthews, E. (trans.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5: 212). Cavell describes the tone of aesthetic judgements as ‘dogmatic’ and then goes on to defend this kind of dogmatism (‘Aesthetic Problems’, p.  96), which, in a way, is also what Kant tries to do in the ‘deduction’ of aesthetic judgements. I’ll come back to all of this in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’. 12  Compare RPPI, 888: ‘Don’t forget that even though a poem is framed in the language of information, it is not employed in the language-game of information.’ 13  Note added 2019: As I note in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, I now find the distinction Wittgenstein repeatedly draws between aspects and colors (and shapes) to be problematic, and potentially misleading. It is true that colors thought of, and talked about, as objective properties are not subject to the will as aspects are; but before they become part of the objective world, perceived colors are part of the phenomenal world—the world of which aspects too are part—and as such are subject to contextual and attitudinal effects.

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think about how we can flip back and forth between the aspects, and feel that what Wittgenstein says is pretty straightforward. Those were the examples I suggested should not be taken as the primary ones. But when, in the natural course of everyday experience, we are struck by the resemblance of one face to another, or by the slyness of a smile, or by something about the picture of the running horse, it doesn’t seem that what we see is up to us. Rather, it seems to almost force itself on us. The point, I think, is that the dependence on the will is not (primarily, or just) empirical, but grammatical. What makes aspects subject to the will, for Wittgenstein, is not that we can see this or that aspect at will, but rather that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’ (PPF, 256).14 And notice that in all of the above ‘real life’ cases, that invitation, or instruction, would still make sense. It makes sense for me to ask you to see the resemblance of one face to another. I can at least ask you to look for it, and give you hints as to how you might bring yourself to see it. And when I cry ‘It’s running!’ in front of the picture of the horse, I am again calling upon you to see something about the picture, which you may have missed even though you have been standing here in front of it and looking at it for some time just like I have. As if it is up to you to enact it. As if nothing stands in your way to the aspect but yourself.15 When we think of the more natural cases of seeing aspects, we can understand why Wittgenstein often talks about being struck, and even surprised, when an aspect is noticed. It is interesting that he even wishes to say that about the duck-rabbit (PPF, 152). This ought to puzzle us. With the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings, it doesn’t seem that it would be correct to say that we are being struck or surprised by the aspect, precisely because it is so clearly something that we have intentionally brought about. In some of those cases, it might be helpful to think of the first time—the first time we noticed that the duck can also be seen as a rabbit, for example. But for me, again, this difficulty shows that the ambiguous figures should not be the first place in which to look for the nature, and grammar, of aspects. Something important will emerge if we think of this non-obvious combination of the aspect’s being subject to the will and its being something that strikes us. We are struck because it appears all of a sudden, and appears out of nowhere. It appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance. We know that, not so much because we have made a conscious effort to bring it about—typically we make no such effort—but because we know that nothing other than ourselves could have been the cause of that appearance. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we’ve noticed the aspect (even  This point is also made by Roger Scruton, in Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 110. In many ways, Scruton’s account is more faithful to Wittgenstein than the more recent commentaries. Particularly important, from the perspective of this paper, is that, unlike Mulhall and Johnston, Scruton does not take the dawning of an aspect to show that we have been seeing the object under an(other) aspect all along (ibid, 114). 15  Cavell makes a very similar point about acknowledging—coming to see—other people, and connects it with the seeing of aspects, in the fourth part of The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (hereafter ‘CR’), (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1979; see in particular 368–9). 14

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when no switch from one relatively-determinate aspect to another has occurred), has in another sense not changed at all. And this means that even though what we see is there, still the change is due, somehow, to us. We have ‘brought a concept to [what we see]’ (RPPI, 961), which is why it might be said that the aspect is an ‘echo of a thought in sight’ (PPF, 234), or ‘an inarticulate reverberation of a thought’ (RPPI, 1036). One might say that what we are struck by is our own power—of seeing, and of being blind, to things.16 We are now in a good position to see why Wittgenstein says that when we see an aspect we are thinking of it (PPF, 139), and occupied with it, which is a reason to think of this seeing as something that we do, as opposed to something that just befalls us (LWII, 14). He also says that the seeing of an aspect is a ‘paying of attention’ (LWII, 15). The aspect ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237). Why do we have to, grammatically, be occupied with the object when we see an aspect? Why do we have to see it? Because we are bringing a concept to what we see. As if the concept wouldn’t just rest there unless we kept it there, pressed it with our gaze against the object, as it were.17 That the aspect is something we bring to the object is also why the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, habitual, way of seeing the object (RPPI, 1028), but rather has to strike us, be new to us (see PPF, 237). This will become crucial in the next section, when we ask whether, or in what sense, an aspect can continuously be seen. As I said in the introduction to this paper, that we see something, in the ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ (the first sense of ‘seeing’ in PPF, 111), is never a good enough reason for giving it expression. Something other than what we see, something in the context, has to make what we see worth noting and expressing. We would not, normally, be making sense if we gave expression to what we saw just because we saw it. When we see an aspect, on the other hand, that we see it—that we have been struck by it—is normally a good enough reason for giving it expression,18 exactly because it is not objectively there. It is not objectively there; but neither have we placed it there just by imagining it there. It is this peculiarity of the aspect—its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it—that gives its expression its point in ordinary contexts.  In PPF, 152, the term used is Staunen, so perhaps something closer to a sense of wonder than to a surprise. 17  Footnote added 2019: As noted in the introduction, and for reasons broached in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’ and elaborated in ‘Aspects of Perception’, I now find problematic the notion, which many of Wittgenstein’s commentators have found not just metaphorically compelling, but literally true, that Wittgensteinian aspects may aptly be identified with, or in terms of, concepts. I still think Wittgenstein is right to say that in seeing an aspect we bring something to what we see; but I no longer think that something is (aptly identified as) a concept. If I were writing this paper today, I would say that we play an active role in projecting, and sustaining, the physiognomic unity and sense we perceive. 18  Which is not to deny that we may sometimes have very good reasons for keeping the aspect, or our seeing it, to ourselves. But you can, grammatically, only keep something to yourself that you could intelligibly express. 16

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2.4  Can Wittgensteinian Aspects Be Seen Continuously? In Sect. 2.2 we saw that Mulhall understands ‘aspect seeing (or perception)’ to refer to the normal human perceptual relation to the world. So much of what Wittgenstein says about aspect perception, however, has to do with its being something that strikes us, and something that cannot last for long. This would seem to make it unsuitable for being a typical, and continuous, relation to things. Mulhall addresses that difficulty by claiming that while much of what Wittgenstein says is about ‘aspect dawning (or lighting up)’, there is another term—‘continuous seeing of an aspect’—which, according to Mulhall, serves Wittgenstein in order to characterize our ‘general’ relation to the world. ‘The dawning of an aspect’ is then taken to be but a mere indication, admittedly striking, for ‘continuous aspect perception’: [C]ontrary to appearances—Wittgenstein’s primary concern in this area is not the concept of aspect-dawning but rather that of continuous aspect perception (or ‘regarding as’, as Wittgenstein sometimes labels it)… [T]he capacity to experience aspect-dawning is of importance primarily because it manifests the general attitude or relation to symbols and people which the concept of continuous aspect perception picks out (OB, 123).

On this point, Johnston—who also believes that the ‘seeing of aspects’ marks for Wittgenstein a typical relation that we have to certain things (basically pictures, people and words)—seems to be in agreement with Mulhall: The importance of aspect-dawning is that it draws attention to the wider phenomenon of continuous aspect perception (RI, 43).

This, I believe, is a forced reading of Wittgenstein. ‘Continuous seeing of an aspect’ is used only once in section xi of the second part of the Investigations (and barely used anywhere else in Wittgenstein’s numerous remarks on aspect).19 After introducing the duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein says: And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous (stable, constant, stetigen) seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect. The picture might have been shown me, and I never have seen anything but a rabbit in it …. (PPF, 118).20

 It’s worth noting that in the English translations of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, ‘continuous’ translates sometimes ‘stegig’, sometimes ‘dauernd’, and sometimes ‘chronisch’, where each one of those German words is used in only a couple of remarks. That might encourage the idea that ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect is more central to Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects than it actually is, and that it always refers to the same thing in those remarks. 20  In the next remark, PPF, 119, which I omit, Wittgenstein introduces ‘the concept of a pictureobject’, and notes how, in some respects, we respond to or engage with such picture-objects as we respond to or engage with “real”, non-depicted objects. For Mulhall, this similarity between how we relate to picture-objects—drawn faces, for example—and how we relate to “real”-objects— flesh and blood faces, for example—just is what Wittgenstein is calling ‘continuous aspect perception’. I see no support for this interpretation in Wittgenstein’s text. As I understand Wittgenstein, he is noting that our perceptual experiences with such picture-objects—including the experience of aspect-dawning—are not unique to such objects, but may also be had with “real” objects. So, on my reading, Wittgenstein is downplaying the representational function of picture-objects, not 19

2.4  Can Wittgensteinian Aspects Be Seen Continuously?

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I may, then, have seen the duck-rabbit simply as a picture-rabbit from the first. That is to say, if asked ‘What’s that?’ or ‘What do you see here?’ I should have replied: ‘A picture-­ rabbit’ …. (PPF, 120). I should simply have described my perception: just as if I had said ‘I see a red circle over there’ (PPF, 121).

The criterion here for someone’s ‘continuously seeing an aspect’ is simply a report of perception—made in a suitable context, of course, as I will shortly note—and we saw in the first section that Wittgenstein distinguishes the seeing of aspects from perception, and distinguishes the typical expression of seeing an aspect from reporting. ‘Continuous seeing of an aspect’, as it is here described, is nothing other than an account of what you (take yourself to) know to lie in front of you. A straightforward answer to the question ‘what’s that?’ might very well (be used in order to) teach another person something about the external world. The same kind of answer may be given in response to a similarly worded question asked about a non-­ ambiguous picture, and it would then make no sense to say that the responder is ‘continuously seeing an aspect’. Nor would it be correct to say that the responder is seeing (something in) the picture, as opposed to merely knowing what the picture is a picture of.21 One way to see that ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ is not simply a continuous version of what Wittgenstein elsewhere refers to as the ‘seeing of an aspect’ would be to see that even the person he calls ‘aspect-blind’ should be perfectly capable of ‘continuously seeing an aspect’ as it is characterized in the above remarks. The aspect-blind is defined by Wittgenstein as someone who lacks ‘the capacity to see something as something’ (PPF, 257). Now it is not at all easy to make sense of such total incapacity22; but, for present purposes, it is enough to note that nothing Wittgenstein says about the aspect-blind should make us think he would be unable to tell a picture of a rabbit when he saw one, and I don’t see why the person in PPF, 120–2, does anything more than just that. If the aspect-blind were unable to tell a stressing it as key to the understanding of aspect perception, as Mulhall suggests. I’ll come back to this issue in Sect. 2.5. 21  In order to justify calling ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ a case of ‘seeing’ and not ‘knowing’, Mulhall goes back to what he takes to be the criteria that distinguish between the two: ‘… it involves an immediate, spontaneous reaching for the relevant form of description; we employ those words as a simple perceptual report, without any awareness that it is one of several available options. This preliminary characterization is enough on its own to reveal that, for Wittgenstein, “continuous aspect perception” is just another label for what he is investigating in his later separation of seeing from knowing’ (OB, 20). As we saw in Sect. 2.2, however, immediacy and spontaneity, and the lack of awareness of there being other ways of describing what we see, do not warrant the talk of ‘seeing’ as opposed to merely ‘knowing’. 22  Note added 2019: Wittgenstein himself makes it clear that what is meant by ‘aspect blindness’ is unclear, and stands in need of elucidation (PPF, 257). I was only able to truly make sense of ‘aspect-blindness’ when I read Merleau-Ponty’s description of Schneider, a patient of Gelb and Goldstein, in the Phenomenology of Perception (cf. PP. 103ff). Schneider is incapable of creatively, playfully, projecting perceivable sense onto a given situation. This, I have found, is one place where phenomenology is more enlightening than Wittgensteinian grammar.

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picture of a rabbit when he saw one, his handicap would be way more severe than ‘not being able to see something as something’; and, actually, it would then make no sense to attribute the latter to him. But if even the aspect-blind is capable of ‘continuously seeing an aspect’ as characterized by Wittgenstein, what justifies calling it ‘seeing an aspect’ at all? It only makes sense to talk about ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ here, because someone else, who knows that there is another way to see this picture, ‘could have said of me: “He is seeing the figure as a picture-rabbit”’ (PPF, 121).23 The ‘seeing of an aspect’ Wittgenstein is talking about here can be said to occur whenever we may say of someone else that she sees an object under a particular aspect, because she describes the object one way whereas we know that it could also be seen, and accordingly described, differently. Now, of course, that person could maintain that description, offer it whenever asked what this object is, and so be said to continuously see an aspect, or see the object under one of its aspects. But it is an altogether different sense of ‘seeing an aspect’ from the one it has in almost all of Wittgenstein’s other remarks on aspect seeing. Among other things, as we saw, the seeing of an aspect is marked by a certain awareness that we play a role in what we see, that it is not independent of us, and by an occupation with what we see—a paying of attention. These grammatical features play into the sense of what is being said when the seeing of an aspect is expressed, and into the determination of what would be a proper context for, and a proper response to, such an expression; and none of them holds in the above case of ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’. And so, while there is certainly a sense, a pretty straightforward sense, in which the person in the above remarks may be said to see an aspect—a sense that is tied to ambiguous figures, figures we know to have more than one aspect24—we mustn’t assume that there is a necessary, or obvious, connection between this person and the person struck by an aspect. In few (very few!) of his remarks, Wittgenstein thinks of senses in which aspects could be, or become, continuous.25 He does so, I believe, not because this is his main

 We can also come to say some such thing about ourselves, in retrospect.  Ted Schatzki, in a review of Johnston’s book, makes the mistake of recognizing only this sense of ‘seeing an aspect’. He says that seeing an aspect ‘presupposes multiple possibilities of what something can be seen as’ (‘Inside-out?’, Inquiry, 38 (1995), pp. 43–4). But in order for you to be struck by the resemblance of one face to another, for example, there need not be another, particular aspect under which the face you are looking at was seen up until right before its resemblance to the other face dawned on you. 25  Wittgenstein imagines, for example, someone saying that he is ‘continuously seeing [some] figure red (Ich sehe diese Figur dauernd rot)’ (RPPI, 863). But ‘red’ names a property of the object, and Wittgenstein contrasts such properties and aspects (PPF, 247); and the imagined utterance makes sense as a move in ‘the language-game of information’: ‘the description, that it is red… is continuously correct (dauernd richtig ist)’ (PPPI, 863). Wittgenstein then says the same thing about continuously seeing one aspect of an ambiguous figure: ‘…that description, without any variation, is the right one and that only means that the aspect did not change’ (RPPI, 863–4). Thus, as we also saw in the case of the sole mentioning of ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ in the Investigations, one way in which the aspect can be seen ‘continuously’ is by being, for the person seeing it, just something they know about the object, and so something that person may be said to see in Wittgenstein’s first sense of ‘see’ (PPF, 111). 23 24

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interest—he gives no indication whatsoever that it is—but because it is another way of bringing out the grammatical peculiarity of aspects. There could perhaps be senses other than the one discussed in the Investigations, of ‘continuously seeing an aspect’, and there is nothing wrong with exploring those senses, as long as we keep in mind the sense of ‘seeing an aspect’ for which there is no continuous version; for that is the sense of ‘seeing an aspect’ that is primarily under grammatical investigation in Wittgenstein’s remarks. The aspect can stay with us for some time, but cannot, grammatically, stay with us for long while remaining, for us, its perceivers, an aspect: If this constellation is always and continuously a face for me, then I have not named an aspect. For that means that I always encounter it as a face; whereas the peculiarity of the aspect is that I see something into a picture. So that I might say: I see something that isn’t there at all, that does not reside in the figure, so that it may surprise me that I see it (at least, when I reflect upon it afterwards) (RPPI, 1028). ‘I have always seen it with this face.’ But you still have to say what face. And as soon as you add that, it’s no longer as if you had always done it (RPPI, 526). There is a physiognomy in the aspect, which then fades away (PPF, 238). ‘I noticed the likeness between him and his father for a few minutes, and then no longer’ (PPF, 239). I should like to say that what dawns here lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way … Ask yourself ‘For how long am I struck by a thing?’—For how long is it new to me? (PPF, 237). It is as if the aspect were something that only dawns, but does not remain; and yet this must be a conceptual remark, not a psychological one (RPPI, 1021).26

In other remarks, Wittgenstein suggests that there could be a continuous relation to a picture, a continuous attitude toward it. And he says that it would make sense to talk in this case of a way of ‘seeing’ the picture (PPF, 193). The ‘chronic sense’ (chronischen Sinne) of ‘aspect’, he elsewhere says, ‘is only the kind of way we again and again treat the picture’ (RPPI, 1022). But he notes the grammatical difference between treating the picture in a certain way and seeing it under an aspect: ‘The expression of the aspect is the expression of a way of taking (hence, of a way-of-dealing-with, of a technique); but used as a description of a state’ (RPPI, 1025, my emphases). In another place, he says that ‘the essential thing about seeing is that it is a state’ (RPPII, 43). So in so far as an aspect stays with us by somehow becoming incorporated into the way we treat an object, or by becoming such a way, it thereby ceases to be something that we can sensibly be said to see—at least in the sense in which aspects may be said to be ‘seen’. Shortly we shall see that when something does become incorporated into our habitual way of encountering an object, Wittgenstein no longer wishes to call it an aspect. 26  Note added 2019: I now take the necessary momentariness of the aspect to be, first and foremost, phenomenological: to see an aspect, you must attend to the object in a particular way—hold it there with your gaze; and, normally, we have limited control over what we attend to and how, and for how long. More on this in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’.

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It looks as though interpreters of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects tend to think that what happens in the ‘dawning of an aspect’ cannot be that different from what happens when we continuously see it. The latter is taken to be but an extended version of the former: ‘the change of aspect in an ambiguous figure is simply the correlate of the unchanged aspect in an unambiguous drawing’, says Johnston (IR, p. 43). Marie McGinn says: ‘If we feel disinclined to speak of “seeing” at all [in the case of the dawning of an aspect], then we should recall the connection with the case of continuous aspect seeing: in that case “It’s a rabbit” is a straightforward perceptual report…’.27 Mulhall also makes the change from the dawning of an aspect to the continuous seeing of it seem very simple: the words that in the dawning of an aspect serve as an Äußerung, as giving voice to the experience of having been struck by an aspect, are now employed ‘as a simple perceptual report’ (OB, p. 20). But as we saw in the previous section, the whole language-game changes when an Äußerung changes into a simple perceptual report. We also saw, in section one, that Wittgenstein distinguishes the seeing of aspects from perception. It is only when one disregards the context and implications of the utterance (and focuses on the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings), that one can come to think that the aspect that dawns, and our perceptual relation to it, cannot be significantly different from the aspect that stays, and our perceptual relation to it. This is not unlike supposing that there is no significant difference between falling in love with someone and loving her all your life: in both cases, you love her. But the criteria of each are very different from those of the other; and the latter is not simply an extended version of the former; nor is the former a momentary experience of a shift in, or against the background of, the latter. And anyone who has known both would know to appreciate the difference between them. To continuously see an aspect— where ‘seeing an aspect’ is understood in the sense Wittgenstein is focusing on in his remarks—would be akin to continuously falling in love with the same person. And I’m not saying that either of them is entirely unimaginable. I just want us to be clear on what it is that we are trying to imagine.

2.5  Aspects and Representation One reason why Mulhall and Johnson don’t find the notion of ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ problematic, it seems to me, is that they think about it primarily, or at least initially, in connection with the sort of representation paradigmatically exemplified by (representational) pictures. They both propose that to see a picture under an aspect is to treat the picture, or otherwise relate to it, as we treat or relate to the object it represents. ‘[W]e relate to [the picture] as the representation of a specific object and treat it almost as if it really was the object it depicts’, says

 Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (hereafter known as W), (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 192.

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Johnston (RI, 44). And Mulhall proposes that seeing an aspect in the case of pictures just means ‘that someone is regarding a picture as one does the object it depicts’ (OB, 33). Now a picture, as Mulhall himself says, ‘just is the sort of thing that is correctly described by describing what it represents’ (OB, p. 23). Not to describe a picture in terms of what it represents is not to know what pictures are (what ‘(representational) picture’ means). But if so, then describing pictures in terms of what they represent cannot be the distinguishing criterion between knowing (what the picture is a picture of) and seeing (the picture under some aspect); both reactions, being reactions to pictures, would be in terms of what the picture depicts. Mulhall is aware of that and therefore goes back to the idea that the distinguishing criterion of ‘seeing’ is ‘the readiness-to-hand of that correct form of description; and this readiness-to-­ hand is a manifestation of the perceiver’s taking for granted the identity of what he perceives’ (OB, 23). But again, as we saw in Sect. 2.2, the immediacy with which we offer the correct form of description is not what distinguishes ‘seeing’ from ‘knowing’, nor does Wittgenstein say that it is. And knowing what you see does not contrast with taking its identity for granted. It goes hand in hand with it. Emphasizing the importance of the relation of representation to aspect seeing, even in the case of pictures, is not helpful for elucidating the grammar of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’. First of all, we can see aspects in cases where no representation at all is involved. Think of Wittgenstein’s first example of seeing an aspect: the case of seeing a resemblance between two faces. One face does not represent the other, and the two faces together don’t represent a case of real resemblance. Similarly, when you ‘hear [a] bar as an introduction’ (PPF, 178), it is not that the bar represents an introduction. If anything, it is an introduction. And when we see the letter F as facing right, or left (RPPII, 464–5), we are surely not seeing it as representing something that faces right, or left. Take another example which seems to me a clear case of what Wittgenstein means by seeing an aspect. It occurs in Yehoshua Kenaz’s The Way to the Cats. Yolanda, an old woman recovering from a bone fracture, is walking down a corridor in the hospital when a sharp pain makes her bend forward and lean over her walker in order to reduce the weight on her legs. After a moment, she raises her head and looks at the corridor, and Kenaz writes: ‘Suddenly, it appeared as though she was standing there for the first time in her life. Never before had she sensed like this the tragic, inhuman, beauty of this place’.28 Yolanda was struck by an aspect—exactly as Wittgenstein characterizes that experience (PPF, 113). What she saw had entirely changed, so much so that she felt she was standing there for the first time in her life, and yet, of course, objectively nothing has changed about the corridor, as no doubt she knew. And there is just no room for us to talk about ‘representation’ here. And now think of the drawing of a triangle, which Wittgenstein says can be seen as standing on its base, as hanging from its apex, and in other ways as well (PPF, 162). It is true that Wittgenstein goes on to suggest that ‘the aspects in a change of

28

 Yehoshua Kenaz, The Way to the Cats (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 87–8, my translation.

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aspects are those ones which the figure might sometimes have permanently in a picture’ (PPF, 166), but that surely does not mean that a relation between a representational object and the thing it represents is essential for the change of aspects. I could see these very same aspects, or some of them, in a wooden triangle lying on my desk; and if, for example, I saw it as standing on its base or as lying on its side, no representation would be in play. Now, when we see the smile of the picture-face as timid, for example, what would be gained by saying that the key to understanding this experience is to note that we stand towards the picture in some respects as we do towards a “real” human face? What shall we say about someone who comes to see a “real”, flesh and blood, human smile as timid (see PI, 537)? If no appeal to representation is needed in order to account for the second case, why should we have to appeal to it in the first? Why not simply say (about the drawing) that it is a face—a picture-face—and that it is smiling, and that its smile strikes us as timid?29 Wittgenstein, who later on urges us to simply accept the primitive language-game which children are taught (PPF, 161), tells us that the child can treat picture-objects as it treats, not people and animals, but dolls (PPF, 119). Shall we now speak of a transitive relation of representation? I’m not saying we can’t; I just can’t see how it would help us understand ‘aspect seeing’. McGinn writes: ‘we “stand towards” [those “picture-objects”] in somewhat the way we stand towards the objects they represent’ (W, p. 191). But in the relevant passage she refers to (PPF, 119), Wittgenstein says nothing of ‘representation’. Nor does he imply that the way in which we sometimes stand towards pictures is what ‘seeing them under an aspect’ amounts to. All he says is that ‘in some respects I stand towards [the “picture-face”] as I do towards a human face. I can study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of a human face’ (PPF, 119). For me, this means to suggest, not that representation is essential to the seeing of aspects in the case of drawings and pictures, but rather that what happens to us perceptually in the case of drawings and pictures is important and revealing, at least in part, because it can also happen to us with flesh and blood people: we can be perceptually struck by things about them that go beyond what can simply be known, or we can be blind to those things. We can be perceptually occupied with their expression; or we can take their expression, and what it means, as something we already know, and shift our attention elsewhere. My point is simple. Wittgenstein is perfectly right when he says that there is a similarity between our reaction to pictures and our reaction to the “real” things depicted in them. In both cases, we can either see only what we know to be there, or we can see something that “isn’t really there”, an aspect, something that makes this picture, this smile, this running, worth attending to—something that calls upon us, so to speak, to give it expression. This adds to the interest of seeing aspects in pictures, or seeing pictures under aspects, and makes those cases usefully illustrative  I think it is worth noting here that Wittgenstein chooses to speak of ‘a picture-object (Bildgegenstand)’ and ‘a picture-face (Bildgesicht)’, and not of ‘a picture of an object’ or ‘a picture of a face’. What is in focus is a certain kind of object, or face, not a certain kind of picture.

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of the broader phenomenon of aspect perception; but it is not what seeing aspects in pictures consists in.

2.6  Soul Aspects? Another thing on which Mulhall and Johnston seem to be in agreement is the idea that the best way to understand the peculiarity of psychological concepts is to see them as ‘aspect concepts’ (see RI, 182; and OB, 72). The idea, roughly, is that the soul is an aspect of ‘behavior in context’. This is supposed to be a way to avoid behaviorism without falling prey to the Cartesian ‘myth of the inner’. This proposal again ignores the sense in which for an aspect to be seen it has to strike us, and be other than what may simply be known to be there. To call psychological concepts ‘aspect concepts’ is to make the connection between the ‘inner’ and its ‘outward’ criteria weaker than it is. It is exactly the fact that our psychological talk is informed by public criteria—to which we are responsive in taking this to be sadness, that to be excitement, and so on—that makes the normal seeing of sadness, excitement, and so on, not the seeing of aspects. Similarly, pain is not an aspect of groaning and itching is not an aspect of scratching. Not to know that someone who groans (in this way, under these circumstances) is groaning in pain (or else is pretending to be in pain), is not to know that she is groaning (in pain); not to know that the monkey that scratches is itching, is not to know that it scratches.30 The Cartesian (but equally Humean) ‘myth of the inner’ is a myth all right, but a myth that is sustained by grammar (see PI, 307): it rests on the fantasy that it should be possible for us to identify, and intelligibly talk about, the states and processes and attitudes to which ‘see’, ‘feel’, ‘think’, ‘mean’, ‘intend’, and so on, refer, while forsaking altogether the public criteria that guide and inform our use of those words in different contexts. To see an aspect, on the other hand, is to step beyond the guidance of Wittgensteinian criteria. Wittgensteinian criteria may tell you, for example, that the horse in the picture is running—that that is what we call ‘(a horse) running’: if you don’t know that, you don’t know what ‘a running horse’ means. But they will not tell you, ‘It’s running!’ (in the sense these words have in the Äußerung of an aspect). And similarly, whereas there are normally public criteria for the application of ‘psychological’ terms—and so for the presence of mental states, processes, attitudes, and so on—there are no such criteria for (the presence of) ‘psychological’ aspects. This is not to say that we cannot come to see some stretch of behavior under this or that Wittgensteinian aspect. People’s (and animals’) expression and behavior may come alive for us, just as pictures may. This may happen, for example, when we are all of a sudden perceptually struck by the slyness or irony or despair in a smile. But we can only thus be struck against the background of our already seeing

30

 For a beautiful making of this point, see Stanley Cavell (CR, pp. 92–3).

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and responding to others; and that is not a matter of seeing one thing—the physical human body—as representing, or expressing, something else—her soul. The other person’s (phenomenal!) body is the best picture of her soul (PPF, 25) not because there is, for others, no better, more faithful, picture of it, but because her soul is embodied, because you can point to a living human being and teach your child that that is (what we call) happiness, and that is (what we call) sadness. Wittgensteinian aspects, on the other hand, cannot similarly just be pointed to, or pointed out. I could get you to see—that is, realize—that someone is sad, by appealing to our shared criteria of ‘sadness’; but I couldn’t in that way get you to see—that is, be perceptually struck by—the sadness of, or in, her face.

2.7  Conclusion: The Scope of Aspect Perception Both Mulhall and Johnston raise the question of the scope of aspect perception: how broad is the range of cases in which it makes sense to speak of us as ‘seeing (or otherwise perceiving) aspects’? Mulhall, as we saw, takes ‘aspect seeing’ to contrast with (a metaphysical picture of) an intellectual process of inference and interpretation, and makes it our ordinary relation to the world. He argues, essentially, that whenever we encounter an object as an object of some particular kind, which he says is how we normally encounter objects, we can be said to see it under an aspect (OB, p. 137). For Johnston, it is essential to ‘aspect seeing’ that there will be one way of taking the object (as a pattern of colors and shapes, behavior described physically, or a bare sound) as opposed to another (as the object depicted, a psychological state or process, or a meaningful sound). This is why he restricts the domain of ‘aspect seeing’ to pictures, human behavior, and language. In those areas, he argues, it is typical of us that we take things in the second way, and this is the sense in which we may be said to ‘continuously see those things under aspects’. As against Mulhall, Johnston argues that there is no room for ‘aspect seeing’ when it comes to other types of objects. It makes no sense, says Johnston, echoing Wittgenstein (PPF, 122), to talk about ‘seeing the table as a table’, because there isn’t any obvious other way of seeing it—there isn’t any clear contrast that could give sense to that talk (RI, p. 244). By way of conclusion I want to suggest that Mulhall is right in claiming that we can see aspects everywhere, but not because we always can, and typically do, take objects for the particular objects they are. Rather, we can see aspects everywhere because it is always possible to see something as more than ‘what it is’—that is, as more than what it may be known, objectively, to be. We don’t, however, typically, or even commonly, see aspects, because we tend to let what we know—what we take for granted—do the seeing for us. We see a corridor, for example; and it really does make no sense to say that we ‘see it as a corridor’. –But it makes perfect sense to see the corridor, some particular corridor, as tragically and inhumanly beautiful.

Chapter 3

On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects? 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. Keywords  Aspect perception · Wittgenstein’s method of grammatical investigation · Wittgensteinian therapy · Mulhall

3.1  Introduction Many who write about Wittgenstein these days speak of his philosophy as a form of therapy that does not present us with some heretofore unknown truths, but rather aims at dispelling confusions and returning us to a knowledge we couldn’t have failed already to possess. I suppose that at this level of generality there is nothing wrong with that characterization. The real difficulty in coming to terms with Wittgenstein’s teaching, I find, emerges when philosophers turn from talking about that teaching to actually doing philosophy that’s supposed to proceed in its light. And that difficulty seems to me to tell, perhaps more than anything else, of the kind of teaching that Wittgenstein’s teaching is. 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. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_3

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In this paper, I will attempt to illuminate the nature of the difficulty by attending to the way it manifests itself in a recent article by Stephen Mulhall on Wittgenstein’s remarks on seeing aspects.1 I find Mulhall’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects to be a good example of a reading of Wittgenstein that takes itself to be alive to the question of the nature of Wittgenstein’s teaching, but that in effect represses the kind of work undertaken by Wittgenstein’s remarks. The aim of the first part of this paper will be to characterize that work more precisely, by looking closely at Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks are meant to remind us of, or to imaginatively project us into, situations of speech, or anyway situations in which certain philosophically troublesome words may be used intelligibly, whereby we are meant to discover things about the meanings of those words—things that we cannot have failed to know, but which, for some reason, are hard to see. I will further argue that this is essential to the teaching of these remarks—that apart from effecting, or enabling, a kind of re-acquaintance with the meanings of our words, their teaching does not happen. There is no result that these remarks aim at that can be had apart from the work they call upon us to do on ourselves. And that means, I will argue, that Mulhall’s account, however interesting and even at times insightful it may be in its own right, is essentially unfaithful to Wittgenstein’s teaching. Purporting to deliver us once and for all from puzzlement concerning the experience of aspect-dawning to clarity, Mulhall’s interpretation looks to find in Wittgenstein’s remarks a very different kind of satisfaction from that which they are designed to enable. And the satisfaction it arrives at, I will argue in the second part of this paper, is actually of the sort that Wittgenstein’s procedures are designed to make us question.

3.2  L  earning from Wittgenstein I: The Work of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Aspects Let me begin with what Mulhall claims to have found in Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects. The central claim is that Wittgenstein’s true interest in his remarks on seeing aspects lies not in what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect,’ but rather, and contrary to appearance, in a particular attitude that, according to Mulhall’s Wittgenstein, is our typical perceptual relation to things in our world—at the very least to pictures, to words, and to stretches of human behavior. This attitude, according to Mulhall, is what Wittgenstein calls ‘the continuous seeing of aspects.’ It then 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.

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turns out that this attitude is also what Wittgenstein means by ‘regarding (something as something)’ and, most strikingly, what he also means by ‘seeing.’ This attitude is characterized, according to Mulhall, by the ‘immediacy’ and ‘lack of hesitance’ with which we perceive the meaning of things, by our taking their significance or exact nature ‘for granted’; it contrasts with what Wittgenstein, according to Mulhall, calls ‘knowing,’ which in turn is characterized by hesitancy, and by the perceiver’s taking his description of what he sees to be just one interpretation among many possible ones. The capacity to experience the dawning of an aspect turns out, in Mulhall’s reading of Wittgenstein, to be ‘simply one (admittedly striking) manifestation of—one criterion for—a person’s general relation to pictures [and analogously to words and to people] being one of continuous aspect perception.’2 Mulhall argues that it is only against the background of ‘continuous aspect perception’ that ‘the inherent paradoxicality’ of the experience of the dawning of an aspect can be ‘dissolved.’3 So far as I can see, Mulhall’s recent account essentially follows his earlier, extended account in On Being in the World.4 In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’,5 I criticized Mulhall’s original account—criticized it, for the most part, as an interpretation of Wittgenstein—and I presented an alternative understanding of what Wittgenstein means by ‘aspect’ and by ‘seeing an aspect’. In this paper, my aim, as I said, is to situate that initial disagreement that I found I had with Mulhall’s reading of Wittgenstein within a broader context—the context of the question of how Wittgenstein’s remarks are supposed to do their work, and hence what learning from Wittgenstein requires. For while my original disagreement with Mulhall, as presented in that earlier paper—concerning, among other things, what Wittgenstein means by ‘aspect,’ by ‘seeing an aspect,’ by ‘seeing and not merely knowing,’ and by ‘continuously seeing an aspect’—still seems to me substantive and worth stressing, it has become increasingly clear to me that the disagreement goes deeper than how we each understand this or that term of Wittgenstein’s, and even deeper than where we each locate the significance of the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects. I have presented what I take to be the gist of Mulhall’s interpretation of Wittgenstein in one paragraph. I may have misrepresented or left out this or that aspect of that interpretation. In particular, I need to say more, and will in the second part of this paper say more, about how exactly Mulhall’s account is supposed to ‘dissolve’ the ‘paradox of aspect-dawning’. But I don’t think that I was wrong in taking Mulhall’s interpretation to be paraphrasable in something like a paragraph. After all, he himself says that Wittgenstein has ‘his views’ (or ‘his position’) on the subject of aspect seeing, and further suggests that these views are capable of being

 ‘Seeing Aspects’, 253–4.  ‘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. 2 3

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‘formulated’ and ‘justified.’6 But if indeed Wittgenstein has views on the subject of aspect-seeing, and if Mulhall’s presentation of those views is faithful, why doesn’t Wittgenstein ever just say what Mulhall claims he says? And why did he feel the need to write hundreds of remarks on the seeing of aspects, if what he really was trying to say can be put in twenty pages or so,7 which in turn are paraphrasable in a paragraph? If the purpose of the remarks, or of some of them, were simply to remind us of the smooth and unhesitating way with which we ‘generally respond to pictures in terms of what they depict’ or ‘treat pictures in terms of what they depict,’ and to suggest to us that, given this basic attitude that we have to pictures, ‘our paradoxical sense of the dual-aspect figure changing even though we know that it remains unaltered becomes entirely unsurprising,’8 then Wittgenstein certainly chose an odd way for getting us to see that. Is there no connection between the peculiar form of Wittgenstein’s remarks and their teaching? What is happening in these remarks? How do they work? Section xi of Part II of the Investigations opens with a distinction between two uses of the word ‘see,’ to which there correspond two ‘objects’ of sight. On my understanding of the remarks on aspects, the first object of sight is what we ordinarily, and for the most part, describe, report, inform another person of, alert someone to, raise a question about, etc. Importantly, the presence (at some location) of objects of sight of that first sort does not depend on our, or anyone’s, actually seeing them. The second object of sight is what Wittgenstein will call ‘an aspect’; and it is characterized, in part, precisely by the fact that it makes sense for us to call upon someone to see it who is standing there and is seeing the object as clearly as we do: ‘“I see a likeness between these two faces”—let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself’ (PPF, 111). Mulhall, as far as I can see, has no real use for Wittgenstein’s initial distinction between the two uses of the word ‘see’ and the two ‘objects of sight’ corresponding to them. For he ultimately is going to want to call, in Wittgenstein’s name, most of what we typically see9—what we describe, inform others of, attract someone’s

 ‘Seeing Aspects,’ 246--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. 6 7

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attention to…—‘aspects.’ And the inter-subjective dimension—To whom are we addressing ourselves in giving expression to an aspect, and why? What puts us in a position to address the other in that way? What would count as an appropriate response on her part to our exclamation? What may she intelligibly do with what we say?—also plays no part in Mulhall’s understanding of what seeing an aspect is, or means.10 This, I suppose, is why he chose to open his article by quoting the third remark of section xi, and to say about it that it ‘introduces’ the topic of aspect-­ seeing.11 This shift of focus—from the inter-subjective context, and language-game, within which the expression of the seeing of an aspect assumes its sense, to the experience—is philosophically fateful, or at least could be.12 But I’m already going too deeply into my original disagreements with Mulhall. I want to remain on the more general level of how Wittgenstein’s remarks are to be read, and learned from. So let me note that immediately following those introductory remarks Wittgenstein says that the causes of the experience of noticing an aspect are of interest to psychologists—that is, not to him—and that ‘we’ (that is, he and anyone who cares to try to join him) are interested in ‘the concept and its place among the concepts of experience’ (PPF, 114–5). Here are some of the concepts whose interrelations, mutual affinities and distances, Wittgenstein’s remarks in section xi invite us to assess: ‘seeing’ (and, or versus, ‘seeing’), ‘seeing a property of the object’ (as opposed to ‘seeing an aspect’), ‘being struck,’ ‘noticing,’ ‘interpreting,’ ‘knowing’ (‘merely knowing’), ‘seeing something as something,’ ‘treating something as something’ (alsbehandeln), ‘regarding something as something’ (alsbetrachten), ‘taking something as (or for) something’ (fürhalten), ‘conceiving [auffassen] something in one way or another’ (as opposed to ‘seeing it as this or that’), ‘seeing something three-dimensionally,’ ‘looking without being aware,’ ‘being conscious of something,’ ‘thinking,’ ‘recognizing,’ ‘seeing something without recognizing it,’ ‘imagining,’ ‘feeling’ (as in ‘one feels the softness of the depicted  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. 10

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material’), ‘concerning one’s self with what one sees,’ ‘paying attention,’ … If I were to urge, following Wittgenstein, that the purpose of the remarks on aspects just is to attain a perspicuous representation of the concept of ‘noticing an aspect’ and its place among our concepts of experience, I suppose this would be welcomed with a shrug: Of course this is what Wittgenstein is interested in!13 But I find that it is not yet clear how Wittgenstein conducts his conceptual inquiry, and therefore not yet clear what he is after. What we need now is some textual evidence for the how and the what of Wittgenstein’s conceptual inquiry into ‘noticing an aspect’. So consider the following sample—by no means exhaustive but I think representative—gathered in the order of appearance from the remarks of section xi. I try to present the quotations in a way that increasingly abstracts from what might be called the content of Wittgenstein’s remarks, in order to bring out what might be called their form: 1. If you say ‘Now it’s a face for me,’ we can ask: ‘What change are you alluding to?’ 2. I see two pictures, with the duck-rabbit surrounded by rabbits in one, by ducks in the other. I do not notice that they are the same. Does it follow from this that I see something different in the two cases? 3. I am shown a picture-rabbit and asked what it is; I say ‘It’s a rabbit.’ Not ‘now it’s a rabbit.’ I am reporting my perception. 4. The change of aspect. ‘But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!’ But what is different: my impression? My point of view?—Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object has altered before my eyes. 5. Someone suddenly sees an appearance which he does not recognize[…] Is it correct to say[…]? 6. Now, when I know my acquaintance in the crowd, perhaps after looking in his direction for quite a while, —is this a special sort of seeing? Is it a case of both seeing and thinking? Or an amalgam of the two, as I should almost like to say? The question is: why does one want to say this? 7. How does one tell that human beings see three dimensionally? 8. If later I see[…] can I say[…]? 9. If you ask me what I saw, perhaps I shall[…]; but I shall mostly[…] 10. Look at all that can be meant by ‘description of what is seen.’ 11. What does it mean to say[…]? Is it enough that[…]? What is the expression of[…]? 12. What does anyone tell me by saying[…]? 13. What does it mean for me to look at[…] and say[…]? Does it simply mean[…]? 14. But this is seeing! In what sense is it seeing?

 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.

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15. Of course I might also have seen the picture first as something different, and then have said to myself ‘Oh, it’s two hexagons!’ So the aspect would have altered. And does this prove that I in fact saw it as something definite? 16. ‘Is it a genuine visual experience?’ The question is: in what sense is it one? 17. This is one meaning in calling it[…] But can I say in the same sense[…]? 18. And does the child now see the chest as a house? ‘He quite forgets that it is a chest; for him it actually is a house[…]’ Then would it not also be correct to say that he sees it as a house? 19. If someone said[…] he might still be meaning very different things. 20. Someone tells me: ‘I looked at the flower, but was thinking of something else and was not conscious of its color.’ Do I understand this?—I can imagine a significant context. What do we call…? How do we tell…? What makes you want to say…? Would it be correct to say…? How might we understand someone who said…? Inviting the reader to say, and thereby find out, what he or she would want to call something, what word or words he or she would choose to employ in a particular case, and then asking the reader to reflect upon his or her choice and try to account for it, is the Wittgensteinian elicitation of criteria. In the remarks on aspects we are repeatedly invited to test out our words, see whether and how we want to employ them in various contexts—all more or less familiar—that Wittgenstein invites us to imagine. And then we are asked to account for our choice, which doesn’t necessarily, or exactly, mean to justify our choice; for it really is more a matter of getting clear on what our choice is—what it amounts to. And the implied claim is that we don’t know in advance—part of our problem is precisely that we think we may know in advance—what we will find, and hence that the structure, or grammar, of the range of human experiences which these words are used to articulate, though in a sense perfectly familiar, is something that we don’t yet clearly see. ‘Let the use teach you the meaning,’ Wittgenstein urges in his remarks on aspects (PPF, 250), as he similarly urges us in other places. ‘Don’t think that you knew in advance what “state of seeing” means here!’ (PPF, 250). What could be more familiar and better understood in Wittgenstein than this call? But I find that the tendency among readers of Wittgenstein has been to think of this repeated call as expressing what may be called ‘Wittgenstein’s contribution to our understanding of the concept of meaning’, not as something that is internal to the philosophical work that happens in his remarks. Whatever understanding or revelation we are offered in Mulhall’s account of the seeing of aspects, that understanding or revelation is not arrived at by reminding ourselves of the uses of our words—by our struggling in this way with the temptation to think that we know in advance what our words mean, or may (reasonably be taken to) mean under various circumstances. It would be impossible to guess, going solely by Mulhall’s reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks, that so many of them end with a question mark. ‘What we have […] to do is to accept the everyday language-game, and to note false accounts of the matter as false’ (PPF, 161; see also PI, 654–6). How hard can accepting the everyday language-game be? It turns out to be extremely hard. We are

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tempted, for example, to suppose that we already know what seeing is, and hence what we must mean by ‘seeing.’ As against this temptation, Wittgenstein urges us to remind ourselves of how we use the word ‘seeing’ in different contexts, hence of what we (may) mean by ‘seeing,’ and hence of what seeing, for us anyway, is. A great many of the remarks on aspects exhibit this struggle to attain clarity, ‘despite an urge to misunderstand [the workings of our language]’ (PI, 109). And why should such a work of reminding ourselves of something we already know require hundreds of remarks? Well, it turns out that what we already know is immensely complex—no less complicated than the human organism (TLP 4.002; see also PI, 156 and 182). It is also the case that the lures of misleading pictures and false explanations are powerful and hard to resist. For example, it is very tempting to suppose, when an aspect strikes us and we see something in a way we’ve never seen it before, that before the new aspect dawned we had been seeing the thing all along under some different aspect. It is tempting, in other words, to suppose that there is, that there must be, some continuous version to the seeing of aspects, and that we are always seeing things under some (determinate) aspect or another.14 And the problem is not that this supposition is false, but that it is not at all clear what we mean, what it is we are supposing. Our problem, as I might put it, is that we think we know what we mean—what we must mean—and this blinds us to what we do, or might, mean. And since that is our problem, it may help us to ask ourselves, with Wittgenstein, whether the fact that I have just been struck by an aspect and now see the object in a way I have not seen it before ‘prove[s] that I in fact saw it as something specific’ (PPF, 189). Or it may help us to consider Wittgenstein’s suggestion that while there is no doubt about the possible aptness of the ‘never’ in ‘I’ve never seen this in that way before,’ the ‘always’ in ‘I have always seen this like that’ is not equally certain (see RPPI, 512); or that when we say ‘I’ve always seen it in this way’ what we really mean to say is ‘I have always conceived (auffassen) it this way, and this change of aspect has never taken place’ (RPPI, 524); or that when you say ‘I have always seen it with this face’ you still have to say what face, and that as soon as you add that, it’s no longer as if you had always done it (RPPI, 526); or that to say of a real face, or of a face in a picture, ‘I’ve always seen it as a face’ would be strange (or odd, selt-

 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. 14

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sam), whereas ‘It has always been a face to me, and I have never seen it as something else’ would not be (see RPPI, 532); or that ‘If someone were to tell me that he had seen the figure for half an hour without a break as a reversed F, I’d have to suppose that he had kept on thinking of this interpretation, that he had occupied himself with it’ (RPPI, 1020); or that ‘If there were no change of aspect then there would only be a way of taking (Auffassung), and no such thing as seeing this or that’ (RPPII, 436). Disentangling a philosophical entanglement can require the kind of patience, attentiveness, and persistence that disentangling a knot made of delicate threads would require. It also requires resisting false senses of satisfaction. But in Wittgenstein, the threads are nothing more, nor less, than grammatical threads—our ordinary and normal ways of making sense, of putting our world into words, or trying to, and positioning ourselves in relation others; and disentangling those threads is done, as it is done in the examples given in the previous paragraph, by reminding ourselves of what we couldn’t have failed to know.

3.3  Learning from Wittgenstein: II But if it meant this I ought to know it (PPF, 117). But now, what about Mulhall’s ‘dissolution’ of the ‘paradox’ of aspect-dawning? For after all, if indeed there is a genuine paradox which Mulhall manages genuinely to dissolve, then perhaps one does not need to take Wittgenstein’s torturous way in order to arrive at a clear (over)view of the phenomena of aspect-dawning; perhaps there is no need for the kind of painstaking work that I’ve suggested is undertaken by Wittgenstein’s remarks; perhaps we need no more than to be reminded of ‘the very general fact that human beings relate to, treat, or regard pictures as pictures (as representational objects).’15 (Why is this very general fact about us, whatever exactly it amounts to, something that we need to be reminded of? Is it supposed to be a fact that it is easy to overlook? Is it supposed to be a fact that we know but for some reason have been failing to acknowledge? Are there strong sources of resistance to its apt recognition? Is it a fact that is hard to bring into clear view? After all, it seems that all that being reminded of it and having it become a forgone conclusion requires is simply for Mulhall to propose it to us, or for him to have Wittgenstein propose it to us.) Let us therefore consider Mulhall’s ‘therapeutic dissolution’16 of the paradox of aspect-dawning: If, in general, we do not simply recognize that pictures depict and what they depict but rather take their pictorial identity (as a picture of x rather than y) for granted in our dealings with them, if we generally respond to pictures in terms of what they depict, then we will of

15 16

 ‘Seeing Aspects’, 253.  ‘Seeing Aspects’, 255.

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3  On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take to See the Grammar… course tend to regard a picture-duck as being as different from a picture-rabbit as a duck is from a rabbit; and we will accordingly be tempted to give expression to the sudden realization that the picture-object before us is both a picture-duck and a picture-rabbit in terms which suggest that the picture-object itself has altered—that a pictured duck has been transformed into a pictured rabbit, one sort of picture-object into another, very different sort. In short, against the background Wittgenstein encapsulates in his notion of continuous aspect perception, our paradoxical sense of the dual-aspect figure changing even though we know that it remains unaltered becomes entirely unsurprising; what else would one expect from people who relate to pictures and picture-objects in terms of what they depict? [...] Understood as simply one manifestation of a general tendency to treat pictures in terms of what they depict, the apparent paradoxicality inherent in the ways in which we give expression to experiences of the dawning of an aspect dissolves.17

The first question I wish to raise is what sort of an account this account is supposed to be.18 Is it supposed to be a conceptual account, which seeks to elucidate things we sometimes find ourselves ‘tempted’ (or inclined, or compelled, or called upon…) to say, and to remove certain confusions and difficulties that result from misconstruing those things? Or is it, rather, an empirical, causal account, which aims to explain our ‘tendency’ to have certain peculiar experiences, or the fact that it sometimes seems to us—that we ‘have the sense’19—that what we see has changed, even though we know it hasn’t changed? Put otherwise, my question is how the ‘puzzlement’ induced by the experience expressible by ‘everything has changed and yet nothing has changed’ is supposed to disappear in the light of Mulhall’s account. Is it supposed to disappear through our finding, as it were, ‘another dimension’ in which ‘see,’ as employed in ‘I see his likeness to his father’, for example, or in ‘I see the sphere floating,’ has ‘room’ (PPF, 165)? Or is it, rather, supposed to disappear in the way that, say, our puzzlement over certain forms of hallucination is supposed to disappear in the light of psychological theories of psychic mechanisms? It seems quite clear that Mulhall thinks of his account as of the former sort. And yet the account seems to me to follow, in many of its moments, the grammar of the latter sort of account. And the result is that it ends up being neither, or a confusing combination of both. As we just saw, Mulhall wants, as part of his dissolution of the paradox of aspect-­ dawning, to be able to talk about a particular ‘characteristic’ attitude that we have toward drawings and pictures. But what exactly is that attitude? What does it mean to say about someone that ‘he takes the specific pictorial identity of a picture (as a picture of x rather than y) for granted,’ or that ‘he has the general tendency to treat  ‘Seeing Aspects’, 253–4.  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. 17 18

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pictures in terms of what they depict’? Does it simply mean that if we showed him a schematic drawing of a face and asked him ‘What’s that?’ he would in all likelihood say something like ‘a face,’ ‘a picture-face,’ or ‘a drawing of a face’? But that would only show that he knows what a drawing of a face is, what ‘a drawing of a face’ means. Is this what the dissolution of the paradox comes to, that given that we know what a drawing or a picture of x is—can normally tell one when we see one— our sense (or our saying) that everything has changed, even though we know that objectively nothing has changed, becomes entirely unsurprising? Mulhall knows, of course, that this could not be what the dissolution of the paradox comes to. First of all, he himself acknowledges that ‘a picture-object (like a picture) just is the sort of thing that is correctly described by describing what it represents,’20 which means that describing pictures and drawings in terms of what they depict could not, in itself, account for a certain ‘capacity’ that most, but possibly not all, people have, for being struck by aspects. Mulhall also knows that the ‘sense of paradox’ arises precisely because the person does not merely say ‘Oh, this could also be a picture of a rabbit,’ but rather says something like ‘Now it’s a rabbit,’ ‘Everything has changed,’ or ‘I see it differently.’ So what Mulhall, as I understand him, thinks we need is a specific, and at the same time typical or characteristic relation that we have to pictures or drawings; and he conceives of it as a general category of relation to pictures and drawings, such that the dawning of an aspect would amount to something like a switch from one relation to another within this general category. Mulhall claims that this general category of relation is what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing,’ and he further claims that this category is contrasted, in Wittgenstein’s remarks, with another category, that of ‘knowing’: ‘We distinguish seeing from knowing what a picture represents in terms of the immediacy with which a description of what it represents is forthcoming even after only a glimpse of the picture, of whether that description is proffered as one amongst a number of possible interpretations, and of whether any faults in that description make sense in terms of what it depicts.’21 In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, I argued that the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, as Mulhall proposes to draw it, corresponds to no distinction that might exist in our language between ‘seeing’ (in whichever of its ordinary senses) and ‘knowing’ (in whichever of its ordinary senses), and that Wittgenstein says nothing that would justify attributing such a general distinction to him.22 But one may presumably postulate whatever meaning one wishes for his words; and there may be no harm in doing so, provided one manages to avoid confusing oneself  ‘Seeing Aspects’, 251.  ‘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. 20 21

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and others. Of course, one would not thereby become free of one’s dependency on our context-sensitive, shared criteria; for, having postulated what one is going to mean by ‘seeing,’ one would now have to be prepared to say what he or she means by—what he or she is going to count, in some particular context or another, as— ‘immediacy’ (‘smoothness,’ ‘lack of hesitance’), ‘proffering one’s description as one amongst a number of possible interpretations,’ and ‘a fault in the description that makes sense in terms of what the picture depicts.’ Let us suppose that that can coherently be done. Let us suppose we now have a clear enough concept of a certain specific relation to pictures and drawings, and can go on applying that concept. We show someone a schematic drawing of a face and we ask her ‘What’s that?’. If she then responds by saying something like ‘A face,’ or ‘A smiling face,’ or maybe ‘A picture-(smiling) face,’ and if we find that her response may aptly count (under the circumstances) as ‘(more or less) immediate’ (she does not ‘hesitate’ before answering), and if it seems to us that she doesn’t take ‘face’ or ‘smiling face’ to be ‘one amongst a number of possible interpretations of the drawing,’ then we will call her relation to the drawing ‘continuous aspect perception.’ And then, sure enough, we will discover that most people’s relation to pictures is the relation that (following Mulhall) we have decided to call ‘continuous aspect perception.’ But now suppose that the other person looks once again at our drawing and exclaims: ‘Ha! Just a moment ago, I looked at the picture and the expression of the face struck me as that of a meek person, humbly, even if not entirely without resentment, accepting the blows of fate; but now it all of a sudden strikes me as having the expression of a complacent businessman, stupidly supercilious, who though fat, imagines he’s a lady killer.23 I see, of course, that the drawing hasn’t changed, and yet I see it differently.’ And suppose further that even though the experience she expresses is altogether familiar to me—I know exactly what she is talking about, I myself have occasionally been struck by aspects in the past and might also be able to bring myself to see the two aspects she speaks of—I find myself puzzled and intrigued by the possibility of such a shift in how a visible object visibly strikes us. I want to understand the perceptual experience of aspect-dawning, and I turn to Mulhall’s account for enlightenment. Recall that we have already established that my friend’s relation to drawings is one of ‘continuous aspect seeing’—she (normally) ‘responds to drawings, immediately and without hesitation, in terms of what they depict.’ According to Mulhall, the next thing I’m supposed to realize about my friend is that, given her general relation to drawings, it is no wonder that she should be

 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.

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‘tempted to give expression to [her] sudden realization that the picture-object I showed [her] is both a picture-meek-man and a picture-complacent-businessman in terms which suggest that the picture-object itself has changed—that one sort of a picture-object [has been transformed] into another, very different sort.’24 Do I understand that? First of all, it is not at all clear that I am well described as ‘tempted’ to express myself as I do when an aspect dawns on me, any more than I am tempted to express bewilderment when I’m bewildered, or surprise when I’m surprised. Is there some better judgment, or wisdom, against which I express myself in the way I do? Is there any reason for me to refrain from thus expressing my experience, other than a certain (mis)conception of what ‘seeing’ must mean? Nor do I find that the terms of my expression suggest that the object itself has changed, any more than my saying ‘Now it’s clear’ about a theorem you’ve just explained to me suggests that the theorem itself had changed (though if I said the same words in response to your question about the weather I would very likely be suggesting, or rather saying, that the weather had changed). Next I think we need to figure out what exactly is meant by ‘his sudden realization that the picture-object is both a picture-meek-man and a picture-complacent-­ businessman.’ Does it mean that he suddenly realizes—it all of a sudden occurs to him—that it could serve as either of them, be taken or interpreted to be either of them? Or does it mean that he found he could see it as one or the other? If it means the latter, then Mulhall’s dissolution of the paradox presupposes the very concept it purports to be explicating, and we are exactly where we started: He says he sees it differently, even though, in another sense of ‘see’, he also sees that it hasn’t changed, because he really does see it differently, even though he realizes that it hasn’t changed. This, as Wittgenstein says, ‘really means: This expression is justified!— (For taken literally it is no more than a repetition)’ (PPF, 171).25 So I suppose Mulhall must mean something like the former understanding: The man suddenly realizes—it suddenly occurs to him—that the drawing could (be meant to) represent two sorts of character, could be interpreted in (at least) two different ways. But since each of the two competing interpretations induces a particular kind of attitude—a way of standing toward and responding to the drawing—what  Note added 2019: see also ‘The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words’, 265.  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). 24 25

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he discovers is that he can relate to the drawing in two different ways. Let us further grant that the two moments—the one of interpreting the drawing in a particular way, and the one of regarding or treating it as we interpret it—need not always come separated and in this order. Let us grant that a particular interpretation may reveal itself to us in (our discovery of the possibility of) a (new) way of regarding or treating the object. This would mean that Mulhall’s dissolution of the paradox proceeds as follows: We tend to express the dawning of an aspect by saying that everything has changed, even though we know that the drawing or picture has not changed, because we really do have a ‘sense of the dual-aspect figure changing even though we know that it remains unaltered’;26 and we have the sense that the figure itself has changed, because our attitude toward it—the way we treat or regard it—has changed.27 But if Mulhall’s dissolution of the paradox is meant to work along the above lines, then I think at least the following four worries arise: 1. Mulhall’s proposed criteria of ‘continuous aspect perception’—one’s immediate and unhesitating response to something, in certain terms, etc.—have been of no use to us or to him.28 If Mulhall indeed meant to capture with his criteria a way of treating or regarding something, then his criteria failed to come in contact with what he was trying to capture. For responding immediately and unhesitatingly to the question ‘What’s that?’, when it is asked about some drawing (or picture), taking the identity of the object for granted, offering correct descriptions, or descriptions that if wrong are wrong only in certain ways but not in others—none of that means that we are regarding, or treating, the drawing in any particular way. It only means that we know what drawings are, and what drawing this particular one is. 2. Even if we disregard Mulhall’s proposed criteria for his notion of ‘continuous aspect perception’ and take the term, as he clearly wishes us to, to mean something like ‘treating’ or ‘regarding’ the drawing in a particular way, we will not thereby come any closer to a satisfying understanding, let alone dissolution, of what may be called ‘the paradox of aspect-dawning.’ For the ‘seeing’ of aspects does not mean ‘the way we treat or regard things’, on any plausible understanding of the latter. What constitutes the peculiarity of the seeing of aspects, what perhaps lies at the root of the difficulty of attaining a clear view of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects,’ is precisely the fact that conceptually, grammatically, the seeing of an aspect goes beyond treating, or regarding, something in a particular way. This is why we should have no problem understanding someone  ‘Seeing Aspects’, 254.  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. 26 27

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who said: ‘You can think now of this now of this as you look at it, can regard it [my emphasis] now as this now as this, and then [my emphasis] you will see it now this way, now this’ (PPF, 163; see also PPF 116–7). Elsewhere Wittgenstein reminds us of one of the typical criteria of seeing something as something: exclaiming, in a particular situation, ‘Now it’s a house!’ (PPF, 207). This exclamation of ‘Now…!’ signals that the person is not, or not only, treating or regarding the thing in a particular way but seeing it in a particular way. And it should further be noted that one is not likely to be struck—certainly not in the way one may be struck by an aspect—by one’s attitude toward something. ‘Seeing,’ unlike ‘regarding’ or ‘treating,’ refers, grammatically, to ‘a state’ (RPPII, 43; see also PPF, 248): like paying attention to something, the seeing of an aspect has a determinate and, normally, limited duration, and it can be interrupted. So in the expression of the dawning of an aspect, the same form of words that in other contexts would have been used to say how the person is treating or regarding the thing is being used to say something different, to give voice to a perceptual experience: ‘The expression of the aspect is the expression of a way of taking [Auffassung] (hence, of a way-of-dealing-with [Behandlungsweise], of a technique); but used [my emphasis] as description of a state’ (RPPI, 1025). ‘Seeing something as something’ does not mean ‘treating, or regarding it as, something.’29 3. If it did—if Mulhall were correct in equating, as he does, ‘seeing something as something’ with ‘treating or regarding something as something’30—then the dawning of an aspect would not be the philosophically puzzling phenomenon that it is. If by giving voice to the seeing of an aspect we meant to say no more than that we were treating or regarding the object in a particular way—if in saying ‘Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed’ we meant to say no more than ‘the thing has not changed, but my attitude toward it, the way I treat or regard it, has changed’—then there would have been no puzzlement to begin with. That we can regard the same thing in different ways, relate or respond to the same person or house or piece of furniture in different ways, is not puzzling in the same way that our sometimes seeing the same thing in different ways is. Faced with children who as part of their play ‘interpret a chest as a house in every detail’ (PPF, 205), seeing that for them, as we might put it, ‘the chest actually is a house,’ we may very well admire and even wonder at their powers of imagination and at their freedom in using those powers; but we are not going to be puzzled in the way that it is quite natural to become puzzled in the face of the

 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. 29

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(conceptual) possibility of seeing the chest as a house. It is precisely the way in which the concept of ‘seeing’ forces itself upon us in the case of the dawning of an aspect (cf. PPF, 191) that makes the seeing of aspects so philosophically ­puzzling, especially when we are held captive by a traditional picture of what ‘seeing’ must mean. 4. So Mulhall’s ‘dissolution of the paradox’ has left ‘the paradox’ untouched. Given what he may have entitled himself to claim, in his remarks concerning the way we treat or regard drawings and pictures, his ‘dissolution of the paradox’ really comes to something like the following: If we generally respond to pictures in terms of what they depict, then of course how we tend to regard a picture-duck should be expected to be as different from how we tend to regard a picture-rabbit as how we tend to regard a duck is different from how we tend to regard a rabbit; and we will accordingly (be tempted to?) give expression to the sudden realization that the picture-object before us is both a picture-duck and a picture-rabbit in terms suggesting(?) that we (found we) are capable of two different responses to, or attitudes toward, the picture-object—that the very same drawing that we earlier regarded as a pictured duck we now (realize we can) regard as a pictured rabbit.

Aspect-dawning, thus understood to consist in a shift in how we regard the drawing or picture, indeed ceases to be puzzling and intriguing; it indeed becomes ‘entirely unsurprising’. What else would we expect from people who tend to regard drawings and pictures in terms of what they depict? But understood this way, it also ceases to be what Wittgenstein is investigating in his remarks on aspects. If my analysis of Mulhall’s account is correct as far as it goes, his predicament is the following: He wants to be able to speak of a continuous relation that we have to pictures and drawings, against the background of which aspect-dawning would be discovered to be ‘unsurprising’—just what one would expect. But it turns out that any relation to the picture or drawing short of seeing it under some aspect is bound to leave the dawning of an aspect floating outside its reach, as mysterious as it ever was. So it appears that an account of the kind Mulhall has been looking for must either fail to come in contact with what it presumes to explain or else presuppose it. And by that I mean: Either we take our general relation to pictures and drawings (however exactly we wish to conceive of it) to be different from our relation to them when an aspect dawns on us, in which case that general relation could perhaps be the background against which the dawning of aspects is made possible, but the latter is still importantly different from the former; or else that general relation to pictures and drawings is taken to be just an extended version of our relation to them when an aspect strikes us. In either case, we’d better first get clearer on (what Wittgenstein calls) ‘the dawning (or lighting up) of an aspect’; and one important thing we might then find is that the seeing of an aspect, in the sense Wittgenstein most cares about in his remarks, cannot, grammatically, be continuous: ‘It is as if the aspect were something that only dawns, but does not remain; and yet this must be a conceptual remark, not a psychological one’ (RPPI, 1021; see also RPPI, 1028). The aspect ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied with the observed object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237). And for that reason, taking ‘continuous aspect perception’ to be key to

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an understanding of ‘aspect-dawning’ is bound to distort the very thing it is meant to elucidate.31 Let me say one more word about what sort of account Mulhall’s account is, or might be. Faced with the (various) phenomena of aspect-dawning, Mulhall has, in effect, been asking, not ‘How can sense be made of our saying that we see something differently even though we know it hasn’t changed?’, but rather ‘How come we have this seemingly strange experience in which the very same thing all of a sudden seems to us to have completely changed, even though we know it hasn’t?’ To this second question, Mulhall in effect answers: ‘What has in fact changed is our relation to, our attitude toward, the thing,’ and I’ve been trying to show that it is not clear how we are supposed to understand this answer. As a causal explanation of the experience of aspect-dawning, there might be nothing wrong with such an answer to such a question—just as there might be nothing wrong with our saying to our friend who tells us that even though nothing in her world has changed everything has changed, ‘Of course it (perceptually) strikes you as if everything has changed, for your attitude has changed!’ It should be noted, however, that an account of this type presupposes our understanding of the concepts involved and of the utterances in which they are employed; it does not in any way explicate them. It would be different if we said: ‘To speak of everything changing is an inaccurate and misleading way of expressing oneself. What the person really means is that her attitude has changed. This is all she could possibly mean when she says that everything has changed, for the thing itself clearly has not changed, as she herself both knows and acknowledges.’ That would be an attempt to conceptually dissolve the puzzlement generated by the other’s form of expression. I have tried to show that in the case of aspect-seeing (just as possibly also in the case of the person to whom the world seems different), this way of trying to dissolve the paradox would end up distorting that which it attempted to clarify. For one thing, it misses altogether the point of our giving voice to the dawning of an aspect: when I call upon you to see the likeness of one face to another, I am not inviting you to share with me a new way of relating to that face (though possibly this is part of what I expect from you), but rather inviting you to discover something—to see something—in this face. Instead of painstakingly recovering the domain to which the expression of the seeing of aspects belongs, such a conceptual ‘dissolution’ of the difficulty posed by aspect perception squeezes it into another domain, which, though phenomenologically connected to the domain we are looking for, is importantly not identical with it. I said that perhaps Mulhall’s account might work as (part of) a causal explanation of the dawning of aspects in some cases.32 But the important thing, for Wittgenstein,  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 character31

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is not to explain these and other similar experiences, but to explore their grammar; in part, so that certain forms of explanation will lose their appeal. Seeing aspects in representational objects, which is a sort of experience that assumes a variety of forms, itself belongs to a much wider range of experiences—a range characterized by things striking us perceptually, in such a way that how they perceptually appear to us changes, and changes wholly. Wittgenstein, as I understand him, was trying, in his remarks on aspects, to arrive at an unobstructed view of the conceptual domain within which those varied experiences have their sense for us. And in the light of what Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects enable us to see, I find that my sense of where the significance of aspect-dawning lies runs counter to Mulhall’s. Whereas for Mulhall, aspect-dawning acquires its significance by revealing our normal perceptual relation to the world to be smooth and unhesitating— something that we have already attained and rightfully take as a matter of course—I find that aspect-dawning reveals our basic relation to the world to be one in which we are continually in danger of losing touch with our world, and thereby with ourselves, precisely by taking our world as a matter of course, so to speak. My sense is that our relation to the world, as revealed by the dawning of aspects, is one in which we continually need to restore an intimacy with it—an intimacy that is forever at stake, and that if taken for granted is bound to be lost. The continual danger, in other words, is that, succumbing to habitual ways of treating, or regarding, things, we will lose our ability to see them, or see them anew.

ized 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.

Chapter 4

Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty

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. Keywords  Aspect perception · Mental states and processes · Philosophical difficulty · Philosophical therapy · The illusion resulting from conflating the ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ uses of ‘a quite particular’

4.1  Introduction I want in this paper to trace a new line of thought through, or actually to, Wittgenstein’s writings on aspect perception, and to stay away as much as possible from old controversies. My point of bearing will be the second part of the Brown Book. I believe it has not previously been noted that this is where Wittgenstein’s first sustained engagement with the topic of aspect perception, and one that is clearly continuous with his work on that topic all the way to the end of his life, takes place. This fact might well have been of a merely biographical interest. I shall try to show, however, that the trail of philosophical reflection that apparently naturally leads Wittgenstein in the Brown Book from questions concerning how we ought to conceive of our various mental states (and processes)—i.e., from what is arguably one of the underlying overall concerns of the first part of the Investigations—to the topic of aspect perception, is in fact philosophically interesting. It is also different from what previous attempts to relate the remarks on aspects to the first part of the Investigations would have made one expect. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_4

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Before I set out, however, I would like to briefly put my cards on the table. First, I do not take Wittgenstein’s numerous remarks on aspect perception to be anything like the first part of the Investigations when it comes to how far each one of them individually, and the way in which they may, or ought to, be found to fall together, were thought through by him. In fact, I see no reason to suppose that Wittgenstein ever came as far as to form an idea of how his remarks on aspects, or some selection of them, may fall together to form some sort of a unified whole. The first part of the Investigations, as I understand it, was extremely carefully designed, over many years, to make its reader work; in the remarks on aspects, on the other hand, we see Wittgenstein himself at work, making his way. I do not suppose any of this to be controversial; and I know it might seem barely pertinent to the work of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, whatever it may be. I would not have felt the need to remark upon it here were it not for the tendency among readers of those remarks to look for a comprehensive, unified and complete account of aspect perception in them, and to look for it under the presumption that Wittgenstein himself had such an account on offer. Second, and more specifically, I see no reason to think of section xi of the second part of the Investigations as constituting some sort of a philosophically unified whole. The circumstances of its composition and the way in which it made its way into what became the Philosophical Investigations no more justify thinking about it in that way1 than does the form it ended up taking. Once again I would not have felt the need to make this remark if it were not for the tendency among commentators to claim support for their interpretations from the particular composition of section xi and from the particular order in which its remarks are arranged. I do not say that the composition and order of the remarks in section xi are entirely arbitrary, for clearly they are not: some remarks clearly rely upon or even make reference to previous remarks (much more so in the first half or so of section xi than in the second half). At some point, however, interpretive moves that take the form of ‘from his discussion of A Wittgenstein moves to a discussion of B, and it is therefore clear that his intention was to connect A to B, and to do so in this or that way’ strike me as unwarranted. Third, even if Wittgenstein had worked 20 more years on his remarks on aspects and had managed to come to the point at which some particular selection of them more or less satisfied him and seemed to him to fall together more or less satisfyingly (perhaps together with the remarks currently comprising the first part of the Investigations), I doubt very much that those remarks would have presented us with Wittgenstein’s ‘views’ on aspect perception and on perception more generally.2 If

 I take this on the authority of Michael Nedo from the Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge.  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 1 2

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Wittgenstein had anything that might aptly be described as ‘philosophical views’ they concerned the nature of philosophical difficulty, what lies at its roots, and the method, or methods, of philosophical response called for by difficulty of that nature. As for the seeing of aspects, or for perception more generally, or, for that matter, for naming, or understanding, or meaning, or reading, or following a rule, and so on, I think that an important point of departure for Wittgenstein’s work was that he found literally incredible the dominating conception of philosophy, on which it ought to enable us to form correct views about these sorts of ‘phenomena’ (PI, 90)—the sort of views that one person could teach another, who until then had been holding incorrect views (or no views) about them. That we repeatedly and seemingly inevitably come to expect just that of philosophy, and therefore are liable to be disappointed with the sort of progress Wittgenstein pursues, is something to which Wittgenstein’s work is everywhere alive. Fourth, when it comes to perception, there is a further reason for resisting the temptation to attribute a unified and comprehensive view of it to Wittgenstein. In contrast to virtually any other treatment of perception in the tradition of western philosophy, Wittgenstein’s remarks are persistently attentive to the richness and complexity of all that may fall under the concept of ‘perception’. Here, as in other areas of philosophical reflection, one of Wittgenstein’s chief aims was to teach us differences. ‘There are here hugely many interrelated phenomena and possible concepts’, he says in the course of his investigation of aspect perception (PPF, 155). The following is only a partial list of all of the ‘concepts of experience’ (Erfahrungsbegriffe) that come up for consideration in the Investigations (many of them in section xi of part two of that text): ‘a feeling (Gefühl) of familiarity (unfamiliarity)’, ‘a feeling of naturalness (unnaturalness)’, ‘finding something conspicuous (inconspicuous)’, ‘seeing’ (and, or versus, ‘seeing’), ‘seeing a property of the object’ (as opposed to ‘seeing an aspect’), ‘being struck’, ‘noticing’, ‘interpreting’, ‘knowing (merely knowing) what one sees’, ‘seeing something as something’, ‘treating something as something (behandeln als)’, ‘regarding something as something (betrachten als)’, ‘taking something as (or for) something (halten für)’, ‘conceiving (auffassen) something in one way or another (as opposed to seeing it as this or that)’, ‘having what one sees come alive for one’, ‘seeing something three-dimensionally’, ‘being conscious (aware) (Bewußtsein) (of something)’, ‘looking without being aware (of something)’, ‘thinking (of what one sees/looks at)’, ‘recognizing’, ‘seeing something without recognizing it’, ‘imagining’, ‘feeling (as in ‘one feels the softness of the depicted material’)’, ‘knowing one’s way about (with a drawing, say)’, ‘concerning one’s self with what one sees’, ‘paying attention’, ‘being blind to an expression’… And consider further that the criteria that inform the application of each one of these terms are themselves complex and context dependent. It may not be obvious that one ought to lose one’s appetite for

on other topics) a unity that is foreign to ‘their nature’ (PI, preface), and therefore to misconstrue the philosophical work undertaken in them.

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a philosophical theory of perception upon consideration of the richness and complexity of the forms that the human relation to the world can take. It does, however, seem to me rather difficult to ­consider seriously the richness, complexity and context-sensitivity of our concepts of experience and not to become rather suspicious of the (purportedly) comprehensive, unified, and complete theories of perception (or experience) that western philosophy has tended to produce.3 Fifth, and relatedly, I do not take, and I do not take Wittgenstein to have taken, the experience he calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’ to be a manifestation of some one underlying, basic (sort of) relation that we have to the things of our world.4 It has been argued in Wittgenstein’s name that the experience of aspect dawning is somehow a manifestation of some such basic relation, that it is that relation which constitutes Wittgenstein’s true interest in his numerous remarks on aspect perception, and that that relation is what he refers to by ‘continuous seeing (stetigen Sehen) of an aspect’ (PPF, 118).5 In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, I argued, first, that there is a very important sense in which aspects, as Wittgenstein thought of them, can (conceptually) ‘only dawn, but not remain’ (RPPI, 1021); and, second, that in the one place in section xi in which Wittgenstein speaks of the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect, he is talking about a rather special and very local phenomenon—the case, namely, in which someone looks at an object that others know to be ambiguous (which is not our relation to most objects in our world), ‘sees it under’ one of its two or more ‘aspects’, and fails to realize that there are other ‘aspects under which the object can be seen’6—a phenomenon which is not at all at the center of Wittgenstein’s concern, but rather is one that he feels he ‘must distinguish’ from what centrally concerns him. I accordingly propose that we take Wittgenstein at his word when he tells us that he is interested in the concept of ‘noticing an aspect’ and its relation to other concepts of experience (PPF, 113 and 115). Six, and finally, I do not take, and I do not take Wittgenstein to have taken, the experience of aspect dawning to present us with an apparent ‘paradox’ that calls for a philosophical solution (or dissolution).7 What we do have is an experience, or a set 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’,

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of variously related types of experience, which is indeed striking—the striking experience of being perceptually struck, if you will. The striking experience of aspect dawning, and our ordinary and normal ways of expressing it, may invoke any number of conceptual difficulties and unclarities—especially when one wishes to reconcile them with certain prevailing assumptions about what ‘seeing’, or ‘perceiving’, must mean, or refer to; and Wittgenstein was very much concerned with those difficulties and unclarities. But conceptually speaking, ‘Everything has changed and yet nothing has changed’, or ‘I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently’, is no more paradoxical or apparently paradoxical in the case of aspect perception than it would be if said by someone who has had a revelation, or by someone who has undergone successful therapy, or by someone who simply has had a mood swing. Our typical ways of giving voice to the dawning of an aspect are no more paradoxical, or apparently paradoxical, I’m suggesting, than ‘war is war’ (or Mary Poppins’ characteristic ‘Oh well, if we must, we must’) would be tautological, or apparently tautological, when used significantly (see PPF, 311). In all such cases, if we could only become clear on what Wittgenstein calls ‘the application (Anwendung) or use (Gebrauch)’ of the words—that is, on the circumstances under which they would (normally) be uttered, on the (sort of) point they would (normally) have when uttered, on the significance and possible consequences of uttering them under various circumstances, on what proper (and improper) responses to them would be under various circumstances, on the significance and possible consequences of different kinds of response, on the worldly conditions of meaning them one way or another…—there would, conceptually speaking, be nothing further to find out, or discover, about what is referred to, or what is expressed, by means of those words.8 This is not to say that attaining conceptual clarity with respect to the seemingly thoroughly familiar phenomena of our world is easy. In the case of aspect perception, for example, Wittgenstein’s pursuit of conceptual clarity ended up requiring hundreds of remarks, and many years of work that never led him to anything like a satisfying conclusion, or resolution.9

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.

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4.2  Background I said that the second part of the Brown Book contains Wittgenstein’s first sustained engagement with the topic of aspect perception, or seeing something as something. Here for the first time we encounter—in addition to the Necker cube that served as illustration in Wittgenstein’s all-too-brief and patently unsatisfactory attempt to accommodate aspect perception within the framework of the Tractatus (5.5423)10— the picture puzzle wherein mere dashes come to be seen as a face, a square with two diagonals which can be seen as a swastika, a line of four dots that can be seen as two pairs of dots side by side with each other or as two interlocking pairs, W which can be seen as an upside down M, and other more or less similar cases, of the sort that also come up in section xi and elsewhere in Wittgenstein’s later writings. What leads Wittgenstein in the Brown Book to the topic of aspect perception, or seeing something as something? Neither the idea that his philosophy aims at re-­ presenting us with ‘aspects of things that are most important to us [but which] are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’ (PI, 129)11; nor the attempt to solve “the paradox of rule-following” by proposing the seeing of aspects as ‘a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation’ (PI, 201)12; nor his realization of the limitations of his “idea” that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI, 43), or that ‘essence is expressed by grammar’ (PI, 371).13 And he certainly does not come to speak of aspects as a way of revealing something general about human perception as such. Rather, Wittgenstein comes to the topic of aspect perception in an attempt to say something about the nature and source of a certain type of difficulty that arises when we ‘do philosophy’. To summarize the second part of the Brown Book would be impossible. Not only does Wittgenstein attack his target from various directions and in different ways,

 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. 10

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and not only does each line of attack open up new difficulties and possible confusions, but it is also the case that the target itself has several dimensions and sometimes seems to shift in mid-argument. In reading this text one sees what Wittgenstein means when he says in the preface to the Investigations that it used to be his ambition to present his thoughts in such a way that they would ‘proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks’; for this ambition is clearly manifested in the Brown Book. But one can also see why Wittgenstein ultimately came to the conclusion that his ambition resulted in a ‘crippling’ of his thoughts, and why he decided to give it up. One theme that comes up again and again in the Brown Book, however, just as it comes up again and again in the Investigations, is how we ought to conceive of our mental states and processes—states and processes such as recognizing, understanding, reading, being guided, finding a similarity, thinking, wishing, expecting, believing, knowing, deriving, and following a rule. There is a tendency ‘in philosophy’, to which Wittgenstein is responding, to think that any particular sort of mental state (or process)—the state of recognizing something, for example—is the particular sort of “object” that it is in virtue of a particular something which all “objects” of this sort have in common and which makes us call them what we call them. So the philosophical position to which Wittgenstein is responding takes the general form of insisting that there must be (a) something in which Φing consists—where ‘Φing’ stands for recognizing, understanding, reading, etc. (See BB, 86, 99, 144). To this tendency to look for that something in which Φing consists Wittgenstein responds in a variety of ways, not all of which are directly relevant to the purposes of this paper. Two central moves, familiar from the Investigations, are the invitation to ‘look and see’ that there is in fact no one thing (in the Brown Book mostly spoken of in terms of ‘an experience’) which is common to all of the cases of Φing (see BB, 156), and the introduction of the idea of ‘family resemblance’, as an alternative to the prevailing picture of how all of the things (and “things”) to which some particular word (or concept) applies relate to one another (see BB, 87–8, and 125). The above moves are not specific to Wittgenstein’s treatment of mental state concepts. In the case of these concepts, there is the further move of suggesting that what guides and informs our ‘application of the concepts’ (=our use of the words embodying them) are ‘outward’—that is, publicly accessible and assessable—criteria. This move is still not fully developed in the Brown Book (and in fact, the word ‘criteria’ is nowhere used in that text, though it is used a few times in the Blue Book); but it is certainly present there, together with one of the strongest sources of resistance to it—namely, the “anti-behaviorist” idea that the mental state cannot consist in the presence of behavioral criteria, for it is conceptually possible for any set of such criteria for Φing to be present while Φing itself is absent (see BB, 144, 149). In response to this objection Wittgenstein invokes the example of the ‘friendly face’ (BB, 145)—a beautiful example, to my mind, which did not make it to the Investigations (but see PI, 583). The example is meant to remind us that it may be perfectly correct to say of certain eyes that they are friendly, and even to say that they are what makes the face friendly, even though those very same eyes, or eyes

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perfectly (descriptively) identical to them, could feature in a face that was not at all friendly, and even though in such a face they would not be (aptly describable as) friendly. And the lesson of the example is that some particular feature (or set of features) may, under suitable circumstances, perfectly legitimately, and correctly, be taken as a criterion of, say, understanding, even though it is possible for that same feature (or set of features) to be present where understanding is absent. And just as in the case of the eyes what makes the difference is not something essentially hidden but rather the rest of the face (and possibly other features of their environment), in the case of criteria what makes the difference is what Wittgenstein calls the ‘circumstances’ (or sometimes, in the Investigations, the ‘context’) in which they are present. The criteria for someone’s ‘merely appearing to understand’ (or ‘saying something without believing it’, etc.) are no less public, outward, than those for someone’s ‘understanding’ (or ‘believing what she says’, etc.) (see BB, 144–5). Another component in the attempt to effect a transformation in the way that we think of our various mental states and processes is the distinction Wittgenstein draws between ‘What happens when one Φs (recognizes, understands, reads, etc.)’ and ‘What Φing is (what “Φing” means)’. The general idea is that we tend to confuse the two, or to confusedly look for the latter in the former: we attend to instances of Φing in an attempt to find out what Φing is (what ‘Φing’ means); but the only thing we could reasonably hope to find in this way is, at best, things that happen when one Φs. And then we are bound to be disappointed, for even if—counterfactually—we did find something that happens whenever one understands, for example, what would justify taking it to be that in which understanding consists? ‘Even supposing that I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding,—why should it be the understanding?’ (PI, 153). The reader may begin to wonder at this point how all of this connects with the seeing of aspects. And the answer is that it connects in at least two ways. First, seeing an aspect is itself a mental state; and here too there is the tendency, as we shall see, to attend closely to the experience in an attempt to find out what seeing an aspect is—what it consists in. And this tendency, as we shall see, might lead to philosophical confusions and difficulties. More immediately, however, the seeing of aspects is invoked by Wittgenstein in order to illustrate and elucidate a distinction that is key to his diagnosis of an ‘illusion’ we tend to fall into when, in ‘doing philosophy’, we attend to an instance of Φing in order to find out what Φing is. The ‘illusion’ (or ‘delusion’)14 is associated according to Wittgenstein with the expression ‘(a quite) particular (peculiar, certain, bestimmt)’—an expression that Wittgenstein investigates grammatically in both the Brown Book and the Investigations (see BB, 135, and note attached to PI, 165). And it is in connection with that investigation that Wittgenstein invokes the example of aspect perception.

14

 In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein seems to be using these two terms interchangeably.

4.3  ‘A Quite Particular’

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4.3  ‘A Quite Particular’ I said above that according to Wittgenstein there is a tendency ‘in philosophy’ to attend to an instance of Φing in order to find out what Φing is, or what it consists in. I believe he is quite right about this. (Just think, for example, of G. E. Moore waiving an envelope in front of his audience and inviting them to attend to what happens when they see it, in order to find out what seeing something consists in.) Now, when ‘in philosophy’ we attend in this way to an instance of Φing (mostly an enacted, or imagined instance of Φing), we tend, according to Wittgenstein, to come out with utterances such as ‘the name of the color comes in a particular way (when I name the color of the object, as opposed to merely uttering the word while looking at the object)’ (BB, 149, see also 150), or ‘In reading, the spoken words come in a particular way’ (BB, 167), or ‘reading is a quite particular process’ (PI, 165), or ‘being guided is surely a particular experience’ (PI, 173). And we think we have thereby made some progress, however preliminary, toward becoming clearer about (the essence, or concept, of) naming, or reading, or being guided by a rule. As we’ve already seen, one thing that Wittgenstein says about this type of philosophical moment is that we should ‘look and see’ and ‘ask ourselves’ whether the experience to which we attend in such moments is always present whenever one Φs. He goes further than this, however, and suggests that the experience we attend to in such moments is not only not common to all of the cases of Φing, but is actually one that we bring about by attending in the way that we do to an (enacted) instance of Φing. For example, the experience of ‘homely feeling’ that we might wish to claim as characteristic of moments in which we encounter a word we understand may in fact be ‘an experience rather characteristic for the particular situation… of philosophizing about “understanding”’ (BB, 157). Similarly, ‘what is particular about the way “red” comes [when we name the color of a red object] is that it comes while you’re philosophizing about it’ (BB, 159; see also 160, 167, and 177). This very same idea—that what we find when we attend to an instance of Φing in order to find what Φing consists in is really something that we bring about by this very (specific form of) attending—returns in the Investigations (cf. PI, 170 and 175), with the additional suggestion that what we experience in such moments results from our looking at the case through ‘the medium’ of the very concept that we are trying to clarify (see PI, 176–7). I find thought provoking the suggestion that we affect what we find when we attend philosophically to an instance of Φing, by looking at ‘what happens’ through the medium of our concept of ‘Φing’. For one thing, it seems to connect with the topic of ‘experiencing the meaning of a word’ that comes up in section xi: The medium of the concept of ‘Φing’, as Wittgenstein thinks about it in this connection, may plausibly be thought of, it seems to me, as the experienced meaning (physiognomy) of ‘Φing’. I note this connection without expanding, partly as a way of further indicating the complex ways in which Wittgenstein’s topics of investigation intertwine, but partly also in order to alert those interested in the notion of ‘experiencing the meaning of the word’ to the pos-

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sibility that here too a kind of illusion might be in play that results from our a­ ttending to the word in a rather atypical and artificial way (see, in this connection, PPF, 271–2). Still on our way to aspect perception, let us go back to ‘(a quite) particular’ and to the idea that ‘in philosophy’ this expression often betokens a particular kind of illusion. Wittgenstein attempts to explicate the nature of the illusion (or delusion) he is talking about by distinguishing between the ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ uses of ‘particular (peculiar, certain)’ (BB, 158). In the transitive use we talk, for example, of the particular expression of a face, or of the particular way in which someone enters a room, where the expression or way we speak of is separable from the particular object that we perceive (the face, the person walking into the room), in the sense that we can describe it, or otherwise specify or identify it as this or that expression (or way of entering the room), which can be shared by other faces (or persons). So we may say, for example, ‘She has a quite particular way of walking into a room, namely…’, and now we give a description, which, as such, is general, and could fit any number of other cases that are different from that one in indefinitely many respects (though of course, not just in any respect). In the intransitive use of the term, on the other hand, we again may talk about the particular expression of a face, or the particular way in which someone enters a room, but here the expression, or way, is inseparable from the particular instance we speak of, in the sense that, though we could try to specify what expression, or way, we are talking about, ultimately we find that no such specification satisfies us (BB, 162); and what we rather find we want to do is simply point to the face, or to the person walking into the room, and let the expression, or way, identify itself, as it were, as the particular expression, or way, that it is. I will come back to this Heideggerian idea of letting something present itself in the final section of this paper. The illusion Wittgenstein is talking about results from confusing, or conflating, the transitive and the intransitive uses of ‘quite a particular’ and taking ourselves to have identified the expression (or way, etc.) just by attending to it. This has an interesting connection to the topic of “private language” in the Investigations; for the mistake we make in such moments, according to Wittgenstein, is to think that we could, so to speak, identify a nameable something—a possible name-bearer—to which we could now give any name that we like (say, ‘expression A’), ‘without at the same time committing ourselves about its [the name’s] use, and in fact without any intention of using it at all’ (BB, 159, see also 172–3).15 The moments in which we attend, in the course of ‘doing philosophy’, to an instance of Φing in order to find out what Φing consists in, are according to Wittgenstein moments in which we are likely to fall into the above illusion. We take ourselves to have identified, individuated, some particular experience that occurs whenever one recognizes something, or reads, or follows a rule, etc., whereas in fact we are only ‘laying an emphasis’ on the particular instance to which we attend, by attending to it in the particular way that we do (see BB, 160).  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).

15

4.4  The Intransitivity of Aspects

63

Of course, we need not merely attend to what happens to or in us in such moments. We could try to identify, by describing, the particular experience to which we attend when we look for the essence of Φing. But what would likely happen if we succeeded is one of two things (or some combination of them): either we would find that it is utterly implausible to suppose that ‘the experience’ of, say, understanding, as we have described it, is present whenever one understands something; or we would find that we merely have managed to push the bump in the rug elsewhere, not to eliminate it. The latter would occur if we tried, for example, to explicate the notion of ‘naming’ in terms of ‘finding a similarity’ (between all of the things to which some particular name applies); for Wittgenstein would then invite us to ‘look and see’ and ‘ask ourselves’ what, if anything, is common to all of the cases of ‘finding a similarity’ (BB, 132). Or if we tried to explicate the notion of ‘reading’ in terms of ‘being guided’ (by the signs), Wittgenstein would invite us to consider all of the different possible cases of being guided and to acknowledge that there is no particular feature that is common to all of those cases and which makes them (or makes us call them) cases of being guided (PI, 172).16 And so we find ourselves in a philosophical bind: the attempt to identify ‘transitively’ the particular something in which Φing consists leads us to a something all right, but a something which cannot plausibly be taken to be that in which Φing consists; and the attempt to identify that something ‘intransitively’, by means of what is essentially ‘a private ostensive definition’, does not amount to so much as an identification of anything in which Φing might consist.

4.4  The Intransitivity of Aspects17 And now, finally, we come to Wittgenstein’s way of connecting all of the above with aspect perception. We spoke of the ‘illusion’ or ‘delusion’ of attending to something and taking oneself to have managed to identify something in or about it—something which one takes to be separable from the particular thing in which it is manifested, but which is not in fact thus separable, in the sense that it has not (yet) been identified in a way that would enable one to re-identify it correctly or incorrectly, in other things and on other occasions. And it might seem that seeing an aspect—seeing something as something—is precisely not an example of that; for in the case of the aspect it seems that we do have two things—namely, the object and the particular aspect, or aspects, under which it can be seen.  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  Note added 2019: In retrospect, the discussion in this section now seems to me to anticipate my later claim, in ‘Aspects of Perception’, that Wittgensteinian aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, concepts. 16

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Consider, however, how you might identify the aspect you see—how you might describe, or otherwise specify, what you see when a particular aspect strikes you. Take the duck-rabbit, for example. What do you see when you see, not merely the duck-rabbit (which may be described and thereby identified geometrically), but, say, the rabbit aspect? The obvious answer would seem to be ‘a picture-rabbit’ (or maybe ‘a rabbit’) (PPF, 120–1); and if you were asked what that (i.e. a picture-­ rabbit, or a rabbit) was, you could point to non-schematic pictures of rabbits, or to real rabbits, etc. (PPF, 120). But note the important sense in which pointing to a non-ambiguous rabbit, whether flesh and blood or depicted, as a way of specifying what you saw, would be misleading (at least for someone not already familiar with the grammatical peculiarity of aspects): it would suggest that you took yourself to be seeing a non-ambiguous rabbit—a rabbit, depicted or flesh and blood, that was there anyway, independently of anyone’s seeing it, whereas this is clearly not what happens (see BB, 164). What you see, when you see the rabbit aspect, is the duck-­ rabbit as a rabbit. That’s what someone else would need to see, in order to see, and know, what you saw.18 This is even clearer in the case of seeing a line of four dots ‘as two pairs of dots side by side with each other, or as two interlocking pairs, or as one pair inside the other’ (BB, 164), or seeing a square with two diagonals as a swastika (BB, 164): any description or other sort of representation of the aspect, if taken as separable from the object seen under that aspect and from the experience of seeing it, would fail to capture faithfully what was seen. Seeing something as something, Wittgenstein suggests, is importantly not a case of seeing two separate and independently describable things—the object that’s there anyway, and the aspect, which it could share with other, different objects (BB, 164 and 169). In this respect, the aspect belongs with the ‘intransitive’ cases of ‘a quite particular’. To see something as something is to see that particular something in a particular way, not to see it as falling under some general description which, as such, is separable from the thing perceived and could fit indefinitely many other things that may be perceivably different from the first thing in any number of ways (though, of course, not just in any way). In this respect, the aspect is like the expression of a face or someone’s way of entering a room, insofar as those cannot (fully or satisfyingly) be described and thereby identified apart from the object that has them, and may only be seen, if they are to be seen, in the object that “has” them (see BB, 162). The aspect too cannot be separated by means of a description, let alone an empirical judgment, from the object in which it is manifested, and from a particular perceptual experience of that object.19 It is this similarity between aspects, on the one hand, and what we find when we attend to instances of Φing in order to discover what Φing consisted in, on the other hand, that leads Wittgenstein to the topic of aspect perception in the Brown Book (see BB, 163–4 and 168–9).  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. 19  What we have here, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is a perceived ‘meaning which clings to certain contents’ (PP, 147/148). 18

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Here we could have ended. But I wanted to propose two directions for future thinking that proceed from what I have said so far.

4.5  A  spect Perception, Aspect Blindness, and Philosophical Difficulty20 I spoke about Wittgenstein’s attempt to transform the way in which we think of our various mental states; and I said that the attempt involves drawing a distinction between, on the one hand, things that may happen (to, or “in”, one) when one Φs and, on the other hand, what Φing is, or what ‘Φing’ means or refers to. In section xi, the distinction between what happens when one Φs and what Φing is comes up a couple of times in connection with phenomena other than the seeing of aspects. Thus, Wittgenstein talks of ‘important characteristic processes accompanying talking’ that are missing when one talks without thinking, but warns us against supposing that those phenomena are the thinking (PPF, 292); or he talks about whatever might be going on ‘in our consciousness’ when a word is on the tip of our tongue, and warns us against supposing that that is what is meant by ‘The word is on the tip of my tongue’ (PPF, 298). But now, the seeing of an aspect is itself a mental state. And here too we may suppose that there is no better way of clarifying the nature of that state for ourselves than enacting an instance of it and attending to what happens while we are “in it” (see BB, 164). We may ask, for example, what happens when the likeness of one face to another strikes us, and any number of phenomena would then suggest themselves to us as ‘the phenomena of being struck’ (PPF, 244). But is any of those phenomena, or some particular subset of them, what being struck consist in? Wittgenstein’s answer to this question is ‘No’ (PPF, 244). Earlier we mentioned some of his general reasons for giving that answer; but let me try to further motivate it in the specific case of aspect perception. Take the ‘aspect-blind’—the person defined by Wittgenstein as someone ‘lacking in the capacity to see something as something’ (PPF, 257). In my experience, the general tendency among readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects is to take it to be quite clear what aspect-blindness is—what ‘aspect-blindness’ means.21  Note added 2019: The  argument of  this section is meant to  show that the  attempt to  become clearer about the  experience of  aspect-dawning by way of  reflecting on  ‘what happens’ when an aspect dawns, without at the same time attending to the Wittgensteinian grammar of ‘aspectdawning’, is liable to mislead. I take this claim to be compatible with my claim, in later papers, that ‘aspect dawning’ (or ‘noticing an aspect’) refers to a particular sort of perceptual experience that calls for  a  phenomenological understanding, and  that the  Wittgensteinian grammar of  ‘aspectdawning’ would be of little help to someone unfamiliar with the experience. 21  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

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Wittgenstein, on the other hand, goes on to say, immediately after introducing the term, that we should ‘next consider what might be meant [by “aspect-blindness”]’ (PPF, 257), suggesting that what is, or might be, meant by that term may turn out not to be clear at all. Who, or what, is the aspect-blind? What is it, more specifically, that he cannot see, or have?22 Here we may be inclined to enact for ourselves an instance of the experience of aspect dawning, focus our attention on the experience—on what happens to, or in, us when we have it—and say ‘Why, clearly, this is what the aspect-­ blind cannot see (or have)!’. To see that this answer to our question ought not to satisfy us, consider our friend the ‘aspect denier’. He says: Call me an aspect-blind, if you want, but I think that you have gotten yourself altogether confused by speaking of what you call ‘aspects’ in terms of a particular type of visual (or perceptual) experience, and by describing the dawning of an aspect as a moment in which what you see changes. You take yourself to have identified some clear and definite advantage that you supposedly have over those that you call ‘aspect-blind’, but I think that the advantage is illusory, and is, at any rate, not a matter of one person having and the other lacking the capacity to have some particular kind of visual experience or to see some particular kind of ‘object of sight’. It seems to me rather more plausible, and intelligible, to think of the difference between you self-titled ‘aspect-perceivers’ and people like myself as a difference in manner of speaking; and mine seems to me better, in that it does not encourage false, or at any rate unduly complicated, pictures, and theories, of what you call ‘aspect perception’ and ‘aspect dawning’. No one would deny that many or even all things we may encounter in the world are such that they may serve different purposes, naturally or conventionally mean different things, or in some other way come to have different significances for us. Accordingly, those things may occasion different modes of engagement on our part: we may come to take them in different ways, regard or handle them in different ways, and feel different things in relation to them, depending on the circumstances under which we encounter them. Now, many of Wittgenstein’s examples rely on our ability to imaginatively place ourselves variously with respect to some given object; and this is helped by the fact that many of the examples feature very schematic drawings that are encountered in the artificial context of psychological or philosophical inquiry—apart from any of the concrete circumstances in which objects normally are encountered in the course of everyday life. So now, take the duck-rabbit, for example—a schematic drawing cleverly made in such a way that most people would quite easily be able to see (or brought to see)—and ‘see’ not in the sense of ‘having some particular visual experience’, but in the sense of ‘come to (propositionally) know through the sense of sight’—that it could equally well be (in the sense of serve as) a schematic picture of a duck and a schematic picture of a rabbit. I can easily see these two “aspects” of the drawing myself—I mean, see that the drawing “has” them. And in focusing

 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 MerleauPonty 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 ‘aspectblindness’ 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.

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my attention on one of the two things this drawing could have been—the two different things it could serve as—I can enact in myself various kinds of sensations, emotions, feelings, images, etc. My ability to do this is not essentially different or more mysterious than my ability to imagine my front door opening to an abyss, and thereby to enact in myself various experiences associated with that. And so, I see the duck-rabbit; and I also see—in the sense of ‘coming to (propositionally) know through the sense of sight’—that it could serve to schematically depict either a duck or a rabbit. But beyond this, there is nothing to see—nothing particularly visual to be had—in or about the duck-rabbit. The two “visual achievements” that can be had, on the other hand, can be had by any normal person with normal eyesight; and to think of the person you call ‘aspect-blind’ as unable to do these two things, to have these two sorts of experience, would be to think of him as suffering from a handicap far worse than that of merely ‘being unable to see something as something’, whatever exactly that may mean.23

What could we say in response to this? Shall we say, ‘But what about the flipping back and forth, and the totality of the change? Look, now it’s a duck, and now it’s a rabbit!’? Or shall we say, ‘But look, everything changes when the rabbit-aspect replaces the duck-aspect; we see that the drawing has not changed, and yet see it altogether differently!’? I think it ought to be clear that these kinds of response will not impress our aspect-denier (or aspect-re-describer). Nothing that we can say about our experience and what it is like would be taken by him as a reason to think that he was missing something in his account. We might think: But of course he cannot see what is missing in his account. That is precisely because he is an aspect-blind. He cannot, by hypothesis, have this type of experience (and now we enact the experience for ourselves and focus our attention on it as we say “this”); and this is precisely why nothing would convince him that he was missing something. Until he has had an aspect dawn on him, he is bound to misunderstand our various ways of expressing ourselves when an aspect dawns on us, and there can be no way for us to show him that he really does misunderstand. But let him just once experience the dawning of an aspect, and he will never thereafter deny the existence of this type of experience. I think it ought to be clear that this response too will not do: our aspect-denier is going to insist that he is not denying anything real, that he knows exactly what experience we are talking about and is perfectly familiar with it, that he has fully accounted for that experience, and that he simply refuses to join us in speaking of that experience in misleading and confusing ways that make it appear mysterious. Let me emphasize that the question under dispute is not whether aspect-dawning may aptly be described as a type of experience. The question is rather what sort of an experience it is, or how we should conceive of it. And my aim, in invoking the aspect-denier, has only been to show the futility of trying to answer that question by means of attending to what happens in or to us when we enjoy this type of experience.  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’.

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A more promising line of response to the aspect-denier, it seems to me, would require shifting the focus away from the duck-rabbit and the other schematic drawings. This would anyway be an advisable move; for there is something importantly artificial and therefore potentially misleading in those examples of ‘aspect dawning’. The simplicity of those examples makes them useful for certain purposes; but one has got to keep in mind that none of the concepts that are under investigation in Wittgenstein’s remarks has its ‘original home’ in artificial encounters of the sort that we have with these schematic drawings, which is why we are liable to mislead ourselves in important respects if we take these encounters as paradigmatic instances of the seeing of aspects. Essential to the aspect-denier’s account is the fact that each of the schematic drawings is such that, in a suitable context, it could just have been, could just have served as, a schematic drawing of whatever aspect it could be seen under. Thus, the duck-rabbit could have served as a schematic drawing of a duck, or a rabbit; and similarly, the triangle that can be seen as triangular hole, as a solid, as an overturned object which is meant to stand on the shorter side of the right angle, etc. (PPF, 162), could have actually served as a representation of any of those things. This is something that Wittgenstein recognizes when he considers the proposal that ‘the aspects in a change of aspects are those ones which the figure might sometimes have permanently in a picture’ (PPF, 166). And so, in the case of these schematic drawings there are possible ‘interpretations’ of the drawing, and the different aspects under which it can be seen correspond to its possible interpretations (see PPF, 116). The availability of such interpretations is essential to the aspect-denier’s account; for his proposal is that we attend at will to different such interpretations, and thereby enact in ourselves different experiences that have become associated with the different interpretations and which we misleadingly think of as visual experiences (see PPF, 117). Consider, however, the example that Wittgenstein uses to introduce the concept of ‘aspect dawning’: being struck by the similarity of one face to another. This case is different from that of the duck-rabbit in several important respects.24 The difference that is important for our present purposes is that here the aspect that dawns does not normally correspond to a possible interpretation of the object, or to something that, in a suitable context, that object could just have been. There is normally, in other words, no fact about the object which may simply be known and on our knowledge of which the various experiences invoked in the aspect denier’s account could be attendant. It is, of course, possible for one face just to be similar to another—as a matter of empirical fact that can empirically be established; but this is not normally the case when the similarity of one face to another dawns on us. On  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.

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the contrary, it is precisely typical of those moments—characteristic of the language-­ game of aspects, if you will—that there be no such empirically establishable fact, and that the perceiver acknowledges that the similarity she sees is not such that it could empirically be established: if the other could not see it, or even denied its presence, there would be no way of proving her wrong.25 But now, how do I know all this? How do I know that aspects need not, and in fact normally do not, correspond to a possible interpretation of the object, or to an empirically establishable fact about it? Not, I wish to propose, by attending to instances of aspect perception and asking myself what happens in them, but rather by attending to the Wittgensteinian ‘grammar’ of what he calls ‘aspects’: the circumstances under which aspects would normally be seen, the ways in which the seeing of an aspect normally would be expressed, the inter-subjective significance of giving voice to the seeing of an aspect, the commitments one would normally incur in giving voice to the seeing of an aspect, and so on. The crucial move in the aspect-denier’s ‘conjuring trick’ (PI, 308) is to encourage us to focus on what happens when an aspect is seen (and on examples whose artificiality pretty much ensures that there would be nothing else for us to focus on), and to suppose that that is what one would need to know in order to know what the dawning of an aspect is and what the aspect-blind would, by definition, be incapable of seeing, or having. Again, I am not saying that it is wrong to think of the aspect-­ blind as lacking the capacity to enjoy a particular type of experience—that, after all, is true by definition; I am saying, rather, that it is philosophically unhelpful and potentially misleading to try to answer the question of what sort of experience it is by attending to instances of it and asking oneself what happens in them.26

4.6  Aspect Perception and Things That Speak to Us So as not to end this paper on a purely negative, merely ‘therapeutic’, note, let me very briefly indicate one further line of thinking that extends the work of this paper. I spoke above of the ‘illusion’ or ‘delusion’ that Wittgenstein detects in those moments in which we attend to instances of Φing in order to find out what Φing is, and of how he connects it with the tendency to confuse the transitive and intransitive use of ‘ein ganz bestimmt’. These are the moments, Wittgenstein tells us, in which we wish simply to point to what we see and let it, or whatever in or about it that strikes us, articulate itself, as it were—speak for itself (see BB, 174–5 and 177). The illusion that Wittgenstein is talking about is that of taking ourselves to have already successfully identified that which struck us about the object, merely by  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. 26  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

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focusing our attention on “it”. It is important for Wittgenstein that we do not (yet) have a nameable something if there is no way of distinguishing between correct and incorrect identifications of it; and this is not something that can be achieved by sheer acts of attention, or by what Wittgenstein calls ‘an “inward” act of pointing’ (BB, 174). I want to end this paper by emphasizing that there is nothing inherently or necessarily confused in those moments in which we see something about an object that on the one hand impresses us, or strikes us as worth attending to and trying to bring out, but on the other hand is such that no attempt at describing or articulating it satisfies us. (Compare Kant’s ‘aesthetic idea’—the intuition to which ‘no determinate thought would be adequate’.27) I see no reason to suppose, and nothing said in this paper was meant to imply, that Wittgenstein wanted to dismiss as illusory or deny the significance of these moments. There is nothing necessarily confused about ‘Words can’t exactly describe it’ (BB, p. 162), as long as we do not take ourselves to have already identified the “it” which words cannot exactly describe, but rather acknowledge, precisely, that there is something about the object which we have not yet been able, and maybe never will be able, to identify in a way that would satisfy us and enable us to conceive of it apart from its particular manifestation in that particular object. When Wittgenstein speaks of the ‘illusion [that] possesses us [when in] repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us, we say “This tune says something”, and it is as though [we] had to find what it says’ (BB, 162), it is important to remember that the illusion he speaks of is only that of taking ourselves to have already identified the something which the tune says, when in fact we haven’t. That we are drawn to the tune, and find ourselves wanting to ‘say what it says’, or to say that ‘it says something’, does not need to involve any kind of i­llusion.—Not as long as we see these moments, and their significance, for what they are.28,29

 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. 28  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). 29  In writing this paper I was very helpfully challenged, provoked, and informed by Dan Dennett. 27

Chapter 5

The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar Between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell

Abstract  This chapter, which takes its bearing from Stanley Cavell’s ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, continues the work of ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ of exploring the grammatical affinity between Kant’s ‘beauty’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect’; but it then goes on to develop a Wittgensteinian critique of Kant on two fronts: first, it questions Kant’s commitment to ‘systematicity’ in philosophy, and his related tendency to treat what Wittgenstein calls ‘grammar’ as, at best, an indication of something else—namely, the workings of our cognitive ‘powers’, or faculties, in their (systematic) inter-relations; and, second, it challenges Kant’s understanding of ‘concept’—an understanding that is shared by many in contemporary analytic philosophy, and which essentially divorces concepts from our (evolving and context-sensitive) linguistic practices. Keywords  Aspect perception · Cavell · Kant · Beauty · Ordinary language philosophy · Grammar · Systematicity · Concepts · Bedrock agreement (or disagreement)

5.1  Introduction In ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, Stanley Cavell proposes two ways of connecting judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment and the ordinary language philosopher’s ‘appeal to what “we” say and mean, or cannot or must say and mean’.1 On the one hand, Cavell proposes that Kant’s characterization of judgments of beauty may itself be seen as an instance of the philosophical appeal to ordinary language—an appeal that in this instance aims at clarifying the peculiar ‘grammar’, as Wittgenstein would call it, of judgments of beauty (and their expression). On the other hand, Cavell proposes that judgments of beauty, as characterized by Kant, ‘model’ the philosophical appeal to 1  Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’ (Hereafter referred to as ‘Aesthetic Problems’), in Must We Mean What We Say?. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 86.

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ordinary language, in a way that may help to elucidate the nature of that appeal, and thereby go some way toward vindicating it.2 In using the procedures of ordinary language philosophy to clarify the grammar of judgments of beauty while at the same time proposing that those procedures may themselves be seen as partaking of that grammar, what Cavell does, in effect, is turn ordinary language philosophy onto itself—using its procedures to clarify its procedures. Far from being vicious, this circularity is just as it should be: it underscores the way in which ordinary language philosophy, done right, is neither exempt nor takes itself to be exempt from the conditions that make its particular form of intervention called for sometimes, and possible—the conditions, in other words, that make it possible for us both to sometimes get lost with our words and to help each other regain our footing with them. The ordinary language philosopher, Cavell has taught us, has no special authority, speaks from no special position, and must ultimately rely on a level of agreement among us that we all must rely on whenever we presume to speak to, and for, each other.3 I will begin by pressing some of the implications for Kant’s overall account of beauty of Cavell’s first proposal; and I will end with a way—I will not attempt to show, and do not claim, that it is Cavell’s—to understand and vindicate Cavell’s second proposal. On the way, I will note some deep affinities between Kant and (Cavell’s) Wittgenstein, some of which were first pointed out by Cavell himself half a century ago; but I will also emphasize and work out some of the implications of what I take to be two fundamental differences between Kant and Wittgenstein: the first having to do with how they each envision what might be called the form of philosophical understanding, or knowledge; the second having to do with how they each (invite us to) think about concepts and how they relate to their instances. A pivotal role in my argument will be played by the phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, to which Wittgenstein refers as the dawning or lighting up (Aufleuchten), or noticing (Bemerken), of ‘aspects’.

5.2  C  avell’s Two Proposals; and an Important Methodological Difference Between Kant and Wittgenstein Cavell’s first proposal—that Kant’s characterization of judgments of beauty may be seen as an instance of the philosophical appeal to ordinary language—is at once insightful and, I will argue, threatening to Kant’s overall account of beauty and its significance. It is true, and striking, that in his attempt to bring out and clarify the peculiar nature of judgments of beauty—and thereby of beauty itself—Kant on sev See ‘Aesthetic Problems’, 86.  See in this connection the opening pages of Cavell’s ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, in Must We Mean What We Say? 2 3

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eral occasions makes claims about what we might call the peculiar force of the normal expression of the perceptual experience of beauty. Kant appeals to that peculiar force in order to distinguish judgments of beauty from experiences of mere agreeableness or pleasantness on the one hand, and from moral or empirical judgments on the other hand. When we give voice to the experience of beauty, Kant notes, we normally lay claim to the agreement of others—we expect them to perceive the beauty we perceive, just as if it were a property of the object that any competent speaker with eyes (or ears) in her head could rightfully be expected to recognize.4 In this, Kant says, giving voice to the experience of beauty is importantly unlike giving voice to the experience of agreeableness, or mere sensual pleasure, and resembles the expression of empirical or moral judgments (as Kant thinks of them). At the same time, however, there is no way for us to establish the presence of beauty, no way of proving wrong those who do not find it where we do, or find it where we don’t (see CJ 215 and 284–6). And in this, Kant says, judgments of beauty are importantly different from empirical judgments and from moral judgments (as Kant conceives of them): we speak of beauty as if it were a property of the object, Kant says, but at the same time acknowledge, both in the way we invite people to share our experience of beauty and in how we proceed in the face of aesthetic disagreements, that it is not. I said that Cavell’s proposal that Kant’s characterization of judgments of beauty may be read as grammatical, in Wittgenstein’s sense of that term, is potentially threatening to the overall argument of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment. The potential threat may be seen both at the level of philosophical method and at the level of content. The threat at the level of content will be discussed in Sects. 5.3–5.5. At the level of method, the tendency of both Kant and his interpreters is to take the grammatical distinctions he points out to be grounded in something else—namely, the different roles played respectively by ‘the understanding’, ‘the imagination’, and ‘the feeling of pleasure and displeasure’ in the constitution of what he calls ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) by way of combining ‘concepts’ and ‘intuitions’. For Kant, our cognitive and practical powers or capacities, and their workings, together with every other dimension of human experience and activity, are parts of one all-encompassing, universal, and immutable system, as he likes to refer to it,5 and should be understood philosophically, and legitimized ‘transcendentally’, in reference to that system. His appeals to ‘what we say and mean’—in his discussion of beauty and elsewhere—ultimately function in his work as indications of features or aspects of that system. In taking linguistic expression (together with the linguistic practice that is its home) to be no more than a helpful indicator of a metaphysical reality that is theoretically separable from that expression, Kant and many of his interpreters are in the 4  CJ, 5:212–14 and 5:282. References to the first Introduction Kant wrote for the third Critique will be given in the text as ‘FI’, followed by the page numbers in Volume 20 of the Prussian Academy Edition. 5  Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter ‘CPR’), Guyer, P. and Wood, A. (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, A11/B25–A16/B30.

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company of many others in contemporary analytic philosophy.6 Unlike many contemporary analytic philosophers, however, Kant does not take his investigation to be modeled on that of empirical science, and to be carried out from an essentially third-­ person perspective. Kant’s transcendental investigation is meant to be a continuation of philosophy’s ancient pursuit of self-knowledge: it is an investigation of one’s capacities and their workings from within, so to speak. One does not need to ‘go far’, he says, in order to find and have ‘complete knowledge’ of the objects of that investigation, for, as he puts it, ‘I come upon them in my own self’ (CPR, Axiv). This connects with Kant’s idea, strikingly echoed in Wittgenstein’s Investigations (PI, 435), that in the field of transcendental inquiry, ‘nothing can be concealed’, because what reason ‘produces’ must ultimately be surveyable by reason (CPR, Axx). Kant expresses a similar idea in his discussion of the ‘Antinomies’ when he writes that transcendental philosophy is an area of inquiry such that ‘every question occurring in [it] must absolutely be answerable from what one knows, because the answer must arise from the same source as the question’ (CPR, A476/B504). That Kant takes himself to be investigating our cognitive and practical capacities from within—from a perspective only afforded to the creature whose capacities they are—is one of several respects in which his critical work anticipates the work of the later Wittgenstein.7 As Cavell has insightfully pointed out,8 there is deep affinity between Kant’s ‘transcendental’ philosophy and Wittgenstein’s ‘grammatical’ investigations: both aim at the articulation of necessities and possibilities that are not empirically discoverable, and which guide and inform our linguistic practices, including that of empirical inquiry. At the same time, however, Kant’s commitment to an all-encompassing, universal, and immutable system that underlies our various language-games and concepts of experience, and to which one could appeal in order to explain or legitimize those concepts and language-games, is suspect from the perspective of the later Wittgenstein. From that perspective, the worry is that, in pursuing the system, we will try to ‘penetrate’ the phenomena under investigation, as Wittgenstein puts it (PI, 90)—to ‘see through’ (durchschauen) them to the system that supposedly underlies them (see PI, 92)—and thereby force false constructions on them. In what follows, I will propose that something like that happened to Kant in his reflections on beauty.

6  In When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017), I document the ambivalent attitude exhibited by contemporary analytic epistemologists toward everyday linguistic practice: they seem unable to proceed far without relying on (examples of) it, but at the same time take themselves to be tasked with the discovery of a reality that is theoretically separable from it; as a result, they tend to misrepresent that practice, sometimes quite grotesquely, despite being (no doubt) fully competent practitioners themselves. 7  I thank Jim Conant for pressing me about this point. For other points of affinity between Kant and Wittgenstein, see When Words are Called For, especially the ‘Epilogue’. 8  ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy, in Must We Mean What We Say, 64.

5.2  Cavell’s Two Proposals; and an Important Methodological Difference Between…

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Though the main drive for the philosophical attempts to see through phenomena—as they come into view in Wittgensteinian grammar—to an underlying reality is, on Wittgenstein’s view, a scientistic way of thinking that seeks to explain everything causally and from a third-person perspective, and though, as I said, Kant’s critical philosophy constitutes an important break with that way of thinking, that break, seen from Wittgenstein’s perspective, is not radical enough: it still seeks to ‘explain’ and ‘justify’—which is precisely what the Deductions in all three Critiques are supposed to accomplish—what, on Wittgenstein’s way of thinking, should only be ‘described’ and ‘accepted’ (see PI, 109, and PPF, 161).9 It still seeks to find essences—of beauty, for example—behind or anyway elsewhere from, rather than in, Wittgensteinian grammar. Once we give up the Kantian pursuit of metaphysical grounding for our various forms of discourse, together with the Kantian aspiration for a complete philosophical system, and take Wittgensteinian grammar to express everything we could sensibly have hoped to find and capture in our philosophical pursuit of essences, two central tenets of Kant’s account of beauty come more or less immediately into question: the first is Kant’s claim that judgments of beauty are grammatically unique, in a sense that will soon be clarified, and the second is his claim that those judgments express, or otherwise make essential reference to, pleasure. Pressing these difficulties for Kant’s account of beauty, in Sects. 5.3–5.5, will lead me to Cavell’s second proposal—the proposal that Kant’s grammatical characterization of judgments of beauty may help to elucidate, and even vindicate, the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’. While thought provoking, Cavell’s proposal is left underdeveloped in ‘Aesthetic Problems’. It is not clear how exactly judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant are supposed to ‘model’ the philosophical appeal to ordinary language. The following passage is the closest Cavell comes to spelling out what he has in mind: Kant’s “universal voice” is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claims about “what we say”; such claims are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses (‘Aesthetic Problems’, 94).

But we are not told in what respect(s) philosophical claims about “what we say” are closer to judgments of beauty than to empirical hypotheses; nor are we told what Cavell has in mind when he talks about the ‘slight shift of accent’ between the philosophical appeal to what we say and the aesthetic appeal. Cavell then adds: ‘though the philosopher seems to claim, or depend upon, severer agreement than is carried by the aesthetic analogue, I wish to suggest that it is a claim or dependence of the same kind’ (‘Aesthetic Problems’, 94, my emphasis). But he doesn’t tell us 9  To justify or legitimize (our employment of) certain key concepts is to give an answer to what Kant calls the ‘quid juris’ question (CPR, A84/B116). In When Words Are Called For, I argue that there is a sense in which for Wittgenstein, Kant’s ‘quid juris’ question and his ‘quid facti’ question become inseparable: the use to which we (may reasonably be found to) put our words is not separable from our normal and ordinary ways—identifiable from within the practice—of entitling ourselves to that use.

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what kind of claim or dependence he has in mind. In the final paragraph of his paper Cavell makes yet another thought-provoking but under-developed suggestion. ‘Kant’s attention to the “universal voice” expressed in aesthetic judgments’, he writes, seems to me, finally, to afford some explanation of that air of dogmatism which claims about “what we say” seem to carry for critics of ordinary language procedures, and which they find repugnant and intolerant. I think that air of dogmatism is indeed present in such claims; but if that is intolerant, that is because tolerance could only mean, as in liberals it often does, that the kind of claim in question is not taken seriously. It is after all a claim about our lives; it is differences, or oppositions, of these that tolerance, if it is to be achieved, must be directed toward (‘Aesthetic Problems’, 96).

But how exactly, or in what sense, can Kant’s elucidation of the grammar of judgments of beauty help explain the air of dogmatism carried by philosophical appeals to ordinary language? It seems that the air of dogmatism is supposed to be explained by the fact that the philosopher’s claims about ‘what “we” say’ are claims about our lives. But how, in what way or sense, are they claims about our lives? Are aesthetic claims too claims about our lives, and in a similar way? And how is that supposed to explain, or legitimize, the air of dogmatism carried by either kind of claim? Surely, not just any claim we make about our lives carries, or may rightfully carry, an air of dogmatism. I mean ultimately to propose a line of answer to these questions.10

5.3  Kantian Beauty and Wittgensteinian Aspects I begin with the question of the grammatical uniqueness of judgments of beauty. Consider what Wittgenstein refers to as the seeing of ‘aspects’—the seeing of something as something. In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, and partly under the inspiration of Cavell’s ‘Aesthetic Problems’, I have proposed that Wittgensteinian ‘aspects’ too partake of the grammar of Kantian ‘beauty’. Like beauty as characterized by Kant, an aspect as characterized by Wittgenstein hangs somewhere between the subject and the object, or between the subjective and the objective: it is not a property of the object, Wittgenstein says, and yet we call upon others to see it in the object. Though we have no way of establishing its presence or proving wrong those  As I said, I do not claim and will not argue that that line of answer is what Cavell had in mind when he wrote ‘Aesthetic Problems’. Stephen Mulhall, who does attempt to spell out the connection Cavell saw between judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant and the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’, offers a different line of answer to the above questions (Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). I will not attempt to summarize, let alone fully assess, Mulhall’s comprehensive interpretation of Cavell. I will only say that, so far as I can see, his account of the connection between the practice of aesthetic evaluation and the practice of ordinary language philosophy does not deliver on Cavell’s promise to vindicate the latter—or at least go some way toward doing so—on the basis of Kant’s account of the former. This is what I will attempt to do in the final part of this paper.

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who cannot see it, and though someone could make a perfect copy or representation of the object without seeing the aspect under which we see it, we nonetheless talk about it as if it is there to be seen, and as if those who fail to see it are missing something about the object.–And yet, for all of their grammatical and phenomenological affinity, it seems clear that a Wittgensteinian aspect—the duck aspect of the duck-­ rabbit, for example, or the Necker cube seen as going this rather than that way—is no Kantian beauty. In Kant’s third Critique, however, what he calls ‘subjective universal validity’ (CJ, 215)—which manifests itself in our ‘speaking with a universal voice’, or offering our judgment as ‘exemplary’ (CJ, 216), calling upon others to see or acknowledge the presence of something whose presence we cannot prove or establish—is presented as a peculiarity of judgments of beauty. Between the full-fledged objectivity of empirical and moral judgments (as Kant understands them), and the mere subjectivity of ‘This sure feels good’ or ‘I like it’, there is in Kant’s system only room for judgments of beauty. This, it seems to me, is one reason for thinking that Kant’s system—however compelling—is to be suspected. I do not mean to deny that the philosophical imagination could and perhaps even should draw inspiration from the discovery of grammatical affinities such as the one holding between Kant’s ‘beauty’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘aspects’. My point is just that the construction and maintenance of a philosophical system of the sort envisioned by Kant is only one way of pursuing such an inspiration, and might not be the best way of doing justice to the phenomena. Though there is no denying that all of our capacities, together with every element and dimension of our experience, must somehow fit together, for they evidently do fit together in the unfolding of normal human experience, or existence, they need not fit into a universal, all-encompassing, and immutable system; and the worry is that the assumption that they must so fit together would lead us to mis-describe those capacities, elements, and dimensions, as well as how they fit together. Our philosophically interesting concepts, I have found, crisscross each other in complex and often unexpected ways that defy Kantian systematization and call rather for Wittgensteinian local elucidations in the face of particular difficulties.11 For example, it may well be true that the experience of being struck by an aspect is closer to the experience of being struck by beauty than it might initially appear. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein likens the seeing of aspects to cases in which something—a piece of music, for example, or a bed of flowers—speaks to us, and we feel called upon to say what it says, but at the same time find that we cannot satisfyingly say it (BB, 162, 174–5, and 177). A Wittgensteinian aspect, just like what a thing says when it speaks to us, and, we could add, just like Kant’s beauty, cannot be separated by means of description from our experience of the thing in the way that an objective property of it can be.12 If I tell you that the thing is a duck, or red, or round,  This, I believe, is the realization that brought Wittgenstein to give up the plan to arrange his thoughts in such a way that they would ‘proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks’ and to opt instead for the ‘album’ format (PI, ix). 12  This paragraph rehearses a point made in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’. 11

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or weighs 79 kilos, I may thereby be telling you all that there is to tell in this respect—all that I know and all that you need to know. If you trust my testimony, you may spare yourself the effort of checking the object out for yourself, and may even rightfully assure other people that the object is a duck, or red, or round, or weighs 79 kilos, on the strength of my word. But if I come to see, not a courageous face, but a face as courageous (see PI, 537), then the word ‘courageous’ alone, apart from the experience of seeing this face as courageous, will not adequately convey what I see. Likewise, according to Kant, the word ‘beauty’ will not adequately capture what we see when something strikes us as beautiful. The concept of beauty is not a ‘determinate’ concept, as Kant puts it (CJ, 341). And in the same way, what we experience when something speaks to us typically cannot be separated by way of articulation, according to Wittgenstein, from the thing as experienced. To suppose otherwise, Wittgenstein says in the Brown Book, is to succumb to an ‘illusion’ (or ‘delusion’, he uses the two terms interchangeably) (BB, 158 and 166). The illusion Wittgenstein is talking about does not consist in experiencing objects as speaking to us—there is nothing illusory about that kind of experience if we see it for what it is—but rather in supposing that we may identify what those objects say just by attending to them, and thereby make what they say separable from our experience of them.13 One may go a step further and equate the beauty of something with its speaking to us. Heidegger sometimes seems to be doing that.14 There are arguably moments in which Wittgenstein at least suggests it, as when he talks, in his lectures on aesthetics, about how a piece of music or poetry sometimes gives you experiences that you find yourself wanting, or even called upon, but unable to describe (see LCAPR, 37). And Kant himself seems to be moving in that direction when later in the third Critique he comes to equate the seeing of beauty with the seeing of what he calls ‘aesthetic idea’, which he defines as a ‘presentation of the imagination that compels (or even obliges, veranlasst) much thinking, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no concept, can be adequate’ (CJ, 314).15 The problem for Kant’s grand story, however, is that, if we take seriously this idea of perceiving something that compels or obliges us to try to put it into words or otherwise express it, and thereby connect what Kant says about aesthetic ideas with the sort of experience that Wittgenstein is describing above and that Heidegger equates with the experience of beauty, we seem to move away, as Heidegger proposes we should,16 from Kant’s central claim that judgments of beauty are somehow essentially connected with, and expressive of, pleasure. To have something speak to  That’s the illusion that in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’ I characterized as conflating the intransitive and transitive uses of ‘a quite particular’. 14  See, for example, Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings, Alfred Hofstadter (tr.), David Farell Krell (ed.), (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 161. 15  Guyer and Matthews translate ‘veranlasst’ by ‘occasions’, and thereby cover up the phenomenological feature invoked by Kant’s word of being goaded, called upon by the beautiful thing to articulate, and thereby bring out, what it says. 16  Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, J. Glenn Gray (tr.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 19. 13

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you, to feel compelled to give voice to and thereby bring out something about it for no reason external to the thing itself—and so, if you will, ‘disinterestedly’ (cf. CJ 204–5)—is not the same as, nor even necessarily involves, taking pleasure in it, it would seem. A necessary connection with pleasure is even more clearly absent in at least some cases of aspect perception—seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck, for example, or the Necker cube as going this rather than that way, or everything as unreal.17 It could be argued that what Kant says about aesthetic ideas fits with things that he says earlier about the ‘free play’ of the imagination and the understanding in the experience of beauty (CJ, 217) and about how ‘we linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself’ (CJ 222). And it could further be argued that given Kant’s formal definition of pleasure as ‘the consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject, for maintaining it in that state’ (CJ 220; see also 230–1), finding an object to be speaking to one, and finding oneself compelled to say what it says, just is a form of pleasure.18 Whether or not one finds this attempt to fit Kant’s characterization of aesthetic ideas within his overall account of beauty compelling, it should be realized that it comes with further theoretical baggage that is itself problematic—it moves the bump to a different part of the system, as it were. As I have argued in detail elsewhere,19 Kant situates his account of beauty and of aesthetic pleasure against a background transcendental story that portrays us all as having a necessary ‘aim’ or ‘need’ to form a ‘thoroughly interconnected experience’—to fit all of our ‘perceptions’ into an all-encompassing and unified understanding of ‘nature’ (CJ, 184 and 186). What guides us in this presumably necessary pursuit of a unified empirical

 An anonymous reviewer for the European Journal of Philosophy, where this paper was originally published, has commented that ‘aspect-perception experiences do seem phenomenologically rather commonly tied to pleasure (more generally, to playing games, to the pleasurable free play of the imagination)’. This is certainly true of some aspect-perception experiences. As Juliet Floyd points out, in some cases of aspect perception ‘what is to be discerned is not an object or fact or concept, but a world, a human being, an expression or gesture, a total field of significance’ (‘On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics’, in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Day, W. and Krebs, V. (eds.), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 324). These kinds of cases of aspect perception actually support the argument I will present later against the identification of aspects with empirical concepts. For my present purposes, however, what matters is that some clear cases of aspect-perception cannot plausibly be seen as involving pleasure, and yet their typical expression nonetheless manifests the kind of ‘subjective universal validity’ that according to Kant, as we will shortly see, necessitates a link with pleasure. I also think that at least certain kinds of moral claims exhibit ‘subjective universal validity’ as characterized by Kant (as noted by Mulhall, in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34–54), without being essentially connected with, or expressive of, pleasure. 18  I am thinking here in particular of Rachel Zuckert’s interpretation of the third Critique in Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 19  ‘Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness, and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments’, Kantian Review 10 (2005): 1–32. 17

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understanding of everything is the a priori ‘regulative idea’ of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ for us, or its ‘agreement with our aim’ (CJ, 186).20 On Kant’s story, the (naturally) beautiful object, in presenting us with a unity that we have not had to enforce, so to speak, by means of the application of determinate, objective concepts, encourages us in our presupposition of nature’s cooperation with, or suitability for, our presumed cognitive aim (see CJ, 246 and 340). We take pleasure in the beautiful, according to Kant, because we all necessarily have that transcendental cognitive aim, because the encounter with beauty supports our necessary assumption of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ for our cognitive powers, and because ‘the attainment of every aim is combined with a feeling of pleasure’ (CJ, 187).21 The pleasure we take in the beautiful ‘can express nothing but [the object’s] suitability to the cognitive faculties’, Kant says (CJ, 189–90; see also FI, 221). It is precisely because the aim of ‘unifying the whole of nature’ is taken by Kant to be universally necessary that he thinks we are a priori justified in expecting everyone to take pleasure in the object we find beautiful (CJ, 187).22 If we reject Kant’s idea that we are all, necessarily, interested in unifying the whole of nature, as I have argued that we should,23 then we will need to look for a different understanding (which does not mean explanation, or Kantian Deduction) of our finding ourselves compelled to try to say what objects say when they speak to us; and once we come to that understanding, we might be readier to consider the idea that beauty may not necessarily be connected with pleasure (or else to consider the idea that not every case in which something we perceive speaks to us, and we find ourselves compelled to say what it says, is a case of beauty).

5.4  Why Pleasure? The Allure of the System Let us consider the intra-systemic, architectonic reasons Kant had for connecting judgments of beauty with a feeling of pleasure. For it’s not as if it is just obvious that judgments of beauty are based on, or express, pleasure. It was not obvious to Heidegger, for example; and it was not obvious to the rationalists to whom Kant was, in part, responding. And even Kant moves somewhat undecidedly between speaking of beauty simply as an object of liking (Wohlgefallen)—which makes no necessary reference to a feeling of pleasure, and may simply come to saying that we find the beautiful object worthy in a particular way of our and other people’s disinterested attention—and speaking of it as an object of pleasure (Lust). One can see  This idea of the assumption of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ is a development of Kant’s discussion, in the first Critique, of the ‘Regulative Ideas’ that guide our investigation of nature. 21  This is why, for Kant, natural beauty takes precedence over artistic beauty (CJ 299 and 301). 22  That we all are tasked with ‘unifying the whole of nature’ is Beatrice Longuenesse’s way of putting the Kantian assumption I’m questioning here (Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Wolfe C. T. (trans.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 42). 23  ‘Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness, and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments’. 20

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how, at some point, everything fell together for Kant, in such a way that judgments of beauty just had to be intimately tied to a feeling of pleasure. The system seemed to Kant to demand this; and Kant had great faith in his system. ‘Without becoming guilty of self-conceit’, he wrote in a letter to Reinhold at the time that he was writing the third Critique, ‘I can assure you that the longer I continue on my path the less worried I become that any individual or even organized opposition (of the sort that is common nowadays) will ever significantly damage my system. My inner conviction grows, as I discover in working on different topics that not only does my system remain self-consistent but I find also, when sometimes I cannot see the right way to investigate a certain subject, that I need only to look back at the general picture of the elements of knowledge, and of the mental powers pertaining to them, in order to discover elucidations I had not expected’.24 A good place to begin seeing what systematic considerations have guided Kant in his account of beauty and led him to insist on the connection between beauty and pleasure is the much-discussed problem of judgment from the first Critique (CPR, A132/B171–3)—a problem to which Kant returns in the preface to the third Critique (CJ, 169). On Kant’s view, in empirical, objective judgments we fit together or ‘associate’ concepts, which Kant thinks of as rules of unification, and—at the most basic level—sensible intuitions, to form cognitions (Erkenntnisse) of objects and so experience (Erfahrung) as Kant thinks of it (CJ, 295); but evidently our doing so cannot itself ultimately be guided by concepts or rules, for those too would need to be applied in any given case, which would lead to an infinite regress of judgments. It would appear, then, that if our judgments are not to be thought of as either arbitrary or merely caused, and so as not being true judgments, they must be guided by feeling—a sense of fit between concept and intuition, law and particular case. In seeking to communicate our judgments to others we tacitly rely on them to agree with us in their sense; for if they did not, our judgments would presumably be ‘empty’ as far as they were concerned—mere formal moves in a formal system, with no connection to the deliverances of the senses, and so with no ‘correspondence with their object’, as Kant puts it (CJ, 238). This is the presupposition of what Kant calls ‘Sensus Communis’. For the most part, our reliance on the Sensus Communis remains in the background: our communication with others runs smoothly and effectively enough, serves its purposes well enough, and so long as it does, our tacit assumption of a common sense receives all the validation it needs, by Kant’s lights. Judgments of beauty, on Kant’s account, make our presupposition of a common sense explicit, and thereby put it explicitly to the test. Given Kant’s way of thinking about empirical judgments, as acts of unifying (at the most basic level) sensible intuitions by means of concepts, and given the impossibility, or nonsensicality, of grounding or ensuring the correctness of judgments in concepts or rules, or so much as trying to, it is quite understandable why he came to think of empirical judgments as ultimately resting on nothing but a sense of fit

 ‘Letter to Reinhold, December 1787’, in Kant’s Correspondence, Zweig, A. (ed. And tr.), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 272.

24

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between concept and intuition, and why he further thought that in taking ourselves to be communicating our judgments to others we must tacitly rely on that sense being in fact common, shared. What is less clear is why Kant thought that, over and above the communication of empirical judgments, it must somehow also be possible for us to communicate directly to others (as on his account we do when we give voice to the experience of beauty) our experience of fit itself—or, as he puts it, the felt ‘disposition of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general, and indeed that proportion which is suitable for making cognition out of a representation’ (CJ, 238)—separated or abstracted from the production of any particular, ‘determinative’, empirical judgment (see CJ, 290). I mean, it is one thing to say that if communication of empirical judgments, and hence perhaps the fittingness-assessable connection between our words and our world, is to be at all possible, it must be possible for us to communicate to others not just our judgments, but also our conviction in them, or lack thereof, and we must on the whole agree in our respective levels of conviction (cf. CJ, 238). We should on the whole agree, for example, not only that this or that is a tree, say, but also that it is somewhat or quite uncertain—given its distance, or the dim light, or the quality of the picture, or the thing’s unusual shape or history or constitution—whether it is or it isn’t. But why should there be, in addition, judgments or claims directly expressive of the disposition of our cognitive powers toward each other upon encountering an object? It is one thing, when you’ve reached bedrock and your spade is turned, to call with a ‘universal voice’ upon the other, ‘Don’t you see?!’. It is quite another thing to call upon the other to share in the experience of the bedrock with you. The Deduction of judgments of beauty, Kant says, ‘asserts only that we are justified in presupposing universally in every human being the subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves…’ (CJ, 290). But I confess to have found in myself neither the subjective conditions of the power of judgment nor their relation to judgments of beauty, or for that matter to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. —Not until I read the third Critique for the first time, at any rate, and had Kant suggest them to me.25 I am saying that it is not clear what justifies Kant’s claim that it must be possible for there to be judgments of beauty as he conceives of them. I suspect the best answer might be that there just are judgments of beauty, or claims to have perceived beauty; and those judgments struck Kant as having just the inter-subjective force and phenomenological character that one would expect of judgments whose object was the very sense of fit between any empirical concept and the intuition it unifies—

 So, by Kant’s lights, I was competently making judgments of beauty and competently responding to those of others without having any notion or sense of what entitled me or anyone else to make those judgments. As I said in Sect. 5.2 first Section, this Kantian idea—that fully competent speakers of a language might use certain words or expressions fully competently and sensibly, and yet have no notion or sense of what entitles them (or others) to that use—is deeply problematic from Wittgenstein’s perspective: it partakes of the old philosophical fantasy of finding a metaphysical grounding for our practices from a perspective that is still external to those practices (even if not quite in the empiricist or rationalist way).

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a sense of fit that, by his lights, is tacitly at work in every perceptually-based empirical judgment. The ‘subjective universal validity’ of judgments of beauty struck Kant as just what one would expect of judgments whose subject matter, so to speak, was our capacity to make objective perceptual judgments überhaupt. He seemed to himself to have found a way to explain, and vindicate, that air of dogmatism that characterizes aesthetic claims, by finding a place for those claims in his system. And then things got even better, systematically speaking, since judgments of beauty had traditionally been linked, by empiricists at any rate, and by Kant himself in earlier years, to a feeling of pleasure; and while in the division of the faculties of cognition through concepts understanding and reason relate their representations to objects, in order to acquire concepts of them, the power of judgment is related solely to the subject and does not produce any concepts for itself alone. Likewise, if in the general division of the powers of the mind overall the faculty of cognition as well as the faculty of desire contain an objective relation of representations, so by contrast the feeling of pleasure and displeasure is only the receptivity of a determination of the subject, so that if the power of judgment is to determine anything for itself alone, it could not be anything other than the feeling of pleasure… (FI, 208, my emphasis).

And also: An aesthetic judgment in general can… be explicated as that judgment whose predicate can never be cognition (concept of an object) (although it may contain the subjective conditions of cognition in general). In such a judgment the determining ground is sensation. However, there is only one so-called sensation that can never become a concept of an object, and this is the feeling of pleasure and displeasure… Thus an aesthetic judgment is that whose determining ground lies in sensation that is immediately connected with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure (FI, 224, my emphasis; see also CJ, 189).

The reasoning here strikes me as bearing the signs of an eager systematizer. But if we let it pass, then it would seem that all that’s left for us to do is to “discover” that judgments of beauty demand of others that they find the object pleasing, and everything would seem to fall neatly into place—the system would be completed, once and for all. What would be left for us to do is just to patch it here and there, tighten a few loose screws, and otherwise just make good use of it, whenever that is called for.

5.5  ‘Subjective Universal Validity’ Without Pleasure But hold on. Like beauty, a Wittgensteinian aspect—while not associated in any obvious, let alone necessary way with pleasure—is also not a property of the object (PPF, 247); it organizes and unifies some perceived object, without objectively applying to it. We may see some face—schematically drawn, or flesh and blood—as having a particular expression, or physiognomy, that we could approximately describe as that of ‘a complacent businessman, stupidly supercilious, who though fat, imagines he is a lady killer’ (BB, 162), without judging that the face is that of a complacent businessman, etc. As in the case of beauty, we may call upon others to

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see the face as we see it, or feel that if they cannot so see it then there is something in or about that face that they’re missing; but we’ve made no empirical, objective, judgment or claim. If someone is a complacent businessman, stupidly supercilious, etc., then whoever cannot see that either is missing some pertinent fact(s), or does not know what ‘complacent’, ‘businessman’, ‘supercilious’, and so on, mean; but the person who understands our invitation to see the face as having that expression, but cannot so see it—cannot see how our approximate description could be found to fit its expression—need not be missing any fact or perceivable objective detail, and must know what the words in our description mean, on pain of not being in a position to be unable to see the face as having an expression thus describable. And he is not disagreeing with us either: his difference from us is not a matter of an opinion or belief he does not have, but rather of a perceptual experience he cannot (bring himself to) share with us.26 The judgment that someone is complacent (or supercilious, or…) commits us to indefinitely many further thoughts and deeds. You cannot, conceptually, truly judge that someone is complacent and not expect her to be at least disposed to act in certain ways, and so without being yourself disposed to act in certain ways in relation to her. By contrast, when you see someone’s expression as that of a complacent businessman, etc., there is nothing further that you have thereby committed yourself to do, think, or expect of her. This is yet another way of seeing why the aspect is not a property of the object.27 ‘Aspects’, Wittgenstein says, ‘do not “teach us about the external world”’ (RPPI, 899). He also says that giving voice to the seeing of an aspect is ‘a reaction in which people are in touch with each other’ (RPPI, 874). This combination of ideas echoes Kant’s saying of the judgment of beauty that ‘although it does not connect the predicate [‘beautiful’]… with the concept of the object considered in its entire logical sphere, yet it extends it over the entire sphere of judging persons’ (CJ, 215). It turns out that one need not have a sensation of pleasure incorporated into the content of one’s perceptual “judgment” in order to ensure that the “judgment” is not objective. Virtually any description may be applied to a perceptually given object non-objectively, as it were. To see this, we do not need a systematic theory of the faculties of cognition and their workings. We only need to remind ourselves of a piece of Wittgensteinian grammar. Moreover, the seeing of Wittgensteinian aspects also appears to be an occasion on which our sense of fit between concept and intuition comes to the fore, which gives us an opportunity to find out whether, or how far, our sense is indeed common. In seeing an aspect, Wittgenstein says, we ‘bring a concept to what we see’ (Wittgenstein RPPI, 961), and find, or bring it about, that the two fit each other (PI, 537); but we do so freely and disinterestedly, in precisely the sense that we need not, and normally do not, worry about how this experience fits with our overall e­ xperience  And it’s important that, just as in the case of Kantian judgments of beauty, even those who cannot perceive some particular aspect they are invited to perceive, would still understand the invitation, and recognize its peculiar sort of legitimacy (see CJ, 214). 27  In ‘Aspects of Perception’, I explore in much greater detail the difference between Wittgensteinian aspects and (objective) properties.

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and practical life. (In this sense we could say, as Kant says about the experience of beauty, that here the understanding is at the service of the imagination, rather than vice versa (CJ, 242); but that would be misleading, in part because when we perceive an object under an aspect it is not clear ‘what fits what’, as Wittgenstein puts it (PI, 537), and therefore not clear what serves what, and in part because the contributions attributable respectively to ‘the understanding’ and ‘the imagination’ here are, as I shall soon argue, altogether unlike what may plausibly be taken to be their respective contributions to the application of concepts in the course of everyday experience and discourse.) In seeing an aspect, I’m proposing, we seem to be doing what, in Kant’s story, we do in judgments of beauty, but far more straightforwardly, phenomenologically speaking: we seem to exercise our sense of fit between intuition and concept without making any empirical, objective judgment, and therefore unencumbered, but also unguided, by the tie-ups that place any such judgment in relation to indefinitely many others and to our practical life more generally; and we thereby create an opportunity for ourselves to find out whether our sense is indeed common, by inviting others to see what we see, or see things as we see them.

5.6  Kantian Beauty, Wittgensteinian Aspects, and the Application of Concepts Should we be satisfied with the expansion just proposed of Kant’s story—adding the perception of aspects to the perception of beauty as a place where a capacity that we have to apply concepts to perceived instances, or universals to particulars, and which is essential to putting our experience into words and sharing it with others, is isolated, so to speak, and thereby comes to the fore?28 I think not. For I do not think that concept—if it could even be called that29—and particular case fit together when we see something as something in anything like the way, or ways, that concepts and particular cases may plausibly be thought to fit together in the ordinary and normal course of human experience and discourse. To take the seeing of aspects as bringing out in a straightforward manner a basic feature of human experience and linguistic communication as such, is to aestheticize—just as the tradition of Western philosophy has tended to intellectualize—our ordinary and normal relation to our world. This is especially clear when the schematic drawings and ambiguous figures that Wittgenstein uses in his conceptual investigation of aspect perception are taken to  Something like that, though without the link to Kant’s aesthetics, has been proposed by Reshef Agam-Segal in ‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-preparatory Aspect-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 1–17; and ‘When Language Gives Out: Conceptualization, and Aspect-Seeing as a Form of Judgment’, Metaphilosophy 45 (2014): 41–68. 29  This clause anticipates the argument of ‘Aspects of Perception’ against the identification of Wittgensteinian aspects with, or in terms of, concepts. 28

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be paradigmatic of the phenomenon. We encounter those figures, as Merleau-Ponty importantly notes, in contexts in which they do not ‘belong to a field’ of embodied, temporally extended, significant engagement (PP, 216/224), but rather are ‘artificially cut off’ from it (PP, 279/292), which is precisely what makes it fairly easy for most people to switch from one aspect to another at will when looking at those figures. And for this reason, Merleau-Ponty says, Only the ambiguous perceptions emerge as explicit acts: perceptions, that is, to which we ourselves give a significance through the attitude which we take up, or which answer questions which we put to ourselves. They cannot be of any use in the analysis of the perceptual field, since they are extracted from it at the very outset, since they presuppose it, and since we come by them by making use of precisely the structures we acquired in our regular dealings with the world (PP, 281/294, my emphases).

I think much of this is also true of Wittgensteinian aspects that do not attach to schematic drawings and ambiguous figures and are not encountered in the artificial contexts of philosophical or psychological inquiries into perception. Even when an aspect—the similarity of one face to another, for example, or the particular physiognomy of a face that we try to approximate by saying it’s that of a complacent businessman, etc.—strikes us in the natural course of everyday life, it is importantly insulated from the rest of our Kantian ‘experience’ (Erfahrung): the aspect does not come with the sorts of tie-ups that may serve to define elements of the objective world.30 And this means that, even from the perspective of how Kant thinks about concepts and their application, there is good reason not to identify aspects with, or in terms of, empirical concepts. The objects and properties picked out by empirical concepts belong within what Charles Travis has called ‘networks of factive meaning’.31 That something is a duck, for example, factively means certain objectively establishable things (and indicates or makes likely certain other things), where ‘factively’ here means: if those other things do not hold, then either the thing’s being a duck does not mean them, or the thing is not a duck. Because empirical judgments, and more broadly Kantian ‘cognitions’ (Erkenntnisse), are interconnected in this way—forming the unity Kant calls ‘nature’—they commit anyone who makes any one judgment to indefinitely many other Kantian cognitions. They also commit that person practically. Empirical concepts, understood as constituents of empirical judgments (or cognitions), or as what those judgments apply to cases, may accordingly be thought of as individuated or defined by those commitments, regardless of whether particular applications of

30  This is not to deny that an experience aptly characterizable as one of ‘aspect dawning’ could have a profound effect on how we go on with our life. As Kiku Mizuno has pointed out to me, if, for example, a meat-eater comes to see, or is brought to see, meat as butchered animals, rather than as food, that could have the effect of making it harder, or impossible, for that person to go on eating meat. The point remains, however, that the dawning aspect does not come with, and is certainly not identifiable by, the sort of network of commitments that an empirical judgment, or the application of an empirical concept, comes with and may be identified by. 31  Charles Travis, Perception, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91.

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them are committed or somehow uncommitted (hypothetical, counterfactual).32 But if so, then aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts, for they may not be identified in terms of such commitments.33 Indeed, in perceiving an object under some aspect, I have not even committed myself to perceiving the same object under the same aspect the next time I perceive it, or even at the next moment. The identification of aspects with concepts, which, as we have just seen, is problematic from a Kantian perspective, becomes even more problematic when considered from a Wittgensteinian perspective. As I’ve already mentioned, Wittgenstein says in one of his remarks that in seeing an aspect ‘we bring a concept to what we see’. But what could that possibly mean from a Wittgensteinian perspective in which possessing the concept of X is not aptly thought of in terms of the ability (as Kant would put it) to ‘schematize’ and unify given intuitions so as to make them appear as Xs (cf. CJ, 287), or in terms of the ability to categorize given objects as belonging or not belonging to the category of X—even apart from any context of significant employment of the word ‘x’—but rather is to be thought of precisely in terms of the ability to use ‘x’ competently and more or less creatively in a wide enough range of contexts, and to respond competently to other people’s uses of it? To possess a concept, Cavell usefully suggests, is to be able to ‘keep up with the word’.34 Insofar as it makes sense at all to speak of application of concepts in the course of ordinary and normal experience, it happens as we talk (or think), in situations that call forth and give significance to those acts of speech (or thought). In the beginning was the deed, or the inter-subjectively situated and significant speech-act, not an isolated mental act of subsuming a particular under a universal or of aesthetic appreciation. So say, if you will, that I apply the concept of complacency to a friend when I remark that she is (being) complacent (about this or that, or in general), for example. But if that is what the application of the concept of complacency (or being

 This last point connects with Kant’s saying that the modality of a judgment ‘contributes nothing to the content of the judgment’ (CPR, A74/B100). 33  This point will be developed in much more detail in ‘Aspects of Perception’. That aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts was first proposed by Peter Strawson (‘Imagination and Perception’, in Kant on Pure Reason, Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) (originally published in Experience and Theory, Foster and Swanson (eds.). Amherst, Mass. and London: University of Massachusetts Press and Duckworth, 1971). It has since been proposed by Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects (second edition), New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Severin Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in J.  Cottingham & P.M.S.  Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, New  York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Reshef Agam-Segal (‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-preparatory Aspect-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 1–17). 34  The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 78. Insofar as we equate concepts with the meanings of words, a similar idea may be seen to be expressed by Adriane Moore when he proposes that ‘meaning is a matter of how we carry on with a word’ (‘Transcendental Idealism in Wittgenstein, and Theories of Meaning’, Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985), 144). 32

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complacent) normally comes to in the course of everyday experience and discourse, then it is importantly unlike what I do, or undergo, when the expression of a face strikes me as complacent, or as that of a complacent businessman, etc. ‘We talk’, Wittgenstein says, ‘we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life’ (PPF, 224). And he also calls on us to ‘look at the language-game as the primary thing […] [a]nd at the feelings, etc., as a way of viewing the language-game, an interpretation of it’ (PI, 656, translation amended). Accordingly, I want to propose that what we bring to what we see, when we attempt to see something as x is not our concept of X—understood as whatever ultimately guides us in our ordinary and normal employment of ‘x’—but rather pictures, feelings, embodied attitudes, etc., that have gotten associated for us with ‘x’, and so with our concept of X, later. The wonder of intentional aspect-dawning is that enacting those feelings, pictures, attitudes, and so on, can bring it about that what we perceive changes. This reveals the internal relation between the phenomenal world and the phenomenal body—the ‘subject-object dialogue’ that Merleau-Ponty talks about in the Phenomenology of Perception (PP, 132/134; see also 441/465).35 Thus, when trying to see a triangle—whether drawn or three dimensional—as having fallen over (see PPF, 162), I enact, or simulate, a bodily attitude toward it that has become associated for me with the notion of ‘having fallen over’: perhaps I artificially enact (or find enacted in me upon being invited to see the triangle as having fallen over) the (simulated) intention to “put it back up”, or recall and relive the vague feeling of discomfort or of things being out of order that has become associated for me with the notion of ‘having fallen over’. But no such attitude or feeling must be present whenever I see, or judge, that something has fallen over; and it is certainly not such an attitude or feeling that I normally go by in counting some object as having fallen over. Even Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect-blind’, as defined by Wittgenstein, should be capable of seeing, and correctly saying, that something has fallen over. Just as Merleau-Ponty suggests in the above quotation, the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects—especially the ones that we intentionally bring about—is parasitic on everyday experience and speech, and so if you will on the application of concepts; but it is importantly discontinuous with it and does not reveal in any straightforward way what’s involved in what may plausibly be thought of as the normal application of concepts. The insulation of the Wittgensteinian aspect, which was considered in the previous section as useful for bringing out in a clear and straightforward way a fundamental moment of our ordinary and normal wording of our world, is actually what prevents it from doing precisely that. The ordinary and normal application of concepts is situated and happens as we position ourselves significantly by means of words, in contexts suitable for that positioning. That these are not some added features of the relation between our words and our world—­

 The internal relation between the phenomenal body and the phenomenal world will be discussed in greater detail in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’.

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features that may be abstracted from without distortion—is arguably the most fundamental insight of ordinary language philosophy.36

5.7  The Sound of Bedrock I come now to my final proposal. Others have already noted the apparent affinity between Kant’s ‘Deduction’ of judgments of beauty and Wittgenstein’s saying, in PI, 242, that if language is to be a means of communication then there must be agreement not only in definitions, but also in judgments.37 Cavell finds it important that the German word Anscombe translates by ‘agreement’ is ‘Übereinstimmung’, which Cavell suggests is better translated by ‘attunement’, and that Wittgenstein speaks of attunement in judgments (in den Urteilen), not on (über) judgments, which for Cavell suggests that the attunement in question is an attunement apart from which we would not mean the same things with our words and so would be talking past each other—able neither to agree nor to disagree on this or that judgment.38 Cavell’s interpretation is reinforced by PI, 241, which speaks of agreement or attunement ‘not in opinions but in form of life’. Elsewhere Cavell famously characterizes the attunement that Wittgenstein relies on in his procedures, and at the same time seeks to recover in the face of philosophically induced distortions, as ‘a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life”’.39 Both Kant in his ‘Deduction’ of judgments of beauty and Cavell’s Wittgenstein, then, are concerned with a level of agreement or attunement between us apart from which it would not have been possible for us to truly agree or disagree with each other on empirical (or other) judgments—for we would not have agreed in the

 In When Words are Called For (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017), I argue that the widespread philosophical ‘method of cases’—that is, theorizing, as Analytic philosophers have tended to do, on the basis of the ‘application’ of terms to ‘cases’—is misguided precisely because it ignores this insight of ordinary language philosophy. 37  See David Bell, ‘The Art of Judgment’, Mind 96 (1987): 221–244; and Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 35–7. 38  The Claim of Reason, 31–2. In ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ Cavell makes essentially the same point: ‘[M]y interest in finding what I would say (in a way that is relevant to philosophizing) is not my interest in preserving my beliefs… My interest, it could be said, lies in finding out what my beliefs mean, and learning the particular ground they occupy’ (in Must We Mean What We say, 241). 39  Must We Mean What We Say, 52. 36

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meanings of our words, or, if you will, in our concepts.40 But if my discussion thus far has been on the right track, then there is an important difference between what the agreement Kant has in mind comes to and what the agreement Wittgenstein has in mind comes to. In Kant, as we saw, speech is pictured as grounded in, and expressive of, acts of ‘associating intuitions with concepts and concepts in turn with intuitions’ (CJ, 296); and the agreement he has in mind is agreement in what strikes us as good or satisfying or unforced fit between concept and intuition. Speech, for Kant, is thought of as parasitic on acts of judgment that are not essentially linguistic, let alone tied to intersubjectively shared and significant situations, and practices. In Wittgenstein, by contrast, and putting it extremely roughly, concepts and particular instances come together through the medium of speech, which in turn is understood first and foremost in terms of shared practices or activities—‘language-­ games’. From the Wittgensteinian perspective as I understand it, to speak is first and foremost to position oneself in a world shared with others and in relation to others—to enter one’s words into a humanly significant situation, to make thereby some more or less determinate and more or less significant difference, for both oneself and one’s audience, and to become responsible for having made that difference. And from that perspective, the meanings of words—and most importantly for Wittgenstein’s purposes, the meanings of philosophically troublesome words—are best thought of as their suitability, or potentiality, given the history of their employment, for being used to make specific inter-subjectively significant differences under suitable conditions.41 It is in this sense, I wish to propose, that philosophical appeals to what we say and mean, or cannot or must say and mean, are claims about our lives. In what Wittgenstein likes to refer to as ‘doing philosophy’ (cf. PI, 11, 131, and 348), we tend to get entangled because we rely on our words to mean something clear even apart from our using them to make some particular difference (or set of differences) that may reasonably be found to be worth making (at least from the speaker’s perspective), and becoming responsible for having made it. We wish, as Cavell puts it, ‘to speak without the commitments speech exacts’.42 The ordinary language philosopher’s appeal to the ordinary and normal use of our philosophically troublesome words is an invitation to project ourselves imaginatively into situations of significant speech, and is meant as a corrective for that particular form of philosophical fantasy and the philosophical difficulties it tends to lead us

 An important difference between Kant and Wittgenstein is that the possibility that we might not be in (full) agreement with (all) others at that level does not seem to be a live option for Kant (see CJ, 239), whereas it is for Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein, or anyway in Cavell’s Wittgenstein, the possibility that we might at any point discover that our attunement with others only reaches so far is very much a live possibility. Cavell speaks of it as the possibility of ‘intellectual tragedy’ (The Claim of Reason, 19). This feature of Cavell’s Wittgenstein is helpfully brought out in Stephen Mulhall’s Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 41  In The Crisis of Method, I argue, on the basis of empirical studies of first language acquisition, for this way of thinking about the meanings of words. 42  The Claim of Reason, 215. 40

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into. By contrast, those who take it that the experience of noticing a Wittgensteinian aspect brings out in a simple and straightforward manner a fundamental moment of our ordinary and normal wording of our world seem to me to share in that fantasy.43 This means, finally, that the philosophical appeal to ‘what “we” say and mean, or cannot or must say and mean’ has just the place within Wittgenstein’s ‘vision of language’ that judgments of beauty are supposed to have within Kant’s system. Both are supposed to search for and bring out a level of attunement between us that tends to remain implicit in ordinary and normal discourse, and that we tend to lose touch with, or overlook, when we ‘do philosophy’. According to Kant, the two grammatical features of judgments of beauty ‘abstracted from their content’ (CJ, 281)—that is, abstracted, precisely, from the alleged involvement of pleasure—are the claim for universal agreement (CJ §32), and the lack of any established procedure for proving or settling the correctness of our judgment (CJ §33). These two features, Cavell has proposed, also characterize the philosophical appeal to ordinary language; and their combination makes for the ‘air of dogmatism’ that he acknowledges as characteristic of that appeal. But these, as Kant saw well, are precisely the grammatical features one should expect of claims that appeal to, and are meant to bring out, a level of agreement or attunement between us apart from which we would not have been able to prove or settle anything objectively, nor, indeed, to truly speak to and understand one another. Kant’s ‘claim to subjective universality’ (CJ, 212) is the sound of one’s spade turning against one’s bedrock, however we picture that bedrock to ourselves when we do philosophy.44

 By this I do not mean to say that the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects, or of Kantian beauty for that matter, does not reveal an important feature of ordinary and normal human perception. I believe it does. In ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’ and ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, I argue, following Merleau-Ponty, that far from revealing what’s involved in the ordinary and normal application of empirical concepts to cases in judgments, it reveals our capacity to find, or project, perceived unity that is pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental, and pre-objective, and yet is intersubjectively shareable. 44  Versions of this paper were presented to audiences at Auburn University, University of Chicago, Åbo Akademi, and the University of Helsinki. I have benefited greatly from the ensuing discussions. In particular, I would like to thank James Conant, Eli Friedlander, Keren Gorodeisky, Martin Gustafsson, Harata Hamawaki, Kelly Jolley, Thomas Wallgren, Christian Wenzel, and an anonymous referee for the European Journal of Philosophy. 43

Chapter 6

Aspects of Perception

Abstract  Beginning with a critique of Richard Wollheim’s understanding of aspect perception and its significance, this chapter argues against the widespread tendency, which Wollheim shares, to identify aspects with, or in terms of, concepts. The chapter also argues that the experience of aspect-dawning provides evidence in support of, and at the same time elucidates, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that in order to understand human perception, we must recognize perceptual indeterminacy as a ‘positive phenomenon’. Keywords  Aspect perception · Richard Wollheim · Peter Strawson · Concepts · Aspects as internal relations · Perceptual indeterminacy

6.1  Introduction The topic of this paper is what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing something as something’ or the seeing (or otherwise perceiving) of ‘aspects’, and Richard Wollheim’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ in a supplementary essay appended to Art and its Objects.1 While I believe I have a fairly clear grasp of what Wittgenstein means by ‘seeing-as’ or by ‘seeing aspects’, I suspect, and will try to show, that it is not altogether clear what Wollheim means by ‘seeing-as’—what phenomenon or set of related phenomena he means to refer to with that expression. And it seems to me, moreover, that Wollheim’s difficulties are not special to him. Becoming clearer about seeing-as is difficult. Anyone who wishes to come to a satisfying understanding of that topic must grapple with fundamental and difficult questions about human perception, and at the same time grapple with fundamental and difficult questions about philosophical method—what it is we are after, or ought to be after, in philosophy, and how it may best be pursued. Wittgenstein, who first brought to broad philosophical attention (in the English-speaking world) the topic of seeing-as, is reported to have said not long 1  Art and Its Objects, Second Edition (hereafter ‘AO’) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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before his death, and after many years of thinking about the topic: ‘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’.2 Over the years I have found myself returning again and again to the topic of seeing-as, each time with a sense of its importance and of the inadequacy of my own understanding of it, as well as a sense that the topic presents us with a particular sort of difficulty that is itself philosophically interesting, and which has not been aptly appreciated by some prominent readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects. Since the above is my topic, I will ignore the broader context of Wollheim’s discussion—namely, his theory of artistic (mostly pictorial) representation, and the distinction he draws between what he calls ‘seeing-as’ and what he calls ‘seeing-in’. I will begin with a characterization of the phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, that I understand Wittgenstein to be investigating in his investigation of seeing-as, or the seeing of aspects. Wollheim takes himself to be offering an account of essentially the same phenomenon (cf. AO, 209). I will argue that he is not. And the real problem with that is not that Wollheim has lost touch with Wittgenstein’s topic— after all, it is open to him to make clear what phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, he means to refer to by ‘seeing-as’, and to offer an understanding of it. The real problem is that, in losing touch with Wittgenstein, Wollheim has rendered his own subject matter—whatever it is he means to be talking about—unclear. Or so I will try to show. At the same time, I think the motivation behind Wollheim’s proposed account of what he calls ‘seeing-as’ should be taken seriously. Whereas Wittgenstein refrains from any attempt to offer anything like a comprehensive theory of seeing-as and its relation to human perception more broadly, Wollheim, together with many other readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception, is motivated by the conviction that such a theory—or anyway comprehensive and unified account—can and ought to be given. More precisely, whereas Wittgenstein characterizes his topic through the phenomenon he calls ‘noticing an aspect’ or the ‘lighting up (dawning, Aufleuchten)’ of an aspect, and though he says at various places things to the effect that ‘the aspect can only dawn’ (RPPI, 1021; see also RPPII, 540) and ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237), Wollheim and many others have felt that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is, must be, revelatory of (normal) human perception as such—of what Wollheim calls ‘straightforward perception’ (AO, 217). Specifically, these philosophers have come to hold one version or another of the idea that, over and above the lighting up of aspects, there must also be a continuous version to the perception of aspects, and that all (normal) human perception can, and ought to, be understood as the perception of aspects. All of the attempts with which I am familiar to give sense to the notion of ‘continuous aspect perception’ (or some equivalent notion),3 and to use it to characterize  Quoted by Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1990), 537.  Beyond the very narrow sense that Wittgenstein is giving it in one remark of the Investigations (PPF, 118). In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ I say what I understand Wittgenstein to be talking about in that remark. Wittgenstein is talking about something far more specific, and far less 2 3

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(normal) human perception as such, seem to me to have failed, however.4 In the first part of this paper, I will argue that Wollheim’s attempt fails. At the same time, however, I have come to think that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is revelatory of a fundamental feature of human perception. The problem with previous attempts, Wollheim’s included, to draw a broader lesson about perception from the phenomenon Wittgenstein investigates in his remarks on aspects, is that they have over-intellectualized human perception and therefore misidentified that feature. In a word, those attempts identify aspects in terms of determinate concepts, so that, at least in the most basic or paradigmatic case, what something may be seen as is taken to be something it could be judged, or known, to determinately be.5 By contrast, taking my cue from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and from Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, I will propose that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals our power to perceive unity and sense that are not aptly thought of as conceptual, but which are nonetheless inter-subjectively shareable. And I will further propose that these unities and senses are, for the most part, importantly indeterminate—irreducible to any concept or set of concepts, and always open to further or competing articulation. In proposing a broader lesson about human perception that I think may be drawn from the dawning of aspects, I will be going beyond what may plausibly be found

central for him, I there argue, than some commentators—most prominently, Stephen Mulhall— have made it out to be. What Wittgenstein calls ‘continuous aspect perception’ is something that he is setting aside—distinguishing it from the primary phenomenon he is investigating—rather than something that he is singling it out as the true object of his interest. 4  In ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, I argue against Stephen Mulhall’s influential claim that what he calls ‘continuous aspect perception’ characterizes our normal perceptual relation to the world. 5  This characterization might seem not to be true of Mulhall’s account of aspect perception, since he proposes to cash out ‘continuous aspect perception’ in terms of how we ‘relate’ to things, which he in turn connects with Heidegger’s anti-intellectualist notion of ‘readiness-to-hand’ (cf. On Being in the World, 139–40; and ‘Seeing Aspects’, 265). Even setting aside the difficulty posed for Mulhall’s reading of Wittgenstein by the grammatical distinction, noted in ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’, between how you treat or regard something and how you see it, there’s the problem that ‘how one relates to something’ is terribly vague; and on any natural understanding of it, it does not seem that there is any one particular way one relates to any of the things we encounter in the course of everyday experience: things encountered may well be ready-to-hand for us before becoming objects of knowledge, or true-or-false judgments, but, apart from this or that particular context of engagement, not in any one particular way. (A tree, for example, may offer shelter from the rain, or from the sun, or (if it is large enough) from bullets, or it may invite climbing, or serve as an anchor, or as something from which to hang a swing, or as a something behind which to hide, or as a source of timber, or firewood, or it may just obstruct the view or block the path…) So the Heideggerian notion of readiness-to-hand actually supports the idea of perceptual indeterminacy, which will be argued for in Sect. 6.6 and then in even more detail in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’, and undermines the idea of continuous aspect perception. Mulhall avoids that difficulty, by cashing ‘continuous aspect perception’ out in terms of ‘relating to an object as one particular kind of object or another’ (‘Seeing Aspects’, 265, my emphasis); and that is where his (tacit) conflation of perception and conception becomes evident.

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in Wittgenstein’s remarks. In this respect, I will be doing what many other readers of those remarks have done—at the cost, I have argued in earlier work, of confusing themselves and others. I therefore embark on this project with trepidation, for in no way do I take myself to be immune to the risks of confusion and nonsensicality. But I think there is at least this difference between what has driven others who have written on aspect perception to leave behind Wittgenstein’s ideas and method of inquiry, and what drives me to do so: what has driven others away from Wittgenstein are more or less explicit theoretical ambitions that he did not share and moreover considered philosophically harmful; so the drive in their case is not essentially different from that of many others who have either never felt compelled by Wittgenstein’s general approach to the understanding and dissolution of philosophical difficulties or sought to move beyond Wittgenstein in their philosophical reflections on other topics. In my case, the need to move beyond Wittgenstein is internal to the substance of my specific subject matter and proposal. For if, as I will propose, what gets revealed in the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is a level of human experience at which we perceive and respond to things without making up our mind (judging, thinking, asserting…) that they are one objectively determinate way or another; and if, moreover, that ‘pre-objective’ level of experience serves as the basis of, but at the same time gets covered up by, everyday discourse, which, as I will propose following Merleau-Ponty, mostly focuses on the objects of our perceptual experience rather than on our experience of them, and thereby hides from us the role we play in the constitution of the world-as-perceived; then it is only to be expected that what the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals about human perception will never come clearly and truly to light in a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation that proceeds on the basis of reminders about the sorts of things we say about phenomena (PI 90).6 Here the method, or methods, of inquiry will have to be different.

6.2  T  he Grammar and Phenomenology of Wittgensteinian Aspects I begin with what I take Wittgenstein to mean by ‘seeing (perceiving) something as something’ or ‘seeing (perceiving) an aspect’. The first few remarks of Section xi of part II of the Investigations are a good place to seek initial orientation: Two uses of the word “see”.

6   I am suggesting that what Juliet Floyd has insightfully described as Wittgenstein’s ‘grammaticaliz[ation of] our talk of the intuitive’ (‘On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on AspectPerception, Logic, and Mathematics’. In Day, W. and Krebs, V. (eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 316), while it may help us dissolve any number of philosophical difficulties, may have its limitations too.

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The one: “What do you see there?”—“I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness between these two faces”—where the man I say this to may be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself. The importance of this is the difference in category between the two ‘objects’ of sight. The one man might make an accurate drawing of the two faces, and the other notice in the drawing the likeness which the former did not see. I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect” (PPF, 111–3, translation amended).

The first thing to note, even before we draw on the basis of these remarks an understanding of what Wittgenstein means by ‘seeing-as’ or by ‘aspect’, is that he characterizes his subject matter both grammatically—in the Wittgensteinian sense of that term—and phenomenologically. On the one hand, he talks about two uses of the word ‘see’, and gives an initial and partial characterization of those two uses. This is in line with his ‘later’ philosophical practice. At the root of any number of traditional philosophical difficulties, Wittgenstein identified the tendency to suppose that our words—including philosophically troublesome words such as ‘see’, ‘understand’, ‘know’, ‘think’, ‘mean’, ‘intend’, ‘pain’, and so on—‘name objects’, or, as contemporary analytic philosophers like to say, ‘refer to (denote) items in the world’; and accordingly to suppose that the best way to become clear about the meaning of those words, or the concepts they embody, is to identify and study those ‘objects’ directly—that is, not by way of an investigation of the use of those words.7 And since at least many of those ‘objects’ have been taken to be metaphysically private—in the sense that each of us may only directly be acquainted with her or his ‘objects’—the tendency has been to suppose that such an investigation must either take the form of introspection, or else take the form of theoretical inference from ‘mere behavior’ to what best explains it. What Wittgenstein tries to get us to see is that the model, or picture, of ‘object and designation’ (PI, 293) is misguided and misleading when it comes to those words, and that what we end up producing, when we attempt to elucidate the nature of the ‘objects’ to which they are supposed to refer, are philosophically constructed chimeras—‘structures of air’, as he puts it (PI, 118)—that we erect on the basis of questionable theoretical commitments, and of ‘pictures’ that we have formed for ourselves of those ‘objects’. Wittgenstein’s appeal to the use of philosophically troublesome words, or to what he calls their ‘grammar’, is an antidote to the above tendencies and the philosophical idleness they lead to. In the remarks on aspects, he repeatedly urges his reader (or himself) not to try to understand aspect perception by way of introspection of what happens in or to us when we see an aspect (see PPF, 241; and RPPI, 1011). ‘Forget’, he urges his reader (or himself), ‘forget that you have these experiences yourself’ (RPPII, 531). ‘Don’t try to analyze the experience within yourself’ (PPF, 188; see also PPF, 204). ‘The question’, he writes, ‘is not what happens here 7  In The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, I argue, following Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, against this prevailing understanding of language, which (I argue) has underwritten the philosophical ‘method of cases’ and hence much of the work produced within mainstream analytic philosophy in the past 50 years or so.

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[that is, when someone tells me: “Now I am seeing this point as the apex of the triangle”, AB], but rather: how one may use that statement’ (RPPI, 315). Wittgenstein reorients his reader’s attention away from his or her own experience and toward the use of relevant words—here, first and foremost, the words with which the experience of noticing an aspect may aptly and naturally be voiced. To attain clarity about the seeing of aspects—or for that matter about any other ‘concept of experience (Erfahrungsbegriff)’ (PPF, 115)—we need to do more than just remind ourselves of particular isolated forms of words that may be used to describe or otherwise 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 piece of communication? What can I do with it?’ (PPF, 176, translation amended). A striking feature of many of the readings of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects with which I am familiar, and equally of attempts such as Strawson’s and Wollheim’s to offer accounts of seeing-as that are more or less independent from Wittgenstein’s, is that they fail to heed this Wittgensteinian call altogether. The use of the relevant terms—where that importantly includes the philosopher’s use of them—tends to be neglected in favor of theoretical commitments and ambitions.8 What can we say about the grammar of (noticing) Wittgensteinian aspects? Taking our initial bearing from the opening remarks of PPF, section xi, cited above, we could say at least the following. To begin with, aspects are contrasted with ‘objects of sight’ of a different ‘category’. What are these other objects of sight? A red circle over there would be one example (PPF, 121), a knife and a fork would be another example (PPF, 122), a conventional picture of a lion yet another (PPF, 203). Another type of object of sight that Wittgenstein contrasts with aspects is ‘a property of the object’ (PPF, 247). In short, aspects contrast with what is objectively there to be seen, where what is objectively there to be seen may be determined, and known to be there, from a third person perspective, and independently of any(one’s) particular experience of it. In contrast, someone may look at an object, see everything there is to see about it—in the first, objective sense of ‘see’—and yet fail to see (second sense) an aspect that may be seen by another. For this reason, it may aptly be said that aspects ‘teach us nothing about the external world’ (RPPI, 899). This last remark, while illuminating, has to be taken with caution, however, for it is going to matter what one understands by ‘teaching something’ and by ‘the external world’. In particular, the tendency to think that if the aspect is not objective (part or 8  As a result, ‘aspect’ as used by philosophers who see themselves as interpreting Wittgenstein has come to mean, literally, just about everything and anything one might be said to perceive. Thus, for example, Severin Schroeder writes: ‘[W]henever something is seen (and not only looked at inanely or absent-mindedly) some aspect of it must be noticed, be it only certain shapes or colors’ (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in J.  Cottingham & P.M.S.  Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 366). But how exactly, or in what sense, is the color of an object or its shape an aspect? Surely not in Wittgenstein’s sense. And why are aspects, thus understood, philosophically interesting?

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feature of ‘the external world’ objectively understood) it must be subjective (‘inner’, metaphysically private) needs to be resisted; for it may be that one important lesson to be learned from the phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, of aspect ­perception is precisely that this traditional dichotomy is at least sometimes misguided and misleading. Given the common philosophical ways of understanding ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, or ‘external’ and ‘internal’, the Wittgensteinian aspect is, importantly, neither. The objects of sight with which aspects contrast may be described and often will be described (or otherwise represented) in order to inform someone else who for some reason is not in a position to see (or otherwise perceive) them—in order to teach her, precisely, something about the world as it is independently of any (particular person’s) experience of it. The other person, in Wittgenstein’s remark, asks ‘What do you see there?’; and unless she is testing our eyesight or linguistic competence, she is asking because she cannot, for a more or less contingent reason, see for herself. By contrast, the person with whom we seek to share what we see when we see an aspect would normally be standing there with us and seeing as clearly as we do the object (the face, for example) in which we see the aspect (its likeness to some other face). Indeed, as Wittgenstein says, she could even make an (objectively) accurate representation of the object while failing to see the aspect. In giving voice to the seeing of an aspect, we accordingly normally seek, not to ‘inform the other person’ but rather, as Wittgenstein puts it, to come in contact with, or ‘find’, the other (RPPI, 874). In everyday, natural contexts—as opposed to the artificial ones of the lab or classroom—the seeing of aspects makes for a particular type of opportunity for seeking intimacy with the other, or putting it to the test. Like beauty (at least as understood by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment), Wittgensteinian aspects are importantly characterized by the possibility that a fully competent speaker (and perceiver) may fail to see them even though she sees (first sense) as well as anyone else the objects in which they are seen, and by the particular sense it makes to call upon such a person to see them. This last point is connected with another feature of aspects: their being ‘subject to the will’ (see RPPI, 899 and 976; and RPPII, 545). Wittgensteinian aspects are subject to the will not so much, or primarily, in the sense that we can see them at will, but precisely in the sense that it makes sense both to call upon another person to see them and to try to see this or that particular aspect (PPF, 256). In the natural course of everyday experience, however, Wittgensteinian aspects normally dawn on us uninvited,9 and even, sometimes, against our will (LWI, 612). They strike us. And yet we know we had something to do with their dawning, for we know that the objective world—the world that may be defined by its independence from any(one’s) particular experience of it—has not changed, and that no new element of that world was revealed to us in the dawning of the aspect. So much, for now, by way of grammatical characterization of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’. All of this Wittgensteinian grammar notwithstanding, the dawning

 Not counting those cases in which the invitation comes from someone else.

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(or noticing) of a Wittgensteinian aspect—unlike thinking, or knowing, or intending, or understanding, or meaning, or reading… this or that—is, first and foremost and essentially, a perceptual experience with a distinct phenomenology. Wittgenstein in no way denies this. On something like the contrary, I think this is one main reason why he found the seeing of aspects so interesting and at the same time so difficult to come to a satisfying understanding of. A striking feature of most of the existing accounts of seeing-as with which I am familiar, is that they either neglect altogether or else misrepresent the distinct phenomenology of aspect perception—in favor, once again, of theoretical commitments and ambitions. An important merit of Wollheim’s account of what he calls ‘seeing-as’ is his insistence that ‘seeing x as f is a particular visual experience of x’ (AO, 223, my emphasis). I will later try to show, however, that Wollheim’s theoretical commitments prevent him from doing justice to that experience. The phenomenology of noticing an aspect is fairly easy to give an initial characterization of, though no characterization would be much good to anyone not already familiar with the experience, and any form of words with which the experience might be characterized could also be understood in such ways that it would not aptly characterize the experience. When we notice an aspect, everything changes and yet nothing changes (see RPPII, 474). We see (in the objective sense of that word, the first of the two uses of it that Wittgenstein speaks of) that the object has not changed, and yet we see it differently (in what Wittgenstein refers to as the second use of ‘see’). We know, and see (first sense), that the object’s objective features have remained unchanged, but its perceived physiognomy or overall expression has changed, and changed wholly. As I pointed out in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, the aspect is un-detachable from the experience, or from the object-as-experienced.10 Another way of putting that point, which will become important for us later on, is that to perceive an object under an aspect is not the same as applying a concept to it, or ‘subsuming’ it under a concept, which, being general, is separate from the particular object and from our particular experience of it. Objects of sight of the first category, Wittgenstein tells us, can be described (or otherwise represented) objectively: I may tell you that what I see is a knife and fork, or that the object I see is red, and thereby tell you exactly what I see—in the first sense of ‘see’; and, if all goes well, you may thereby come to know what I see (first sense) as well as I do, and to be able to rightfully inform others about that object, even though you have not yourself perceived it. By contrast, if you want to know what I see when I see one thing as another, you need to look at the first thing and, if you can, see it as the other thing (or things). In this way, Wittgensteinian aspects illustrate what Merleau-Ponty is talking about when he talks about a (physiognomic) meaning, or sense, that clings to what has it (PP, 147/148).

 This, I suggested in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, is why Wittgenstein found aspect perception useful for elucidating the ‘intransitive’ sense of ‘a quite particular’, in the Brown Book.

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The grammatical-phenomenological characterization I have just given of Wittgensteinian aspects is fairly specific; and yet it allows for quite a range of cases that differ from each other in more or less significant ways. Let me mention some of them: seeing a similarity between two faces; seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck or as a rabbit; seeing a figure such as the famous Necker cube as oriented one way or another in three-dimensional space; seeing the double-cross as a white cross against a black background, or vice versa; seeing a triangle—either drawn or “real” (three-­ dimensional)—as pointing in this or that direction, or as hanging from its apex, or as having fallen over…(PPF, 162); seeing a face in a puzzle-picture; seeing a sphere in a picture as floating in the air (PPF, 169); seeing W as an upside-down M and seeing the letter F as facing right, or left (see RPPII, 464–5); there’s the aspect we may be said to see when something strikes us in a picture of a running horse and we exclaim ‘It’s running!’ (RPPI, 874; see also PPF, 175); hearing a piece of music as plaintive (PPF, 229) or as solemn (PPF, 233), or hearing a bar as an introduction (PPF, 178); there is the experience in which ‘everything strikes us as unreal’ (RPPI, 125–6)… An important thing to note is that aspects may be seen in non-ambiguous figures: for an aspect to dawn on us, there need not be, and often there is not, two (or more) competing, determinate aspects under which the object may be seen. Thus, for example, there is no clear, determinate aspect that competes with the similarity of one face to another, and which that similarity, when it strikes us, might plausibly be thought to have replaced. Even in cases where it seems that there are two or more determinate aspects under which an object may be seen, that does not mean that we must be seeing that object under one of them whenever we look at it. For example, if you invite me to see, and say, which way the letter F is facing, and I look and it strikes me that it is facing right (say), that does not mean that every time I see the letter F I see it as facing right, or else as facing left. This will become important for us later on, when we will ask what sense can be given to the recurrent idea that all (normal) seeing is seeing-as—that everything we see, or at least almost everything we see, is seen under some particular, determinate aspect or another. Another important point is that in some of the above cases, the aspect corresponds to no objective judgment—what the object is seen as is not something that (in a different context perhaps) it could be seen, or known, to be. What, for example, would it be, or mean, for the letter F to be facing right, or left? Moreover, even where we could think of an objective judgment that might be thought to correspond to the aspect—given a suitable context, the duck-rabbit could actually serve as a picture of a rabbit, or of a duck, and the Necker cube could be (meant to be taken as) an illustration of a cube going this (rather than that) way; a triangular wooden block that stands on its longest side could actually have fallen over (it might be that it is supposed to stand on its shortest side), and a drawn triangle might (be meant to) represent a triangle that has fallen over; there might actually be an objectively establishable similarity between two faces; and so on—no such judgment need be made by the perceiver of the aspect; and in the typical case, the perceiver of the aspect makes it clear that what she sees the object as is not necessarily something that she takes it to be. This is why we normally invite the other to see the aspect, and why we do not take her to be mistaken (or literally blind) if she cannot see the aspect we see.

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This is going to matter as we next turn to Wollheim, for whom the typical, or anyway basic case of seeing-as is precisely one in which the object is judged, or believed, to be what it is seen as.

6.3  Wollheim on Seeing-As According to Wollheim, seeing-as is ‘an essential part’ of the capacity for ‘straightforward perception’, which he explicates in terms of ‘the capacity that we humans and other animals have of perceiving things present to the senses’ (AO, 217). A little later on, he similarly proposes that seeing-as ‘partially is, partially is a development out of, an aspect of straightforward perception’ (AO, 219). How so? Wollheim explains: Whenever I straightforwardly perceive something, which ex hypothesi is present to the senses, my perception of it is mediated by a concept, or in perceiving it I subsume it under a concept. For any x, whenever I perceive x, there is always some f such that I perceive x as f. But it is crucial to an understanding of seeing-as to recognize that my seeing x as f is not just the conjunction of my seeing x and my judging it to be f. Such a view, which has gained currency amongst perceptual psychologists who talk of perception as hypothesis, errs in that it leaves the judgment external to the perception. It was just this view that Wittgenstein tried to combat when he asked us to consider cases where we switch from seeing something or other as this to seeing it as that. For the relevance of such cases is that they allow us to observe how experience and concept change not merely simultaneously but as one… [T]he fundamental point… is that, when I see x as f, f permeates or mixes into the perception: the concept does not stand outside the perception, expressing an opinion or conjecture on my part about x, and which the perception may be said to support to this or that degree (AO, 219–20).

The claim that for any perceived object x, whenever I perceive x, there is always some concept f such that I perceive x as f is a very strong claim. So it is worth noting that Wollheim in effect retracts it no sooner than he has made it. For he goes on to describe cases where for one reason or another one cannot at first tell what one sees, and only comes to see the object as f when told by someone else that it is (an) f, or when finally recognizing it to be (an) f ‘after considerable effort’ (AO, 221). Under what concept are we supposed to be seeing the object before we come to know it to be (an) f? Wollheim does not say. Nor does it seem true that our visual experience (cf. AO, 223) changes whenever we come to know of some hitherto unrecognized perceived object that it is an f, as happens for example when someone tells us that a tree ‘blurred by the mist’ is an oak (AO, 221) or when we find on closer examination that a tree that has been ‘damaged, or lopped, or covered with creeper’, and therefore was initially hard for us to recognize, is an oak (AO, 221). Another immediate difficulty is that Wollheim’s basic claim that ‘we cannot see something as something it (or its counterpart) could never have been’ (AO, 222) seems to fly directly in the face, not only of some of Wittgenstein’s examples—in what sense could the letter F have been facing right, or left?—but also of some of Wollheim’s own examples. How is this claim supposed to be true of the case of see-

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ing a church as an overturned footstool (AO, 222), or a mountain range as a naked woman’s body (AO, 222)? If any sense could be given to the claim that a church (or its counterpart) could have been an overturned footstool or that a mountain range (or its counterpart) could have been a naked woman’s body, then, in that sense, anything could have been anything else, and the condition is empty. I set these difficulties aside, and turn to what Wollheim calls ‘the simplest case’ (AO, 220); for if it should turn out that we cannot even make sense of the simplest case as a case of seeing-as, then whether Wollheim’s general account could somehow be made to accommodate the cases he regards as less simple will become significantly less important. The simplest case, Wollheim says, …is when the concept arises in the mind along with the perception, and having thus arisen, what it does is to give content to a belief. The concept f enters the mind along with the perception of x, blends with this perception, and stays in the mind to form the belief that x is f. So I look out of the window of a train and see a tree which I straightaway see as an oak, which I thereupon believe it to be (AO, 220).

So I look out of the window of a train and see a tree which I immediately know, recognize, to be an oak. What sense can be made of the idea that I thereupon enjoy a ‘particular visual experience’ (AO, 223), which may be described by saying that I ‘see the tree as an oak’? Of the equivalent idea in the case of a knife and fork, or a conventional picture of a lion, or the letter F, Wittgenstein says that it makes no sense. It makes no sense to say one sees, or tries to see, an object as what one knows it to be, Wittgenstein says (see PPF, 122 and 203). Once again, it is open to Wollheim, just as it is open to anyone else, to give sense to ‘seeing something as what we know it to be’, by making clear how he uses, or means it—how his words are to be understood. But as far as I can see, all we get from Wollheim in this respect is the highly metaphorical talk of a concept ‘entering the mind and blending with the perception’, or of a concept ‘permeating or mixing into the perception’.11 Do we understand this talk, which has seemed just about right to any number of interpreters of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, or does it only give us the illusion of sense? In order to even begin to understand Wollheim’s talk, or try to, we need to know what he means by ‘concept’. Wollheim says nothing to elucidate what he means by that word. He appears to be counting on something like the common understanding  Wollheim is here echoing Peter Strawson, who claims that what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing something as something’ is a visual experience that ‘is irradiated by, or infused with, the concept; or it becomes soaked with the concept’ (‘Imagination and Perception’, in Kant on Pure Reason, Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 93). And Wittgenstein too speaks metaphorically, in a couple of his remarks, about how, in seeing an aspect, ‘we bring a concept to what we see’ (RPPI, 961) or how the aspect is ‘the echo of a thought in sight’ (PPF, 235). But, first of all, Wittgenstein is here trying to characterize the experience of noticing an aspect, not our ordinary and normal perceptual relation to just about everything. Second, in contrast with Wollheim, he makes it clear that the talk is not only metaphorical, but also tentative— something that ‘one would like to say’ (PPF, 235); it does not by itself constitute an account or explication of anything. And third, these remarks of Wittgenstein’s, even if taken in context and with a grain of salt, may still be potentially misleading or problematic in how they invite us to understand the seeing of aspects.

11

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of ‘concept’; but it is not clear what that might be.12 Nor is it clear how any such understanding could serve his purposes. If we follow Wittgenstein (and Austin), and begin by reminding ourselves how the word ‘concept’ functions in ordinary and normal discourse, I believe we will find that ‘the concept of x’ is often interchangeable with ‘the meaning of “x”’, and means something like ‘whatever it is that “x” carries with it from one occasion of its use to another, and makes it fit for some uses but not others, or for being meant in some ways but not others’.13 Our everyday criterion for ‘possessing the concept of X’, and similarly for ‘knowing the meaning of “x”’, is the ability to employ ‘x’ (and cognates) competently in a wide enough range of contexts, and to respond competently to other people’s employment of it. But if this is roughly what ‘concept’ ordinarily and normally means—what we ordinarily and normally mean by it—then to possess any one concept is to possess very many others and to master a wide range of interrelated practices. And if so, it is not clear what Wollheim’s ‘the concept enters the mind and blends with (or permeates, or mixes into) the perception’ might mean. Here it might be objected that Wollheim is relying not on the everyday use and understanding of ‘concept’ but rather on its more or less technical use in philosophy, as well as in psychology and linguistics. Let us see whether any such understanding of Wollheim’s ‘concept’ could help us understand what he means by ‘seeing-as’. As commonly used in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, ‘the concept of x’ means roughly ‘whatever it is that ultimately guides us in classifying items in the world as (belonging to the category of) x, and in distinguishing between correct and incorrect classifications (relative to some concept, of course)’. This rough understanding of ‘concept’ may also be given a linguistic turn: ‘Our concept of x is whatever it is that ultimately guides us in applying “x” to cases (or withholding “x” from cases), and in distinguishing between correct and incorrect applications’,14 where—in stark contrast with Wittgenstein’s understanding of language—the ‘application’ of words to cases is taken to be something that we ought to be able to do, and do mostly cor-

 Joseph Rouse has fairly recently pointed out that ‘a remarkable sequence of prestigious John Locke Lecturers’ (he mentions John McDowell, Jerry Fodor, Frank Jackson, and Robert Brandom) ‘have presented and defended very different accounts of concepts or the conceptual domain’. ‘The disconnection among these views is substantial enough’, he goes on to suggest, ‘that an observer might wonder whether we philosophers have any idea (or at least any one idea) of what we’re talking about when we talk about concepts’ (‘What is Conceptually Articulated Understanding?’, in Mind Reason and Being-In-The-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, Schear, J. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 250). 13  ‘Concept’ may also mean something like an approach to, or a way of looking at and doing things, as in ‘The management of the company has come up with an altogether different concept of marketing’. But that could not possibly be what Wollheim means by ‘concept’, or what he must mean by it given the overall story he wishes to tell. 14  The ‘ultimately’ in both versions is important, for, on any plausible account, what actually guides us—what we actually go by—in classifying an item as (an) x, or calling an item ‘x’, may be accidental or inessential from the perspective of (what is taken to be) our concept of x. 12

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rectly, even apart from any context of significant use of those words.15 Most of the academic disagreements about the nature of concepts, both within and outside philosophy, occur within the framework of this broad characterization.16 The ­disagreements, in other words, are about what ultimately guides our classifications of worldly items, or our ‘applications’ of words to cases—whether it is rules or necessary and sufficient conditions, or proto-theories, or prototypes or exemplars and ways of assessing an item’s similarity to them, or ‘family resemblance’, and so on. Given the above, common understanding of ‘concept’, the following dilemma may be posed for Wollheim. On the one hand, the more cognitive, or even theoretical, one takes concepts to be—the more one packs into one’s understanding of ‘concept’ things (rules, conceptual entailment relations, contextual parameters and effects, broadly practical considerations, Wittgensteinian grammar…) that are not directly perceived, certainly not by the eyes as they lay on a more or less familiar and recognizable object—the harder it should become for one to make sense of the idea of a concept mixing into or permeating the perception of the object and thereby giving rise to a particular visual, or otherwise perceptual, experience. On the other hand, if we go in the opposite direction and take concepts to be (not theoretical or cognitive but) essentially perceptual entities—that is, if we take ‘the concept of x’ to refer to something like a visual (or otherwise perceptual) schema of x-in-general, or what an x should look like—then it is not clear what a concept thus understood could add to our perceptual experience of the particular object. For example, let’s assume that I have in my mind a perceptual schema of dog-in-­general, which enables me to recognize dogs as belonging to the particular category of dogs, and to refer to them correctly by means of the word ‘dog’ (or its equivalents in other languages I know). And suppose that here in front of me is Henry, the neighbors’ mixed German shepherd. What could my dog-in-general schema, or even my German-shepherd schema, possibly add to my visual experience of Henry? I should add that the second, perceptual way of understanding ‘concept’ is anyway problematic, for it conflates what Charles Travis calls ‘recognitional capacities’ and what he calls ‘conceptual capacities’17: it fails to distinguish between detectors (of objects of a certain type)—however reliable they might be under normal conditions—and what Travis calls thinkers. The latter, unlike the former, know, at least to some extent and with respect to very many types of objects, what makes objects count, in general or in given contexts, as objects of those types, and are capable of judging that a particular object—for example, an oak tree that has been damaged, or lopped, or covered with creeper (AO, 221), or a table that stands on only one leg—

 I discuss this fundamental difference between Wittgenstein and both the tradition of Western philosophy and mainstream Analytic philosophy, in When Words are Called For and The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. 16  As is evidenced in Margolis and Laurence’s Concepts: Core Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1990). All of the contributors to this comprehensive volume think of concepts from within the framework of that broad characterization. In The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, I give evidence showing that, in this respect, nothing significant has changed since the publication of that volume. 17  Charles Travis, Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 185–7. 15

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belongs to that type, or may in certain contexts reasonably be counted as belonging to it, even though it does not display the usual perceptual features. Conceptual capacities are indefinitely flexible and potentially open-ended in a way that merely recognitional capacities are not. Now, it may well be that for the most part we relate to objects in our world as detectors, not as thinkers (in Travis’s sense). It may be that much of our talk, for example, is drawn out from us by the world as it presents itself to us—where this refers not just to the world we speak of, but also, and importantly, to the world we speak in—without any prior reflection on our part on the appropriateness of that talk. Not every time that we respond to the world with words, let alone without words, must we be giving voice to what may sensibly be called ‘a judgment’. But if so, then Wollheim’s idea that everything we perceive is perceived under some concept or another is a distortion—an intellectualization, so to speak, of human perception that the phenomenon Wittgenstein refers to by ‘seeing-as’ may actually help us find unsatisfying.

6.4  Aspects and Concepts I’ve argued that Wollheim’s ‘simple case’—the case of perceiving something that we immediately recognize, know, to belong to some particular type, or, if you will, to fall under some particular concept—cannot be understood as a case of seeing-as. More precisely, ‘seeing-as’, as Wollheim invites us to understand it, cannot be made sense of when applied to such a case. And yet Wollheim is not alone among readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on seeing-something-as-something who has come to think that there must be a continuous version to seeing-as, and that somehow, human perception as such must be understood in terms of seeing-as.18 Three ideas have fed into this widespread conviction, it seems to me. The first is the idea—which some have attributed to Kant, incorrectly in my view—that our perception is necessarily and always ‘conceptualized’ or, as Wollheim puts it, ‘mediated by concepts’ (AO, 219).19 As I have begun to show in the previous section, it is not clear what this idea comes to, exactly; but it has nonetheless appealed to many and has exerted much influence in modern Western philosophy up until the present.20 The second idea is

18  The earliest version of this idea is found in Strawson’s ‘Imagination and Perception’. Later versions may be found in Mulhall’s On Being in the World and ‘Aspect Perception’; Johnston’s Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner; and Schroeder’s ‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’. 19  John McDowell, in Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and subsequent work, has played a central role in promoting the notion that for Kant all perceptual experience is conceptualized. Lucy Allais has more recently made a strong case against that interpretation of Kant (‘Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 383–413)—an interpretation, I should add, that seems very hard to fit with Kant’s account of beauty. 20  Criticizing that idea will be one of the main tasks of ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’; but some of what I will say in this paper, and some of what I have said in the previous section, has

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that the dawning of aspects, as described by Wittgenstein, could only be understood as occurring against the background, so to speak, of a state aptly describable as ‘continuous aspect perception’. Differently put, the idea is that the aspect that dawns must be replacing some other aspect that had been perceived up until the dawning of the new aspect. The third idea, which bridges the first two, is that what dawns on us when a Wittgensteinian aspect dawns on us may be identified with, or in terms of, a concept.21 This third idea may be expressed by saying, as Wollheim does, that what something may be seen as must be something that it could be judged to be. In sect. 6.6, I will briefly discuss the second idea, which has an important grain of truth in it but has hitherto been spoiled by the tendency to overlook the indeterminacy of the perceived, or phenomenal, world. In this section and in Sect. 6.5, I will discuss the third idea. I will argue that Wittgensteinian aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, what may sensibly be called ‘concepts’. Echoing Wollheim’s metaphorical talk, I could also put the point by saying that what permeates or mixes with or blends into our perception of an object when a Wittgensteinian aspect dawns on us may not plausibly or usefully be taken to be a concept.22 This should be easiest to see when it comes to aspects for which no description, and therefore no candidate concept, readily suggests itself. One may all of a sudden be struck by the expression of a face, for example, or by the atmosphere in a party (or something about it), or by someone’s peculiar way of walking into a room, and find it hard, or even impossible, to put it satisfyingly into words. And even if one does manage to come up with a description of what has struck one—saying of a drawn face, for example, or of its expression, that ‘it looks like a complacent busimore or less immediate bearing on it. And see also my ‘On When Words are Called For: Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of Our World’, (Inquiry 46 (2003): 473–500), for an early critique of that idea. A powerful and detailed critique of the idea that human perception is ‘conceptualized’ may be found in Travis’s Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). In ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’, I will argue that Travis’s proposed alternative to that idea ought not to satisfy us either. 21  Compare this combination of ideas to one that Ned Block attributes (‘with permission’, he writes) to Jerry Fodor: ‘(1) No seeing without seeing as; (2) No seeing as without conceptualization; (3) No conceptualization without concepts’ (‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014), 561). I should note that neither Block nor Fodor means by ‘seeing-as’ what I take Wittgenstein to mean by it; for neither of them, is seeing-as a particular kind of (necessarily passing) visual experience, in which what is seen is seen as some other thing(s), and therefore, as I am about to argue, is not subsumed under a concept. 22  This is not to deny that the power that we have to give perceptual unity and sense, or significance, to what encounters us in experience—a power that manifests itself dramatically in the dawning of aspects—is a power that, ultimately, makes it possible for us to perform, when we do, what may sensibly count as acts of ‘empirical judgment’, or the ‘application of empirical concepts’. But that just means that seeing-as prepares the ground for the application of concepts, not that it consists in the application of concepts. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that the capacity to make empirical judgements, or apply empirical concepts, is based on the capacity to perceive, and respond to, pre-conceptual unity and sense. ‘[I]f we go back to concrete description’, he writes, ‘we notice that the categorial activity, before being a thought or a form of knowledge, is a certain manner of relating oneself to the world, and, correspondingly, a style or shape of experience’ (PP, 191/197).

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nessman, stupidly supercilious, who though fat, imagines he is a lady killer’ (BB, 162)—one may still only ‘[mean this] as an approximate description of the expression’ (BB, 162, my emphasis), and perhaps also say something like ‘words can’t exactly describe it’ (BB, 162). Such aspects are not uncommon, though they may easily be overlooked if one takes the ambiguous figures as one’s paradigmatic examples of aspect perception; and I don’t suppose anyone would propose to identify them with concepts. Insofar as we use language to express and try to share our experience of them, its use is precisely that: to try to get others to share, and thereby validate, our experience of the thing, not to capture that thing as it is independently of our, or anyone’s experience of it, as the application of concepts would. To see that this is also true of aspects for which particular descriptions do readily suggest themselves, consider Wittgenstein’s example of being struck by the likeness of a face we are looking at to another. Though, as I have noted, there is a great variety of cases of aspect-dawning that differ from each other in significant ways, if the idea that dawning aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, concepts, can be shown to be misguided in this case, then I think we will have a good reason to be generally suspicious of it. One important advantage of this case is that, unlike cases of seeing aspects in schematic drawings and ambiguous figures, being struck by the likeness of one face to another is something that may naturally happen to us in the course of everyday experience. And this is important, for if we wish to learn something general about human perception from the phenomenon of aspect dawning, we had better take into account the artificiality of some of the examples Wittgenstein discusses, and the differences between them and the more natural cases. Another advantage of the case of the dawning similarity of one face to another— given my aim of questioning the widespread idea that aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, concepts—is that, though a description of the aspect does readily suggest itself here, it is none too clear what the candidate concept might be in this case. No obvious generality under which the face we’re looking at might be subsumed, or for that matter perceived, suggests itself; there is only this one face, and that other. That might encourage us to consider the possibility that no generality, and hence no concept, is, let alone must be, in play in the perception of other aspects. If we were committed to the idea that aspects are to be identified with, or in terms of, concepts, and therefore committed to finding some such concept in the case of the dawning similarity of one face to another, I suppose the most plausible candidate would be the empirical concept of bearing (some) visible similarity to a particular, given face. Being a concept, it is, as already noted, general: it allows for indefinitely many instantiations that differ from each other in any number of ways; and it transcends any finite set of instantiations: for any particular face, and for any finite set of faces that may all correctly be judged to bear visible similarity to that face, there could always be another face that is visibly distinguishable from all of those faces and yet may correctly be judged to bear visible similarity to the first face. One could go a step further and argue that any two faces may, in some contexts, correctly be judged to bear some visible similarity to each other.

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This leads us to the further point that, as Charles Travis has taught us to recognize, the concept bearing visible similarity to a particular face, just like any other empirical concept, is ‘context-sensitive’: for any given face, and for a wide variety of faces that in some contexts would correctly count as bearing visible similarity to it, there could be other contexts in which those same faces would not correctly count as bearing visible similarity to that face. This means that in judging that one face bears (or does not bear) visible similarity to another, we are beholden, not just to the two faces, but also to the context in which we make the judgment. And if someone were to ask us, apart from a context suitable for fixing what ‘bear visible similarity’ means (in that context), whether two given faces bear visible similarity to each other, the correct response would, in most cases, be ‘yes, or no, depending on what you mean, on how your words are (to be) understood’. I think the above reminders should already give pause to anyone who wishes to claim that what blends with or mixes into our perception of a face, when its likeness to another face strikes us, is a concept; not because they show that the claim might be mistaken, but because they show that it is not even clear what exactly is being claimed. But let’s move closer. Concepts, at least as commonly thought of in Western and contemporary Analytic philosophy, are paradigmatically applied to cases in objective, truth evaluable, judgments. As noted in the previous section, however, it is important that the case Wittgenstein describes is not one of judging that the one face is similar to the other. In fact, it seems clear that, in many cases at least, what we perceive something as is something we are not taking it, let alone claiming it, to be. That characteristic of aspect perception might be thought to be accommodated by Wollheim’s allowing for possible ‘developments’ of seeing-as (AO, 220), beginning with ‘the simple case’ and moving along a series of ‘declining degrees of assent, diminishing from belief through likely supposition, informed guess, outside bet, to the case where there is no commitment at all to the satisfaction of the concept by the object and imagination or make belief takes over’ (AO, 221). But where exactly in this series should we place Wittgenstein’s case of being struck by the similarity between two faces? The case Wittgenstein describes fits nowhere in Wollheim’s series. The person struck by the similarity is not imagining (let alone supposing or believing) that the face she is looking at satisfies the concept of bearing some visible similarity to the particular other face. In being struck by the similarity between two faces, I am not imagining that they are similar. Nor am I imagining a counterfactual state of affairs in which they would be. Wollheim’s invocation of imagination and make belief is doubly misleading. First, the aspect is not something we merely imagine (to be there). If it were, calling upon others to see what we see, as we characteristically do when an aspect strikes us, would not make sense—or anyway, not the sense it normally makes.23 Second,

 By this I do not mean to say that no role is played in the dawning of an aspect by something we may call ‘imagination’. I actually suspect that a certain equivocation on ‘imagination’—roughly, between what Kant calls ‘reproductive imagination’ and what he calls ‘productive imagination’ (cf. CJ, 540)—has led Wollheim, and perhaps some of his readers, to miss the inaptness in this case of what he means, or must mean given his overall account, by ‘imagination’.

23

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the aspect may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, an empirical concept: if a concept is something that may contribute to—or, perhaps better, is abstractable from—the content of judgments or Fregean ‘thoughts’, however hypothetically or even counterfactually entertained24; if, in other words, the application of the concept of f to a case is what may be expressed by asserting, or even just hypothesizing, that the case is (a case of) f; then what dawns on us when a Wittgensteinian aspect dawns on us is not a concept; nor may it be identified in terms of one. The empirical judgment that something is (an) f, and so if you will the subsumption of a case under the empirical concept f, situates the object and its property of being f in the objective world—within what Charles Travis calls ‘networks of factive meaning’.25 A particular face’s being similar to some other particular face, for example, factively means certain objectively establishable things (and indicates or makes likely certain other things), where ‘factively’ here means: if those other things do not hold, then either the similarity of the one face to the other does not mean them or the similarity does not hold. Because empirical judgments, and more broadly Kantian ‘cognitions’ (Erkenntnisse), are interconnected and form a system—the system Kant calls ‘nature’ (cf. CPR, A114)—they commit those who make any one judgment to indefinitely many other Kantian cognitions, or Fregean thoughts. They also commit them practically. Empirical concepts, understood as constituents of empirical judgments (or cognitions), or as what those judgments apply to cases, may accordingly be thought of as individuated or defined by those commitments, regardless of whether particular applications of them are committed or somehow uncommitted (hypothetical, counterfactual).26 If I judge that one face is visibly similar to another, for example, then I am committed to expecting all normal and competent people who are suitably positioned to recognize this; and I am committed to holding those who deny the similarity to be mistaken, and to be liable to err practically as a result; and I am committed to taking it that each of the two faces, or some feature(s) of it, may be pointed to as a way of giving someone (some) information about the other face (‘The escaped suspect’s face (nose) is similar to so and so’s face (nose)’); and I’m committed to there being certain objectively establishable features of the faces that are responsible for the similarity, so that if those features were sufficiently altered in one of the faces the similarity—I mean, that similarity—would cease to exist; and I am committed to being able to identify those features—to specify in what the similarity consists (‘They have the same pointy and

 For the idea that concepts are abstractable from whole thoughts—where whole thoughts are primary—see Frege, ‘Notes for Ludwig Darmastaedter’, in Posthumous Writings, Hermes, H., Kambartel, F., and Kaulbach, F. (eds.), Long, P. and White. R. (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell), 253. For a recent development and defense of this Fregean idea, see Travis, Perception, 181, and 357– 63. For another recent understanding of ‘concepts’ along this line, see Ned Block, ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014), 561. 25  Perception, 91. 26  This connects with Kant’s saying that the modality of a judgment ‘contributes nothing to the content of the judgment’ (CPR, A74/B100). 24

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slightly crooked nose’); and so on and so forth.27 If I am not thus committed, I have not thus judged. It is true that when I merely imagine that—or imagine a state of affairs in which—one face bears a visible similarity to another, I do not commit myself as I do when I judge that it does. But what I imagine may still be defined or specified in terms of the same set of commitments28: what I imagine is, precisely, a state of affairs in which there is an empirically establishable visible similarity between the faces, where that means a situation in which the two faces are such that normal and competent perceivers who are suitably positioned may rightfully be expected to find them similar to each other (given a suitable context); and in which those who denied the similarity would be mistaken and would be liable to err practically as a result; and in which each of the two faces, or some feature(s) of it, would be such that it could be pointed to as a way of giving someone some information about the other face; and in which the faces have certain objectively establishable features—identifiable by normal and competent perceivers who are suitably positioned—that make them alike; and so on and so forth. A Wittgensteinian aspect, by contrast—and this goes for such aspects as the duck- or rabbit-aspect of the duck-rabbit, or the two aspects of the Necker cube, no less than for the similarity between the faces—is not similarly situated within a network of factive meanings; it is not a feature of the objective world. While my being struck by the similarity between two faces is an objectively establishable fact, and as such means, factively, any number of objectively establishable things (mostly things about me), the similarity between the faces that strikes me—and similarly the duck- or rabbit-aspect, or one of the two aspects of the Necker cube, and so on— does not (factively) mean, or indicate, or make likely, anything objectively establishable. It is not part of the objective (‘external’) world. Nor, as noted, is it imagined to be part of the objective world. But if so, then it may not aptly be identified in terms of the empirical concept of bearing visible similarity. And yet, for all that, the aspect—in the case under consideration, the similarity that has dawned on me of one face to another—is not merely subjective. Both phenomenologically and grammatically, it is there, in the perceived face: though I cannot objectively establish its presence, or describe it geometrically, or prove wrong those who fail to see it, I still take it that others could be brought to see it there too, and I take it that they are missing something about the face if they don’t. Though the (Kantian, objective) ‘I think’ could not sensibly attach to our experience of the aspect, neither the experience nor the aspect are ‘nothing to us’ (contra Kant, CPR, B131).  This list of commitments is not meant to be complete; and it does not even matter whether it is accurate (as far as it goes). What matters for my purposes is that an accurate (even if still incomplete) such list may be given. 28  This is really just the basic Fregean truth, emphasized by Geach (‘Assertion’, Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 449–465), that (what may count as) the same thought may, on the one hand, be asserted or otherwise committed to and, on the other hand, be merely ‘entertained’ or ‘considered’ (or imagined to be true). 27

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A long tradition, beginning with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (at least on one popular reading of it) and exerting its strong influence all the way to the present, would have us suppose that only the subsumption of what presents itself to us in our experience under concepts—thought of as systematically inter-related rules for the unification and organization of the ‘sensible manifold’—could enable us to move from the merely ‘inner’ or ‘subjective’ succession of Vorstellungen to a world sharable with others (see CPR, A196–7/B242).29 Part of what Wittgenstein has taught us to recognize, or reminded us, is that what may sensibly be called ‘the application of concepts to cases’ could itself only truly be understood in terms of inter-subjectively shared practices into which we are initiated, and in which we participate, in a world that is, to some degree, always already shared with others. This is a point of deep agreement between Wittgenstein and phenomenologists such as Heidegger and, especially, Merleau-Ponty. But as those phenomenologists have taught us to recognize, it is extremely difficult to describe without distortion our perceptual relation to the not-yet-objective but nonetheless intersubjectively sharable, and largely shared, world. In particular, it is extremely difficult to resist the temptation to objectivize the perceived world, and to think of our relation to it in terms of the very same empirical concepts whose application may only be understood, if Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists are correct, against the background of that very relation. This is a place where the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects could prove philosophically enlightening.30

6.5  Aspects as Perceived Internal Relations Wollheim, as we saw, complains against the tendency to ‘leave judgment external to perception’ (AO, 219). The whole point of Wittgenstein’s asking us to ‘consider cases where we switch from seeing something or other as this to seeing it as that’, he says, is that those cases ‘allow us to observe how experience and concept change not merely simultaneously but as one’ (AO, 220). I find the main interest of aspect dawning to lie in its showing something like the opposite of what Wollheim takes it to show. Far from bringing out the inseparability of judgments (or Kantian cognitions) and perception, it brings out the important distinction between those two—a distinction that the tradition of Western philosophy has tended to obscure. ‘What I perceive in the dawning of an aspect’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects’ (PPF, 247). Though the notion of ‘internal relation’ features already in the Tractatus, where it is used to say something—however ultimately discoverable as ‘nonsensical’—about ‘[the relation of] depicting that holds between language and the world’ (TLP,

 Similar ideas may be found in Frege (cf. ‘The Thought’, Mind 65 (1956), 306 and 309).  This idea will be further developed in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’ and ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’.

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4.014),31 I wish to propose that the notion, as Wittgenstein uses it here, is drawn from Gestalt psychology and is, importantly, a perceptual notion, as opposed to an objective, third personal notion.32 Having said that, and though we will shortly see further evidence supporting the attribution of the understanding of ‘internal relation’ I’m about to elaborate to the later Wittgenstein, I should add that it does not ultimately matter for my present purposes whether that understanding is what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote the above remark. Two (or more) perceived things (objects, elements) stand in an internal relation to each other when their perceived qualities are not independent of the perceived relation between them. Here is a passage from Kurt Koffka that illustrates the notion of ‘internal relation’, as I’m proposing it should be understood in connection with aspect-perception: ‘Two colors adjacent to each other are not perceived as two independent things, but as having an inner connection which is at the same time a factor determining the special qualities A and B themselves’.33 According to Gestalt psychology, what we perceive, at the most basic level, is not atomic sensations that we must then somehow synthesize into significant, intelligible wholes, but rather unified, significant wholes, where the perceived qualities of the elements of a perceived whole, and so the specific contributions those elements make to the overall perceived significance, or gestalt, of that whole, are not perceptually independent from that perceived overall significance. The duck-rabbit provides a simple—even if also importantly simplistic—illustration of this. When you see it as a rabbit, say, you see the two ‘appendages’ as ears; but your seeing them as ears is not independent of your seeing the whole thing as a rabbit. Perceptually, the ears are (seen as) ears only when the whole thing is (seen as) a rabbit. One important thing this means is that your seeing the duck-rabbit as a rabbit cannot be explained, or rationalized, as the outcome of your seeing this portion of the drawing as ears, that portion as mouth, another portion as the back of the head, and so on. The rabbit aspect is not synthesized from elements that have their ‘rabbit-parts’ significance independently of being elements of that overall aspect. On the other hand, if you took the basic elements of our perception of the duck-­ rabbit to only have objectively establishable, geometrical properties, and so to be devoid of any rabbit (and equally duck) significance, then you would never be able to explain, on that basis, why those elements got synthesized, in someone’s perceptual experience, into the rabbit aspect, say, rather than the duck aspect. This shows  For an illuminating discussion of the different ways—‘metaphysical’ and ‘anti-metaphysical’— of understanding ‘internal relation’ as used in the Tractatus, see Marie McGinn, ‘Wittgenstein and Internal Relations’, European Journal of Philosophy 18 (2009): 495–509. 32  Schroeder muddles his discussion of aspect perception, it seems to me, by speaking of the similarity that strikes us as at once ‘an internal relation’ (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, 359) and ‘an objective feature of the object, namely a relation of likeness between it and some other object’ (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, 360). But how is an objective similarity of one object to another an internal relation between the two objects? 33  Kurt Koffka, The Growth of the mind, An introduction to Child-Psychology (second edition), M. R. Ogden (trans.) (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927 (Kessinger Publishing, 2007)), 221. 31

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that the perception of significant wholes should be taken as phenomenologically primary. And that, I’m about to propose, is true not only when the perceived ‘whole’ in question is some individual object taken in (artificial) isolation, but also when it includes some such object and the perceptual background against which it is perceived in the natural course of everyday experience.34 Wittgenstein gives clear, if also characteristically non-theoretical, expression to this fundamental feature of human perception (and at the same time provides further evidence for the attribution to him of the above understanding of ‘internal relation’), in the following remark: Look at a long familiar piece of furniture in its old place in your room. You would like to say: “It is part of an organism”. Or “Take it outside, and it is no longer at all the same as it was”, and similar things. And naturally one isn’t thinking of any causal dependence of one part on the rest. Rather it is like this:… [I]f I tried taking it quite out of its present context, I should say that it had ceased to exist and another had got into its place. One might even feel like this: “Everything is part and parcel of everything else” (external and internal relations [my emphasis, AB]). Displace a piece and it is no longer what it was… (RPPI, 339).

In ‘Wittgenstein and The Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’, I will say something about Wittgenstein’s tentative tone here; and I will propose that his tentativeness is due to a misplaced mistrust of phenomenology. For MerleauPonty and Gestalt psychologists, what Wittgenstein says here is just right when said about the phenomenal world: how anything we attend to presents itself to us, is internally related to the background against which it is perceived; and that goes not only for the more or less geographically immediate background of that object, but for anything that contributes, however remotely and indeterminately, to its perceived significance.35 Another case of gestalt perception, which is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophical difficulty, is that of linguistic meaning, or sense. (From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, the gestalt-like nature of linguistic sense is but a spe That the analysis of perceptual experience presupposes its synthesis and therefore cannot explain it, is one of Kant’s fundamental insights and his most basic objection to empiricist-mechanistic accounts of how unity arises in our experience. Kant saw that we must play an active role in bringing about—‘constituting’, as the phenomenologists later came to say—the unity of our experience. What Kant missed in the Critique of Pure Reason, the phenomenologists have argued, and later arguably came to recognize when thinking about the experience of beauty, is the possibility of a synthesis that, while in some clear sense intelligible and intersubjectively shareable, is not (aptly thought of as) conceptual(ized) (see PP, xvii/lxxxi). The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects brings out especially clearly the distinction between what we perceive and what we objectively think (or know), and the reality of intersubjectively shareable, non-conceptual, perceptual synthesis. 35  In The Visible and the Invisible, and partly under the inspiration of Saussure, Merleau-Ponty goes as far as to suggest that some perceived red dress is 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 also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of woman, robes of Professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and of uniforms’ (132). I will come back to this passage in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’. 34

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cial case of what is true of all perceived sense, whether linguistically-expressed or not.) On Wittgenstein’s view, which may be seen as a development of Frege’s ­‘context principle’,36 the basic unit of linguistic sense is neither the isolated word, nor the isolated string of words, but an utterance—a human act performed against the background of the history of the language, the culture, and of the individual participants. ‘The total speech act in the total speech situation’, as John Austin puts it.37 Phenomenologically—which means, from the perspective we all occupy as speakers engaged in discourse (as opposed to theoreticians reflecting on it)—the analysis of linguistic sense presupposes its synthesis: the contribution made by each word to the overall sense of an utterance is not independent of, and therefore cannot analytically explain, or rationalize, that overall sense. On this, Wittgenstein and Merleau-­Ponty are in full agreement. ‘In understanding others’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘the problem is always indeterminate; because only the solution to the problem will make the givens retrospectively appear as convergent...’ (PP, 179/184; see also 389/408–9).38 It is only when you see the overall sense of an utterance, that you can see what contribution each of the words is making that that overall sense. As I’ve already noted, internal relations hold not just among the perceived elements of perceived objects but also, and equally fundamentally, between perceived objects and the background against which they are perceived. This is illustrated in Wittgenstein’s example above of the old piece of furniture that ‘ceases to exist’— perceptually, experientially—when taken out of its familiar context, and may be seen as well in the context-sensitivity of linguistic sense. It is likely to be missed in the case of aspect-perception, however, if we mostly focus on the schematic drawings and figures that were designed to be ambiguous. These objects are typically encountered in the artificial context of a psychology lab or philosophy classroom. They are therefore ‘cut off’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, from our perceptual field, with its temporally structured and extended personal and cultural ‘horizons’; and it is precisely that artificial insulation of those objects that makes it possible for us to project different perceptual physiognomies on them, more or less at will (PP, 279–80/292). Even here, the perceived objects stand in internal relations to other objects, as Wittgenstein suggests in PPF, 247; but the way in which foreground and background are internally related in normal perception, and therefore change together, does not come out clearly in their case. It comes out far more clearly in the more natural cases of aspect dawning. Now go back to the experience Wittgenstein describes of being struck by the similarity between two faces. A similarity understood as an objective property of the faces is an external relation between them: each face has its objective properties, which one may come to know without knowing anything about the other face, and those properties determine whether, and if so to what extent, the two may correctly  Frege, G., The Foundations of Arithmetic, Austin, J. L. (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, x. 37  Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 148. 38  I develop this important affinity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty in some detail, in chapter Five of The Crisis of Method. 36

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count (context-dependently) as bearing some objective similarity to each other. And so you may look at a face and see (first sense), or have someone point out or ­demonstrate to you, that there is some visible similarity between it and another, where seeing that need not involve, or bring about, any change in how you visually experience the face you’re looking at: its perceived gestalt (physiognomy, expression) need not change at all. By contrast, in the experience Wittgenstein describes, the perceived gestalt of the face you’re looking at changes; and what dawns on you here is an internal relation between the one face and the other, precisely because the perceived relation—of similarity—is inseparable from the perceived change in the overall physiognomy or expression of the face. The perceived qualities of each of the two faces that make them bear a similarity to each other are not independent, perceptually, from our perception of the similarity. (Again, they could be: we could recognize an objectively establishable similarity between the faces—a similarity that may simply be known to be there, and which does not depend on anyone’s visual experience of the faces. But that would not be the seeing of a Wittgensteinian aspect—the seeing of one thing as another. As Wittgenstein notes, even the person he calls ‘aspect-blind’ and defines as someone ‘lacking in the capacity to see something as something’ should be able to recognize objective similarity and ‘execute such orders as “Bring me something that looks like this”’ (PPF, 257)) The perceived, dawning similarity of one face to another, I’ve proposed, is an internal relation between the two faces—a way of bringing individual things together perceptually without (yet, or necessarily) subsuming them both under some one concept, or generality that, as such, transcends them and any other finite set of its instances. What the two faces share is a perceived, experienced, physiognomy, not a determinate, empirical concept of which they may both be judged to be instances. And the same is true when, in trying to get another person to hear a musical theme in a particular way, one says, ‘Here it is as though a conclusion were being drawn, here as though someone were expressing an agreement, or as though this were a reply to what came before’ (CV, 52). Our understanding of such invitations to hear one thing as another presupposes not familiarity with the concepts of conclusion, agreement, and reply, but rather, as Wittgenstein notes, ‘familiarity with conclusions, expressions of agreement, replies’ (CV, 52). Once again, the invitation is to perceive—effect perceptually for oneself—an internal relation between one thing (here, the theme, or a part of it) and other moments or elements of one’s experience—here, of human discourse. In this way, ‘the theme interacts with language’: ‘the rhythm of our language, of our thinking and feeling’ is the background against which the theme acquires its perceived sense for us, becomes understandable in some particular way (CV, 52); and, at the same time, the theme itself becomes ‘a new part of our language[…] becomes incorporated into it […] we learn a new gesture’ (CV, 52). And, in a similar way, ‘a whole world of pain [may be] contained’ in, or ‘bound up with’, the words ‘Fare well!’ (CV, 52). To insist that what we hear in the words, when we hear a whole world of pain contained in them, is a concept— and which concept might that be? of pain? of a whole world of pain?—would distort

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the perceptual experience it purports to elucidate, it seems to me, or else distort our concept of concept. This, I wish to propose, is how we should think about other Wittgensteinian aspects as well: seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck, or as a rabbit; seeing the letter F as facing right, or left, seeing the Necker cube as going this way, or that… in all of those cases, I’m proposing, the aspect is a perceived, experienced physiognomy that connects it internally—not necessarily by way of similarity!39—with other things in the phenomenal world, or elements of it. That physiognomy may of course be described, more or less satisfyingly; and in some cases, its (first) description would be readily available (‘duck’, for example). But to describe an object’s perceived physiognomy, or the aspect under which it is perceived, I have been arguing, is not the same as applying to it an empirical concept, or subsuming it under one—not under any common or plausible understanding of the latter, at any rate.

6.6  Perceptual Indeterminacy Judging that one face is similar to another, or otherwise conceiving of a similarity between them, is one thing, I have argued, having a similarity between them perceptually dawn on one another. That distinction shows itself as well in the less natural cases of Wittgensteinian seeing-as. Thus, for example, it is one thing to take, or consider, the duck-rabbit drawing to be a picture of a duck (say), or know it to be meant to serve as such a picture, and quite another thing to see it as a duck. Similarly, it is one thing to (cognitively) take the Necker cube as meant to represent a cube going this rather than that way, and quite another thing to be able to see it as going this or that way. As I’ve already noted, the former is something that even the ‘aspect blind’, as Wittgenstein describes him, could do. If he could not, his handicap would be even severer than aspect-blindness. ‘Ordinary experience’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘draws a clear distinction between sense experience and judgment’ (PP, 34/35). He appeals to cases where we know, or think, one thing about what we perceive, but perceptually experience something else. One of those cases is that of the Necker cube:

 That the internal relations among elements of our perceptual field need not be ones of similarity, should already be clear even in the case of the duck-rabbit: the different elements of the rabbitaspect, for example, are internally related to each other, but are not perceptually similar to each other. Normally, the immediate background against which we perceive something as we do, and which is internally related to it in the way, or sense, I’ve described, is not similar to it, or composed (exclusively) of elements that are. About our perceptual experience of some particular red thing Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘[T]his red is what it is only by connecting up from its place 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’ (132, my emphasis). In ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’, I will give an example, taken from Alice Munro, of an internal relation between two objects—two houses—that ‘discredit each other’.

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6  Aspects of Perception A cube drawn on paper changes its appearance according as it is seen from one side and from above or from the other and from below. Even if I know that it can be seen in two ways, the figure in fact refuses to change its structure and my knowledge must await its intuitive realization. Here again one ought to conclude that judging is not perceiving (PP, 34/36).

As Wittgenstein notes, seeing something as something requires that you attend to the object in a particular way. It therefore could not be one’s ordinary or habitual relation to the object, could not be continuous—not even if we willed it to be; for what we attend to and how, is not normally subject to the will, certainly not for long. What could be continuous is, precisely, a cognitive relation to an object—cognitively taking it to be one thing, or type of thing, or another (see RPPI, 524). Those who, like Wollheim, have taken the continuous seeing of aspects to be unproblematic, have invariably conflated the question of how you see something—how it organizes itself under your gaze, so to speak—and how you conceive of it, or what you take it objectively to be. They have taken what we know (or take ourselves to know) we perceive—that is, objects of sight of Wittgenstein’s first category, determinate objects determinately situated in the objective world—to determine what we actually perceive, in the sense of how things in fact present themselves to us in our perceptual experience. They have taken the objective world—or, more precisely, the world as objectively thought of and understood—to be, or determine, the world as perceived. They have thus committed what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl and Gestalt psychologists, calls ‘the experience error’ (PP, 5/5). The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals the experience error to be an error. It shows that there is a perceived physiognomic unity, or overall sense, that is importantly different from the unity, or overall sense, capturable in Kantian Erkenntnisse. And it thereby shows that the ‘constancy hypothesis’ is false (PP, 7/8): there is no one-to-one correlation between the world we objectively know, or think, we perceive, on the one hand, and the world as perceived, on the other hand.40 And it arguably shows even more than that. Arguably, it shows, or helps to bring into view, that the perceived unity or sense of the world-as-perceived is importantly indeterminate. The dawning of a Wittgensteinian aspect in the natural course of everyday experience is not normally the replacement of one determinate physiognomy by another determinate physiognomy. Rather, it is the necessarily passing replacement of an indeterminate physiognomy with a relatively determinate one: some particular way of perceptually taking hold of the object replaces, for a time, not (normally) some other particular way or taking hold of it, but rather no particular way of taking hold of it. Early on in the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty says that ‘We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon’ (PP, 6/7)—that is, not as due to some kind of more or less contingent limitation of our cognitive or perceptual powers. This is one of the most difficult ideas in his account of perception—difficult both to understand and to accept. I will not here try to fully explicate and defend that

40  Merleau-Ponty borrows the notion of ‘constancy hypothesis’, as well as the idea that gestalt changes refute the hypothesis, from Wolfgang Köhler.

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idea, which is tied to Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of the internal relation between foreground and background in perception, to his understanding of the ­temporal structure of perception, to his discussion of the inherent ambiguity in human experience between the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’ or ‘anonymous’, and, relatedly, to the ineliminable role he assigns to creativity in his account of normal human perception.41 I do want to propose, however, that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects may be seen as an illustration of, and as lending support to, Merleau-Ponty’s idea. And the basic point, as I see it, is actually fairly simple: the dawning of aspects reveals the role we play in effecting and sustaining the physiognomy—the perceived unity and sense—of what presents itself to us in perception, by attending to it in a particular way; but if so, and since what we attend to perceptually in the normal course of everyday experience must have been perceived by us prior to our attending to it in some particular way—for otherwise, it could not have drawn our attention, or invite us to attend to it in a particular way—it follows that it had been perceived by us under no particular aspect, and was, in that sense, perceptually—or if you will aspectually—indeterminate. This is likely to be missed, and has in fact been missed, by those who mostly focus on the dawning of aspects in the artificial cases of deliberately ambiguous figures. In the case of the duck-rabbit, for example, it seems just obvious that the determinate aspect that dawns replaces another, equally determinate aspect under which the object had been seen up until the dawning of the new aspect. Here it would help to remind ourselves of some of Wittgenstein’s other examples of aspect dawning, such as the case we’ve discussed in which one is all of a sudden perceptually struck by the similarity of one face to another. In that case, there does not seem to be any plausible candidate for the competing aspect under which the face had been seen up until right before the dawning of the new aspect. We had been seeing the face all right, but not as having some particular, determinate overall expression or physiognomy—not unless we had been struck, for some time and right up until the dawning of the similarity, by some other expression or physiognomy. Nor would it help to insist here that we had been seeing the face continuously as a face; for, as Wittgenstein notes, that insistence makes no (clear) sense, and, in any case, that alleged ‘aspect’ does not disappear when the ‘new’ aspect dawns. So the phenomenon of aspect dawning, far from showing that everything we perceive is perceived under some determinate aspect or another, should actually make us suspicious of that idea. Those who take the idea of continuous aspect perception to be clear and unproblematic, invariably conflate how we see something and how we conceive of it; and then they attribute to the former the relative determinacy and stability that characterize the latter.42 Thus, when we say ‘I’ve always seen it in this way’, what we really mean to say, Wittgenstein suggests, is ‘I have always conceived it this way (Ich habe es immer so aufgefasst), and this change of  In ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’, I will do significantly more by way of explicating and motivating Merleau-Ponty’s idea of perceptual indeterminacy. 42  I say ‘relative’, because even the determinacy of the objective world is historically conditioned and context-dependent. But that’s a topic for another occasion. 41

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aspect has never taken place’ (RPPI, 524). And if we find ourselves tempted to say that there is some particular aspect under which we’ve always seen a face, he further suggests, then we should try to say what that aspect is—how we’ve always seen the face; for as soon as we describe the aspect in some way, it will become clear to us that we have not always seen the face under that aspect (RPPI, 526; and PPF, 189). I have suggested that the dawning of an aspect may aptly and usefully be thought of as the introduction of a passing determinacy—a momentary perceptually-taking-­ hold of the object.43 But now, is the dawning aspect determinate? We have already noted that it is necessarily passing: it only lasts as long as we are ‘occupied with the object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237; see also LWI, 14–15); it ‘presents a physiognomy that then passes away’ (PPF, 238). For it to last indefinitely, the aspect would have to turn into a piece of knowledge, or Kantian ‘cognition’. It would then become, for us, an objective feature of the object, and therefore independent of how we perceive it. And then it would no longer be a Wittgensteinian aspect. Is the dawning aspect determinate while it lasts? That would depend, of course, on what one means by ‘determinate’. It is undeniable that in some cases we are readily able to describe the dawning aspect well enough to get other people to (see whether they can) see it. However, it is important to note, first of all, that this is not always the case. As I have noted in Sect. 6.4, sometimes aspects dawn on us for which we have no readily available description: something strikes us all of a sudden about the mood of a party, or the spirit of a time, for example, and we struggle to put it into words, and perhaps even find that someone else is better able to do so than we are. This may be one reason for feeling gratitude toward literature and poetry.44 As Juliet Floyd notes, there are ‘cases of aspect-perception [in which] there is a more open-ended range of significance: What is to be discerned is not an object or fact or concept, but a world, a human being, an expression or gesture, a total field of significance’.45

43

 That, according to Merleau-Ponty, is true of the perception of colors as well:

We must first understand that this red under my eyes is not as is always said, a quale, a pellicle of being without thickness, a message at the same time indecipherable and evident, which one has or has not received, but of which, if one has received it, one knows all there is to know, and of which in the end there is nothing to say. It requires a focusing, however brief; it emerges from a less precise, more general redness, in which my gaze was caught, into which it sank, before—as we put it so aptly—fixing it. And, now that I have fixed it, if my eyes penetrate into it, into its fixed structure, or if they start to wonder round about again, the quale resumes its atmospheric existence (The Visible and the Invisible, 131–2). 44  In Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano talks about how the German occupation of Paris and its horrors have been covered up, and for the most part forgotten. ‘Nobody remembers anything anymore’, he writes. ‘And yet’, he goes on to say, ‘from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say’ (Dora Bruder, Joanna Kilmartin (tr.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 109). 45  ‘On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics’, 324.

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Let us next look more closely at those cases in which we do seem to have a readily available description of the dawning aspect. Thus we may say that we see a similarity between one face and another, for example, or that we see the duck-rabbit as a duck, or as a rabbit. Surely, however, ‘a similarity to some other, given face’ does not capture the particular physiognomy that has dawned on us. And even the two aspects of the duck-rabbit, for all of their schematicity, have physiognomies—‘quite particular expressions’, as Wittgenstein puts it in the Brown Book (BB, 135)46—that go beyond anything capturable by ‘duck’ and ‘rabbit’. (I would go as far as to propose the following: normal human perceivers cannot attend perceptually to a face, however schematic and however unlike a human face, without seeing it as expressive—however indeterminate and passing what it expresses might be.) We could try to further describe the dawning physiognomy. The duck, we might say, looks serious and somewhat self-important, like a retiring general posing for a portrait. The rabbit too looks pleased with itself, but in a more naïve or less pompous way, like a teenager driving an open-roofed convertible for the first time, taking pleasure in the feeling of freedom and speed and the wind in his hair, as well as in the thought of the (imagined) envious gazes of onlookers. Similarly, we could try to describe the similarity—the shared physiognomy—we see between the faces. Or it could happen that the similarity strikes us, we call upon someone else to see it too, and then we find that the other is better able than we are to describe or articulate the similarity. I wish to propose, however, that no description of the aspect we might give would be complete, unique, and final, in the sense that it could not be improved upon or contested. Someone else, or we at a later moment, could see the duck as loyal and eager to please but not too intelligent, for example, and the rabbit as stunned and taken aback by something it faces.47 Each such description would only be an ‘approximation’, as Wittgenstein puts it (BB, 162); and any description of the aspect would be improvable, or contestable. In this and other respects, Wittgensteinian aspects—at least those that strike us in the natural course of everyday experience— are akin to Kantian beauty.48

6.7  Concluding Remark: Aspects and Beauty As we have seen, it is one thing to see something as x and quite another thing to conceive of it as x, or judge it to be x. And seeing something as x—I mean, the perceptual phenomenon Wittgenstein investigates under that title—cannot be con See also a note attached to PI, 165.  This illustrates the way in which the perceived physiognomy an object presents may change in accordance with its perceived, or imagined, background, which is one important source of perceptual indeterminacy. 48  The affinity between Wittgensteinian aspects and Kantian beauty is worked out in some detail in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘The Sound of Bedrock’. 46 47

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tinuous. The dawning of a Wittgensteinian aspect, especially when it happens in the natural course of everyday experience, is the momentary emergence, more or less willed or invited, of relative determinacy—a particular way of momentarily perceptually taking hold of what encounters us in our experience. Wittgenstein’s investigation of aspect-perception, far from showing, or trying to show, that everything we see is seen under some particular concept, as Wollheim and others have proposed, rather suggests that the more or less indeterminate unity of the perceived world is neither brought about nor secured by the application of concepts. And this, interestingly enough, is an insight that Merleau-Ponty, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, credits to the author of The Critique of Judgment (PP, xix/lxxxi). For beauty, as Kant characterizes it phenomenologically, is precisely a perceived meaningful unity that is not, and cannot be, captured by any available concept or set of concepts, is in this sense indeterminate, and yet for all that is experienced as genuinely perceived and as inter-subjectively sharable (see CJ, 240–1, 287, and 292).49 What the natural dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects suggests is that Kantian beauty is perceptually prior to Kantian Erkenntnisse, and is to be found everywhere.

 Where Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Kant, and beyond virtually everyone else in the tradition of Western philosophy, is in bringing out the way in which this pre-conceptual and largely indeterminate unity of the world is a unity for and in relation to, not our disembodied cognitive powers, but, precisely, our body. The perceived world is a field of actual and potential embodied engagement.

49

Chapter 7

Motivational Indeterminacy

Abstract  This chapter questions the widespread assumption of motivational determinacy—an assumption shared by philosophers as otherwise different from each other as Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, as well as by their contemporary followers. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception, and using moments from a couple of Alice Munro’s short stories for illustration, the chapter argues that since it is the phenomenal world that solicits, or elicits, or otherwise motivates, much of what we do, say, think, and feel—including much that may be found morally significant; and since we play an active role in how we perceive things, and therefore in the ‘constitution’ of the phenomenal world, so that not just judgment, but perception itself is already active or, as Kant would say, ‘spontaneous’; it follows that our motivation is more or less indeterminate as well—more so, the more what we do, say, think, or feel is ‘personal’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, or creative.

Keywords  Aspect perception · The assumption of motivational determinacy · Aristotle · Hume · Kant · Donald Davidson · Talbot Brewer · Alice Munro · Merleau-Ponty · Perceptual indeterminacy · Motivational indeterminacy · Problems and riddles

When you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood… It is only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you’re telling it to yourself or to someone else (Michael Polley, in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell).1 I think when we talk about it as a family there seems to be this—this kind of a lot of questions about who [our mother] was. You know, a lot of disagreement about what kind of person she was; and there’s this misconception that she was some thing, and I guess that to me is another misconception—that there is a state of affairs or a thing that actually happened, and we have to reconstruct exactly what happened in the past. And I don’t think there

 Reid Albecker has drawn my attention to the fact that Michael Polley is actually quoting here from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. 1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_7

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ever was a “what actually happened”. I think there were a lot of perspectives from the very beginning. You don’t ever get to an answer. You don’t ever get to “okay, now we’ve figured it out, we know exactly what happened, we know exactly what kind of person she was”. I think those things are just illusory (Joanna Polley, Stories We Tell).

7.1  Introduction A fundamental and pervasive assumption in much contemporary moral philosophy and the philosophy of action is the following: whenever we do something ‘intentionally’, or ‘voluntarily’, or, more broadly, do something for which we may aptly be held responsible and which may be morally or otherwise rationally assessed, there is an answer to the question of what has moved us to do it that is full, unique, and true absolutely—true from the perspective of God, so to speak. However inscrutable and complex it might be, we are supposed to have, in every case, a determinate and in principle fully determinable, even if possibly also complex, motive—be it (something that could take the form of) an Aristotelian practical syllogism, a Humean desire or constellation of desires and beliefs, or a Kantian maxim. I will call this deep-seated and pervasive assumption ‘the assumption of motivational determinacy’; and I will question that assumption. In setting out to question a fundamental and pervasive philosophical assumption, one can hardly hope to argue from premises that all those committed to the assumption would accept. This is all the more true in cases such as the present, in which the assumption in question has been spelled out in a wide variety of ways and from philosophical perspectives that are otherwise very different from each other. But my aim is to present an argument that presupposes little that is, or should be, contentious. Drawing on ideas of Merleau-Ponty’s and of Wittgenstein’s, I will mostly appeal to what I believe to be familiar features of our experience as perceivers and agents, which I will illustrate by means of moments taken from a couple of short stories by Alice Munro. So my argument will be phenomenological in character, though a priori considerations will also come into play. The upshot of my argument will be that what phenomenologists have called ‘the phenomenal world’—the world as it presents itself to us perceptually and to which we find ourselves always already responding prior to theoretical reflection or explicit judgment—is, in some yet to be clarified sense, indeterminate; and its solicitations—the responses it calls for, or calls forth, including how it invites us to perceive it—are therefore, ultimately, indeterminate as well.2 And if so, then, at least for a 2  The indeterminacy I will appeal to and try to bring out is to be distinguished, importantly, from the indeterminacy of ‘translation’ or ‘interpretation’, or of ‘reference’, made famous by Quine and Davidson. The latter sort of indeterminacy is arrived at as the conclusion of an argument that begins with certain—at the very least contestable—theoretical presuppositions about linguistic meaning and understanding. The former—though hard to see clearly, especially when we theorize—is meant to be pre-theoretically familiar to us as human perceivers and agents. Another significant difference is that the latter sort of indeterminacy is, essentially, cognitive, whereas the

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wide range of morally or otherwise significant human doings, there may not be— not even in principle, or from some imaginable absolute or ideal point of view—one final, unique, and objectively true answer to the question what has moved us to do or say (or think or feel) this or that. There may only be answers that could be found, or seen as, good enough—acceptable—within some particular context and for present intents and purposes. And it would be a mistake to suppose that those answers— those ‘rationalizing explanations’ that we could competently and legitimately proffer within suitable contexts—straightforwardly represent some unique worldly-­ cum-­mental constellation that is what actually moved us to act. Though hopefully phenomenologically familiar, my conclusion will be somewhat radical, and certainly philosophically unorthodox. But my argument may be seen as nothing more than a thinking through of two ideas that have been central to contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics, and its critique of the modern, rationalist conceptions of ethics and of agency. The first idea is that we are moved, motivated, by the world as it perceptually presents itself to us—that at least very many of our doings, including those that may aptly be said to be ‘intentional’ (‘voluntary’, not ‘un-free’…), do not stem from any process of reflection or deliberation, but rather are invited or solicited or drawn out from us by the world as perceived, and constitute immediate responses to it. The second idea is that we play an active role in how the world perceptually presents itself to us (for otherwise, it would make no sense to speak, as contemporary virtue ethicists have done, of striving to morally improve the way we look at, and see, things). Combine these two ideas and think them through, I will in effect argue, and you will have good reason to be suspicious of the assumption of motivational determinacy.

7.2  The Assumption of Motivational Determinacy The assumption of motivational determinacy is, as I said, pervasive—so much so, that I should hardly need to establish its pervasiveness before I turn to question it. But it may still be useful to illustrate the philosophical commitment to the assumption, if only in order to throw into sharper relief what I intend to question. This I could have done by discussing the work of any number of Anglo-American moral philosophers or philosophers of action. I chose Talbot Brewer and Donald Davidson as my stalking horses, because they seem to me to represent well the currently dominant perspectives3: Brewer begins from a broadly Kantian perspective and, finding it unsatisfying, moves in the direction of an Aristotelian conception of agency; Davidson articulates a Humean conception of agency, while at the same time suggesting that it could be reconciled with the Aristotelian conception. former sort of indeterminacy is, essentially, perceptual and (in a sense later explicated) pre-cognitive. 3  As I point out in various places below, one contemporary philosopher that could have replaced Davidson in almost every respect pertinent to the argument of this paper is Nomy Arpaly.

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Moreover, both Brewer and Davidson show themselves sensitive to considerations that might have led them to be suspicious of the assumption of motivational determinacy. In holding on to the assumption despite being alive to those considerations, and without feeling the need to argue for it, they reveal its status in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to be that of a dogma. In ‘Maxims and Virtues’, Brewer points out a difficulty with Kantian maxims and the role they are supposed to play within the Kantian conception of human agency and its moral evaluation.4 A ‘maxim’, says Kant, is ‘the subjective principle of acting’;5 and Brewer, following Rawls,6 plausibly interprets that to mean that an agent’s maxim is supposed to connect a generic description of her circumstances (including her interests and goals) with a generic description of an action type that she takes those circumstances to warrant (MV, 543). Kantian maxims are supposed to capture, at once, our reasons for doing this or that and our motive for doing it: what has made doing this or that seem to us right, or good, is supposed to also be what has moved us to do it. This is a way of spelling out the basic Kantian idea that as rational beings we (necessarily) act, not merely in accordance with laws, but in accordance with ‘the representation of a law’ (GR, 412; see also MV, 543). Maxims thus understood, Brewer tells us, are supposed to structure moral deliberation and serve as the basic objects of moral assessment. Moreover, their presence—that is, our having them—is also supposed to be what turns stretches of human behavior into actions, as contrasted with ‘bits of mere behavior such as sneezes, tremblings, twitches, and involuntary blinks’ (MV, 545). The basic problem with Kantian maxims, Brewer argues, is that much of what we do in the course of everyday life—Brewer focuses on what he calls ‘unreflective actions (and omissions)’ (MV, 546),7 but I will later propose that the relevant range is far broader than this suggests—we find ourselves doing (MV, 544); and in doing it, we do not seem to be guided by, or follow, or express, any clear maxim. Or at least, if there is a maxim—in some yet to be clarified sense of ‘there is’—we would in most cases be unable to say what it is ‘with even a modicum of confidence’, Brewer says (MV, 545). But if so, it is unclear in what sense we could be said to have, or act on, Kantian maxims in much of what we do and say, including much that cannot plausibly be thought of as mere involuntary movement, and seems perfectly apt for moral assessment. This seems to leave us with two basic options: we could either make a radical break with the Kantian conception of human agency, and hence with the Kantian 4  Talbot Brewer, ‘Maxims and Virtues’ (hereafter ‘MV’), Philosophical Review 111 (2002): 539–72. 5  Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter ‘GR’), Revised Edition, ed. and tr. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Prussian Academy page number 422, fn. 9. 6  John Rawls, ‘Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy’, in John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7  See also Brewer’s more recent The Retrieval of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 282.

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understanding of moral thinking and evaluation, or else hold on to at least the central tenets of that conception, and reconceive Kantian maxims in a way that would allow us to do so. In ‘Maxims and Virtues’ Brewer opts for the latter. He begins with the idea that whenever we act unreflectively but at the same time ‘voluntarily’ (MV, 559), we act on desires. He goes on to propose, following Scanlon,8 that desires are best understood, not as mere impulses or urges to do this or that, but as tendencies to focus on features of the world that speak in favor of doing this or that, which Brewer later glosses as ‘subjective outlooks on putative reasons for action’ (MV, 558). Thus understood, Brewer says, desires may be thought of as mirroring the conceptual structure of Kantian maxims (MV, 554), or as ‘candidate maxims’ (MV, 555), since ‘to be in the grip of a desire is to be tempted to accept the validity of inferences from the generic class of considerations that the desire presents as reasons, to the generic action type that the desire inclines one to perform’ (MV, 554). In acting on a desire, Brewer proposes, we endorse, if only tacitly, the maxim ‘embedded’ in it (MV, 555). This is supposed to be the sense in which, in acting ‘voluntarily’, we may be said to act on, and thereby make ourselves responsible for, particular maxims. On this understanding of ‘maxim’ and what it means to act on a maxim, it may still be hard to say with even a modicum of confidence what maxim a person is acting on, or tacitly endorsing, in doing or saying what she does or says. In particular, Brewer says, the agent herself has no overriding authority when it comes to identifying her maxims: while she may wish to attribute to herself one maxim, the broader patterns of her behavior may suggest that she has actually acted on another (MV, 558). But at least we now are supposed to have a clearer sense of what we mean when we talk about a person’s maxim, or the maxim on which a person acts. And on the assumption that all voluntary human behavior—at least as long as it is ‘unreflective’—proceeds from, or expresses, desires,9 and the further assumption that desires have the structure Brewer describes, we now seem entitled to suppose that all such behavior proceeds from, or expresses, maxims, however difficult those may be to discern or identify; and we have a better sense of what we’re supposed to be looking for in looking for our own or another person’s maxims. What we morally ought to do, Brewer concludes, is strive to become as clear as possible about our actual desire-embedded maxims, and to make them such that we could affirm them ‘on full and ideally rational reflection’ (MV, 568–9). In proposing to understand Kantian maxims in terms of ‘evaluative outlooks’— that is, not primarily in terms of how we think about the world and our activity in it  Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 9  In ‘Maxims and Virtues’, Brewer regards that assumption as a ‘truism’ (MV, 550). In The Retrieval of Ethics he acknowledges that some free actions do not proceed from desires, since clearly we sometime act against our desires (The Retrieval of Ethics, 35). But perhaps the idea is that when we act against our desires, our action is not ‘unreflective’, and therefore less problematically seen as attached to a maxim. 8

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but in terms of how we perceive and (more or less habitually) respond to the world prior to any explicit thought or judgment—Brewer takes himself to be pointing us in the direction of virtue ethics.10 At the same time, Brewer thinks this move in the Aristotelian direction allows us to hold on to the main tenets of Kant’s theory of morality in the face of the phenomenology of everyday life. One fundamental Kantian assumption that Brewer firmly holds on to is that of motivational determinacy. When Kant says, in the Groundwork, that we can never know our true motive with certainty, especially when it seems to us that we are motivated by respect for the moral law, for there is always the possibility that ‘some secret impulse of self-love’ might have been ‘the actual determining cause of the will’ (GR, 407), he never doubts that we do have an actual, determinate motive, even if we could never be certain what it is, or was. And Brewer, for all of his questioning of the Kantian conception of agency, never questions that assumption. He takes it that for each and every thing we do ‘voluntarily’, there is a determinate desire—which in principle could be put in the form of a particular determinate Kantian maxim, however inscrutable—on which we act. In his more recent book, The Retrieval of Ethics, Brewer moves further away from the Kantian, and equally from the Humean, conceptions of agency. While he still finds it useful to speak of us, generally, as acting on, or moved by, desires, and to think of desires in terms of ‘evaluative outlooks’ or ‘appearances of goodness or value’, he no longer believes that those desires, or outlooks, may fully or even primarily be captured in terms of (propositionally articulable) reasons for action, and therefore no longer believes that their content may be captured in the form of Kantian maxims.11 Still, one of the central questions the book aims to answer is, in Brewer’s own words, ‘Why do human beings do what they do?’;12 and even though Brewer’s answer to that question is different from that commonly given by Kantians and Humeans of various stripes, he still takes it that the question has, in each case, a correct answer, in the form of a determinate evaluative outlook that is ‘encoded’ in the particular, determinate desire that, in each case, we act on.13 It is worth noting that, at the end of the day, it is not clear that the talk of ‘desires’ is doing substantive work in Brewer’s account. We are supposed to be moved by desires; but if desires may indeed be equated with what Brewer calls ‘outlooks’, why not drop altogether the talk of desires, which Brewer himself says tends to be jargonistic,14 and simply say that we are moved by our outlooks? If, as Brewer comes to say, ‘desires are best understood as consisting not just partly but wholly in

 For an early articulation of the idea that virtue should be understood as a ‘[perceptual] sensitivity that fully accounts for… [the agent’s] actions’, see John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’, in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 52. 11  The Retrieval of Ethics, 283, fn. 93. 12  The Retrieval of Ethics, 13. 13  The Retrieval of Ethics, 29. 14  The Retrieval of Ethics, 19. 10

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appearances of reasons or values’,15 why not drop the talk of desires and just say that we are moved by appearances of reasons or values?16 Dropping the quasi-technical talk of desires leaves us with the idea that we act on, or are moved by, evaluative outlooks—understood, fairly broadly and vaguely, in terms of ‘appearances of reasons or value’. But how exactly are outlooks to be identified, or counted? In ‘Maxims and Virtues’, Brewer seems to think that we each have many evaluative outlooks—one for each maxim we act on. He speaks of us as acting ‘on each of the series of outlooks that determine the content of our maxims’ (MV, 559). In The Retrieval of Ethics, by contrast, Brewer defines ‘evaluative outlook’ as ‘a person’s characteristic sense of the evaluative features of actual or possible human doings’.17 In this, his use of ‘outlook’ seems to have come closer to that of John McDowell, who, as far as I know, is the originator of the talk of ‘moral outlooks’ in contemporary moral philosophy.18 On this use of the term, we each are supposed to have one—or one characteristic—evaluative outlook.19 That outlook may, and normally does, evolve over time; and it is important, for both McDowell and Brewer, that outlooks, thus understood, are sharable: two or more people can (come to) have the same, or more or less the same outlook. It would seem, however, that Brewer still sometimes needs ‘outlook’ to be understood as it was to be understood in ‘Maxim and Virtues’, and that the notion of ‘outlook’ therefore does double duty in The Retrieval of Ethics: it needs to capture a person’s characteristic way of seeing, or appreciating things, so that it would make sense to think of it as evolving over time, and to think of two or more people as sharing, or coming to share, an outlook; but it also needs to capture the way in which the world evaluatively presents itself to a person at a particular moment, so that it would make sense to connect outlooks and desires in the way Brewer proposes, and to invoke a person’s outlook in attempting to give a rationalizing explanation of the particular thing that person did at that moment. These two ways of understanding ‘outlook’ are not necessarily in competition with each other. They might be reconciled thus: what moves us to do or say this or that— most clearly when we do or say it unreflectively, or without pre-meditation—is the world as it ‘evaluatively’ presents itself to us at some particular moment; but how it presents itself to us has at least much to do with how we tend to see, or look at, or appreciate things. On such a view, we are at once moved and implicated by the world as it presents itself to us in perception. And this, as I have already noted in the  The Retrieval of Ethics, 34.  Brewer acknowledges that an appeal to desire to explain something someone has done would not always be apt, for clearly we sometimes do things we have no desire to do; and then he says that ‘what is essential to any rational explanation of an action is that it reveal how the action was lit up for the agent as good or worthwhile, and desires are not the only sorts of appearances of goodness, even if they are the most common ones’ (The Retrieval of Ethics, 35). 17  The Retrieval of Ethics, 244. 18  See ‘Virtue and Reason’, 50. 19  Brewer does allow that we may, on occasion, be moved by an outlook that conflicts with the outlook that ‘we would affirm on reflection’ (The Retrieval of Ethics, 29). 15 16

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Introduction to this paper, is a combination of ideas that brings us to a point from which we may begin to see what’s wrong with the assumption of motivational determinacy. Similarly to Brewer, Davidson seeks to preserve an intimate link—for Davidson, a kind of identity, really—between the justification or rationalizing explanation one may competently and truthfully give for what one has ‘intentionally’ done and what has moved one to do it. For Davidson, the link is between one’s reason for doing something and what caused her doing it.20 A practical reason, in turn, is taken by Davidson to consist of a combination of a desire or some other sort of ‘pro-attitude’ and a belief—both propositionally expressible. The pro-attitude is supposed to correspond to the major premise, and the belief is supposed to correspond to the minor premise, of an Aristotelian practical syllogism (EAE, 31). Now, an agent may have any number of pro-attitudes and beliefs that, in combination, could have constituted her reason for doing something. What makes some particular combination of pro-­ attitude and belief the (‘primary’) reason, or the agent’s actual reason for doing something, is according to Davidson its being the actual cause of her doing it (EAE, 4), provided that it causes it ‘in the right way’ (EAE, 87).21 ‘A reason’, Davidson summarizes his basic thought, ‘is a rational cause’ (EAE, 233); ‘[a person’s] reasons, or the beliefs and desires that correspond to them’, he says elsewhere, ‘explain why he acted as he did’ (EAE, 73). Thus, like Brewer, Davidson takes there to be a very tight link between what actually moves us to do what we do and the sorts of things we might say by way of justifying, rationalizing, or otherwise supporting our (intentional, voluntary) doings. At the same time, and again like Brewer, Davidson says that ‘we cannot suppose that whenever an agent acts intentionally he goes through a process of deliberation or reasoning, marshals evidence and principle, and draws conclusions’ (EAE, 85). The agent, Davidson agrees with Brewer, is not always authoritative about her true motives. Sometimes, he says, we act intentionally and yet ‘cannot explain at all why we acted when we did’ (EAE, 13)22; and he also says, distantly echoing Kant, that  See Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (hereafter ‘EAE’), Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4, 72–3, and 232. Essentially the same sort of link is central to the more recent account offered by Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder in In Praise of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), cf. 62. 21  Davidson ultimately despaired of being able to spell out what exactly ‘in the right way’ means here (see EAE, 79). 22  In Arpaly’s work, our lack of motivational self-transparency is emphasized even more, and taken to be ‘the rule, not the exception, in life’ (Unprincipled Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30). Just like Davidson (and Brewer, and many others), however, Arpaly never doubts that there is a perspective—to which she sometimes refers as ‘God’s eye view’—from which what motivates or moves us may, in every case, be seen as clear and determinate (cf. ‘On Acting Rationally Against One’s Best Judgment’, Ethics, 110 (2000), 488 and 489–90; and ‘Unprincipled Virtue: Synopsis (Of Sorts)’, Philosophical Studies 134 (2007), 430–1). She takes it for granted, in other words, that there are, in every case, ‘the actual reasons’ from which someone has acted (or refrained from acting), and that those could in principle be determined objectively (Merit, Meaning, and Human Bondage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17; see also Arpaly and Schroeder’s In Praise of Desire, 188). 20

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agents are particularly prone to error about their actual motive when ‘[they] have two reasons for an action, one of which pleases [them] and one which does not’ (EAE, 18). And yet, for all that, and again like Brewer (and Hume, and Kant, and many others), Davidson never doubts that there is, even in these types of cases, a determinate motive—a determinate cause that takes the form of a reason, and of whose existence ‘we are sure’, he says, in just the way we are sure there was a determinate cause for the collapse of a bridge, even when we do not know what that cause was (EAE, 13). ‘If someone acts with an intention [which for Davidson is the same as acting intentionally, AB], he must have attitudes and beliefs from which, had he been aware of them and had the time, he could have reasoned that his action was desirable (or had some other positive attribute)’, he writes (EAE, 85, emphasis altered). There are significant differences between Davidson’s account of agency and Brewer’s. Though for both of them what moves us to do something is also what could make our doing it justified or rational, they have quite different ways of conceiving of what that might be. As I already noted, in The Retrieval of Ethics Brewer expresses skepticism about the possibility of always capturing our motives in terms of reasons for action. And while that skepticism is mostly directed against the Kantian conception of agency, Brewer also argues—this time more directly against accounts such as Davidson’s—against any attempt to reduce our motivation to propositionally expressible attitudes.23 For all of their differences, Brewer and Davidson both assume that whenever we do something—as long as we do it ‘intentionally’ or ‘voluntarily’—there is always one, and only one, determinate motive, however complex, for our doing it, which, at least in principle, is fully specifiable. They both assume, in other words, that there is always, in principle, one, and only one, objectively correct and full answer to the question why we did it. Now in Brewer, the commitment to motivational determinacy seems to be a residue of Kantian and Aristotelian rationalism, which requires that we be in control of, which in turn is taken to require that we know clearly enough, what we are doing and why we are doing it—on pain of not being truly responsible, or legitimately criticizable, for having done it. (I note, without elaborating, that this rationalist idea of what responsibility requires seems to me deeply misguided. It is belied by both our practices and our experience. As Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’ reminds us, we are, normally and pervasively, held responsible for what we haven’t willed, or intended: normally, we are called upon to excuse precisely that which we have not—in either the Kantian or the Aristotelian sense—authored.)24 What complicates matters in Davidson’s case is his holistic understanding of meaning and of the mental, which leads him to the thesis of the indeterminacy of the mental: there are, according to him, indefinitely many different ways of assigning

23 24

 The Retrieval of Ethics, 19ff.  ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

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propositional attitudes to a person that do equally well when it comes to fitting those attitudes with her overt behaviors while at the same time maximizing the truth (by the light of some ‘interpreter’) and internal coherence of her beliefs (cf. EAE, 222). The thesis of indeterminacy is meant to capture something not merely about our knowledge of the mental, but about the mental itself; and it connects with what Davidson calls the ‘anomalousness’ of the mental: its being uncapturable in the sorts of ‘strict’ causal laws in which the physical world is supposed to be capturable. The most we can hope for when it comes to the mental, Davidson maintains, is ‘statistical correlations’, or ‘statistical generalizations’ (EAE, 230 and 233). Now, as we shall see, all of this may be seen to cohere—albeit in an overly intellectualist (propositional) form—with fundamental phenomenological insights that imply motivational indeterminacy. Why is it, then, that Davidson is nonetheless committed to motivational determinacy? I suspect the answer has to do with his metaphysical monism—i.e., physicalism. Davidson takes the physical world to be determinate. This is why he supposes, for example, that even when we do not know what caused a bridge to collapse, we can nonetheless be rightfully confident that there is a determinate—and therefore in principle determinable—cause for its collapse. For reasons that may arguably already be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I think Davidson is wrong in taking the physical world to be determinate— causally or otherwise. A perfectly determinate universe is not a scientific fact, or discovery—modern physics most certainly has not revealed to us a determinate universe—but rather is a scientific regulative idea, or ideal (which has been given up in some areas of modern physics in favor of statistical, probabilistic models). But it may well be that since Davidson takes it that every stretch of human behavior must, qua physical movement in physical space, have a determinate cause, and since he takes it that at least when it comes to stretches of behavior that constitute intentional actions the cause is (identifiable with) a reason, he is moved to suppose that there is, in every such case, a determinate reason (=pro-attitude + belief) that moves us, however sub-consciously, to produce a particular stretch of behavior. Whether or not this explanation of Davidson’s commitment to motivational determinacy is correct, I do think there is a tendency to take our motives to be part of the (in principle) empirically discoverable world, and to take that world to be determinate.25 And this—over and above the philosophical, rationalistic tendency to take us to be more comprehensible, more in control of our behavior, and more transparent to ourselves than we actually know ourselves to be—may explain why so many have committed themselves to the assumption of motivational determinacy, even though familiar features of our experience should have made us suspicious of that assumption.

 This tendency is clear in Arpaly and Schroeder’s In Praise of Desire. Arpaly and Schroeder identify desires with states of ‘the brain’s reward system’, and take those states to be determinate and, in principle, determinable (cf. 128 and 146).

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7.3  Motivational Indeterminacy Take Brewer’s idea that we are moved, motivated, by the world as it perceptually presents itself to us, which cannot faithfully be captured in any set of propositions, or propositionally expressible attitudes. Add to it the further idea that we play an active role in how the world presents itself to us; for otherwise, it would make no sense to speak, as Brewer and other Aristotelians have done, of the possibility of morally improving how we see things—of ‘straining to see things through loving eyes’, for example.26 To these two ideas, add Davidson’s ideas about the holism and indeterminacy of the mental, while resisting his (and others’) intellectualization of the mental—his tendency to think of it as reducible to a set of propositionally expressible attitudes. That combination of ideas would by no means bring us all the way to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the phenomenal world as essentially indeterminate; but it does point us in its direction. On Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, the ‘phenomenal world’—that is, the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought (or talked) about—is to be distinguished from the world as thought of and understood in objective terms; and the human subject may be identified with the phenomenal human body—the lived, or living body (Leib), as Husserl called it27—which is again to be distinguished from the human body understood as an object of empirical study and objective cognition. The phenomenal body, be it our own or another person’s, is a power and medium of actual and potential engagement with the phenomenal world: it is geared toward that world, takes hold of it in various ways, and responds to its solicitations. The phenomenal body and the phenomenal world are internally related to each other, in the sense that neither can be understood apart from its relation to the other: the phenomenal world is perceived as a field of actual and potential engagement by the phenomenal body; the phenomenal body is perceived as a power of actual and potential engagement with the phenomenal world. ‘This subject-object dialogue’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘this drawing together, by the subject, of the meaning diffused through the object, and, by the object, of the subject’s intentions… arranges around the subject a world which speaks to him of himself…’ (PP, 132/134; see also 441/465). In Alice Munro’s ‘Simon’s Luck’, Rose leaves her home by car early Monday morning, after Simon—a man she had recently met and with whom she had fallen in love and fantasized a future—fails to show up for a Friday evening dinner she made for him. The farther she gets from her home, the force of her love for Simon— which Munro describes as a magnetic force that tugs at the rear end of her car but never strongly enough to make her turn back—weakens. After several days of driving almost nonstop, Rose enters a café, sits at one of the tables, orders coffee and fried eggs, and looks at the things behind the counter—the coffee pots, the probably  The Retrieval of Ethics, 175.  Cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr (tr.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 161 and 217–8.

26 27

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stale pieces of pie, and the thick glass dishes they put ice-cream or Jell-O in. And it’s those dishes, Munro writes, that ‘tell Rose of her changed state’: ‘She could not have said she found them shapely, or eloquent, without misstating the case. All she could have said was that she saw them in a way that wouldn’t be possible to a person in any stage of love’.28 Rose realizes at that moment that she no longer sees the world as ‘a stage where she might meet [Simon]’.29 In this and other ways, the perceived world speaks to us of ourselves; but we tend to overlook or repress its doing so, Merleau-Ponty notes, either by seeing it ‘impersonally’ and so as telling us nothing about us in particular (see PP, 82ff./84ff.), or else by thinking of it ‘objectively’ and so as telling nothing and implicating no one (cf. PP, 5/5 and 67ff./69ff.). We now come to the idea of indeterminacy, which is central to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of human perception and agency. ‘We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon’, he says early on in the Phenomenology of Perception (PP, 6/7); and by that he means that we must recognize indeterminacy as essential to the very structure of human existence and experience, rather than being wholly due to in-principle-surmountable limitations of our epistemic or cognitive capacities. The idea of positive indeterminacy is hard to understand and make real for oneself; and, as we have seen, it goes against the grain of how analytic philosophers have tended to think of human perception, motivation, and behavior. What follows is my own way of trying to explicate and motivate that idea. I begin with Brewer’s idea—which is at the same time a fundamental existentialist-­ phenomenological idea—that we find ourselves doing and saying much of what we do and say. Phenomenologically, this seems to me undeniable. But it also seems, upon reflection, that it could not have been otherwise: we could not possibly know ahead of time, or plan, each and every thing we do or say in the course of everyday life, including much that may be found morally significant. But if so, then it can’t be true that each of our doings that are not involuntary or otherwise unfree must be preceded, as Brewer says, by ‘some inchoate sense of why it is worth doing at just the time it is done’.30 And similarly it cannot be true that what we find ourselves doing stems, as long as it may be said to be ‘intentional’, from a pro-attitude, in the form of the major premise of an Aristotelian practical syllogism, and a belief that that—what we are just about to do—would satisfy that pro-attitude, as Davidson proposes (EAE, 31–2). For if indeed we find ourselves doing and saying much of what we do or say, then until we do or say it, there is, for us, no clear it that we may find good or worthwhile, or intend. Until we do or say it, it is phenomenologically indeterminate. Not only do we not think or deliberate about, or plan in advance, most of what we do or say, but it is also quite common for us to do or say something that stands in tension with our actual thoughts. Here I’m thinking not primarily of ‘akrasia’, which traditionally refers to a state in which one is fully and explicitly aware both

 Alice Munro, Selected Stories (New York: Random House, 1996), 205.  Selected Stories, 205. 30  The Retrieval of Ethics, 562, my emphasis. 28 29

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of her thoughts about what she should do and of the fact that what she actually does goes against those thoughts. That this is how akrasia has traditionally been thought of is yet another manifestation of the tendency to imagine that we are transparent to ourselves in a way that we neither normally are, nor—if the argument of this paper is on the right track—could ever really be. Not only are we often barely mindful of what we do or say, at the time that we do or say it, but also, as I will later suggest, what we do or say is indeterminate, in the sense that it can always be perceived—not merely thought of—in different ways, or under different aspects. This often enables us not to see the ways in which what we do or say may be found to be in tension with what we think or tell ourselves, especially since what we think or tell ourselves may itself be understood, or taken, in more than one way. In Alice Munro’s stories, there are many examples of people doing things— sometimes fatefully—that stand in more or less clear tension with what they are telling themselves, while apparently failing altogether to register that Kierkegaardian ‘contradiction’. When Rose leaves her home after Simon fails to show up for the dinner she made for him, for example, she tells herself that she’ll only be gone a couple of days. ‘Why did she bring her boots and winter coat’, Munro adds parenthetically, ‘if this was the case?’.31 That Rose is bringing her boots and winter coat does not fit with what she is telling herself she is doing; it suggests that she means to be gone for much longer than a couple days, or that that is at least a live possibility for her at that moment. But to the extent that Rose, in her emotional turmoil, is at all aware of the fact that she is packing her boots and winter coat, she could be seeing it under the aspect of, say, very-quickly-throwing-some-potentially-usefulstuff-into-the-suitcase, thereby avoiding the realization that what she does could naturally and plausibly be found to be in tension with what she is telling herself she is doing. Rose is doing something that will turn out to have been fateful—she will never return to that place—without any clear sense of what she is doing, and why. Nor, and this really is the main idea I argue for in this paper, does it seem plausible to suppose, given Munro’s description of the case, that there is some ideal perspective from which Rose may be found to have either a determinate motive or a determinate intention. It is interesting that Davidson, when he tries to dissolve the seeming paradox of ‘weakness of the will’ as it has traditionally been thought of, anticipates the objection that weakness of the will—as philosophers have tended to understand that term—is at best rare, and that most of the cases that might have been thought to exemplify it, in actuality involve ‘self-deception, insincerity, mauvaise foi, hypocrisy, unconscious desires, motives and intentions, and so on’ (EAE, 28). Davidson acknowledges the existence, as well as the interest, of all of those ‘half-states and contradictory states’ (EAE, 28), as he calls them, but then sets them all aside and goes back to focusing on the paradox in its traditional philosophical form, on the ground that, surely, ‘not every case of incontinence involve[s] one of the shadow-­ zones where we want both to apply, and to withhold, some mental predicate’ (EAE,

31

 Selected Stories, 203.

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29, my emphasis). Perhaps not. The upshot of this paper, however, is that the sorts of cases Davidson sets aside ought to have been at the center of our philosophical attention, for, rather than being, all of them, forms of epistemic or some other sort of deprivation, as Davidson’s list of ‘half- and contradictory states’ would suggest, they reveal in different ways something that is of the very essence of human perception and agency. Contrary to what Davidson’s list encourages us to suppose, not all of the cases in which we do not know what we are doing and why are cases of failure on our part to rise to some ideal of self-transparency. If the argument of this paper is on the right track, that ideal may be a piece of philosophical fantasy that represents nothing we could attain, not even in principle.32 –But I am not yet done showing this. The next thing to note is that even when we do think before we do or say something, those thoughts are, at least for the most part, ones we find ourselves having— our thinking them is something we find ourselves doing. This again seems to me phenomenologically undeniable—we exercise very limited control over what we think, at any given moment and in general. And it also seems clear that it could not have been otherwise, on pain of infinite regress of thinking and deciding what to think and decide.33 Like most of our bodily movements, our practically significant thoughts are solicited or drawn forth from us competent speakers by the situation in which we find ourselves, as experienced against the background of our own and our culture’s history. Prior to being articulated, either out loud or in our head, a thought— be it practically significant or not—is indeterminate in just the way that our actions, and our behavior more broadly, are, for the most part, indeterminate before we find ourselves producing them (see PP, 183/188–9). But if so, our thinking it cannot be preceded by an assessment or appreciation of its value, or truth. Moreover, our ability to create reflective distance between ourselves and some given situation—the sort of reflective distance that according to Merleau-Ponty is unique to human beings, and which allows us to think about what to do or say next (when we do)—is itself dependent upon our ability to relegate much of our

 This is also where the understanding proposed in this paper crucially differs from that offered by Arpaly in Unprincipled Virtue and Merit, Meaning, and Human Bondage. 33  Arpaly and Schroeder present a similar ‘regress of deliberations’ argument in the first chapter of In Praise of Desire. However, being committed to the traditional dichotomy between ‘reason’, on the one hand, and ‘sentiment’ or ‘desire’, on the other, and blind to the phenomenological perspective which is developed in this paper and which points us beyond that dichotomy, they take their argument to show that it must be desires—understood as states of our brain’s reward system—that ultimately ‘cause’ both our bodily acts and our thinking. They then attempt to reconcile this causal understanding of ‘motivation’ with the rational or moral assessability of our thoughts and intentional bodily acts, by attributing to brain states—problematically in my view—propositional and conceptual content (cf. In Praise of Desire, 128–30). Understood from the phenomenological perspective, by contrast, our behavior is normally motivated, precisely in the sense that it is not aptly understood as mechanically caused, and that it manifests an understanding of the phenomenal world to which we respond; but the understanding is not cognitive in the Kantian, ‘intellectualist’ sense of being expressible in true or false ‘judgments’ or ‘propositions’. 32

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e­ ngagement with the world to habitual, reflexive responses (see PP, 86–7/88–9).34 Those responses are precisely not deliberated about or chosen for a reason, but at the same time they do manifest an (habituated) understanding of the situation; and they might be something for which we could be held responsible. This phenomenological insight is also one of the most important lessons of John Austin’s ‘A Plea for Excuses’. There is a certain level, he says, ‘below supervision in detail, [at which] anything that we do is, if you like, inadvertent, though we only call it so, and indeed only call it something we have done, if there is something untoward about it’.35 Our discussion thus far might seem to have left open the possibility that while what we do, say, and think is, for the most part, indeterminate for us until actually drawn out or elicited from us by the (personally, morally, intellectually… significant) situation in which we find ourselves, as evaluatively perceived against the background of the rest of our (personal, moral, intellectual…) world, those perceived situation and world could themselves be determinate. And insofar as we are motivated by them, our motivation may itself be determinate, and in principle completely and finally discoverable, even though what it is a motivation for may remain phenomenologically indeterminate until actually produced. And it might further be supposed that there is a perspective—call it, following Arpaly, ‘God’s eye view’36— from which both the phenomenal world and the bodily or mental performance it is just about to elicit from us are fully determinate (and have always been). To suppose that the world that draws out or solicits our bodily and mental performances is itself determinate is to forget that we play an ineliminable role in bringing about and maintaining—‘constituting’, as phenomenologists have called it, following Husserl—the unity and sense of that very world. That we play an active role in constituting the world we objectively know, or may know, is one of the most fundamental insights of Kant’s critique of empiricism. On Kant’s account, we constitute the objective world by subsuming ‘intuitions’ under ‘concepts’ in ‘judgments’. Where Gestalt psychology and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty have gone beyond Kant is in showing that we play an active role in unifying and giving sense to the phenomenal, or if you will intuited and pre-objective, world.37 Moreover, they have tried to get us to see that this phenomenal world—a world of meaningful  When my children were younger, and I read them stories, I would sometimes drift in my thinking away from the text I was reading; and then I would notice that, and shift my attention back to the text, only to discover that I am already quite ahead of where I was the last time I was paying attention to what I was reading; and the only indication I would have that I had been reading aloud from the text the whole time I was drifting in thought, even though I had no idea what I had been reading, was the fact that my child didn’t complain. 35  Philosophical Papers, 193. 36  ‘On Acting Rationally Against One’s Best Judgment’, 488–450; and ‘Unprincipled Virtue: Synopsis (Of Sorts)’, 430–1. 37  Lucy Allais (2009) has argued that this insight may already be found in Kant’s work (‘Kant, NonConceptual Content and the Representation of Space’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47: 383–413). And indeed, Kant’s account of beauty is premised on the possibility of perceptual—that is, in Kant’s terms, intuitional but not (yet) conceptual—unity that is nonetheless inter-subjectively shareable. I’ll come back to this in ‘Bringing the Phenomenal World into View’. 34

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c­ onstellations in which we, the perceivers, are implicated (see PP, 132/134 and 441/465)—is a world to which we find ourselves always already responding, prior to any theoretical reflection or express judgment (see PP, 111/113–4). In fact, our cognitive reflections and objective judgments, and so if you will our applications of concepts, may themselves be understood as responses—conditioned, to be sure, by the language and culture we have inherited—to that world. The objective world has no center, either temporally or spatially. The world as pre-reflectively perceived, by contrast, always has the structure of figure and background; and that structure is something we effect—though, again, not normally for a reason: we mostly just find ourselves attending to this or that, thereby making it ‘the figure’ of our present experience. ‘The perceived something’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is always in the middle of something else, it is always part of a “field”’ (PP, 4/4). The figure and its background are internally related, in the sense that each affects the perceived sense or significance of the other. In the Brown Book Wittgenstein gives the telling example of friendly eyes in a friendly face (BB, 145). The eyes may strike us as friendly, and even strike us as what makes the whole face friendly; but those very same eyes, or eyes objectively identical to them, could feature in a face that struck us as unfriendly (or just as not friendly), and moreover without mitigating that face’s perceived unfriendliness. The eyes are friendly, but only when seen in the context of a friendly face. At the same time, the eyes do contribute to the friendliness of the face, when it is perceived as friendly. This internal relation between how the part is perceived and how the whole is perceived is the basic insight of Gestalt psychology.38 And the insight generalizes to the relation between anything to which we perceptually attend—a face, a gesture, an utterance, a significant situation—and the background of ‘horizons’—personal and impersonal, natural and cultural, the echoing past and the anticipated future—against which we perceive it. In another of Munro’s Stories, ‘The Beggar Maid’, Rose, who comes from a poor background, is awarded a fellowship to go to college, and finds accommodation in the middle-class house of Dr. Henshawe. And what she finds is that Dr. Henshawe’s house destroys for her ‘the naturalness, the taken-for-granted background’ of the house she grew up in. What the two houses do best, Rose finds, is ‘discredit each other’.39 Perceptually, experientially, the two houses are internally related: each affects Rose’s perception, or experience, of the other; each forms part of the background against which the other acquires its particular perceived significance, or physiognomy, for Rose. The power that we have to give things perceptual unity and sense—before we give them cognitive or objective unity and sense—comes out most strikingly and dramatically in those moments in which we come to see things differently while knowing that, objectively, they have not changed (see PP, 34/36), and so in the  In ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Ned Block cites more recent experimental work that supports this basic insight of Gestalt Psychology (cf. 564–5). The insight may also be found, albeit in an overly intellectualist (propositionalist) form, in Davidson’s holism. 39  Selected Stories, 153–4. 38

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dawning of Wittgensteinian ‘aspects’. The same face that had seemed to us friendly may, without changing objectively, come to seem cynical or even cruel, for example; and that change in its perceived expression comes together with a change in the contribution made to that expression by, hence in the perceived expressive value of, each of its parts. (Creators of comics know that such a change in the perceived expression of a face may be induced by as little as changing what the character says (and hence also by changing what we imagine the character thinks).) One thing Wittgenstein says about aspect perception is that it is ‘subject to the will’ (PPF, 256). And here it is tempting to think of the ambiguous figures and schematic drawings that he tends to focus on, think about how most of us can switch back and forth more or less at will between one way of seeing them and another, and to suppose that it is clear what Wittgenstein means. But it should be noted that those examples of aspect perception, and aspect dawning, are importantly artificial. We encounter those figures, as Merleau-Ponty notes, in contexts in which they do not ‘belong to a field’ of embodied, significant, and temporally extended engagement (see PP, 216/224), but rather are ‘artificially cut off’ from it (PP, 279/294); and this is precisely what makes it fairly easy for most people to switch from one aspect to another at will when looking at those figures. Normally, how we see things is not subject to the will in that way. Normally, we find ourselves seeing things as we do; and when a new aspect dawns on us, we find ourselves seeing things differently from how we saw them before.40 And yet, we do play a role in how we see things, and do normally have the power, however latent, to see them differently. As I have noted, contemporary virtue ethicists such as Brewer have committed themselves to that idea in talking, for example, of ‘straining to see things through loving eyes’.41 Wittgenstein, in explicating what he means when he says that seeing aspects is subject to the will, appeals not to those cases in which we can switch back and forth at will between one aspect and another, but rather to the fact that it makes sense to call upon another person to see something under some particular aspect (PPF, 256). Correlatively, it also makes sense to try to see something under some particular aspect. Theoretical reflection tends to cover up our own perceptual, sense-giving power, precisely because it is of the essence of theoretical reflection that it leads us to see things ‘impersonally’—taking the meaning or value we perceive in things to be perceivable by ‘anyone’ (cf. PP, 82ff./84ff.). That tendency culminates in taking the world we objectively know, or think we know, to be the world we perceive and respond to (cf. PP, 5/5, 39/41, and 70/73).42 And we persist in thus thinking about the world we perceive even when it is quite apparent that not everybody, and p­ erhaps  Though, as noted in ‘Aspects of Perception’, there is normally no determinate way we had been seeing things before the dawning of the aspect; the perceptual change in the dawning of an aspect, I there proposed, is normally a matter of the introduction of (greater) perceptual determinacy. 41  The Retrieval of Ethics, 175. 42  Taking the world as objectively known to determine the world as perceived is what MerleauPonty, following Gestalt psychologists, calls ‘the experience error’ (PP, 5/5). I’ll come back to this error in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’. 40

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not even many, see things as we see them. I don’t think we will ever understand the deep and seemingly insurmountable rifts that separate us sometimes from people in different parts of the globe or even just around the corner (or across the hall in the philosophy department!) unless we acknowledge the role we each play in how the world evaluatively presents itself to us prior to any express judgment, thought, or reasoning. Part of what Merleau-Ponty is trying to get us to see is that we are not confined to the impersonal way of seeing things: though we must always rely on an inherited background of impersonal meanings—of the words and gestures we use, of customs and institutions, of the situations in which we find ourselves, and so on (see PP, 440/465)—there is always the possibility of seeing things more or less creatively, differently, or, as he puts it, ‘personally’. On Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, the background of impersonal meanings is the ‘sedimentation’ of previous, more or less creative, acts of sense-giving (see PP, 130/131 and 186–8/192–4). Consider how even the most basic biological states and functions—hunger, thirst, eating, drinking, being hot or cold, needing and seeking shelter, experiencing sexual desire, satisfying it, and so on—have come to mean for us so much more than whatever they might be thought to mean “purely biologically”; and consider also how each one of those states and functions may still be given a more or less new and personal meaning by an individual (see PP, 160/162, 188–9/193–4, and 440/465)—a meaning that may then become ‘sedimented’, ‘impersonal’, and the basis for new acts of meaning giving (see PP, 197/203). By now it should have become clear that our earlier conclusion that much of what we do, say, think, and I would add feel, is indeterminate until actualized needs to be supplemented. For if the determinacy or indeterminacy of something is a matter of how it may be seen, taken up, and responded to—a matter of what meaning we or others may give or find in it—then what we do, say, think, and feel remains indeterminate even after it has been actualized, in the sense that there isn’t just one (correct) meaning or significance it may (reasonably) be found to have. It becomes part of the indeterminate background against which the significance of anything we’ll go on to do, say, think, or feel next will be perceived. This, I take it, is what Merleau-Ponty is getting at when he says that ‘everything we live or think has always several meanings… [E]xistence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its fundamental structure, and in so far as it is the very process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning…’ (PP, 169/173). In a conversation, someone makes an offensive remark, for example—a remark, that is, that ‘anyone’ would regard as offensive—but we don’t, or need not, perceive it that way, and do not, or need not, take offense. Perhaps we see the remark through loving eyes, for example, and therefore see it as a clumsy, or pathetic, or heroic attempt to break through our arrogance or shield of denial. Seeing the remark in some such alternative way—whether at that very moment or in retrospect—goes together with seeing differently the broader context in which it was made. It also affects how we would see and respond to whatever followed that remark. ‘Our freedom’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls up

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s­ pecially favored modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to bring one into being by itself’ (PP, 442/467). The emerging understanding of human agency and freedom is very different from the traditional one. It is not the Kantian understanding that places the ‘practical reasoner’ outside of the world in which she acts and outside of time; nor is it the naturalist understanding that seeks to explain (what we think of as) agency and (our sense of) freedom from the perspective of empirical science and so mechanistically and third-personally. Rather, it is a phenomenological understanding—a description of our lived experience as lived—according to which we continuously find ourselves in situations that always already have impersonal meanings that we have not given them, and to which we must respond, in one way or another (for, normally, anything we would do in a given situation would be a response to it). At the same time, however, those situations are indeterminate, in the sense that they may be perceived, taken up, and responded to in indefinitely many different ways; and it is therefore never clear how much of the perceived significance of a situation was impersonally there, waiting to be recognized by just ‘anyone’, and how much of it is our personal contribution. Here, for example, is a great work of philosophical genius—Wittgenstein’s Investigations, perhaps, or Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; but can’t all of those ideas already be found, however embryonically, in the works of others (or in the philosopher’s earlier work)? Weren’t they all, somehow, already ‘in the air’? And here, on the other hand, is a seemingly trivial and thoughtless everyday gesture—just what ‘one’ does in such situations; but can’t we see in it the deepest, most personal expression of the individual performing it? Can’t we see that person’s whole personality, or unique style, condensed into this one gesture? There is an exchange between generalized and individual existence, each receiving and giving something. There is a moment at which the significance which was foreshadowed in the One [Heidegger’s impersonal ‘Das Man’, AB], and which was merely a precarious possibility threatened by the contingency of history, is taken up by an individual. It may well happen that now, having taken command of history, he leads it, for a time at least, far beyond what seemed to comprise its significance, and involves it in a fresh dialectic, as when Bonaparte, from being Consul, made himself emperor and conqueror. We are not asserting that history from end to end has only one meaning, any more than has an individual life. We mean simply that in any case freedom modifies it only by taking up the meaning which history was offering at the moment in question, and by a kind of unobtrusive assimilation (PP, 450/475–6).

And similarly: The generality of the ‘rôle’ and of the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the ‘share contributed by the situation’ and the ‘share contributed by freedom’ (PP, 453/480).

Go back to the ‘offensive’ remark. Were we right to see it as we did? If this means, ‘Is it on the whole better for us to see the world through loving eyes rather than through, say, angry or cynical eyes?’, then the correct answer might be yes. If it means, ‘Is it on the whole better for us to see and respond to things, as much as

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we can, in our own, “authentic” way, rather than as “anyone” would see and respond to them?’, then again the correct answer may arguably be yes (while keeping in mind that the authentic rests on, or plays with, the inauthentic, and that the inauthentic is the authentic ‘sedimented’, or habituated). But if it means, ‘Was the remark offensive?’, then I wish to propose that the remark, taken apart from how anyone sees and responds to it—the remark as it was in itself, to echo Kant—was neither offensive nor not offensive, nor determinately anything in between.43 It was, in this and other evaluatively relevant respects, indeterminate—open to be perceived and intelligibly responded to in indefinitely many different ways, more or less personal or creative, though of course not just in any way (by which I mean that not just any way of responding to it would be intelligible, or intelligible as a response to it). And the same goes for the situation in which we perceived and responded to the remark, for our history, including the history of our relationship with the maker of the remark, for our linguistic and cultural background, and for anything else that might have contributed to our being moved to perceive and respond to it as we did. Anything we might appeal to in order to explain or otherwise rationalize our response may itself be perceived and responded to in more than one way. (That is something we are sometimes made to recognize when another person responds to the same thing or situation very differently from us, and yet no less aptly, or intelligibly.) And this means that if indeed we were motivated, moved, by the perceived situation as it presented itself to us against the (historical, cultural, linguistic…) background of our world, at the moment right before we responded to the remark as we did, then, precisely to the extent that our response was creative—that is, different from how ‘anyone’ would have responded in ‘such’ situation—our motivation, what moved us, was itself indeterminate.44

7.4  An Illustration My argument for motivational indeterminacy in the previous section was fairly abstract, and the tendency, as I have noted, would be to deny its conclusion. The indeterminacy of the perceived world, and hence of the forces that move us, tends to disappear under theoretical reflection, and therefore is hard for us to make cognitively real for ourselves—even though, if I am right, we live it day by day. To help make it real, I offer one last Munro moment. This one too is taken from ‘The Beggar Maid’. Rose, a poor college student on a fellowship, living at the home of Dr. Henshawe, many years before she’ll meet Simon, has been going out with Patrick—a graduate student of history who comes from a wealthy family. Patrick is in love with  Nor even sensibly a remark (as opposed to some other sort of speech-act).  This, after all, is just what would normally be meant in calling it ‘creative’. One major problem with the rationalist and empiricist approaches that still pretty much control contemporary philosophical theorizing in the analytic tradition is that they are both committed, in effect, to denying the reality of creativity, or to explaining it away.

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Rose and committed to marrying her. But though he is very chivalrous and gentle with her, and though everyone else around Rose takes her to be extremely fortunate to have found such a match—a notion that Rose at once resents and cannot help being moved by—she cannot bring herself to be fully reconciled to the idea of marrying Patrick. One Sunday morning, she walks to his apartment, wakes him up, tells him she does not want to marry him, and goes on to say terrible things to him— some of which she knows she does not believe—all in the attempt, which she knows is bound to fail, to ‘make him see her necessity’, as Munro puts it.45 Finally she says viciously, ‘I don’t want to see you, ever!’; but at the door she turns and says in a normal and regretful voice ‘Goodbye’46—in yet another Munro moment that makes vivid the indeterminacy of both our behavior’s significance and the forces that move us. Patrick, dumfounded, is silent during Rose’s outburst, but afterwards sends her a note suggesting they should not see or talk to each other for two weeks, and see how they feel at the end of those two weeks. The following Saturday, however, Rose, working at the library, walks quietly to a spot from which she knows she’ll be able to see Patrick studying. She looks at him from behind, and finds that she is no longer irritated or frightened by him; she is free. She can now freely appreciate the fact that Patrick has behaved honorably by putting no pressure on her since the incident at his apartment.47 The next thing she feels is shame about the way she behaved toward him.48 And then she is so moved, made so gentle and wistful by the sight of him, Munro writes, that she wants to give him something, some surprising bounty, to undo his unhappiness.49 She imagines herself running to his carrel, throwing herself on him, and saying I love you, I was terrible, I didn’t mean it, I was crazy, I love you… Munro describes Rose as overtaken by ‘a violent temptation’ that turns out to be irresistible. She runs and throws herself on Patrick.50 They get married. The marriage lasts 10 years, during which the scenes of the first breakup and reconciliation periodically repeat themselves, with Rose saying to Patrick all of the terrible things she said to him the first time, and many other terrible things as well. What was it that moved Rose to throw herself, fatefully, on Patrick’s back—a move that, under the circumstances, may well have made marriage seem inevitable? We’ve already mentioned her shame for the way she behaved, and her wish to undo Patrick’s unhappiness. Within the next few paragraphs, however, Munro describes Rose as giving several very different rationalizing explanations for that act, at different moments in her life.51 One thing she’ll say is that ‘comradely compassion overcame her, she was not proof to the sight of a bare bent neck’. But then she’ll say

 Selected Stories, 177.  Selected Stories, 180. 47  Selected Stories, 181. 48  Selected Stories, 181. 49  Selected Stories, 181. 50  Selected Stories, 182. 51  Selected Stories, 182–3. 45 46

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that it was greed: ‘she did not know how to do without his love and his promise to look after her; she was frightened of the world and had not been able to think up any other plan for herself’. In other moments—moments in which ‘she was seeing life in economic terms, or was with people who did’—Rose would say that ‘only middle-­class people had a choice anyway, that if she had the price of a train ticket to Toronto her life would have been different’. ‘Nonsense’, she might say later, ‘never mind that, it was really vanity, it was vanity pure and simple, to resurrect him, to bring him back his happiness. To see if she could do that. She could not resist such a test of power’. One thing Rose never said to anybody, Munro adds a few paragraphs later, was that she sometimes thought it was not pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness. In view of everything else she told people, she could hardly tell that, Munro writes. As readers, we are offered between five and seven, or even more—depending on how you count—different accounts of what moved Rose at that fateful moment. Now it is true that Rose is more reflective and articulate in her accounts of herself than most of us—after all, she has something of Alice Munro in her—but the accounts she offers are of the sorts that we ourselves may well have had occasion to offer, or to be offered (which does not mean that they could be reduced without distortion to a set of propositionally expressible attitudes!). We could easily enough imagine circumstances under which any one of those sorts of account would be found perfectly acceptable. And yet, some of the motives Rose ascribes to herself are hard to reconcile with some of the others, and it is implausible to suppose that all of the different motives she ascribes to herself could somehow fit together to form one complex motive. Like the duck and the rabbit aspects of the duck-rabbit, Rose’s different ‘rationalizing explanations’—each expressing a different way of seeing herself at that past moment—eclipse each other. And to suppose that one of those explanations is true—captures her motivation as it really was, in itself, independently from how anyone might see it—and all of the others false, would be like supposing that the duck-aspect is true and the rabbit-aspect false, or vice versa. Rose was moved by the sight of Patrick, there is no question about it; but what it was that she saw, in seeing him, and which, against the background of their shared history and the rest of her world, moved her to throw herself on him, was indeterminate then, I’m proposing, just as it is indeterminate when she reflects upon it later. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty (PP, 169/173), not even God could sound her heart and mind as they were at that very moment and determine her one, true motive. This does not mean that our common practices of asking for, and sometimes demanding, ‘rationalizing explanations’ of each other, and of proffering such explanations, and challenging the explanations proffered, and so on, or the related practice of tormenting ourselves with questions about our own ‘true’ motivations, are wholly misguided (though it does suggest that instances of those practices might be misguided, if engaged in under the assumption that there must be some one, true, motive for anything anyone does, says, thinks, or feels). For one thing, as I’ve already noted and will further emphasize in Sect. 7.5, in some cases the motivational indeterminacy is going to be more significant than in others: in general, the more what we do, say, think, or feel, is what ‘one’, or ‘anyone’, would do, say,

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think, or feel in our situation as impersonally perceived, there is going to be less indeterminacy, or less indeterminacy that would matter for the proper functioning, and value, of the above practices. Relatedly, for those practices to serve their aims, or have their value, there need not be, nor need we presuppose, the sort of motivational determinacy envisioned by philosophers and others. All we need is the ability to find that some rationalizing explanation is, or is not, good enough, acceptable, ‘for present intents and purposes’, and a more or less shared sense of what is acceptable. Some such explanations would be given in bad faith, for example, and therefore be (found) unacceptable—it would be fairly clear that not even the person proffering them believes them. In other cases, the person proffering the explanation might (come to) believe themselves, but to others it would be fairly obvious that, for all of the indeterminacy of the situation under scrutiny, that couldn’t have been how they perceived it at the time; or we could find that in order to perceive the situation that way, one would need to perceive other elements of the world we take them to share with us in a way that we find problematic; and so on and so forth. For all of the indeterminacy of Rose’s motivation, for example, it could still be (found) unacceptable, or unreasonable, to attribute to her the desire, or intention, to hurt Patrick, for example, or to punish herself by marrying someone she doesn’t love; and it might also be (found) acceptable, or reasonable, for some intents and purposes, just to say that she found the temptation to throw herself on him irresistible, perhaps adding ‘for whatever reason’, or ‘for any number of reasons’. And so on. Our practices do not require motivational determinacy. On something like the contrary, they provide us with ways of introducing sufficient determinacy into our world of experience to allow us to go on—even if not always get along—with each other, and with ourselves.52

7.5  Concluding Remark: Problems and Riddles In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty invokes the distinction between a problem and a riddle (PP, 135/136). A problem is determinate in the sense that finding a solution for it does not change your perception or understanding of it. A riddle, by contrast, is indeterminate until solved: until you find the solution—or a solution—you do not really know what it is asking or calling for. The riddle and its solution come clearly and determinately into view—to the extent that they do— together. Cora Diamond, in whose interpretation of Wittgenstein the notion of the riddle plays a central role—thereby affirming the affinity I have found between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the subject of determinacy and indeterminacy53—puts the same basic point this way: ‘It is only when one has the solution  I’d like to thank Martin Gustafsson and Bill Day for comments that prompted this last paragraph. 53  David Cerbone also explores, differently from the way I do here, the affinity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty on the subject of indeterminacy (‘The Recovery of Indeterminacy in Merleau52

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that one knows how to take the question, what it is for it to have an answer’.54 (I note that the line between problems and riddles, thus understood, is not sharp. Moreover, to the extent that a solution to what first presented itself as a problem does change our perception and understanding of it, it has revealed it as a riddle, in Merleau-­ Ponty’s sense. In other words, whether a situation we face is a problem or a riddle is itself, partly, a matter of how we perceive and respond to it.) Normal perception and (hence) behavior, Merleau-Ponty suggests, move somewhere in between riddle solving—finding answers to ‘questions which are obscurely formulated’ (PP, 214/222)—and problem solving.55 The freer, more personal and creative we are in how we perceive and respond to a situation in which we find ourselves, the more how we perceive and respond to that situation resembles riddle solving. In those moments, until we see things a certain way, or respond to them a certain way, what elicits that way of seeing or piece of behavior from us is itself indeterminate. – Except that when it comes to human perception and behavior, the solution to one moment’s riddle may always become part of the next moment’s riddle. And so on.56

Ponty and Wittgenstein’, in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, Romdenh-Romluc, K. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2017)). 54  The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 263. 55  I say ‘normal’, because Merleau-Ponty discusses cases of people from whose perception and behavior the creative, personal element is almost entirely missing. The case he mostly focuses on—that of Schneider, who suffered a brain injury during the First World War—bears striking similarities to cases on the more severe end of the autistic spectrum. 56  I would like to thank Pascal Brixel, Dave Cerbone, James Conant, Michael Mitchell, and Francey Russell, for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Chapter 8

Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying

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. Keywords  Aspect perception · Form of life · Background conditions of sense · Semantic contextualism · Phenomenology · The natural attitude · Creative uses of language

8.1  Introduction: ‘Form of Life’ and the Conditions of Sense I do not know what exactly Wittgenstein meant by ‘form of life’. But if there is anything I’ve learned from Wittgenstein, it is that attempts to answer that question by trying to identify a something—some worldly constellation, or type of worldly constellation, that is there anyway and to which Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ may simply be attached as a label—are more likely to lead to confusion, and to illusions of sense sustained by enticing pictures, than to insight. If we want to see what Wittgenstein meant by ‘form of life’, he himself has taught us, we need to ask ourselves what work that notion was meant to do in his articulation of his thoughts— what he was trying to get at when he invoked the notion of ‘form of life’. And I don’t think there is a simple answer to that question. My own sense is that the notion of ‘form of life’ belongs in a region of Wittgenstein’s thought that presented him with real difficulties that he never came to resolve to his own satisfaction. I might initially characterize that region by saying that it has to do with the conditions of sense—the background apart from which a human utterance, or anything else that a person might (intentionally) do, would not have whatever sense it © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_8

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has for us. (And let me emphasize at the outset that I take, and take Wittgenstein to take, the distinction between sense and non-sense to be basic—not groundable in anything else and therefore, in an important sense, inexplicable. ‘I must begin’, Wittgenstein says, ‘with the distinction between sense and nonsense. Nothing is possible prior to that. I can’t give it a foundation’ (PG, Part 1, Section 6: 81). So when I talk about the conditions of sense, I’m not talking about conditions for generating sense out of what is senseless. A lesson I have learned from phenomenology is that if you don’t begin with the perception of sense, however primitive or rudimentary, you’re going to have a very hard time bringing it plausibly into your account later.) What is the background apart from which some given utterance, or series of utterances, would not have the sense it has for us? The answer to this question turns out to be very complicated. Take, for example, an everyday exchange in which someone—call him Austin—wishes to find out whether such and such. Someone else—call her Informer—tells Austin that such and such. Austin then asks ‘How do you know?’; and Informer responds by telling Austin her basis for thinking, and saying, that such and such. Austin may then be satisfied, and take it that such and such, or unsatisfied, in which case he may challenge Informer’s basis, or its adequacy for supporting her claim, or turn to look for a different source of information, or proceed without assuming that such and such, taking suitable precautions… What is the background apart from which this imagined exchange would not have the sense it has? What must one be familiar with, and moreover somehow alive to—in a sense that will later be explicated—in order to understand the exchange? Keeping in mind that sense comes in various degrees of determinacy, and that understanding too comes in degrees, I think we could here usefully distinguish between things one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand such exchanges, and things one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand this exchange. The latter may include such things as Austin’s practical interests and what is at stake for him in whether such and such, and what he already knows or takes for granted, and the nature of his relationship with Informer and why he turned to her for information. The former include such things as the human practice of asking others for needed information and relying, or else deciding not to rely, on the information they provide; and the related practice of giving others assurance, and the significance of accepting, or rejecting, another person’s assurance; and the practice of asking ‘How do you know?’ or otherwise inviting others to give us their basis for saying that such and such, and of challenging other people’s bases, and responding to such challenges… These are only some of the things one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand the imagined exchange; and we have barely begun to so much as indicate the background apart from which the exchange would not have the sense it has. The list could be extended indefinitely, and in any number of directions. There is, for example, all that one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand ‘such and such’ as uttered by Austin and Informer on that occasion; and similarly with respect to the words Informer uses to give her basis, and the words Austin then uses to challenge that basis, and so on. And since the proper

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understanding of those words is partly a function, not of meanings separable from use—Wittgenstein has shown us that those are illusory—but of the history of their employment, that history too is part of the background apart from which Austin and Informer’s exchange would not have the sense it has, and therefore part of what they, and anyone who understands them, must be drawing and relying upon, however distantly or indirectly. Also part of the background of the exchange that affects its sense are general facts of human nature such as the fact that different people have different risk tolerances, and that our practices normally allow for a range of acceptable tolerances (though in any actual exchange, the difference between what’s acceptable to some particular participant and what isn’t may be slight); or the fact that some people are more trusting of other people than others, and that here too our practices normally allow for a range of acceptable levels of trust (though, again, in any actual exchange, the difference between what’s acceptable to some particular participant and what isn’t may be slight). And then, at the background of all of that, there are what we might call metaphysical facts that contribute, distantly but essentially, to the sense of the exchange, such as the fact that we are embodied and finite—bound to a particular point of view, epistemically and morally fallible, susceptible to injury, disease, fatigue, hunger, death, and so on, as well as to rashness, laziness, gullibility, selfishness, and so on. And there are what we might call phenomenological facts that contribute to the sense of this, or any other exchange, such as the fact that from the moment we open our eyes to the world we find ourselves sharing it with others, whose bodies we almost immediately perceive and respond to as intentional and expressive unities, whose points of view may be more or less similar, but never identical, to ours, and with whom we may come to have various kinds relationships, which may then be challenged, broken, and restored in indefinitely many ways… (I note that though I follow Wittgenstein here in using the notion of ‘(very general) facts (of nature)’ (außerordentlich allgemeine Naturtatsachen (PI, 142, note; and PPF 365–6)), I take this talk of facts to be, not wrong, but potentially very misleading, for it encourages an objectivist, third personal perspective; and from that perspective neither the sense of an utterance, nor the way that sense is affected by the utterance’s background, may truly come into view.). I have tried to give some sense, however rough, of what I mean when I talk about the background apart from which an utterance, or an exchange, would not have its sense for those capable of perceiving and responding to that sense. I think this background is what Wittgenstein means to gesture at when he talks about ‘form(s) of life’. And I think it is clear why he says that our form of life—as opposed, say, to the builders’—is ‘complicated’ (PI, PPF, 1): any direction one might go to bring out, and spell out, the background contributing to endowing some particular human utterance with some particular, more or less determinate, sense, immediately branches off into indefinitely many others; and the different branches may then be seen as internally related—each contributing to the sense, or significance, of the others. This is the deep truth in Stanley Cavell’s referring to our form of life as ‘a

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whirl of organism’.1 To understand a sentence, Wittgenstein says, is to understand a language (PI, 199); and to understand a language, he more or less also says, is to understand a form of life (see PI, 19). That is what my opening example of the exchange between Agent and Austin was meant to illustrate. Wittgenstein also says that a form of life is what is to be accepted, what is given (PI, PPF, 345), in the sense, I take it, that every time we speak or think, or perceive and respond to the speech of others, we are always already responsive and beholden to it, and drawing upon it, more or less creatively. Even when we attempt to throw the whole of our world into doubt, as Descartes did in his first Meditation, we rely on a background of worldly conditions of sense that cannot, as such, be doubted.2 In light of what I’ve already said, I understand Wittgenstein’s remark to mean not ‘there is a definite something, which is our form of life; and it has to be accepted, it is what’s given’, but rather ‘at any given moment, and whatever we do, say, feel, think, or perceive, there’ll be all that lies at the background of what we do, say, feel, and so on, and apart from which it would not have whatever sense it has for us (at that moment); that background will there and then be what has to be accepted, what’s given. Call it “our form of life”.’ The topic of this paper is the difficulty of seeing aright our relation to that worldly background. In particular, this paper concerns Wittgenstein’s difficulties in doing justice to that relation.

8.2  S  tage Setting: Kant and the Difficulty of Understanding Our Relation to the Worldly Conditions of Sense I said that the notion of ‘form of life’ belongs in a region of Wittgenstein’s thought that presented him with real difficulty. In this section, I want to further characterize the difficulty, by way of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, before returning to Wittgenstein’s attempts at overcoming it, and the reasons, as I see them, for why those attempts were not fully successful. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that seemingly unavoidable but at the same time apparently insurmountable traditional philosophical ‘antinomies’ arise when we imagine that it should be possible for words such as ‘cause’, ‘effect’, ‘part’, ‘whole’, ‘one’, ‘many’, ‘simple’, ‘divisible’, ‘beginning’, ‘end’, and so on, to apply, truly or falsely, to the world ‘as it is in itself’—that is, as it is apart from our making true or false empirical judgments about it, and apart from certain ‘transcendental’ conditions that according to Kant make such judgments possible. When we attempt to employ our words apart from those conditions, Kant says, we produce not judgments (true or false), but ‘nonsense’ (CPR, A485/B513), which Kant at one point glosses in terms of our failing to put our words to any ‘use (Gebrauch)’ (CPR,

 Must We Mean What We Say?, 52, my emphasis.  This is one central lesson of ‘The Cogito’ chapter in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. 1 2

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A 247/B304). So for Kant, as for Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday—when we imagine ourselves to be employing our words even though the conditions for their felicitous employment are missing (or not properly drawn upon). Kant likens those sense-conditions to the air resistance that makes it possible for birds to fly, and likens the philosopher to a bird that thinks she could fly (even better) in a vacuum (CPR, A5/B8). Wittgenstein likens those conditions to the friction that makes walking possible, and likens the philosopher to someone who thinks he could walk (even better) on slippery ice (PI, 107). For the Kant of the first Critique, however—and herein lies a fundamental difference between him and Wittgenstein3—the successful employment of words is understood in terms of what he calls ‘judgments’, which he understands as not-­ essentially-­linguistic mental acts, performed by some not-essentially-embodied transcendental subject, of subsuming sensible intuitions under concepts. The conditions of (making) sense, for Kant, are the ‘conditions of sensibility’ (CPR, A240/B 300; see also A239/B 298), by which he means space and time—the ‘forms’ to which sensible intuitions must conform if they are to become subsumable under concepts, in judgment. For the author of the first Critique, sense is essentially conceptual, and therefore general: though a concept would be ‘empty’ apart from its (possible) link to sensible intuitions, it essentially transcends any one, or any finite set, of its instances; and it abstracts from indefinitely many differences among its instances.4 What Kant calls ‘judgment’ is not essentially—or at least he does not seem to take it to essentially be—a worldly act that depends for its sense on a background of shared linguistic practices and on its particular place in history—both the history of the judger herself and the history of her culture—and which positions the judger significantly in relation to others, in a world that she already shares with them. Not only does Kant make it seem as if all that’s required for sense is an encounter between a lonely transcendental subject armed with a priori categories and sensible intuitions, but there are moments, most notably perhaps in the ‘Second Analogy of Experience’, in which he argues that it is only by way of the application of concepts in judgment that we move from a ‘merely subjective succession’ of Vorstellungen with no ‘relation to an object’ to a world we can share with others (CPR, A196–7/ B241–2).5 A way of putting an insight shared by Wittgenstein and Austin, on the one hand, and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger on the other, is that what may plausibly and intelligibly be thought of as the application of concepts in judgments takes place in a world that is already shared with others. Merleau-Ponty refers to that world as the ‘ante-predicative’ ‘phenomenal world’—the world we must already be responding to, and engaged with, in order to produce, or make  I elaborate on this difference in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’.  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). 3 4

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sense of, true or false judgments, or predications; and Heidegger famously protests, in response to Kant and the philosophical tradition that culminated with him, that the real scandal of traditional philosophy is the continued attempt to think of the human subject as not essentially tied to an intersubjectively shared world that is ‘ready-to-hand’ before it becomes ‘present-at-hand’—that is, before it becomes the object of true or false assertions.6 In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that there are moments in the Transcendental Dialectic in which Kant seems to recognize the worldly and intersubjectively-sharable background of the application of concepts. Merleau-­ Ponty says that this is an important insight that Kant seems to ‘forget’ in the Transcendental Analytic (PP, 304/317–8). Though he doesn’t expand on this last remark, I believe Merleau-Ponty has in mind moments in the Dialectic in which reason’s demand for the ‘unconditioned’ or ‘absolute’—the demand that, when combined with the idea of the empirical world as a thing in itself, generates the antinomies—is presented not merely as the demand to transcend the conditions of sensibility, but also, even primarily, as the demand to transcend the temporal unfolding of empirical investigation, or, as Kant refers to it, ‘the successive synthesis of the manifold of intuition’ (CPR, A 417/B 444). Later on, Kant refers to it—to the natural home, as it were, of our transcendental categories and empirical concepts— as ‘the advance of experience (Fortschritt der Erfahrung)’ or as ‘empirical advance (empirische Fortschritt)’ (CPR, A 493/B 521; see also A 479/B 507). On (what I would regard as) a charitable reading, Kant is here alluding to the intersubjectively shared practice of empirical inquiry—a practice whose temporal unfolding, or succession, is neither causally determined nor merely subjective, or metaphysically private. He is thereby also tacitly alluding to the worldly, historical background apart from which that practice would not be the practice that it is, and would not have the sense it has for us. What matters for present purposes, however, is not whether Kant recognizes the worldly, inter-subjectively sharable conditions of (making) sense. What matters is that the Kantian account of what he calls ‘Erfahrung’ does not give us the resources for understanding our relation to that worldly background. ‘We can understand’, Kant says, ‘only that which brings with it, in intuition, something corresponding to our words’ (CPR, A 277/B 333), and that may be fine as far as our relation to the world we speak of is concerned; but it does not help us recognize, let alone understand, our relation to the world we speak in. And yet, that world is a world that we evidently, somehow, perceive and respond to with (at least some) understanding— albeit not the sort of understanding that formulates itself in objective, true or false, judgments. ‘The Kantian subject posits a world’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘but, in order to be able to assert a truth, the actual subject must in the first place have a world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships, and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be

6  Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 249.

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exploited’ (PP, 129/131). ‘The world’, he writes in another passage that alludes to Kant, ‘is not what I think, but what I live’ (PP, xvi-xvii/lxxx).7 Now of course, one could presumably turn one’s attention to any element of the world we live and speak in, and form judgments or make assertions about it; but one would thereby do nothing to elucidate the nature of our relation to the worldly background of any such judgment or assertion, qua that background. And this brings us back to Wittgenstein.

8.3  W  ittgenstein and the Difficulty of Doing Justice to Our Relation to the Background Wittgenstein, I suggested at the opening of this paper, was struggling in his final years to articulate an understanding that would satisfy him of our relation to the worldly background conditions of human discourse. Before I say more about Wittgenstein’s difficulty as I see it, let me emphasize that for much of his later work clarity about the nature of that relation is not essential. The Wittgensteinian work of grammatical investigation and dissolution of philosophical difficulties is carried out from within the perspective we all occupy as competent speakers of our language. As competent speakers, we rely, draw, and play upon features of our form of life; and we do that as well when we engage in the sort of work that is best exemplified in the first part of the Investigations. And for that, it is not essential that we be clear on the nature of our relation to what we rely, draw, and play upon, as we rely, draw, and play upon it. When we do wish to clarify that relation, however, the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation can only take us so far. The remarks from Wittgenstein’s final years collected in On Certainty and elsewhere, show him struggling with questions concerning our relation to the worldly conditions of sense. One source of difficulty is his tendency to think of that relation as a relation to propositions, or to something that is propositionally articulated—a tendency encouraged, no doubt, by the fact that he was responding, in part, to G. E. Moore’s ‘Defense of Common Sense’.8 But, as Wittgenstein himself sometimes acknowledges (cf. OC, 204 and 402), the worldly background against which we make this or that judgment, or commit ourselves to the truth of this or that proposition, or otherwise make sense by means of words—though it is a background apart from which that judgment, or proposition, or other linguistic expression, would not have had the sense it has for us—is not, for us, there and then, the object of judgment or propositionally articulated. Another, related source of difficulty for Wittgenstein is the (broadly Kantian) dichotomy he sometimes falls into between what he calls ‘seeing’ and what he calls 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).

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‘acting’. When he finds that talking about our relation to the background of our language-games in terms of ‘seeing’—which he in turn understands in terms of ‘propositions striking us immediately as true’ (OC, 204)—falsifies that relation, he tends to recoil into putting it in terms of ‘acting’ (cf. OC 204 and 402). But while it is true, and important, that our relation to the worldly conditions of sense is not aptly thought of in terms of certain propositions striking us as true, and also true, and important, that making and responding to sense—verbally expressed or otherwise— is an activity that positions us in a world shared with others and depends for its sense on a worldly background, neither of these two points does much to illuminate the nature of our relation to these conditions, or that background. Moreover, if we could be brought to recognize that, and how, perception makes present to us a world that has more or less determinate sense for us, and to which we immediately respond in one way or another, even apart from making judgments about what we perceive, or otherwise representing it truly or falsely; and if it could also be shown that the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought (or talked) about, always has the structure of figure and background that are internally related—in the sense that how the figure presents itself to us is not independent of its perceived background, and vice versa; and if it could further be shown that perception is not passive, not just a matter of objects causally affecting our sense organs, but that we play an active role in generating and sustaining that pre-objective perceived sense—where that includes effecting its structure of figure and background; then we may find that we may aptly be said to perceive the worldly background of linguistic sense, and that only certain deeply entrenched notions about what perception must be (what ‘perception’ must mean) have prevented us from recognizing that. When Merleau-Ponty speaks, in the passage quoted above, of our ability to sustain round about us ‘a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships, and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be exploited’, he means to be telling us something about perception, and about the world as perceived—‘the phenomenal world’, as he calls it. But he is well aware of the fact that he is working against three long-standing philosophical proclivities: the empiricist-naturalist prejudice of supposing that what we perceive is, or is essentially determined by, what causally impinges on our sense organs;9 the rationalist prejudice of supposing that what we perceive is essentially propositionally articulated, or has the sort of ‘content’ that propositions may have; and the tendency, shared by both empiricists-naturalists and rationalists of various stripes, of thinking about perception from an objectivist, third-personal perspective—a perspective

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.

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from which the perception of meaning, or meaningfulness, cannot truly come into view (but may still be, and commonly is, nonetheless tacitly presupposed). The perception of Wittgensteinian aspects, I will now turn to suggest, effectively undermines all of the above prejudices, and thereby provides important clues about our relation to the background conditions of sense.

8.4  B  ringing the Phenomenal World into View by Way of Aspect Perception Our relation to our form of life, or to what I have been referring to as the worldly background conditions of sense—being a relation to meaningful phenomena in their meaningfulness—may not aptly be understood, or even so much as recognized, from the objectivist, mechanistic perspective of the natural sciences. From that perspective, sense, or meaning, does not come into view, and neither does its perception. Nor, I have argued, may that relation aptly be understood as a cognitive, judgment-based relation, in the Kantian sense. If we are to make sense of that relation, we need to find room for, and recognize the reality of, perception of and response to sense that is not cognitive, not propositional or conceptual. In other words, and following Merleau-Ponty, we need to find room for, and recognize, the phenomenal world—the world as perceived and responded to prior to, and apart from, being represented truly or falsely. One type of experience that brings out in a rather dramatic way the difference between the phenomenal world and the objective world, and brings out the role we play in effecting the non-discursive unity and sense of the former, is the dawning, or lighting up, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’. When an aspect dawns, we see the object differently—its perceived overall unity and sense, its physiognomy, changes; and yet we know that, objectively, it hasn’t changed. That is the sense in which ‘everything changes and yet nothing changes’ when an aspect lights up for us (see RPPII, 474). And seeing aspects is ‘subject to the will’: not so much, or primarily, in the sense that we can see them at will, but rather in the sense that it makes sense both to call upon others to see something under this or that aspect—see it as this or that—and to try to see this or that particular aspect (PPF, 256). We are not wholly passive with respect to what we perceive and, even more so, how it presents itself to us. Moreover, when an aspect dawns on us, what dawns on us is not ‘a property of the object’, Wittgenstein remarks, but rather ‘an internal relation (interne Relation) between it and other objects’ (PPF, 247). The notion of internal relation, which was explicated in ‘Aspects of Perception’, is key, I wish to suggest, to an understanding of our relation to the background against which things—including human utterances—present themselves to us as having some particular (more or less determinate) sense. According to Gestalt psychology, and this much it shares with Merleau-Ponty (cf. PP, 3–4/3–4), what we perceive, at the most basic level, is not

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atomic sensations that by themselves are devoid of any sense, or significance, and which we then somehow synthesize into significant, intelligible wholes. Rather, we (normally) perceive unified, significant wholes, where the perceived qualities of the elements of a perceived whole, and so the specific contributions those elements make to the overall perceived significance of that whole, are not perceptually independent of that perceived overall significance, and in that sense are internally related to each other. This reaffirms Kant’s anti-empiricist dictum that synthesis comes before analysis and is not mechanically given, but rather is actively projected and sustained by the subject (cf. CPR, B 130), except that the synthesis here does not take the propositional form of empirical judgment, and so is not secured by empirical concepts.10 In order to appreciate the way in which the notion of ‘internal relation’ can help us understand our relation to the background conditions of sense, we need to see that internal relations hold not just among the perceived elements of perceived objects (as between the ears of the rabbit-aspect of the duck-rabbit and its mouth, for example), or between one perceived object and some other, particular object (as in the case of the face that strikes us as similar to another, or of the rabbit-aspect in relation to other rabbits), but also between the perceived physiognomies of objects (broadly construed) and the background against which they are perceived. The internal relation between some perceived figure and its background is illustrated in Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘a smiling mouth smiles only in a human face’ (PI, 583). In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein gives a similar example of friendly eyes in a friendly face (BB, 145). He notes that even though the eyes are (perceived as) friendly, and even though their friendliness does contribute essentially to the (perceived) friendliness of the face, those very same eyes—or eyes objectively, geometrically, identical to them—could feature in a face that was not (perceived as) friendly, in which case they would not be (perceived as) friendly. The context-sensitivity of the perceived significance, or physiognomy, of anything we perceptually attend to, and the internal relation between figure and background, manifest themselves at every level: just as a mouth has its particular expression only in the context of a particular face, so is the perceived expression of a face internally related to a worldly context, however indeterminate, apart from which it would not have been, for the perceiver, that expression.11 When, for example, some particular schematic drawing of a face strikes you, as it struck Wittgenstein, as having the expression of ‘a complacent businessman, stupidly supercilious, who though fat, imagines he’s a lady killer’ (Brown Book, 162), the picture-face is, for you, internally related to a context of images, ideas, and experiences: its having that expression, and therefore its invoking that context for its perceiver, is not separable from its relation to that context. All of this is even truer, and clearer, when it comes to everyday, natural perception, as contrasted with the perception of objects that are  As argued in ‘Aspects of Perception’.  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.

10 11

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attended to perceptually in the course of ‘doing philosophy (or psychology, or cognitive science)’. Wittgenstein gives another clear, if also characteristically non-theoretical, expression to the internal relation between perceived figure and its background, in the following remark: Look at a long familiar piece of furniture in its old place in your room. You would like to say: “It is part of an organism”. Or “Take it outside, and it is no longer at all the same as it was”, and similar things. And naturally one isn’t thinking of any causal dependence of one part on the rest. Rather it is like this:… [I]f I tried taking it quite out of its present context, I should say that it had ceased to exist and another had got into its place. One might even feel like this: “Everything is part and parcel of everything else (Es gehört alles zu allem)” (external and internal relations [my emphasis, AB]). Displace a piece and it is no longer what it was. Only in this surrounding is this table this table (RPPI, 339).

In the next section, I will say something about Wittgenstein’s tentative tone here, and in similar moments in which he is moved to describe perceptual experience. But for Merleau-Ponty, what Wittgenstein says here is just right when said about the phenomenal world, and may be said without the tentativeness: in the world as perceived, prior to reflection and objectification, everything is part and parcel of everything else—everything is internally related to everything else, however remotely and indeterminately.12 This, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is the phenomenological truth in Leibniz’s Monadology (PP, 67–8/69–71). And this, I wish to propose, is how we should think of the relation between an utterance and the context in which it has the sense it has for us: they are internally related. Just as friendly eyes are only friendly in a friendly face, and the table you are looking at would not be what it is, perceptually, experientially, if moved to a different context, so would some uttered form of words not have the sense it has for us, apart from its perceived context.

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).

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This, if you will, is just the context-sensitivity of linguistic sense that semantic ‘contextualists’ such as David Lewis, Charles Travis, Robyn Carston, and François Recanati, have argued for, sometimes following Wittgenstein and Austin.13 A good way of summarizing some of the work I have done thus far in this paper, as well as some work I have done elsewhere,14 would be to offer the following additions and amendments to the basic and (I assume) familiar contextualist account: 1. Contemporary contextualists have tended to be representationalist about linguistic sense: they have focused exclusively on utterances assessable in terms of truth and falsity, and have thought about linguistic sense exclusively in terms of that assessment. I have argued elsewhere that, notwithstanding recurrent claims to the contrary, this representationalism follows neither Wittgenstein nor Austin, and has led contextualists to misrepresent, in philosophically significant ways, the ordinary and normal functioning of philosophically troublesome words such as ‘know’.15 2. In this paper, I have made explicit a crucial point that has remained implicit in extant contextualist accounts: on the contextualist account, just as on mine, we must somehow be perceptually alive to the context in which our own words, and those of others, have their particular sense for us; but, I have argued, whether we are using our words representationally or not, their relation to the context against which they have their particular sense for us cannot itself be one of representing it truly or falsely. In other words, even when our words represent this or that truly or falsely, they do not represent the context that makes it possible for them to successfully do so. Nor can our perceptual relation to that context, as we attend to (the object of) that utterance, be one of representing it truly or falsely, on pain of infinite regress of representations of contexts of representations of contexts; but also, no less importantly, on pain of dissolving the figure-background structure that is essential to the perception of anything, including linguistic sense.16 3. Whereas contemporary contextualists have focused on contextual features that change between one utterance featuring some word or expression and another  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). 13

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utterance featuring that same word or expression (in order to bring out the context-­sensitivity of linguistic sense), I have, in this paper, expanded significantly the scope of ‘the context of an utterance’, to include worldly conditions that remain relatively stable over time and across different speech situations. In my initial example of the exchange between Austin and Agent, I drew a (rough) distinction between things one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand such exchanges and things one would need to be familiar with and alive to in order to understand that particular exchange. Contemporary contextualists have (for good reason) tended to focus on the latter. But, as I understand Wittgenstein, it’s background conditions of the former sort that constitute what he calls ‘our form of life’. 4. The tendency in analytic philosophy has been to think of the context of an utterance as something like an objectively existing container that is identifiable apart from the utterance itself and some particular understanding of it, and to think about the determination of utterance-sense by the context of the utterance as an objective matter as well: utter that form of words in that context, the thought typically goes, and you’ll get that sense (typically understood in terms of ‘truth conditions’ and ‘truth value’).17 I believe the tendency has also been to think in a similar way about what Wittgenstein refers to by ‘form of life’—to think, that is, that for any group of people, it should, in principle, be possible to identify and describe their form of life objectively, and independently of its contribution to the perceived sense of utterances made within it. If, as I have suggested, the relation between an utterance and its context, or worldly conditions of sense, is internal, however, this common way of thinking about context, and about the relation between an utterance and its context, cannot be right. The perceived context of an utterance is not independent of its perceived sense: come to hear (or otherwise perceive) an utterance differently, and you’ll come to perceive differently its context, and vice versa.18 5. The context of an utterance—that is, the background that plays into the determination of its sense—is not a set of objectively establishable facts, but a world of meaningful phenomena in their meaningfulness, as I earlier suggested. That we are mortal, and fallible, and dependent on each other in any number of ways, and have certain needs and desires and sensitivities, and have developed certain complex practices of passing information, and challenging it, and so on, might all be taken as objective, empirical facts. But to the extent that those ‘very general facts  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)). 17

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of nature’ affect the perceived sense of an exchange such as that between Austin and Informer, they do so as significant, meaningful ‘facts’; and significance or meaning is not, at bottom, an empirically establishable, objective matter. 6. This in no way means that anything goes in the realm of sense. It is true, and important, that there is an ineliminable indeterminacy in the perception of sense (see PP, 6/7)—whether linguistically expressed or otherwise—and, relatedly, an ineliminable role for creativity in the perception (and expression) of sense (see PP, 189/195).19 And it is also true, and important, that nothing ensures our agreement in what makes (what) sense to us, and under what conditions20—nothing is deeper than our mutual attunement, however far it may be found to reach, in what makes sense to us and how.21 But for all that, one can no more choose or decide what sense some utterance has, and hence what could reasonably be found to belong to its context, than one can choose or decide what expression someone had on her face when one saw her. Though the sense of an utterance is, ultimately, what we competent speakers find it to be, what sense we (can) truly and reasonably find in some utterance is, as Cavell puts it, ‘deeply controlled’;22 and so is what presents itself to us as its context, or background, and how it presents itself. This concludes what I have had to say “positively” about ‘form of life’ in Wittgenstein’s later work. I have tried to show how aspect perception, as identified and characterized by Wittgenstein, points us in what I take to be the right direction for thinking about what Wittgenstein calls ‘form of life’ and our relation to it, by bringing out the distinction between the phenomenal world and the objective world, the role we play in generating and sustaining the sense and unity of the former, and the internal relation between the perceived sense, or physiognomy, of some perceived object and its perceived context. In the next and final section, I will say a little more about the limitations, as I see them, of the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation when it comes to elucidating our relation to the worldly conditions of sense, and so to what he calls ‘our form of life’.

 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. 19

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8.5  T  he Natural Attitude and the Limitations of the Wittgensteinian Grammatical Investigation Wittgenstein, I have suggested, was struggling in his final years with questions concerning our relation to the background apart from which what we say (and think, and do, and feel) would not have the sense it has for us. And the questions are difficult. The basic difficulty, as I see it, is just the difficulty of phenomenology—the difficulty of bringing out and elucidating, without thereby distorting, what is, normally and in essence, not attended to, reflected upon, or articulated. I want to propose, however, that Wittgenstein’s struggles in this area reveal not only the inherent difficulty of phenomenology, but also inherent limitations of his method of grammatical investigation. Wittgenstein’s method, or set of related methods, is designed to enable us to overcome philosophical difficulties that arise when ‘language goes on holiday’ (PI, 38)—that is, when we rely on our words to express thoughts, or to otherwise carry determinate commitments or implications—determinate enough, in any case, for generating and sustaining precisely those philosophical difficulties—even apart from our meaning them in some determinate way or another, in a context suitable for meaning them that way. In the face of philosophical difficulties thus generated, the best response may well be therapy by way of the deliberate assembling of ‘reminders’ that aim at leading the words of our philosophizing ‘back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI, 116), thereby revealing the difficulties as difficulties with ‘Luftgebäude’ (PI, 118) that are sustained by unreasonable and ultimately nonsensical expectations that we have of those words, and by pictures that encourage and sustain those expectations. The basic problem, as I see it, for the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation vis á vis phenomenology in general, and our relation to the worldly conditions of sense in particular, is that we do not normally talk about, or describe, or otherwise verbally express our relation to the background of our talking about or describing or expressing things. This is an important truism that applies not just to linguistic expression: one does not normally attend to the background of one’s attending to something (verbally or otherwise), and cannot attend to it as background. To fully appreciate the significance of this truism, it should be noted that when we talk about or describe something made present to us in perception, our words, or the concepts they embody—being generally applicable—necessarily leave out, as Wittgenstein notes, some of what makes it the particular thing it is (Z, 568).23 That something, however, in its particularity, must have been perceptually present to us—however indeterminately—prior to our attending to it with words; for otherwise, it would not have drawn our attention, and there would have been nothing for us to try be faithful (or unfaithful) to with our words (see PP, 28ff./30ff.) (and for  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).

23

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science to strive to ‘translate into precise language’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (PP, xviii/lxxxii)). There is therefore a sense in which even what we do speak of, or describe, belongs to the perceived background against which our words acquire their sense. And it should further be noted that when we talk about or describe something, we are not talking about or describing our perceptual relation to it. So while it is true, and important, that we never attend to the background of our attending to something, and certainly do not attend to our relation to the background as background, I wish to propose that at the root of Wittgenstein’s special difficulties in this area lies the tendency of our ordinary and normal employment of words to be focused on capturing and objectifying—well enough for present intents and purposes—the world that comes into view in perception, rather than on our perceptual relation to that world, where that includes our perceptual relation to the background conditions of sense. It is for that reason that reminders about the ordinary and normal employment of our words are not going to shed much direct light on that relation, and might actually lead one astray. In its tendency to bypass our perceptual experience in favor of its objects, our ordinary and normal employment of words participates in what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, refers to as our ‘natural attitude’. The natural attitude, according to Husserl, is that of being “immersed naively in the world” and “accept[ing] the experienced as such”24—focusing on “objects, values, goals,” rather than “on the experiencing of [one’s] life”.25 Husserl’s “bracketing,” or epoché is meant to counteract our tendency to focus on the objects of perception, as objectively thought about and understood, and to overlook our experiencing of them—to overlook, that is, how those objects actually present themselves to us, and how we relate to them, before we begin to reflect on and theorize about perception from the perspective of the natural sciences, and therefore on the basis of what we take ourselves to already know, objectively, about what we perceive. Merleau-Ponty invokes the ‘natural attitude’ and the difficulty it creates for the phenomenologist when he says, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, that ‘our existence is too tightly held in the world to be able to know itself as such at the moment when it is thrown into the world’ (PP, xv/lxxviii). He comes back to that idea early in the first chapter of that book, when he says that ‘we are caught up in the world and… do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it’ (PP, 5/5). This natural involvement with the world, which Merleau-Ponty later refers to as our ‘obsession with being’ (PP, 70/73), culminates in the constitution of an objective world, which (failing to heed Kant’s warnings!) we tend to think of as ‘a world in itself’ (PP, 41/43)—fully and finally determinate, and wholly independent of our experience of it (cf. PP, 47/48). This, as I earlier noted, is the objectivist prejudice shared by both empiricists-naturalists and intellectualists-rationalists.  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. 24

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The main obstacle to understanding perception, and hence behavior, Merleau-­ Ponty argues, is the tendency to take the objective world—that is, the world as objectively construed—as the starting point in our theorizing about perception. In trying to reconstruct perception on the basis of what we take ourselves to already know objectively, we commit what Merleau-Ponty, following Köhler, calls ‘the experience error’: ‘we make perception out of things perceived … And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end up understanding neither’ (PP, 5/5). ‘Our perception,’ he similarly says later on, ‘ends in objects, and the object once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experience of it which we have had or could have’ (PP, 67/69).26 The task of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty writes, is therefore ‘to rediscover phenomena, the layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us, the system of “self-others-things” as it comes into being; to reawaken perception and foil its trick of allowing us to forget it as a fact and as perception in the interest of the object which it presents to us and of the rational tradition to which it gives rise’ (PP, 57/57). Now, if it is of the essence of normal perception to overlook itself in the interest of the object which it presents us—if, in other words, we do not perceive perception, do not perceptually attend to our perceptual relation to whatever it is we are perceiving and to the background against which we attend to it perceptually, and against which it has whatever sense it has for us—then it is only to be expected that our ordinary and normal use of words will participate in, and reflect, that overlooking of our pre-reflective perceptual experience. And if that’s right, then there is reason to worry that the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation, insofar as it takes its bearing from the ordinary and normal use of our words, will only take us so far when it comes to elucidating non-objective, or non-objectivized, perceptual experience, where that includes our perceptual relation to what Wittgenstein calls ‘our form of life’. And it might lead us astray, by encouraging us to take the objective, or objectivizing, senses of our words as primary, and to commit the experience error. Wittgenstein himself sometimes commits the experience error in his later writings, when he engages with the ideas of Gestalt psychologists. In a number of his remarks, he betrays a tendency to take ‘seeing’ in what he refers to as its ‘first use’ (PPF, 111), and therefore the objectivist perspective, as primary (cf. RPPI, 1035; and RPPII, 474).27 This comes out most clearly when he responds to Köhler’s idea  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). 26

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that when figure and background switch for us as we look at figures such as the ‘double-cross’, lines that we previously saw as ‘belonging together’ are no longer seen as ‘belonging together’, and vice versa.28 Wittgenstein protests that Köhler’s account is misleading, because ‘…the radii that belonged together before belong together now as well; only one time they bound an ‘arm’, another time an intervening space’ (Wittgenstein RPPI, 1117). But, as Merleau-Ponty notes early on in the Phenomenology of Perception (PP, 4/4) and as empirical studies have shown,29 we actually do perceive the outline of the figure we focus on as belonging to the figure, and not to its background (or intervening space), whose shape is perceptually indeterminate (cf. PP, 13/13);30 and this, despite the fact—of which Köhler was well aware!—that when we consider the matter objectively, the outline of the figure is equally the outline of its background. Köhler was not forgetting or ignoring the objective, or objectivist, perspective. He was challenging the tendency, to which Wittgenstein has here succumbed, to take it as the starting point when attempting to describe and understand the world as pre-reflectively perceived.31 Again, I’m not denying that to project oneself imaginatively into situations of significant speech, as Wittgenstein’s reminders invite us to do, is to make oneself alive to features of our form of life that contribute to the shaping of those situations and to the sense of anything we might say or do in them. On the contrary, it has been my contention from the start that we must, somehow, be alive to the background conditions of sense, both in the course of everyday discourse and when engaged in the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation. The basic contention of this section is just that we do not primarily, or commonly, use language in order to represent, or for that matter express, our form of life as the background of our language-games, and how we relate to it as producers and perceivers of linguistic sense; and this means that our form of life as the background of our language-games, and our relation to it as that background, are bound to remain, precisely, in the background of the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation. The difficulty is to make them come to the fore, without distorting them. This, at the most general level, is just the difficulty of phenomenology, and in the present case is the difficulty of putting our relation to our form of life—qua the background of our language-games—into words,  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. 28

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without thereby distorting it. My more recent proposal has been that the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation is not best suited for that task. It is worth noting in this connection that the later Wittgenstein was suspicious of phenomenology, and one important tenet of his grammatical investigation is that it is meant, among other things, to turn our attention away from our first-personal experiences. This comes out clearly and explicitly in the remarks on aspects, where Wittgenstein again and again calls upon his reader (or himself) to ‘forget, forget that you have these experiences yourself (RPPII: 531), to think about aspect perception from a third person perspective (PPF: 241 and 204), and not to try to ‘analyze your own inner experience’ (PPF: 188). This, I have proposed in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, is an effective and well-motivated approach when it comes to the sort of philosophically troublesome concepts that are the focus of the first part of the Investigations: ‘learning’, ‘understanding’, ‘meaning’, ‘naming’, ‘thinking’, ‘reading’, ‘intending’, and so on. When it comes to concepts such as those, the attempt to elucidate them by way of reflection on the experiences we undergo when we learn, understand, think, intend, and so on, is bound to lead us astray. Here, what is needed is what Cavell has insightfully called Wittgenstein’s ‘undoing of the psychologizing of psychology’.32 However, when we wish, not to disentangle conceptual entanglements, but to bring out and elucidate our pre-­ reflective perceptual experience—our relation to the world as it perceptually presents itself to us before we put it into words—we need, at the very least, to supplement the Wittgensteinian method of grammatical investigation that proceeds on the basis of ‘reminders’ (PI, 127) of the ‘kind of statements we make about phenomena’ (PI, 90). For we do not normally make statements about our pre-reflective, perceptual experience; and even words that might be thought to refer us to that experience— ‘see’, ‘hear, ‘feel’, ‘notice’, and so on—are not normally used for describing, or expressing, that experience. On the common, ‘primary’ use of ‘see’, for example— that’s Wittgenstein’s ‘first use’ of the word (PPF, 111)—what someone saw, is, as Travis has noted, mostly a matter of what was there, anyway, objectively, to be seen.33 I am not saying that the difficulty of phenomenology may not, in principle, be overcome, or that our language somehow prevents us, in principle, from overcoming it. The work of phenomenology—the work, as we may now put it, of bringing to light and elucidating the background of anything we may do or say (or feel, or think, or perceive…) and our relation to it—might be never-ending (see PP, xiv/ lxxviii), but it is not impossible. Our words may be used for describing, or expressing, our perceptual experience, and the world as it presents itself to us prior to being thought or talked about. That our words may thus be used is itself part of ‘the grammar of our language’, and therefore part of what the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation may bring out. It is brought out, for example, in Wittgenstein’s remarks

 Must We Mean What We Say?, 91.  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.

32 33

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on aspect perception. The ‘second use’ of ‘see’ Wittgenstein describes at the opening of section xi, for example, refers us, precisely, to a particular sort of perceptual experience—namely, that of noticing, or being struck by, an aspect. Still, it is one thing to bring out and elucidate the grammar of the phenomenological use of our words and its differences from their objectivizing, or object-­ oriented, uses, and another thing to do phenomenology (just as it is one thing to bring out and elucidate the grammar of empirical science, for example, or of aesthetic evaluation, and quite another thing to engage in empirical science, or in aesthetic evaluation). And what I’ve proposed is, first, that Wittgenstein’s invocation of ‘form (or forms) of life’ was prompted by questions that are best answered by way of phenomenology, and, second, that his grammatical investigation suffers limitations in that area. To be clear, it is open to Wittgenstein, just as it is open to Merleau-Ponty and to everyone else, to try to describe perceptual experience, including our perceptual relation to the background conditions of sense.34 And this, as we saw in Sect. 8.4, is something Wittgenstein does in some of his remarks. It should first of all be noted, however, that in order to do phenomenology well one needs to do more than just recognize pre-objective, pre-conceptual perceptual experience and attempt to describe it (as many people do, at least to some extent and more or less successfully, in the course of everyday life).35 But, beyond that, my point here has just been that when Wittgenstein does attempt to describe pre-reflective and pre-objective perceptual experience, he is no longer engaged in the grammatical investigation of philosophically troublesome words or concepts by way of the perspicuous representation of language-games, but rather is moving, as Cavell puts it, ‘to regions of a word’s use which cannot be assured or explained by an appeal to its ordinary language games’.36 If, as I have proposed, the primary uses, hence meanings, of our words tend to partake of the natural attitude and to focus, or focus us, on objects and their objective constellations, rather than on our perceptual experience of those objects and constellations, it is only to be expected that the phenomenologist will need to use

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.

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her words creatively—in what Wittgenstein calls their ‘secondary meanings’.37 This, if you will, is part of the Wittgensteinian grammar of ‘phenomenology’. But what it means is that when it comes to the work of phenomenology, one’s philosophical footing is not going to be secured by reminding oneself how one’s words are used ‘in the language which is their original home’ (PI, 116). That a displaced piece of furniture is no longer what it was, for example, or that everything is part and parcel of everything else, is not a piece of Wittgensteinian grammar, but rather a piece of what may aptly be called ‘perceptual grammar’. When it comes to the work of phenomenology, one still needs to avoid the ‘metaphysical’ (empty, idle) use of one’s words, if one wishes to make real progress; but leading those words back to their everyday use (PI, 116) is not going to satisfy one’s real need in that area.

 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).

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Chapter 9

Bringing the Phenomenal World into View

Abstract  Using aspect perception as a point of entry, this chapter argues that the phenomenal world—the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought about—is repressed in both Travis’s work on perception and McDowell’s. In focusing exclusively on perception as providing us with objects of judgments, or Fregean thoughts, both Travis and McDowell ignore altogether the world as it presents itself to us apart from any particular judgment or (objective) thought about it. And yet, it is that world that solicits, or elicits, movements and words from us— including what may be called ‘judgments’—and provides the background apart from which they would not have whatever sense they have for us. Keywords  Aspect perception · Perception · Judgment · Charles Travis · John McDowell · Cora diamond · The phenomenal world · Phenomenology

9.1  I ntroduction: Travis’s ‘Fundamental Question of Perception’ and the Repression of the Phenomenal World The fundamental question of perception, Charles Travis tells us, is this: ‘How can perceptual experience make the world bear (rationally) for the perceiver on what he is to think and do?’ (Perception, 3; see also 242). In taking that to be the fundamental question of perception—which means, I take it, the question that philosophers interested in perception should first and foremost attempt to answer—Travis is in very respectable company. It is the question that virtually all of the contemporary philosophers with whom he critically engages have attempted to answer as well. It is also the question that Western philosophers, at least since Kant, and arguably as early as Descartes, have taken to be fundamental. It is worth asking why that is the fundamental question, or the fundamental question, that philosophers interested in perception should focus on. In asking this, I mean not merely to suggest that there might be other equally important and interesting questions for philosophers to ask about perception. Rather, I mean to suggest © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_9

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that there might be better questions—where by ‘better’ I mean: less liable to mislead and more fruitful—for philosophers interested in perception to ask, including philosophers who wish to become clearer about the relation between the world as it presents itself to us in perception and the world as represented in our thoughts and in our justifications and rationalizations of our deeds. ‘Don’t think, but look!’, says Wittgenstein (PI, 66), one of Travis’s main sources of inspiration. Might it not be better to follow Wittgenstein’s general approach here (even if not quite his more specific procedures) and ask what, if anything, can truly be said in general terms about how human perceivers and thinkers do (normally, and abnormally) relate to the world as perceived and responded to prior to being reflected upon theoretically or becoming the object of true or false judgments or thoughts? Isn’t it obvious, and indeed as self-evident and undeniable as our own existence, that we find ourselves always already situated, which means perceptually related not just to the world of which we think and speak but to a world in which we think and speak—a world that elicits words and movements from us and against the background of which they acquire whatever sense, or rationality, they have for us? Even what we attend to and try to capture with our words—and so, if you will, that of which we think (judge, speak) truly or falsely—must somehow be present to us perceptually, however indeterminately, prior to becoming the object of a thought; for otherwise, it could not draw our attention, nor be something we could try to put into words.1 Call the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought (or talked) about, ‘the phenomenal world’. A fundamental problem with Travis’s ‘fundamental’ question—at least as Travis understands and pursues it, as virtually all of his contemporary interlocutors understand and pursue it, and as it needs to be understood in order to seem fundamental—would then be that it is liable to block that world, and our perceptual relation to it, from coming into view. And this is true even where the answer given to the question is correct as far as it goes, and better than most of its extant competitors, as I believe to be the case with Travis’s answer. In recent years, and largely under the influence of John McDowell’s appropriation of Kant and Sellars, the philosophical repression of the phenomenal world— which is nothing less than a repression of the world in which we first and foremost find ourselves, including when we philosophize—has often taken the form of opposition to something called ‘the myth of the (pre-conceptual) given’. One important merit of Travis’s work on perception is its powerful affirmation of the pre-­ conceptual(ized), perceptually given—to which our judgments, or applications of concepts, may be more or less faithful, or else unfaithful. However, Travis too ends up repressing the phenomenal world and our relation to it in his account. He mostly uses ‘things’ (or ‘things being as they are’) whenever he wishes to speak generally of what presents itself to us in perception prior to our making judgments or forming 1  Compare Merleau-Ponty: ‘But it is just as sure that the relation between a thought and its object, between the cogito and the cogitatum, contains neither the whole nor even the essential of our commerce with the world and that we have to situate that relation back within a more muted relationship with the world, within an initiation into the world upon which it rests and which is always already accomplished when the reflective return intervenes’ (The Visible and the Invisible, 35).

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thoughts about it (cf. Perception: 4), without giving any indication of how he thinks we relate perceptually to those ‘things’—as I’ve suggested we must—when we’re not forming true or false thoughts about them. And whenever he needs to say something more specific about the pre-conceptual(ized), perceptually given, or give a concrete example, he switches to an objective, third-personal perspective, and talks about ‘objects in (or features of) the shared environment’ (cf. Perception, 13, 85, 99, 231)—such as a pig or peccary on the path in front of the perceiver, or a chipmunk climbing down a tree (Perception, cf. 182, 191, 195, 225–6; see also 134 and 13)— objects, he writes, that ‘can form images on retinas’ (Perception, 100; see also 19 and 248) and are ‘fully part of a world which is what it is independent of how we stand toward it’ (Perception, 227; see also 241).2 In some moments, Travis seems to find patently absurd the idea that we play any role in the constitution, or shaping, or unification, of what presents itself to us in perception (cf. Perception 20 and 257–8). But, for the most part, his thinking about this issue is framed by his ‘fundamental question’, and his argument is therefore only directed against the idea that what presents itself to us in perception is ‘conceptualized’, in the sense of having the content, or structure, that an objective, empirical judgment might have (cf. Perception, 193–5, and 226–31). As Travis sees things, the attribution to what presents itself to us in perception of that sort of content, or structure, while aiming to secure the rationality of our judgments, actually leaves us with no coherent notion of perceptual judgment—understood as a stance, assessable in terms of truth and falsity, that we may take toward what presents itself to us in perception (cf. Perception, 193–5, and 226–30). And with this I have no disagreement. I believe Travis has shown conclusively, and I myself have argued,3 that it actually makes no sense to think of what presents itself to us perceptually—as perceptually presented—as having the content of true or false judgments (Fregean ‘thoughts’, Kantian ‘cognitions’), even apart from our judging it to be some particular way or another, in a context suitable for endowing our judgment with a determinate sense, or content. One of the most important and far-reaching upshots of Travis’s argument for the ‘context-sensitivity’ of linguistic sense is that, with respect to the sort of content capturable in sentences of the general indicative form ‘Such and such is thus and so’, what presents itself to us in perception is, as such, indeterminate (cf. Perception, 403). What Travis overlooks is the possibility that we play a role in bringing about, and sustaining, perceivable unity and sense that are not conceptual. Recognizing that role, or power that we have, I will later propose, does not commit us to positing metaphysically private intermediaries between us and the perceived world, as Travis supposes. But in order to see this, we will need to bring the phenomenal world— that is, the world as pre-reflectively perceived and responded to—into view, and to distinguish it from the world as thought of and understood in objective terms. 2  See also Travis’s ‘The Room in a View’, in Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation, Kemp, G. and Mras, G. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2016), 5. 3  ‘On When Words are Called For—Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of our World’, Inquiry 46 (2003): 473–500.

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I should say that Travis’s repression of the phenomenal world—his shift to the third-personal, objectivist perspective whenever he needs to refer more specifically to what presents itself to us in perception—is not unmotivated. For one thing, it follows Wittgenstein’s mistrust of phenomenology, on which I have elaborated elsewhere.4 Another source of motivation for the repression is that, if you think about language and linguistic expression as in the business, first and foremost, of representing the world truly or falsely, as Travis and most contemporary analytic philosophers do (but Wittgenstein did not5), then you are bound to find paradoxical any attempt to describe or otherwise bring out and elucidate by means of words the world as it presents itself to us in perception apart from being the object of true or false judgments, or thoughts. And even independently from any commitment to this or that conception of language, there is the inherent challenge of bringing out and elucidating, without thereby distorting, the world as it presents itself to us in perception before we reflect on it, and on our relation to it, from a theoretical perspective. This last is just the inherent difficulty of phenomenology. For all that, the repression of the phenomenal world in Travis’s (and not just Travis’s) work is both internally problematic and phenomenologically untenable. To begin to see why it is internally problematic, ask yourself to what exactly Travis is, or means to be, referring by ‘world’, when he talks about ‘the world’ that perception allows to be brought to bear (rationally) on what we are to think and do, or when he talks about the things we perceive as ‘fully part of a world which is what it is independent of how we stand toward it’. He might have been talking about the phenomenal world; and I will later suggest that the phenomenal world is the world to which our judgments may be more or less faithful (as well as the world against the background of which those judgments may be understood and assessed).6 But that world, as we shall see, is not independent of how we stand toward it. Travis’s talk of a world independent of how we stand toward it brings to mind the Kantian notion of ‘the world as it is in itself’—that is, the world as it is apart from our perceiving and making sense of it. But, as Kant has taught us, thinking of the world in which determinate objects such as pigs and chipmunks relate determinately to each other temporally and spatially (standing on the path in front of us, for example, or climbing down trees), not to mention causally (forming images on retinas, for example), as a world as it is in itself, leads to philosophical nonsense and impasse. In a word, it makes no sense to think of our empirical concepts—of size, location, and direction, for example, or of cause and effect—as applying to the world apart from human judgment, and the shared background against which particular judgments have their particular sense. Travis work, not only on perception,

4  ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes Without Saying’. Travis mentions Wittgenstein’s mistrust of phenomenology in ‘The Room in a View’, 24. 5  I argue for this in Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method. 6  And compare Merleau-Ponty’s referring to the phenomenal world as ‘the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’ (PP, xviii/lxxxii).

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but also on ‘context-sensitivity’ in the philosophy of language, has helped to underscore and deepen this important Kantian lesson.7 This seems to leave us with the objective world, or the world as objectively understood, as the intended referent of Travis’s ‘world’. However, by Travis’s own lights (cf. Perception, 18; and ‘The Room in a View’, 12), and as Kant has taught us to recognize, that world—again, the world in which temporally enduring determinate objects, with their determinate properties, stand in determinate temporal and spatial relations to each other—is constituted by our judgments, against a background of shared practices and standards of measurement, experimentation, calibration, collection of and appeal to evidence, and so on. Though independent of how any particular individual might stand toward it (this is just what is meant in calling it ‘objective’), the objective world is not independent of how we—all those who, in practice, accept and respect the above-mentioned practices and standards—communally stand toward it. It therefore makes no sense, given the framework of Travis’s discussion, to think of that world as present to us perceptually prior to judgment, and as that to which our judgments are to be true, or else false.8 And it most certainly does not make sense to think about the objective world as constituting the background against which our objective judgments, or thoughts, acquire whatever sense they have for us.9 There is nothing wrong with thinking or talking about perception—what someone saw or heard, for example—from an objective perspective. We do it routinely, and not just when we engage in the scientific study of perception. But to speak from that perspective while purporting to answer Travis’s ‘fundamental’ question is to attempt to speak from two very different perspectives—play two very different language-­games—at once. A naturalist à la Quine would simply dismiss the ‘transcendental’ perspective, or deny that there is anything more to it than what is afforded from the objectivist, empirical perspective; but this is clearly not the direction Travis wishes to go: like Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, McDowell, and many of his other interlocutors and sources of philosophical inspiration, he clearly believes there is work for philosophers to do that goes beyond anything empirical science could sensibly be expected to do, especially when we wish to understand the ‘rationality’ of our ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’. I believe he is right about this. But if so, his 7  I elaborate on the way in which Travis’s ‘context-sensitivity’ underscores the Kantian lesson, in Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method. 8  This is what contemporary Kantian objectors to the empiricist-mechanistic ‘myth of the given’ have been right about; and to them Travis—in his talk of objects of perception that form images on retinas—will seem to be begging the question, or simply succumbing to the myth, or both (see McDowell’s ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, in Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 269; and ‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, in Reading Putnam, Baghramian, M. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 345–6). 9  This last point has affinity with Sellars’s and McDowell’s insistence on the distinction between ‘the space of reasons’ and ‘the realm of (natural) law’, except that the talk about ‘the space of reasons’ is an intellectualization and an abstraction of what we are beholden to, and must therefore in some way perceive, when we (try to) make, and respond to, sense. It seems to me that a better term for it would be ‘the phenomenal world’, understood as it is understood in this chapter.

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‘world’ could only sensibly refer to the phenomenal world; and that world, and our relation to it, must philosophically be confronted and elucidated. I said that Travis’s shift to the third-personal, objectivist perspective whenever he needs to say something about what presents itself to us in perception, was also ­phenomenologically untenable. In Travis’s case, the return of the repressed phenomenal world happens when he turns to consider the perception of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’, and tries to accommodate the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects within the general framework of his answer to the ‘fundamental question’. I will argue in what follows that the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects cannot be accommodated within Travis’s framework; and I will further argue that this reveals the limitations of that framework, precisely by forcing us to recognize and confront philosophically the phenomenal world and our relation to it. More specifically, the perception of aspects reveals our power to project more or less creatively, and sustain, perceivable unity and sense that are importantly not the unity and sense afforded and secured by the application of empirical concepts in objective, true or false, judgments. And this revelation should actually be welcome to anyone who wishes, as Travis does, to avoid at once the empiricist myth of the mechanically given and McDowell’s ‘conceptualization’ of perception10; and to do all that—in line with Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, and as Travis clearly aspires to do— by bringing out and elucidating what we must already, on some level and in some way, be familiar with. There is no better way of putting finally and satisfyingly to rest the spate of philosophizing inaugurated in McDowell’s Mind and World—with its roots that go all the way back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and therefore to the philosophical tradition(s) on which Kant draws and to which he responds—than to bring out the phenomenal world, and the unity and sense it has for us prior to any objective thought or judgment. For it is the phenomenal world that’s perceptually given to us; and though it is of its very essence to be hard to put satisfyingly into words, it is not a myth. It is the perceived background against which our deeds and words—including our objective thoughts and judgments—have their sense.11 Before I argue for all of this, however, I want us to have before us Travis’s answer to his ‘fundamental’ question; for his answer, as I have said, seems to me to be essentially correct—albeit only as far as it goes—and useful.

 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception opens, precisely, with a sustained argument against the empiricist’s perceptual given (on its most common versions), but then goes on to argue that extant intellectualist, or rationalist, proposals for how to amend the empiricist story cannot do justice to, or so much as make sense of, a whole range of perceptual phenomena. In this way, Merleau-Ponty prepares the ground for the introduction of the phenomenal world, or ‘field’. 11  In ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes without Saying’, I propose that this background is what Wittgenstein was gesturing at in his invocation of our ‘form of life’. 10

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9.2  T  ravis’s (Kantian) Answer to the ‘Fundamental’ Question Setting aside complications having mostly to do with his critical engagement with, on the one hand, philosophers such as McDowell who read into the phenomenal world the sort of unity, structure, and sense paradigmatically belonging to empirical statements, or ‘claims’,12 and, on the other hand, philosophers such as Tyler Burge who attribute truth- or correctness-evaluable representational content to (sub-­ conscious states of) our perceptual apparatus,13 Travis’s answer to his fundamental question is actually fairly simple. It is also, I will shortly suggest, fairly old, since it is, in essence, Kant’s answer to that question. The answer, in a word, is judgment— understood as the ‘subsumption’ of a ‘particular’ under a ‘universal’, or, in Travis’s terminology, the subsumption of the world as it presents itself to us in perception under ‘generalities’. Travis’s criticism of the two broad positions just mentioned could be summed up succinctly by saying that neither of them recognizes, or so much as allows for, the irreducible role judgment plays in moving us from perception to thought, or to true or false representation of what perception presents to us (cf. Perception, 128 and 247). Perception, on Travis’s account, presents us with ‘things’, or with ‘things being as they are’. But it does not present things to us as being some particular way, or  ‘A judgment of experience does not introduce a new kind of content, but simply endorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by the experience on which it is grounded’ (McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 49; see also 26). ‘[An] ostensible seeing that there is a red cube in front of one would be an actualization of the same conceptual capacities that would be exercised in judging that there is a red cube in front of one, with the same togetherness. This captures the fact that such an ostensible seeing would “contain” a claim whose content would be the same as that of the corresponding judgment’ (McDowell, ‘Having the World in View’, Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998), 458; see also 459, 461 and 476); and see also Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 40). In response to pressure from Travis and others, McDowell has since come to reject the view that perceptual experience has propositional content. Later I will argue that McDowell’s recent attempts to hold on to the idea that our perceptual experience is nonetheless ‘conceptual’ are phenomenologically untrue and empirically implausible. 13  See Burge, ‘Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology’, Philosophical Topics 33 (2005), 1–78. In attempting to undermine Travis’s account of perception and critique of Burge, Block attributes to him the idea that ‘representations in perception are all sub-personal’, and then claims to have provided empirical evidence that ‘we have visual representations of fearfulness of faces […]’ (‘SeeingAs in the Light of Vision Science’, 570). But this criticism misses its mark. The cognitive psychologist’s talk of sub-personal ‘representations’, whose possible sense and usefulness Travis grants, refers to what Travis calls ‘factive meaning’, or ‘effect-representing’—the kind of relation the width of a ring on a tree trunk may bear to the drought of 1923—which, according to Travis, is not the representing that may (sensibly be said to be) true or false, or correct or incorrect, of its object (cf. Perception, 24). And while it is true, as I will argue below, that Travis seems to overlook altogether the perception of physiognomic sense that is not conceptual—such as the perception of the fearfulness of a face—none of the findings Block cites in his paper support the idea that physiognomic perception consists of (anything sensibly called) representations, of fearfulness or anything else. 12

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ways—not, at any rate, if those ways are supposed to be capturable in sentences of the general form ‘This or that is such and such’.14 It is we, human perceivers and ‘thinkers’, who may judge things to be some particular ways and not others, where the ‘ways’ here are ‘generalities’, in the sense of being indefinitely and variously instantiable: for any way we may judge things to be, and however precisely we individuate that way, things could have been different in indefinitely many respects— though of course not in just any respect—and still correctly be judged to be that way (cf. Perception, 187 and 269). A thought, as Travis uses that term, is a linguistically articulable, true or false representation of things as being some particular way. Concepts, in turn, are abstractable elements of thoughts, and inherit their generality.15 Judgment, for Travis, is importantly more than mere differential response to different kinds of objects in the environment. On Travis’s account, only ‘thinkers’ can judge; and what makes perceivers thinkers is their capacity to appreciate, or assess, the propriety of any such differential responsiveness. In other words, thinkers are no mere detectors: they are capable not merely of registering, say, pigs when they see them, and responding suitably to their presence, but of finding that what presents itself as a pig ought not to count as a pig, or that what does not present itself as a pig nonetheless ought to count as one (cf. Perception, 186 and 240); not to mention the capacity of thinkers to judge that what tends to go by the name of ‘goodness’, or ‘justice’, or ‘freedom’, and so on, is not really good, or just, or free, and so on. Moreover, with the cooperation of other thinkers, thinkers can expand or otherwise alter, more or less creatively, a concept’s range of (correct) application, and hence the concept itself—for example, by coming to count beanbag chairs as chairs, or putting quarters into parking meters as feeding. Thus, the ‘conceptual capacities’ of thinkers are self-critical, open-ended, and more or less creative, in a way that the capacities of mere detectors, however 14  This, it seems to me, is the fundamental way in which Travis’s view still differs from McDowell’s, even after all of the adjustments McDowell has made to his view since Mind and World. For, even though his current official position seems to commit him otherwise, McDowell still talks of perceptual experience as if it presented things to us (competent speakers and reasoners) as being some particular way, or ways—where the ways are capturable in indicative sentences of the general form ‘this or that is such and such’ (for a fairly recent expression of this idea, see ‘The Myth of the Mind as Detached’, in Mind, Reason, and Being-In-The-World, Schear, J. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 43). For Travis, such determinate, propositional content is only brought into the picture by way of human judgments, which in turn are dependent on suitable contexts for the determination of their content. Apart from human judgment, what presents itself to us in perception is, on Travis’s view, indeterminate as far as propositional content goes. And this is crucially different from saying, as McDowell still does, that what presents itself to us in perception ‘includes any particular way it can be truly said to be’ (‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, 346, my emphasis). 15  This, in contrast with philosophers such as Jerry Fodor, for example, who take it that thoughts, or representations, are built up of representational elements, or concepts, whose representational ‘content’—what they each contribute to the representational ‘content’, or ‘truth-conditions’, of whole thoughts—is independent of the representational ‘content’ of the whole thoughts to which they may contribute (cf. Perception, 181, and 357–63).

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s­ ophisticated, are not. And, on Travis’s view, in the absence of the former capacities, no differential response to perceived objects or constellation of objects would constitute the judgment, or thought, that there is a pig in front of one, for example, or that the creature in front of one is a pig, or that one was seeing a pig (see Perception, 240). Travis’s basic objection to causal accounts such as Fodor’s of perceptually-­ based cognition (cf. Perception, 180–1 and 357–63), as well as to mechanistic accounts such as Burge’s that seek to identify a level of perceptual-but-not-yetcognitive representations (cf. Perception, 258–312), is that they attribute to our perceptual-cum-neurological apparatus a capacity to represent things as being some particular way or another, which, as he argues, is ‘the preserve of thinkers’—that is, of creatures who can also appreciate and assess the aptness of such representations (cf. Perception, 2, and 313–363). In insisting on the irreducible role of judgment in bringing together two sharply distinct sources, or resources, of empirical cognition—namely, generalities, or concepts, on the one hand, and their perceptually encountered instances, on the other hand—Travis may be seen as following in Kant’s footsteps. When Travis says that ‘conceptual capacities are liable to rely… on an irreducible sense for how the non-­ conceptual would connect to some given bit of the conceptual’ (Perception, 191), he is echoing Kant’s saying in the third Critique that we must presuppose a ‘common sense… as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition’ (CJ, 239, my emphasis)—where the successful communication of cognition requires, according to Kant, ‘a relation between the imagination and the understanding in order to associate intuitions with concepts and concepts in turn with intuitions, which flow together into cognition’ (CJ, 295–6). And when Travis argues that ‘conceptual capacities cannot always reduce to recipes’ (Perception, 191; see also 184), he is in effect reiterating the upshot of Kant’s infinite-regress-of-rules-for-the-application-of-rules argument in the first Critique—namely, that ‘judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, [but] cannot be taught’ (CPR, A133/B172).16 In Kant, ‘intuition’ refers to the contribution that, on Travis’s account, is made by perception to (an episode of) perceptual judgment: the Kantian intuition ‘can be given prior to all thought’ (CPR, B132), puts us ‘immediately’ into contact with its object (CPR, A68/B93 and A320/B377), and is ‘single’, or ‘singular’ (CPR, A320/ B377), precisely in the sense that, unlike a concept, it has no ‘reach’, as Travis puts it (Perception, 192, 247)—no instances falling under it. Concepts, for both Kant and Travis, are marked by their generality (cf. CPR, A68/B93 and A106): they have indefinitely many instances that may be different from each other in indefinitely many respects (though of course not just in any respect). For both Kant and Travis, the possible connection to (what Kant calls) intuition, in judgment—their applicability to perceptually given, particular instances—is what renders thoughts, hence concepts, meaningful, not ‘empty’ (cf. CPR, A51/B75, A62/B87, and A339–­40/ B298–9; and Perception, 189 and 249). What Travis calls ‘thoughts’ is what Kant

16  As I note in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’, this is arguably also one of the main upshots of Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘rule-following’ in the Investigations.

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calls ‘cognitions’ (Erkenntnisse)—that is, in Kant’s terminology, non-empty thoughts, thoughts that may be assessed in terms of truth and falsity by the light of the deliverances of intuition. There is one important respect, however, in which Kant’s account goes beyond anything found in Travis’s, and brings closer to view the phenomenal world: The former recognizes, while the latter methodically ignores, as I’ve noted, and sometimes seems committed to denying, the possibility, and indeed reality, of perceivable unity and sense that are non-objective and non-conceptual—unity and sense, in other words, that could not sensibly be accompanied by the Kantian ‘I think’ (CPR, B132)—but which at the same time are not simply given to us, in the sense that we play a role in enacting and sustaining them. In other words, Kant recognizes, while Travis seems committed to denying, the role in perception of what Kant calls ‘productive imagination’ (CJ, 240; and contrast Perception, 257–8). I am setting aside here the exegetical debate concerning the first Critique, between those who maintain that, on Kant’s view, all of our intuitions are ‘conceptualized’, on pain of being ‘nothing to us’ (cf. B132), and those who maintain that, on Kant’s view, intuitions must be subsumed under concepts only if they are to make a contribution to cognition (cf. A111, and B144–5).17 When it comes to Kant’s account of beauty in the third Critique, at any rate, there can no longer be any question that he recognizes the possibility, and indeed reality, of non-objective, non-­ conceptual unity and sense that are nonetheless genuinely perceived, or ‘intuited’, and intersubjectively sharable. For that is precisely the possibility, and reality, of what he calls ‘beauty’. The beautiful is described by Kant as manifesting ‘aesthetic ideas’, where an aesthetic idea is a ‘presentation of the imagination that compels (veranlasst) much thinking, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no concept, can be adequate’ (CJ, 314). Moreover, while non-objective and non-conceptual, the unity and sense exhibited by the beautiful are not merely given to us: we play a role in projecting and sustaining them, not by way of the application of concepts in true or false judgments, but rather in the way we perceptually attend to the object and take hold of it with our ‘productive and self-active’ imagination (CJ, 240). In this way, Merleau-Ponty suggests, Kant’s account of beauty prepares us for recognizing the phenomenal world, and thereby mends a crucial lacuna in the first Critique (PP, xvii-xviii/lxxxi-lxxxii). For while the first Critique presents the human subject as ‘positing a world’ by way of the formation of true or false judgments, or cognitions, it seems to forget that ‘in order to be able to assert a truth, the actual subject must in the first place have a world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose reciprocities, relationships, and involvements do not require to be made explicit in order to be exploited’ (PP, 129/131).18 Kant’s account of beauty

 For an excellent overview of the debate, and further references, see Robert Hannah, ‘The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/supplement1.html) 18  This forgetfulness, as Merleau-Ponty himself notes (PP, 304/318), is evident throughout the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of the first Critique, but seems to give way at certain points in the 17

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in the third Critique, by contrast, reveals ‘a unity of the imagination and the understanding and a unity of subjects before the object’ (PP, xvii/lxxxi)—that is, before the constitution of the objective world. It thereby helps us see that ‘the world is not what I think, but what I live’ (PP, xvi-xvii/lxxx), and that ‘the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is “lived” as ready-made or already there’ (PP, xvii/lxxxi). Elsewhere I have argued that the Wittgensteinian ‘aspect’ is grammatically akin to Kant’s ‘beauty’,19 and that the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects similarly reveals the phenomenal world and the role we play in its constitution.20 In the next section, I will point out Travis’s difficulties in accommodating the perception of aspects within the overall framework of his account, and will propose that those difficulties stem from the repression of the phenomenal world in that account. In Sect. 9.4, I will further illustrate Travis’s failure to recognize the perception of non-conceptual sense by examining a moment of mis-engagement between him and Cora Diamond. And then, in the final section, I will expand the scope of my critique and argue that John McDowell’s account of perception, which contrasts with Travis’s account in several key respects, equally partakes of that repression. The upshot of my discussion will be that what is sorely lacking in both accounts is the work of phenomenology—the work of bringing the phenomenal world, and our relation to it, into view.

9.3  T  he Difficulty Posed by Wittgensteinian Aspects to Travis’s Account of Perception Travis’s answer to the ‘fundamental’ question of perception is structured around three inter-related Fregean dichotomies: the first is that between objects in the environment that can form images on retinas—objects that are wholly independent of their perceivers and in this sense are ‘outside the mind’ (cf. Perception, 226–30)— and metaphysically private, Fregean Vorstellungen, each of which having one, and only one, owner (cf. Perception, 62ff, 82ff, and 387); the second is that between what we are passively presented with in perception, and our response to it, which for Travis is an act of thought, or judgment (cf. Perception, 399); the third, which I have ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, especially in those moments in which reason’s demand for the ‘unconditioned’ or ‘absolute’—the demand that, when combined with the idea of the empirical world as a thing in itself, generates the antinomies—is presented not merely as the demand to transcend the ‘conditions of sensibility’, but also, even primarily, as the demand to transcend the temporal unfolding of empirical investigation, or, as Kant refers to it, ‘the successive synthesis of the manifold of intuition’ (CPR, A417/B444; and see also A493/B521 and A479/B507). As I propose in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes without Saying’, Kant thereby acknowledges, in effect, that the natural home of those categories and concepts is a shared practice, or set of inter-related practices, in which we engage in, and against the background of, a world we already share with others. 19  ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘The Sound of Bedrock’. 20  ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’.

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already discussed, is that between generalities and their perceptually-encountered, singular instances. The perception of Wittgensteinian aspects gives trouble to each of these three dichotomies, as I am about to show.21 It should be kept in mind, though, that since Travis’s dichotomies are interrelated, the difficulty presented by aspect perception to any one of them may only be fully appreciated by taking into account the difficulties it presents to the other two. I begin with the dichotomy between objects in the environment and Fregean Vorstellungen. One of Travis’s central contentions is that only the former are proper objects of perception, and that failure to acknowledge this would lead us straightaway to positing objects of the second kind as objects of perception and the bases of perceptual judgments (cf. Perception, 183), which he takes—correctly in my view— to be hopeless (cf. Perception, 193, 387). In arguing for this, Travis repeatedly reminds us of the grammatical fact that ‘what someone saw is bounded by what there was, anyway, to be seen’ (Perception, 411; see also 102),22 so that ‘if Penelope is not sipping [a mojito], Sid does not see [her sipping a mojito]’ (Perception, 266); and that seems to me just right, but only as long as we are talking about the grammar of ‘see’ in what Wittgenstein refers to as its ‘first use’—a use that Wittgenstein contrasts with the use of that word in which it refers to the seeing of aspects (PPF, 111). When Travis turns to consider Wittgensteinian aspects, he remains committed to the dichotomy between environmental objects and Fregean Vorstellungen, and suggests that at least many aspects are objective ‘looks’ of things23—there for one to perceive (cf. Perception, 101 and 107),24 or ‘register’25—while others are perhaps Vorstellungen and, if so, not possible objects of true or false judgments (cf. Perception, 107–9).26 Objectifying the two aspects of the Necker cube, for example—Travis calls them ‘the A-cube’ and ‘the B-cube’—Travis suggests at some point that the two aspects are ‘objects in plain view’, which one may nonetheless fail to see27; and says elsewhere that ‘if the A-cube was Napoleon’s favourite, then to see it is to see Napoleon’s favourite’.28 The problem for Travis is that Wittgensteinian aspects are objects of perception that fall on neither side of his dichotomy29: their presence is not objectively  The grammatical and phenomenological features of aspects that I’ll be appealing to are expounded in some of the other papers in this volume, especially ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘Aspects of Perception’. 22  See also Travis’s ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, in Wittgenstein and Perception, Campbell, M. and O’Sullivan, M. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2015), 47. 23  Cf. ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57 24  See also ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 51. 25  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 48. 26  See also ‘The Room in a View’, 25–8. 27  ‘The Room in a View’, 17. 28  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49. 29  It is interesting to note that in setting up his discussion of aspects Travis seems to recognize only objective ‘looks’ (looks that the thing objectively has, and which are there for one to see) and 21

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e­ stablishable (you’d be neither wrong nor literally blind, nor necessarily lacking in attention, if you couldn’t see a particular aspect); they are not liable to cause distinct images on retinas—that is, images different from those caused by the object seen under a different aspect, or seen under no particular aspect; they are partly dependent on us (‘are subject to the will’ (PPF, 256)); and they are not to be met with just by ‘anyone suitably placed and perceptually equipped’ (Perception, 63)—not if this means that anyone suitably placed and perceptually equipped will be able to perceive any aspect perceived by someone else. (Wittgenstein’s ‘aspect-blind’ cannot perceive them, even when suitably placed; and while it is true that she is arguably not normally ‘perceptually equipped’, it’s precisely that abnormality that is hard to understand from within the framework of Travis’s account.) In all of these respects, the Wittgensteinian aspect is not part of the objective world, and is unlike pigs, chipmunks, people sipping mojitos, or any objectively establishable look any of those things might have. If a resemblance between a person’s face and her father’s has struck me, where this is the perceptual experience Wittgenstein describes at the opening of section xi (PPF, 114)—in which I come to see the father’s face in the face I’m looking at, so that the perceived physiognomy of the face I’m looking at changes, and changes wholly—rather than the perceptual judgment that there is an objectively establishable similarity between the two faces, then I do not know what it would mean ‘to learn this was not so’.30 And if I’m told that ‘the A-cube was Napoleon’s favourite’,31 the only way I can make sense of that is as meaning to say that Napoleon preferred seeing the Necker cube under the ‘A’ aspect.32 As I note later, there is an important sense in which apart from being perceived, the aspect does not exist. –And yet, for all that, it makes perfect sense to call upon others to share (the seeing of) an aspect with you, whereas—by definition, as it were—it would make no sense to call upon another to share a Fregean Vorstellung with you (cf. Perception, 234).33 subjective ‘looks’ (as when a pillar ‘looks bulgy’ to someone intoxicated) (see Perception, 101). What he misses is precisely the grammatical possibility of what Kant calls ‘subjective universal communicability’, which is neither objective nor subjective, and which according to Kant characterizes (the expression of the experience of) beauty. 30  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 53. 31  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49. 32  Travis seems to me to fudge the issue by saying that ‘the Necker cube, for example, does depict a cube in one orientation (call this the A cube) and a cube in another (call this the B-cube)’ (‘The Room in a View’, 15–16, emphasis altered), and by suggesting that ‘the Necker’s depiction of the A-cube’ is an ‘object of sight’ on par with Sid, or with a burnt toast (‘The Room in a View’, 18, my emphasis). I can only understand this as meaning that the two-dimensional drawing could serve as—it is such that, given a suitable context, it would be correct to take it to be—a depiction of a cube going this, or that, way (but not both at once). And while it may be that Napoleon liked the drawing better when it served to depict a cube going this way, rather than a cube going that way, or that in general he preferred cubes that (relative to him) went this way, we are now no longer talking about the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects, or about the seeing of something as something. 33  Travis, as I said, is ready to think of some Wittgensteinian aspects—for example, what someone sees when she sees four evenly distributed dots in a straight line as two pairs side by side, or as two dots flanking a pair of others, or when she sees the letter ‘F’ as facing right, or left—as Vorstellungen,

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The second dichotomy Travis insists on, as I’ve said, is that between what we are passively presented with in perception (cf. Perception, 130)—‘things’, or ‘things being as they are’, and a little more specifically, ‘objects in the environment’—and our response to what it presents us with, a response that for Travis must be an act of thought that consists of subsuming what we perceive under a generality, but cannot affect what we perceive, or our perceptual experience itself (cf. Perception, 257–8 and 410–411).34 The seeing of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals, however, our power to affect—within limits, to be sure, but wholly—what we perceive, rather than, and separably from, what we think or judge. Merleau-Ponty invokes the example of the Necker cube early on in the Phenomenology of Perception, in support of his claim that ‘ordinary experience draws a clear distinction between sense experience and judgment’ (PP, 34/35). ‘Even if I know that [the Necker cube] can be seen in two ways’, he says, ‘the figure in fact refuses to change its structure and my knowledge must await its intuitive realization’ (PP, 34/36); and this, he says, shows that ‘judging is not perceiving’ (PP, 34/36).35 At the same time, aspect-dawning reveals the role we play in bringing about and sustaining the perceived unity and sense—the ‘physiognomy’—of what perception presents us with. ‘The aspect’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237). To see the Necker cube as going one way or another, for example, is to perceptually take hold of the drawing in some particular way that affects its physiognomic, rather than cognitive, sense—a sense that we grasp not with our bare intellect, or Kantian ‘understanding’, but with our phenomenal, ‘lived’ (or ‘living’) body, as Husserl calls it.36 At several points in his recent attempts to accommodate aspects within his overall account of perception, Travis cites with approval Wittgenstein’s remark that when it comes to aspect perception ‘we must be careful not to think in traditional psychological categories… such as simply parsing experience into seeing and think‘things not in view’ (see ‘The Room in a View’, 22ff). He also suggests that when it comes to such aspects, the person has ‘executive authority’ over what aspect she sees (‘The Room in a View’, 25ff). This, it seems to me, misses the crucial importance of such invitations as ‘Try to see these as belonging together’, or ‘See this as facing that way’, in the teaching of mathematics, or architecture, for example, or in the appreciation of art, and in a whole range of other human activities. It also ignores the potentially far reaching consequences of a person’s seeing something one way rather than another (see Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1991), 250). In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues, on the basis of empirical evidence, that people who have a hard time seeing certain things as ‘belonging together’, or as ‘standing out’ from the rest, are significantly impaired in their acquisition and use of the most basic common nouns, or categories. ‘The categorial activity’, he writes, ‘before being a thought or a form of knowledge, is a certain manner of relating oneself to the world, and, accordingly, a style or shape of experience’ (PP, 191/197). This connects with my later argument that, pace Travis, what gets revealed in the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is of the essence of human perception. 34  See also ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49. 35  For a recent iteration of this basic argument, see Block, ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, 567–9. 36  The Crisis of the European Sciences, 107.

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ing’ (LWI, 542; cited by Travis in Perception, 399 and 410; and in ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 52); but then, when he attempts to account for the perception of aspects, he continues to hold on to those traditional categories, and proposes that aspect perception should be understood as somehow combining seeing and thinking, understood as they have been understood everywhere else in his work on perception (cf. Perception, 411; and ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 55–6 and 62).37 He suggests, for example, that to see a similarity of one face to another is ‘to bring [its] look under a certain generality… [w]hich (within a Fregean perspective, at least), is an exercise of thought’;38 and then, in order to accommodate the fact that Wittgenstein is talking about a particular sort of visual experience—which a mere judgment is not—he goes on to say that ‘[o]ne can, so to speak, drink [the look] in, study it, draw it, fantasize over it, and so on’.39 This attempt to hold on to the Fregean dichotomy between seeing and thinking, while at the same time doing justice to the phenomenology of aspect dawning, will not do, however.40 The dichotomy between ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’, which has served Travis well in in his critical response to positions such as McDowell’s that have intellectualized our perceptual experience, will need to be rethought from the ground up, if we are to understand the phenomenal world and our relation to it, as those begin to come to into view in the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects. The phenomenal world, to which aspects belong, is not an optional layer of experience that may be added to something else that is independently perceived and may become the object of Kantian judgments, or Fregean thoughts. It is the already meaningful ‘text’ that those judgments or thoughts seek to ‘translate into precise language’ (PP, xviii/lxxxii), as well as the background apart from which those judgments or thoughts would not have whatever sense they have for us. The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals an internal relation between the embodied perceiver and the phenomenal world—a relation in which how we stand toward the world affects how it presents itself to us perceptually. How the world presents itself to us therefore reflects our intentions, attitudes, and more broadly our way—which is normally largely habitual and ‘impersonal’ (‘inauthentic’, as Heidegger calls it)—of looking at, and seeing, things. The sense we perceive in the phenomenal world is a sense in which we—more or less creatively—participate.  Wittgenstein too speaks in one remark of a ‘fusion’ (Verschmelzung) of seeing and thinking (PPF, 144). But, first, he is here talking about the experience, or moment, of recognizing an acquaintance in the crowd, not about the dawning of an aspect; and in recognizing someone, you do come to know something about the objective world. And, second, as is typical of his later remarks on perception, Wittgenstein presents the idea as something he ‘would almost like to say’, and then asks ‘why does one want to say this’ (PPF, 114); so the whole tenor of the remark is more tentative, and less theoretical, than what we find in Travis’s work on perception. Admittedly, it is also more tentative and less theoretical than what we find in Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception. 38  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57. 39  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57. 40  I note that Travis’s view here, on which aspect dawning combines various sorts of (optional) experiences and an independent empirical judgment, seems very similar to that of the person that in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’ I called ‘the aspect denier’. 37

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One of the most significant omissions in Travis’s account of perception—an omission that becomes conspicuous when he turns to consider aspect perception—is his failure to recognize the internal relation between how we stand, or orient ourselves, toward the world and how it presents itself to us perceptually. On Travis’s account, we are essentially passive with respect to what presents itself to us in perception, and how it presents itself (cf. Perception, 130). The perception of Wittgensteinian aspects shows we are not. The third Fregean dichotomy Travis insists on, as we’ve seen, is that between concepts, or ‘generalities’, and instances of those concepts or generalities. The aspect, I wish to propose, is neither: it does not have the generality of a concept— does not transcend any one, or any finite set, of its instances as a concept does; and yet there is a sense in which it transcends the particular thing perceived under it, and connects it with others. Among interpreters of Wittgenstein’s on aspects, the tendency has been to identify aspects with concepts.41 And this, coupled with the idea that all (normal human) perception is aspect perception,42 has been one way of trying to substantiate the view that what we perceive is always and necessarily ‘conceptualized’. Travis, as we saw, resists this last conclusion. He resists it, by denying that all (normal human) perception is the perception of aspects (cf. Perception, 102, 411; and ‘The Room in a View’, 32). But what of the identification of aspects with concepts, which, at least in the case of some aspects, Travis appears to accept (cf. ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57)? I believe that identification is misguided, and for reasons most of which Travis himself has identified for us.43 To be sure, the same form of words with which an aspect is described could, at least in most cases, be used to express an empirical judgment—to the effect that there is an empirically establishable similarity between one face and another, for example, or that that is a rabbit, or a picture of a rabbit. But this by itself does not show, or mean, that to perceive an object under an aspect is to perceive it as falling  That aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts was first proposed by Strawson (‘Imagination and Perception’, in Kant on Pure Reason, Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press,1982), 82–99 (Originally in Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974)). It has since been proposed by Wollheim (In a supplementary essay to Art and its Objects (second edition) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)); Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in J. Cottingham & P.M.S. Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Agam-Segal (‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-Preparatory Aspects-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 0–17). 42  The earliest version of this idea is found in Strawson’s ‘Imagination and Perception’. Later versions may be found in Wollheim’s Art and its Objects (second edition); Mulhall (On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (New York: Routledge, 1990), and ‘Seeing Aspects’, in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, Glock, H. J. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)); Johnston (Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (New York: Routledge, 1993)); and Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems’). 43  A fuller version of the argument for this conclusion may be found in ‘Aspects of Perception’. Here I mostly just rehearse the findings of that argument. 41

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under an empirical concept. Neither the grammar of aspects nor their phenomenology supports the idea that they may aptly be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts. Concepts, at least as commonly thought of in contemporary analytic philosophy, are paradigmatically applied to cases in objective, truth evaluable, judgments (Fregean ‘thoughts’, Kantian ‘cognitions’). On Travis’s view, as I’ve noted, concepts are best thought of as abstracted, or abstractable, elements of such judgments.44 Seeing something under an aspect, however, is not the same as judging, or otherwise cognitively taking it to be this or that (way). Seeing a face as (similar to) another, for example, is not the same as judging it to be (similar to) another—so not the same as ‘bringing what was seen under a given generality’;45 and seeing a triangle as having fallen over is not the same as judging it to have fallen over. Aspects, Wittgenstein says, do not ‘teach us something about the external world’ (RPPI, 899); and that is the flipside of the grammatical and phenomenological dependence of the Wittgensteinian aspect on being perceived: unlike a ‘property of the object’ (PPF 247), which the object may simply be known to have and which does not depend on anyone’s perceptual experience of it for its presence, the aspect ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way’ (PPF, 237). Here it might be thought, and Travis at some point seems to suggest, that though seeing something under an aspect is not the same as thinking or judging that it is this or that (way), the aspect may still be identified with a thought about the object that is merely entertained, or merely imagined to be true.46 This will not do either, however. As I’ve argued in ‘Aspects of Perception’, seeing one face as (similar to) another, for example, is, grammatically, not the same as entertaining the thought that it is, or imagining it to be, similar to another. Nor is it the same as ‘acquiescence in [the] appearance’ of their being similar (Perception, 405). If a concept is something that may contribute to—or, as Travis proposes, is abstractable from—the content of judgments or Fregean ‘thoughts’, however hypothetically or even counterfactually entertained; if, in other words, the application of the concept C to a case is what may be expressed by asserting, or even just hypothesizing, that the case is (a case of) c; then what dawns on us when a Wittgensteinian aspect dawns on us is not a concept; nor may it be identified in terms of one. And this is true regard44  McDowell seems to agree (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263); but then he goes on to say that this is compatible with thinking that in discursive activity—and so in judgments, which he says can be thought of as ‘inner analogues to assertions’ (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 262)— ‘one puts contents together, in a way that can be modelled on stringing meaningful expressions together in discourse literally so called’ (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263). For Travis, this idea that the contents of judgment are put together in the way that words are put together when we talk, spoils the Fregean-contextualist insight of the primacy of whole thoughts (cf. Perception, 223 and 250). 45  ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 55. 46  For this idea, see Wollheim’s Art and its Objects, 220–1. And Travis similarly suggests that our relation to aspects might usefully be thought of as ‘Pyrrhonian’ (Perception, 409–412), where a Pyrrhonian attitude ‘has the content of a belief’, but lacks the commitment to (objective) truth that beliefs require (Perception, 405).

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less of whether the application is ‘committed’, as Travis puts it, or merely entertained or imagined, or acquiesced in. The same conclusion—that aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts—may also be reached by considering the phenomenological (as well as grammatical) inseparability of the aspect from the object perceived under it.47 An empirical concept does not depend for its identity, as the particular concept it is, on any one of its instantiations, or instances. This is precisely the sense in which it is general. Nor can any one of its instantiations, or any finite set of them, serve to fully define it, or what Travis calls ‘its reach’ (cf. Perception, 237, and 269–70). Moreover, the presence of some perceived empirical property, and equally the truth of some perceptual judgment about some object, does not depend on anyone’s perceptual experience of the object. This is precisely what is meant in calling empirical properties, and empirical judgments, objective. Normally, if I want you to know what I see (or otherwise perceive) in Wittgenstein’s first, ‘objective’ sense of ‘see’ (PPF, 111), I just need to tell you; and in telling you, I could be telling you exactly what I see: insofar as that ‘object of sight’ goes, you may thereby come to know its presence as well as I do, and even be entitled to assure others of its presence. By contrast, the aspect is not separable from the object perceived under it; and the presence of the aspect does depend on people’s experience of it. Apart from being perceived, the aspect does not exist: as I’ve already noted, following Wittgenstein, it lasts only as long as one is occupied with the object in a particular way. This, again, is the flipside of the point reached above that the aspect is not part of the objective world. If I want to you to know what I see (or otherwise perceive) in Wittgenstein’s second sense of ‘see’, it would not do just to tell you. I would need to get you to see it for yourself. For what I see is not just, or simply, a rabbit, or a picture of a rabbit, or an empirically establishable (and challengeable) similarity between two faces, which would be there even if I wasn’t attending to the object perceptually in a particular way. What I see is the duck-rabbit as a rabbit, or someone else’s face in this person’s face. What we have here, Merleau-Ponty suggest, is perceived, physiognomic sense that—unlike the sense captured in concepts—is inseparable from, or ‘clings to’, what has it, and is inseparable from our perceptual experience of it (cf. PP, 147/148). It is precisely not the sense that may fully be captured by (the application of) a concept. I’ve argued that Wittgensteinian aspects do not have the generality of concepts. Let me say why they may not aptly be thought of as just instances of generalities either, and therefore fall on neither side of Travis’s dichotomy. My basic point here is just that the aspect does connect the object seen under it with other objects—and more broadly and precisely with the rest of our phenomenal world—albeit not in the way that a concept, or its application, does. As I’ve proposed in ‘Aspects of Perception’, following Wittgenstein, the aspect is an internal relation between the object attended to perceptually and other objects. In this way, or sense, it transcends the particularity of the perceived object and connects it with the rest of our phenom-

47

 This topic was broached in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’.

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enal world, however temporarily and indeterminately. It thereby reveals the pre-­ conceptual unity and sense of the phenomenal world.48

9.4  Sense Perception Travis, I have argued, misses the peculiar grammatical and phenomenological position of the Wittgensteinian aspect—its being neither objective nor metaphysically private, its being inseparable from the thing that “has” it while at the same time connecting that particular thing with others and with the rest of our phenomenal world. The Wittgensteinian aspect presents us with perceivable unity and sense that are non-conceptual and yet are intersubjectively sharable; and in this, it begins to reveal the phenomenal world. Travis, I have argued, misses the reality of perceivable and pre-conceptual unity and sense, and at times seems committed to denying it, thereby repressing, in effect, the phenomenal world. Let me offer one more illustration of that repression. In concluding a paper that aims at pressing McDowell to recognize and disown—some twenty odd years after the publication of Mind and World—a lingering intellectualism, or conceptualism, in his account of perception, Travis cites with approval Hilary Putnam, who in turn is citing with approval a passage from Cora Diamond. In that passage, Diamond says that when we say of two faces that they have the same expression,

48  The aspect’s combination of inseparability from what “has” it and transcendence of what “has” it, which I’ve tried to bring out, might seem paradoxical. It is therefore worth noting that this combination actually characterizes, as Wittgenstein suggests, our understanding of works of art, or the relation between such works and their sense, or what they express:

Doesn’t the [musical] theme point to anything beyond itself? Oh yes! But this means: the impression it makes on me is connected with things in its environment—for example, with the existence of the German language and its intonation, but that means with the whole range of our language games. If I say for instance: here it’s as though a conclusion were being drawn, here as though someone were expressing agreement, or as though this were a reply to what came before, —my understanding of it presupposes my familiarity with conclusions, expressions of agreement, replies. A theme, no less than a face, wears an expression. “The repeat is necessary”. In what respect is it necessary? Well, sing it, and you will see that only the repeat gives it its tremendous power. –Don’t we have an impression that a model for this theme already exists in reality and the theme only approaches it, corresponds to it, if this section is repeated?… Yet there just is no paradigm apart from the theme itself. And yet again there is a paradigm apart from the theme: namely, the rhythm of our language, of our thinking and feeling (CV, 51-2; and see also PI, 527, 531, and 533).

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This is not like saying that the mouths are the same length, the eyes the same distance apart: it is not that kind of description. But it is not a description of something else, the expression, distinct from that curved line, those two dots, and so on.49

For Travis, this passage simply confirms his view that ‘to see things which are present in this sort of way, one needs to have the non-conceptual in view; something on which to exercise capacities to link that of a sort to fall under given generalities with the generalities it in fact falls under’ (Perception, 196–7). This, it seems to me, is to misread Diamond; and what Travis misses in the passage from Diamond is precisely what goes missing in his account of perception. For here and in the rest of her paper, Diamond is concerned, precisely, with the perception of sense that cannot be captured by means of the application of concepts in objective, true or false, judgments. Diamond writes in response to what she sees as two opposing but equally misguided ways of thinking about the sense that things—she is especially concerned in this paper with mathematical activities such as counting or constructing a proof— may have for us. On the first way of thinking, the distinction between sense and nonsense, as well as the particular senses things (may) have for us, are taken to be establishable ‘from sideways on’, as McDowell has put it, and independently of anything peculiar to us.50 On the second way, they are taken to be arbitrary, purely conventional, merely (collectively) subjective, wholly up to us. On the first way, the rules and concepts that guide and inform our mathematical practices (for example) are, or ought to be, beholden to a (mathematical) reality that is somehow imagined to be altogether external to and independent of those rules and practices, and assessable by the light of that reality; on the second way, those rules and concepts constitute (mathematical) sense, and might have been replaced by other rules and concepts that would have been equally valid, or sensible to us, once we got the hang of them. Diamond is especially concerned with readers of Wittgenstein—in this particular paper, mostly Michael Dummett—who, seeing that Wittgenstein repeatedly questions the first way of thinking about sense and nonsense, are moved to attribute to him the second. Noting that the second way, just like the first, presupposes a perspective—imagined to be available to the philosopher—altogether external to how we see and respond to things, to what sense we find in them under given circumstances and against the background of the history of our practices and more broadly our culture and its history, Diamond is attempting to dissolve the whole problematic by questioning the (intelligibility of the) very notion, or fantasy, of such a philosophical perspective, and by trying to get us to see, or acknowledge, that our perception of sense is neither grounded, or groundable, in something else and assessable from sideways on, nor (because of that) arbitrary or merely conventional. She is trying to get us to see that we can make sense of neither way of thinking about sense. Specifically, Diamond proposes that the sense some activity—counting, say— has for us, is not reducible to, or determined by, any set of rules that may be seen to

 The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1991), 249; cited by Travis in Perception, 196. 50  The Realistic Spirit, 185. 49

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be guiding us, whether explicitly or tacitly, when we engage in it. In the part of her paper from which Travis quotes, Diamond likens seeing one activity as having the same sense as another, or, alternatively, seeing one activity in another51—even though the two activities are not identical in their rules—to seeing two faces as having the same expression, even though the two faces are not identical in their objectively establishable properties.52 The perceived expression of a face, just like—or being—a Wittgensteinian aspect, is not reducible to the objective features of the face, and at the same time is not separable from the face (as a concept or ‘generality’ would be); and in this, Diamond proposes, the expression of a face is like the sense of an activity. Diamond proposes that to ask philosophically about some activity, ‘If a difference in sense is not a matter of different rules, what is it?’ is like asking, ‘If the description of the expression on a picture face is not just a complicated method of describing lines and dots, what is being described?’; and she goes on to say that ‘it is not a shortcoming of philosophy that it should not be able to produce a something in reply’53—that is, it is not a shortcoming of philosophy that it cannot locate pre-conceptual perceived sense in the objective world, or give an account of the former in terms of the latter. A little later, and following Wittgenstein, Diamond likens the sense a mathematical activity (or a move in such an activity) may have, or fail to have, for us to the sense that a sequence of musical notes may have, or fail to have, for us. When a sequence of notes makes no sense, Wittgenstein writes, ‘I can’t sing it with expression. I cannot move with it’.54 Contrary to how Travis reads her, Diamond is not concerned here with the sense we make, or fail to make, when we (attempt to) link what we perceive with a generality. She is concerned with the sense perceived things may have for us prior to any such linking, the sense that such linking—should we attempt it—may try to capture, or ‘translate’ (PP, xviii/lxxxii), well enough for certain intents and purposes, but to which, as in the case of Kantian beauty, no such linking would do full justice. Diamond also says that even though the sense she is talking about is there to be perceived and shared, and therefore is not aptly thought of as a mere psychological accompaniment of the perceived thing, or activity55; and even though the sense we find in things manifests itself in how we comport ourselves toward them, and in how we go on—following, or continuing, a line of conversation, or a proof, or a sequence of musical notes, or an aesthetic evaluation—and therefore has important and pervasive implications56; there is always the possibility of finding that our attunement with others in what makes sense to us, and how, has reached its end: an activity, or  The Realistic Spirit, 249.  Diamond later notes the possibility of being struck by the expression of a face without seeing it as the same as that of another face (The Realistic Spirit, 258). 53  The Realistic Spirit, 249. 54  Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, I, 116; cited by Diamond in The Realistic Spirit, 251. 55  The Realistic Spirit, 248 and 251, fn. 18. 56  The Realistic Spirit, 250. 51 52

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a thing, may have a different sense for someone else than it has for us, or have no sense at all for her.57 And, in the face of disagreement with others at that level, there would be nothing else for us to appeal to—which importantly does not mean nothing else we could do!—in order to restore the attunement, or justify how we go on. ‘I must begin with the distinction between sense and nonsense,’ Wittgenstein writes. ‘Nothing is possible prior to that. I can’t give it a foundation’ (PG, part I, Section 6: 81). What, at any given moment, makes sense to us, or fails to make sense, and how, is what we must begin with: it can neither intelligibly be thought to be grounded, objectively, in something else, nor intelligibly be thought to be arbitrary or up to us to choose or decide—not even collectively. That’s Diamond’s main point in the paper from which Travis quotes. Travis, it seems to me, would actually agree with that point, thus put; but, guided throughout by what he takes to be the fundamental question of perception, he appears to only recognize the sort of sense that is expressible in true or false, objective judgments, and to miss altogether the sense we perceive and respond to prior to any such judgment—the sense apart from which such judgments would not have their sense, or even be possible.

9.5  T  ravis, McDowell, and Two Ways of Missing a Hole in the Wall Responding to a passage in which McDowell claims that even though a cat can see that an opening in a wall is big enough for it to go through, and so can he, McDowell, see that an opening in the wall is big enough for him to go through, his experience would nonetheless be ‘conceptual’ in the way that the cat’s experience would not be,58 Travis writes: I note that if what John takes in, perceptually, is just what he sees, or what is before his eyes, then, since it is the same scene John and the cat see, their perceptual intake is so far the same. I note too that that the hole in the wall is big enough for a philosopher to pass through, or just that there is a hole, is not in the scene, as the hole itself is (Perception, 194).

A little later Travis adds that one’s conceptual capacities ‘have no role in constituting what [one conceptually] responds to’ (Perception, 195). These reminders are useful for the removal of certain sorts of philosophical confusions that stem from the tendency to attribute to our perceptual experience of the world the form and content of our objective talk about the world. But, beyond this, what do these and similar reminders teach us about perception? Granted, in Wittgenstein’s ‘first use’ of ‘see’ (PPF, 111), one can only see what is objectively there to be seen. And granted, the sort of content, or sense, that may be expressed by indicative sentences of the general form ‘This or that is such and such’, may not sensibly be thought to be presented to us perceptually; as far as that sort of content  See The Realistic Spirit, 248 and 251.  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 321.

57 58

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or sense is concerned, what presents itself to us in perception is indeterminate, and awaits our determination. But again, what does that teach us about perception— about the world as perceived, and about our relation to that world before it becomes the object of our judgments? This is not the place to discuss in full detail McDowell’s work on perception and how his ideas on this topic have evolved over the years. I will only say that I have found entirely compelling Travis’s criticisms of McDowell’s various attempts to substantiate, or salvage, in one way or another, his early idea from Mind and World that our perceptual experience is, as such, ‘conceptual(ized)’. In his most recent attempts to salvage the idea, by proposing that our perceptual experience has ‘intuitional’ rather than ‘propositional’ content, and unity,59 McDowell seems to me to be groping toward the idea, and reality, of physiognomic perception—for example, of an animal’s ‘posture’.60 In this, he is groping toward something Travis has missed; and this—I mean, Travis’s seeming repression of the way in which the world as perceived makes sense to the embodied subject apart from her representing it truly or falsely, and McDowell’s sense that Travis is repressing something in that area— seems to me to underlie McDowell’s repeated charge that Travis has succumbed to the Myth of the Given.61 McDowell spoils the insight, however, by holding on to the idea that the intuitional unity we perceive, while not ‘propositional’, is still ‘conceptual’, or (following Kant) ‘categorial’.62 And this, I believe, is hopeless. To begin with, if, as Travis has argued following Frege, and as I have argued, concepts are best thought of as (abstracted, or abstractable) elements of Fregean ‘thoughts’, or Kantian ‘Erkenntnisse’, it is not clear they can be divorced from propositions in the way McDowell seems to propose. Second, and even more importantly, McDowell’s recent proposal flies in the face of the phenomenology of perception: even the most basic ‘modes of space occupancy’ such as ‘shape, size, position, [and] movement or its absence’,63 are perceived physiognomically—that is, as elements of unified, significant wholes that solicit, or elicit, affective and motor responses from us—before we capture them, if and when we do, objectively, by means of mathematical and empirical concepts (cf. PP, 61/62). Even the most basic elements of perceptual experience are perceived within the context of a temporally extended perceptual field of actual and potential bodily engagement—a field whose elements form a system in which they are all internally related to each other (cf. PP, 46–7/47–8, 52ff/53ff., 209ff/216ff., and 313/326), so that colors have affective and motor significance (PP, 210ff./216ff.), and the blue of a carpet, for example, ‘would never be the same blue were it not a woolly blue’ (PP, 313/326).64 When we reach out with

 See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 260.  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261. 61  See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 269; and ‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, 345. 62  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261; and ‘What Myth?’, Inquiry 50 (2007), 347. 63  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261. 64  Contrast this understanding of perception with the mechanistic-atomistic approach that, accord59 60

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our hand to grab a ball, or a glass of water, and our arm, and indeed our whole body, adjusts itself to that task, we perceive and respond to the perceived shape, size, weight, movement, and so on, of the object, without anything that could sensibly be thought of as the application of empirical, objective concepts of shape, size, and so on. Concepts, understood as (abstractable) elements of true or false empirical judgments, are instruments of objectification: they enable us to introduce publicly establishable determinacy into the phenomenal world—a world that is always already shared with others, and which is also the background against which all that we do, including what may be called ‘the application of concepts’, acquires its more or less determinate sense. As for the differences and similarities between human perception and that of cats, one crucial mistake that Travis and McDowell both make, it seems to me, is to take it that the fundamental difference between us and cats is that we have conceptual capacities whereas cats don’t. The difference between McDowell and Travis is just that the former insists, while the latter denies, that our conceptual capacities somehow affect what we are presented with in perception. What Travis and McDowell both miss is the possibility that while for both us and cats the world as perceived is a field of actual and potential bodily engagement—where that, in our case, importantly includes from some fairly early point in life linguistic, and linguistically informed, engagement—our normal relation to that world manifests levels of creativity, or freedom, not manifested in cats’ perceptual relation to their world.65 The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals what Merleau-Ponty calls our ‘genius for ambiguity’ (PP, 189/195), and our capacity to project, more or less creatively, non-conceptual, perceivable sense, onto what’s given to us in perception. Human babies few months old already manifest this capacity in their playful, humorous, teasing interactions with other people.66 Moreover, children whose capacity for such creative projection of sense is significantly impaired, will invariably be impaired in their use and understanding of words, and so in what may be called their conceptual capacities (see PP, 191ff/197ff.). There is no denying that our phenomenal world is incomparably broader, more complex, and multi-layered than that of cats. And there is also no denying that that difference is largely due to—or anyway inseparable from—our possession of language. What I’m challenging is the failure to appreciate the continuity between our perception and inhabitation of a cultural world of linguistically expressible m ­ eanings,

ing to Ned Block, is characteristic of vision science, on which there are ‘low level’ ‘perceptual attributives’—‘shape, spatial relations (including position and size), geometrical motion, texture, brightness and color’—‘that are the products of sensory transduction and are causally involved in the production of other [“high level”] visual attributives’ (‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014), 560). 65  Merleau-Ponty suggests that the same similarity and difference hold between human perception and the perception of insects (PP, 77–8/80–1). 66  For plenty of empirical evidence, see Vasudevi Reddy’s How Infants Know Minds (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially chapters 8–10.

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on the one hand, and, on the other hand, our perception and inhabitation of a “natural” world that is already a world of meaningful phenomena, and meaningful situations, which are comprehended by our phenomenal body and responded to in normatively assessable ways before, and often apart from, becoming the objects of true or false judgments.67 In insisting that the cat, facing the same (objectively identified) scene we face, would see essentially what we see, Travis seems to me to be led by a piece of Wittgensteinian grammar (of ‘see’ in Wittgenstein’s ‘first use’) to overlook the phenomenal world altogether—ours, as well as that of the cat. If the world as perceived—ours as well as the cat’s—is perceived as a field of actual and potential bodily engagement; if things present themselves to us, first and foremost, as having affective and motor significances (affordances, solicitations…); then our phenomenal world is surely different from that of cats, and what we perceive—how things present themselves to us perceptually, even apart from any judgment or application of a concept—is different from what a cat perceives, even when ‘facing the same scene’. Let’s go back to that hole in the wall, and remind ourselves why we are talking about it. We are talking about it because we are discussing Travis’s critical response to McDowell; and McDowell is in turn responding to Dreyfus, who has tried to impress McDowell with the reality of pre-reflective, pre-conceptual, ‘absorbed coping’, in which the world presents itself to the perceiver not as the object of true or false judgments, but rather as a field of actual and potential bodily engagement, where the sense of things perceived is, first and foremost, a matter of their affective and motor value—the embodied responses they solicit, elicit, allow, inhibit…68 Depending on the situation in which we perceptually attend to it, the hole in the wall may present itself to the perceiver as a happily discovered way out, or as exposing her to danger or to the cold, or as something out of order that needs to be fixed; or the perceived sense, or significance, of the hole may be indeterminate; or it is perceived but not focused on: something else has drawn our attention and the hole has become a more or less significant part of the background against which that other thing is attended to (perhaps as yet another one of those things that need fixing). A striking feature of Travis’s account of perception—and in this it is similar to McDowell’s, and to any number of other accounts of perception given by analytic philosophers in recent years—is that it virtually ignores the fact that in normal human (and not just human) perception, the perceptual field is always organized into figure and background that relate to each other internally (see PP, 4/4 and 67–8/69–70).69 Ipso facto, those accounts also ignore altogether the question of

 I therefore agree with Dreyfus that an important task facing ‘existential-phenomenologists’ is to ‘spell out in much greater detail how conceptuality arises on the basis of being-in-the-world’ (‘The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’, 31). The chapter on speech and expression in the Phenomenology of Perception would be a good beginning for that work. 68  The Gibsonian notion of ‘affordances’, commonly used in these debates, seems to me much too narrow for capturing the variety of affective and motor values perceived things can present themselves as having. 69  I discuss the internal relation between figure and background in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy’ and in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’. I say ‘normal 67

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what calls for, or motivates, the perceiver’s attention, and the role of the perceiver in effecting the figure-background structure by attending to something in a particular way and ‘putting its surroundings in abeyance’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (PP, 67/70). This is a lot to leave out, in accounts purporting to be of perception. Coming back to Dreyfus’s phenomenological critique of McDowell’s account of perception, his immediate and crucial point is that when the hole presents itself as affording escape from imminent danger, for example, it may—immediately and without any reflection—‘solicit’ appropriate movement from the distressed perceiver, who may run or crawl through it, adjusting its body appropriately, without ever judging, nor needing to judge, that it is big enough, given its and her objective size, for her to pass through. McDowell is quick to respond to Dreyfus that his account allows for that level of perceptual relation to the world, and that it’s just that, for ‘mature human beings’, that level of ‘absorbed coping’ has been incorporated into a conceptually articulated ‘world’, or ‘world-view’: the hole that would have presented itself to the pre- or non-verbal creature merely as soliciting or calling forth, or allowing for, a certain bodily response, has now become ‘conceptual’.70 ‘Conceptual’ in what sense? McDowell’s most recent answer to this seems to be that the hole in the wall (for example), as presented in perception, ‘is already suitable to be the content associated with a discursive capacity’.71 In other words, and put plainly, the hole in the wall, or our perceptual experience of it, is ‘conceptual’ just in the sense that it could become the object of objective, ‘rational’ judgment and talk—for example, to the effect that it is big enough for a cat to go through. Put thus plainly, McDowell’s most recent incarnation of the idea that all of our perceptual experience is ‘conceptual(ized)’ may seem underwhelming: neither Travis, nor Dreyfus, nor I suppose anyone else, would deny that anything we perceive could become, and therefore is obviously fit to become, the object of indefinitely many judgments. But what does that tell us about how that hole in the wall presents itself to us in perception apart from becoming the object of judgment, or thought, or talk? Travis, as far as I can see, offers no answer to this question; and that, I’ve been saying, is a glaring omission in what purports to be an account of perception. McDowell, on the other hand, does offer an answer to it. He proposes that ‘all of the content’ of the perceptual experience of mature human beings ‘is present in a form in which… it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities. All that would be needed for a bit of it to come to constitute the content of a conceptual capacity, if it is not already the content of a conceptual capacity, is for it to be focused on and made to be the meaning of a linguistic expression’.72 Elsewhere McDowell says that ‘an intuition’s content is all conceptual, in this sense: it is in the human perception’, because in some people—for example, some people on the autistic spectrum— the ability to effect the figure-background structure, to focus one’s attention on something and push other things to the background, is severely impaired. 70  See ‘What Myth’, 346; and ‘The Myth of the Mind as Detached’, 43, 48, and 53. 71  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 264; see also ‘What Myth?’, 347–8. 72  ‘What Myth?’, 347–8, my emphasis.

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intuition in a form [my emphasis] in which one could make it, that very content, figure in discursive activity’.73 I set aside the question of what exactly is meant by ‘the content’, let alone ‘all of the content’, of ‘an experience (or intuition)’, and by saying that ‘that very content’—though ‘it is not discursive content at all’74—could ‘figure in discursive activity’. I just do not know how perceptual experiences (or intuitions) are supposed to get counted, how their contents are supposed to be determined and counted, and how, or in what sense, or by what criteria, those contents could be (determined to be) the very same contents of discursive activities. McDowell might simply have meant to remind us of the following truism: that what it makes sense to say someone perceives has got to be something that it makes sense to say someone perceives. But it seems quite clear that he means to say more than just that. He wants to say something about how things present themselves to us in perception before they become objects of judgment, or talk. He is attempting to answer the question Travis conspicuously ignores. And this is where McDowell’s proposal that the perceptual experience of mature human beings, or the world it presents to them, has a certain form, and that it is that form that makes it suitable for becoming the object of true or false judgments (or talk), is clearly supposed to do crucial work. Again, in talking about the form of the perceived world apart from its actually becoming the object of empirical judgments, McDowell might have been talking about something like physiognomy—the sort of significant form, and unity, that we may perceive, however fluidly and indeterminately, in a facial expression, or bodily gesture, or work of art, or in any situation we find ourselves in, as perceived against the background of our personal and cultural background. I think it is undeniable that anyone whose perceptual experience did not take that sort of form, would be seriously limited in her or his capacity to acquire and use language. This, however, is clearly not what McDowell has in mind; and the key to seeing what he does have in mind is his characterization of the form of our perceptual experience as ‘categorial’,75 or his claim that our perceptual experience is ‘categorially unified’.76 Taking himself to be following Kant, McDowell maintains that some basic concepts (Kantian ‘categories’) are responsible for ensuring that our perceptual experience has a form that makes it suitable for being subsumable under other, non-basic concepts.77 Following Kant, McDowell proposes that at least some of those concepts are concepts of ‘modes of space [and, I suppose, time, AB] occupancy’ such as ‘shape, size, position, movement or its absence’.78 It is these concepts that are supposed to enable us to unify and organize our perceptual experience, so that higher-order-but-still-basic concepts such as ‘animal’ or ‘flying’ would

 ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 265.  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 270. 75  ‘What Myth?’, 347. 76  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263. 77  See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 260. 78  ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261. 73 74

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apply to it, and I suppose further participate in giving it form.79 So our perceptual experience is ‘conceptual’, according to McDowell, not just in the sense that it could be conceptualized, but in the sense that at least some concepts play key role in giving it form—in organizing it spatially and temporally, and unifying it. For Travis, as we’ve seen, this last idea makes no sense. For him, what we perceive are such things as peccaries; and he finds incredible the idea that ‘conceptual capacities can shape a peccary’ (Perception, 193). This objection to McDowell is fine as far as it goes. The only problem with it, I’ve been arguing, is that we are trying to become clearer about perception, and therefore are interested not in peccaries, or holes in walls, or any other environmental objects or constellations of objects we may be said to perceive (in Wittgenstein’s first sense, in PPF, 111), but in how those objects, and their constellations, present themselves to us in perception prior to, and apart from, becoming the objects of true or false judgments. And on that, Travis is completely silent. In order to become clearer about that, it would not do to engage in McDowellian transcendental argumentation that overlooks perception as it actually is in favor of certain ideas about what it must be (like) if certain cognitive achievements as construed by philosophers are to be possible. But nor would it do to satisfy ourselves with Travisian grammatical reminders and Wittgensteinian therapy. Here what is needed is the work of phenomenology. Fortunately, there is a serious and rich tradition of such work on which to draw.

79

 See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261.

Index

A Aesthetic connection with pleasure, 79 idea, 70, 78, 79, 178 judgment, 73, 76, 79, 80, 83 Affeldt, S., 58 Agam-Segal, R., 85, 87 Agency Aristotle’s account of, 10 Hume’s account of, 10 Kant’s account of, 10, 75, 76, 95, 106, 137, 178 Merleau-Ponty’s account of, 3, 4, 10, 14, 47, 115, 117, 137, 178, 194 Aidun, D., 58 Albecker, R., 123 Allais, L., 106, 137 Anscombe, G.E.M., 89 (A quite) particular intransitive sense, 62 transitive sense, 62 Aristotle, 10 Arpaly, N., 125, 130, 132, 136, 137 Aspects attending to, 15, 16, 32, 36, 63, 65, 67, 69, 119 blindness to, 20, 27, 65–69, 117 continuous perception/seeing of, 5, 26–28, 30, 36, 42, 56, 118 dawning (lighting up), 2–5, 7, 8, 26, 30, 36, 37, 43–46, 48–52, 56, 57, 65–69, 72, 86, 88, 94–96, 99, 107–109, 112, 114, 115, 118–122, 139, 155, 182, 183, 192 paradox of, 4, 8, 37, 43, 44, 48, 52 difficulty of accounting for, 4, 15, 48, 55, 58

duration, 49 grammar of, 5, 8, 18, 20–25, 31, 35–52, 65, 69, 76, 165, 185 identification with concepts, 6, 79, 85, 87, 184 intersubjective shareability of, 91, 112, 114 intransitivity of, 63–65 noticing, 3–5, 16, 39, 40, 55, 56, 65, 72, 91, 94, 97, 98, 100, 103, 166 objective and subjective, 22, 23, 39, 76, 77, 84, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101, 113, 155, 164, 174, 180, 181, 189 perception, 1–5, 7–10, 15, 17, 18, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36–38, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53–70, 77–79, 85, 87, 94–100, 106–109, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122, 139, 155–160, 165, 166, 180, 182–184, 186 phenomenology of, 3, 5, 10, 66, 96–102, 166, 183, 185 as property of an object, 28, 39, 55, 73, 77, 83, 98, 112, 185 psychological, 16, 17, 33, 38, 182 relationship with “normal” human perception/human perception “as such”, 2–5, 9, 56, 58, 91, 93–95, 108, 119, 182, 184 seeing of, 5, 7, 13–17, 20, 21, 23–28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 48–51, 55, 56, 58, 60, 65, 68, 69, 76–78, 84, 85, 94, 98–100, 116, 118, 164, 180–182 struck by, 3, 4, 19, 28, 31, 32, 42, 45, 46, 49, 68, 77, 166 subject to the will, 23, 24, 99, 139, 155, 181

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2

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Index

198 Attitude, 5, 14, 18, 26, 29, 33, 36, 38, 44, 49–51, 74, 86, 88, 131–133, 144, 161–167, 183, 185 Atwood, M., 123 Austin, J.L., 104, 115, 131, 137, 148, 150, 151, 158–160 B Background conditions of sense, 147, 150, 155, 156, 162, 164, 166 and figure, 115 Beauty connection with pleasure, 76, 79, 81 kantian judgments of, 84, 189 as property of an object, and not, 73, 76, 77, 83, 84 Behaviorism, 33 Bell, D., 89 Block, N., 107, 110, 138, 154, 164, 170, 182, 192 Body human, 34, 133 phenomenal, 34, 88, 133, 166, 193 Brandom, R., 104 Brewer, T., 125–131, 133, 134, 139 Burge, T., 175, 177 C Carston, R., 158 Cavell, S., 9, 11, 22–24, 33, 71–91, 107, 149, 160, 165, 166 Cerbone, D., 145, 146 Conant, J., 10, 74, 91, 146 Concept identification of aspects as, 6, 7, 79, 87, 184 relationship with perception, 106–110 subsuming of experience under, 112 understanding of, 7, 9, 18, 41, 44, 48, 51, 104, 105, 110, 192 Constancy hypothesis, 118 Context/contextualism, 4, 7, 9, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 41, 42, 46, 49, 52, 55, 60, 66, 68, 86–88, 94, 95, 101, 103–105, 108, 109, 111, 115, 125, 138–140, 156–161, 171, 176, 181, 191 Criteria, 4, 15, 18, 20, 27, 30, 33, 34, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 59, 60, 195

D Davidson, D., 124, 125, 130–136, 138 Day, W., 8, 58, 65, 79, 96 Dennett, D., 67, 70 Descartes, R. Myth of the inner, 33 Desire, 83, 124, 127–130, 132, 135, 136, 140, 145, 159 Diamond, C., 62, 145, 179, 182, 187–190 Dreyfus, H., 193, 194 Drury, M., 57 Duck-rabbit, 15, 23, 24, 26, 42, 64, 66–68, 77, 79, 101, 111, 113, 117, 119, 121, 144, 156, 186 Dummett, M., 188 E Earle, W.J., 22 Eilan, N., 163 Empiricism, 137, 175 Experience error, 6, 7, 118, 139, 163 F Face(s) expression of, 22, 32, 46, 51, 62, 64, 88, 107, 116, 139, 156, 189 (seeing a) likeness between two, 101, 185 Family resemblance, 59, 105 Floyd, J., 79, 96, 120 Fodor, J., 104, 107, 176, 177 Form of life as background conditions of sense, 10, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, 166 compared with Kantian “conditions of sensibility”, 151, 152, 179 as what is given, 150 as “whirl of organism”, 89, 150 Frege, G., 110, 112, 115, 151, 173, 191 G Geach, P., 111 Gelb, A., 27, 66 Gestalt psychology, 113, 137, 138, 155, 164, 167 Gibson, J., 193 Glock, H.-J., 19, 36, 184 Goldstein, K., 27, 66 Grammatical/grammar, 4–10, 14, 16, 19, 21, 23–25, 27–29, 33, 41, 43, 44,

Index 48–50, 52, 58, 60, 64–66, 71–91, 95–102, 105, 111, 153, 158–161, 163–167, 179–181, 185–187, 193, 196 Gréve, S., 10 H Hannah, R., 178 Heidegger, M. presentness-at-hand, 18 readiness-to-hand, 18, 31, 95 Hume, D., 10, 33, 124, 125, 128, 131 Husserl, E., 6, 14, 18, 118, 133, 162, 182 I Indeterminacy motivational, 9, 18, 29, 46, 51, 88, 91, 95, 119, 124–146, 193 perceptual, 9, 95, 117–121 Intentional, 18, 24, 66, 88, 124, 125, 130–132, 134, 136, 147, 149, 165, 180–185 Intuition, 10, 70, 73, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 137, 151, 152, 177–179, 191, 194, 195 J Jackson, F., 104 Jenova, J., 58 Johnston, P., 2, 3, 8, 17, 20, 21, 24, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 56, 106, 184 Judgment aesthetic, 23, 73, 76, 79, 80, 83 empirical, 64, 73, 81–83, 86, 107, 110, 150, 156, 171, 183, 186, 192, 195 irreducible role of, 177 moral, 73, 77 objective, 81, 84, 85, 101, 138, 173, 186, 190 K Kant, I. first Critique, 14, 80, 81, 151, 177, 178 groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 126 third Critique, 73, 77–79, 81, 82, 151, 177–179 Kemp, G., 9, 171 Kenaz, Y., 31 Kierkegaard, S., 135 Koffka, K., 113 Köhler, W., 118, 163, 164, 167

199 Krebs, V., 8, 58, 65, 79, 96 Kuusela, O., 9 L Landes, D., 3 Language-game, 3, 6, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30, 32, 39, 41, 69, 74, 88, 154, 164, 166, 187 Laurence, S., 105 Leibniz, G.W., 157 Levin, D.M., 22 Lewis, D., 158 Longuenesse, B., 80 M Margolis, E., 105 Martin, C., 10 Maxim, 124, 126–129 McDowell, J., 7, 8, 10, 104, 106, 107, 128, 129, 170, 171, 173–176, 179, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190–196 McGinn, M., 30, 32, 113 Merleau-Ponty, M., 2–4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 27, 47, 56, 64, 66, 69, 86, 88, 95–97, 100, 107, 112, 114, 115, 117–120, 122, 124, 133, 134, 136–141, 144–146, 150–152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162–164, 166, 167, 170, 172, 174, 178, 182, 183, 186, 192, 194 Method of cases, 89, 97 Minar, Ed, 65 Modiano, P., 120 Monk, R., 57, 94 Moore, A., 87 Moore, G.E., 61, 153 Moral outlooks, 129 Motive/motivation indeterminacy of, 9, 18, 29, 46, 51, 88, 91, 95, 107, 117–121, 124–146, 193 whether one can know one’s true, 144 Mras, G., 9, 171 Mulhall, S., 2, 19, 36, 56, 76, 106, 184 Munro, A., 10, 117, 124, 133–135, 138, 142–144 N Natural attitude, 15, 161–167 Necker cube, 58, 77, 79, 101, 111, 117, 180–182 Nedo, M., 54

Index

200 O Ordinary language appeal to, 71, 72, 75, 90, 166 philosophy, 72, 75, 76, 90, 91 P Perception empricist/mechanistic accounts of, 47, 114 phenomenological accounts of, 4, 5, 51, 56, 78, 79, 107, 110, 114, 122, 164, 167, 187, 194 Perspective first-personal, 165 third-personal, 149, 154, 171, 172, 174 Phenomenology, 2–7, 10, 27, 39, 56, 88, 95–102, 107, 114, 118, 122, 128, 133, 134, 141, 145, 148, 161–167, 172, 174, 182, 183, 185, 191, 193, 196 Physiognomy, 29, 47, 61, 64, 83, 86, 100, 116–121, 138, 155, 156, 160, 181 Picture, 2, 19, 36, 57, 81, 97, 147, 176 Polley, J., 124 Polley, M., 123 Polley, S., 123 Putnam, H., 173, 187 Q Quine, W.V.O., 124, 173 R Rationalism, 131 Rawls, J., 126 Reasons, 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 30, 36, 38, 43, 47, 50, 54, 55, 65, 67, 70, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 98–100, 102, 103, 108, 112, 114, 120, 125–132, 137, 138, 140, 145, 150, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 173, 174, 179, 184 Recanati, F., 158 Reddy, V., 192 Relations external, 47, 115 internal, 7, 88, 112–117, 119, 138, 155–157, 160, 183, 184, 186, 193 Representation/representationalism, 9, 17, 18, 22, 26, 30–33, 40, 43, 45, 51, 52, 64, 68, 77, 79, 82, 83, 94, 99, 106, 126, 137, 158, 166, 175–177

Resemblance, 22, 24, 28, 31, 59, 105, 181 Rhees, R., 58 Rouse, J., 104 S de Saussure, F., 114 Savile, A., 89 Scanlon, T.M., 127 Schatzki, T., 28 Schneider, 27, 66, 146 Schroeder, S., 87, 98, 106, 113 Schroeder, T., 130, 132, 136, 184 Scruton, R., 24 Seeing As, 102–107, 110, 138, 154, 175, 182, 192 contrast with knowing, 16, 20, 22, 31, 34, 37, 45, 98–100, 103, 116, 180 distinction with knowing, 16–20, 23, 38, 45, 60, 65, 94 a likeness/resemblance between, 22, 28, 31, 38, 44, 51, 52, 65, 97, 99, 108 something as something, 4, 25, 39, 49, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 93, 94, 102, 103, 106, 112, 118, 121, 182, 185 two objects of, 117 two senses of, 17 Sellars, W., 7, 170, 173, 175 Myth of the Given, 7, 173, 185, 190 Smith, C., 3, 4 Sperber, D., 159 Stories We Tell, 123 Strawson, P., 7, 87, 98, 103, 106, 184 T Therapy, 9, 35, 57, 161, 196 Travis, C., 8, 22, 67, 86, 105, 158, 175 V Virtue ethics, 125, 128 Voluntary, 125, 127, 130 W Wilson, D., 159 Wollheim, R., 4, 7, 9, 87, 93–95, 98, 102–107, 109, 112, 118, 122, 171, 184, 185 World external, 21, 23, 27, 84, 98, 111, 185 objective, 99

Index as perceived, 3, 6, 8, 10, 58, 96, 118, 125, 133, 139, 154, 155, 157, 170, 191–193 phenomenal, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 22, 66, 67, 88, 106, 107, 112, 114, 117, 133, 136, 137, 155–160, 169

201 Z Zemach, E., 58 Zuckert, R., 79