Aspects of Perception

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission

Aspects of Perception

Avner Baz

The topic of this paper is what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing

something as something’ or the seeing of ‘aspects’, and

Richard Wollheim’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ in a

supplementary essay appended to Art and its Objects. 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 this expression.

And it seems to me that Wollheim’s difficulties are not

special to him. The philosophical topic of 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.

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionWittgenstein, who first brought to philosophical attention

the topic of seeing-as, is reported by his friend Maurice

Drury to have said not long before his (Wittgenstein’s)

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’.1 Over the years I have found myself

returning again and again to the topic of seeing-as,

prompted in part by a sense of its importance and of the

inadequacy of my own understanding of it, in part by the

sense that the topic presents us with a particular sort of

difficulty that is itself philosophically interesting, and

in part by the sense that that difficulty 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissioncharacterization of the phenomenon, or set of related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. 209). I will

argue that he is not. And the real problem with this is not

that Wollheim has lost touch with Wittgenstein’s topic—after

all, it is open for him to make clear what phenomenon, or

set of related phenomena, he means to refer to by ‘seeing-

as’, and to offer an account 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 deliberately

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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionmotivated by the conviction that such a theory 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 RPP II, 540) and ‘lasts only as long as I am occupied

with the object in a particular way’ (PI, p. 210c), 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’. 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.

It seems to me that all of the attempts (with which I

am familiar) to give sense to the notion of ‘continuous

aspect perception’ (or some equivalent notion),2 and to use

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionit to characterize (normal) human perception as such, have

failed.3 In this paper I will argue that Wollheim’s attempt

fails. At the same time, 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 concepts, so that, at least in

the most basic or paradigmatic case, what something may be

seen as is taken to be something it can be judged, or known,

to be.4 By contrast, taking my cue from Merleau-Ponty 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 non- or pre-

conceptual, but at the same time inter-subjectively

shareable, unity and sense.


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 in

Wittgenstein’s remarks. In this respect, I will be doing

what many other readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects

have done—at the cost, I have argued, of misrepresenting

human experience and of failing to make clear sense with

their words. I therefore embark on this project with great

trepidation, for in no way do I take myself to be immune to

the risks of confusion and nonsensicality. It seems to me,

however, that 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionphilosophical difficulties or have sought to move beyond

Wittgenstein in their philosophical reflections on other

topics. In my case, by contrast, 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 that is pre-conceptual and which

serves as the basis of, but at the same time gets covered up

by, everyday discourse—which mostly focuses on the objects of

our experience rather than on our experience itself—then

perhaps it is only to be expected that what the dawning of

Wittgensteinian aspects reveals about human perception will

never come fully or explicitly to light in a Wittgensteinian

grammatical investigation. Its essence will not be expressed

by grammar.5

1. 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionof the Investigations are a good place to seek initial

orientation:

Two uses of the word “see”.

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 might 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” (PI, p. 193, translation

amended).

The first thing to note, even before we draw from these

remarks an understanding of what Wittgenstein means by

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission‘seeing as’ or ‘aspects’, 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 uses. This is in line with

Wittgenstein’s ‘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—refer to objects, and that the best way to

become clear about the meaning of those words, or the

concepts they embody, is to investigate those “objects” and

become clear about their nature. 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.

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionWhat 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 nothing more than ‘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 result in. 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 PI, p. 211a;

and RPPI, 1011). ‘Forget’, he urges his reader (or himself),

‘forget that you have these experiences yourself’ (RPPII,

531). ‘Don’t try to analyze your own inner experience’ (PI,

p. 204e; see also PI, p. 206c). ‘The question’, he writes,

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission‘is not what happens here, but rather: how one may use that

statement’ (RPPI, 315, check translation). So he 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, PI p. 193e)—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 (PI, p. 221e). ‘It is necessary to get down to the

application’ (PI, p. 201a), 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?’ (PI, p. 202f, translation ammended). A striking

feature of all of the readings of Wittgenstein’s remarks on

aspects with which I am familiar, and equally of attempts

such as Wollheim’s to offer accounts of seeing-as that are

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionmore 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.6

What can we say about the grammar of (noticing)

Wittgensteinian aspects? Taking our initial bearing from the

opening remarks of section xi cited above, we could say at

least the following: First, 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 (195a), a knife and a fork would be another example

(195b), a conventional picture of a lion yet another (206b).

Another type of object of sight that Wittgenstein contrasts

with aspects is ‘a property of the object’ (212a). 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,

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionsee everything there is to see about it in the objective

sense, and yet fail to see 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 feature of ‘the external

world’) it must be subjective (‘inner’, ‘metaphysically

private’) needs to be resisted; for it may be that one

important lesson of aspect perception is precisely that this

traditional dichotomy is at least sometimes misguided and

misleading. Given the common philosophical understanding of

‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, the 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 them—in order to teach

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionher, precisely, something about the external world. 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 probably 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

two faces) in which we see the aspect (the likeness between

the two faces). 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

study—the seeing of aspects makes for a particular type of

opportunity to seek intimacy with the other, or put it to

the test. Like beauty (at least as understood by Kant in his

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionthird Critique), Wittgensteinian aspects are importantly

characterized by the possibility that a fully competent

speaker (and perceiver) may fail to see them even though he

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, 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 the other to see them and to try to see

this or that particular aspect (see PI 213e). Mostly,

however, Wittgensteinian aspects dawn on us uninvited, and

even, sometimes, against the will (see LW, 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.


So much, for now, by way of grammatical

characterization of what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspects’. All

of this grammar notwithstanding, the dawning (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 or 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 f as x is a

particular visual experience of x’ (223). I will 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 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. This is why the phenomenology and grammar of

aspect perception are intimately connected, and why both are

needed for an understanding of what Wittgenstein is talking

about. When we notice an aspect everything changes and yet

nothing changes (see RPP II, 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’). All of the object’s objective

features remain unchanged, we know, but its perceived

physiognomy or expression changes, and changes wholly.

In an important sense, the aspect is un-detachable from

the experience, or from the object-as-experienced. Another way

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionof putting this point, which will become important for us

later on, is that to see an object under an aspect is not

the same as applying a concept to it or subsuming it under a

generality which, as such, 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): 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, even though

you have not yourself perceived the object.

Not so with aspects. For illustration, consider the

duck-rabbit, keeping in mind that this is just one example,

and not in all respects a representative one, of the wider

set of phenomena that concerns Wittgenstein in his remarks

on aspects. What do you see when, aware of the ambiguity of

the figure, you see, not merely the duck-rabbit (which is an

object of sight of the first category, and may be described

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionand thereby identified geometrically), but, say, the rabbit

aspect? What do you see when you see the duck-rabbit as a

rabbit? The obvious answer would seem to be ‘a picture-

rabbit’ (or maybe ‘a rabbit’) (PI, p. 194). Now, 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. (Ibid). But note the important sense in

which saying ‘rabbit’ or ‘picture-rabbit’, or pointing to a

non-ambiguous rabbit, whether flesh and blood or depicted,

as a way of specifying what you saw, would be misleading: it

would suggest that you were somehow unaware of the ambiguity

of the figure and of the possibility of seeing it as a duck,

and unaware of the active role you play in casting the

rabbit aspect onto the figure, so to speak, whereas we are

here supposing that this is not the case.7 What you see when

you see the duck-rabbit as a rabbit (say) is, therefore,

well, this (and now one would like simply to point to the

duck-rabbit, perhaps with the addition of hints to help the

other see the rabbit aspect, if for some reason she has not

yet been able to see it).8


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 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

it apex, or as having fallen over…(200c); seeing a face in a

puzzle-picture; seeing a sphere in a picture as floating in

the air (201e); seeing W as an upside-down M and seeing the

letter F as facing right, or left (see RPP II, 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); hearing a piece of music as a

variation on another, or as plaintive (209f,g), or hearing a

bar as an introduction (202h); there is the experience in

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionwhich ‘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, this does not mean

that we must always be seeing that object under one of them.

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), this 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 is seen

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionunder 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 it could (in a

different context perhaps) be seen, or known, to be. What

would it be, for example, 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 is actually made by the perceiver of the

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionaspect; and in the typical case, the perceiver of the aspect

makes it clear that what she sees the object as is not

something that she takes it to be. This is why we normally

invite the other to see the aspect, rather than demand that

she does, and why we do not take her to be mistaken if she

cannot see the aspect we see. This is going to matter when

we turn to Wollheim, for whom the typical, or anyway basic

case of seeing-as is one in which the object is judged, or

believed, to be what it is seen as.

2. 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’ (217). A little later on he similarly proposes that

seeing-as ‘partially is, partially is a development out of,

an aspect of straightforward perception’ (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.

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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionthat 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’ (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 even remotely plausible that our visual experience (cf.

223) changes whenever we come to know of a 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 (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 (Ibid).

Another immediate difficulty is that Wollheim’s basic

claim that ‘we cannot see something as something it (or its

counterpart) could never have been’ (222), seems to fly

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissiondirectly 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 seeing

a church as an overturned footstool (222), or a mountain

range as a naked woman’s body (222)? If any sense could be

given to the claim that a church could have been an

overturned footstool or that a mountain range 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’ (220); for if it turns

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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionhaving 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 (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’ (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. You can, conceptually, neither see, nor

try to see, an object as what you know it to be,

Wittgenstein says (see PI, p. 195b and p. 206b). 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionWollheim 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’.9 Do we understand this talk, 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 of ‘concept’, but it is not clear what that

might be. 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, the first thing

we will find is that the word is not used very frequently.

When it is used, ‘the concept of x’ is often interchangeable

with ‘the meaning of “x”’, and means something like

‘whatever it is that guides us in our use of the word “x”

(and its cognates)’.10 Our everyday criterion for

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission‘possessing the concept of X’, and similarly for ‘knowing

the meaning of “x” (or what “x” means)’, 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 of ‘concept’ but rather on its more or

less technical use in philosophy, as well as perhaps 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’. A fundamental

difference between the way Wittgenstein thinks about our

relation to our world and about language, and hence about

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionconcepts, and the way the tradition of Western philosophy

has tended to think about these issues, is that the latter

has tended to be representationalist, whereas Wittgenstein, as I

read him, aims in part at freeing us from the

representationalist conception, or picture, of our relation

to the world. Accordingly, whereas Wittgenstein tries to get

us to see and acknowledge the variety of ways our words are

ordinarily and normally used and related to our world, and

suggests that failure to appreciate that variety is a root

cause of traditional philosophical difficulties, the

tradition has tended to think of words—including,

importantly, philosophically troublesome words—in terms of

‘reference’ to ‘objects’, and as instruments, first and

foremost, for the ‘classification’ or ‘categorization’ of

worldly ‘items’.11 This makes for a fundamental difference

between how ‘concept’ is commonly used in philosophy, as

well as in psychology and much of linguistics, and how it

may aptly be thought of from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

As commonly used in philosophy, as well as in

psychology and linguistics, ‘the concept of x’ means roughly

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission‘whatever it is that 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 guides us in

applying “x” to cases (or withholding “x” from cases), and

in distinguishing between correct and incorrect

applications’, where, in line with the representationalist-

referentialist conception of language, the ‘application’ of

words to cases is taken to be something that we ought to be

able to do, and do mostly correctly, even apart from any

context of significant use of those words. Most of the

academic disagreements in recent years about the nature of

concepts, both within and outside philosophy, occur within the

framework of this broad characterization.12 The

disagreements, in other words, are about what 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionexemplars and ways of measuring an item’s similarity to

them, or ‘family resemblance’, and so on.

And now 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 effects, 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, 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionlike, then it is not clear what a concept thus understood

could add to what the object anyway presents us with under

more or less normal conditions. 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 Sheppard. What

could my dog-in-general schema, or even my German-Sheppard

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 (2013, 185-7) calls

‘recognitional capacities’ and what he calls ‘conceptual

capacities’: 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionwith 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 (Wollheim, 221), or a table

that stands on only one leg—belongs to that type 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 about the

world is drawn 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

must we be giving voice to what may sensibly be called

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission‘judgment’. If so, however, then Wollheim’s (Kantian) 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.

3. Aspects and Concepts

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.13 Three ideas have fed

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissioninto this widespread conviction, it seems to me. The first

is the Kantian idea that our perception is necessarily and

always ‘conceptualized’ or, as Wollheim puts it, ‘mediated

by concepts’ (219). 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.

Since I have criticized that idea elsewhere, I will not

focus on it here. Some of what I will say, however, and some

of what I have already said, has more or less immediate and

clear bearing on it.14 The second idea is that the dawning of

aspects, as described by Wittgenstein, could only be

understood as occurring against the background, so to speak,

of a state 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. This third idea may be expressed

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionby saying, as Wollheim does, that what something may be seen

as must be something that it could be judged to be. In

section 5, I will briefly discuss the second idea. In this

section and the next one I will discuss the third. I will

argue that Wittgensteinian aspects may not 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 be

taken to be a concept.

For the sake of clarity and avoidance of repetition, I

will be using as my stalking horse Wittgenstein’s example of

being struck by the likeness of a face we are looking at to

another. Though 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissiongenerally suspicious of it. The reader is invited to

extrapolate to other cases. One important advantage of this

case is that, unlike cases of seeing aspects of 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 cases Wittgenstein discusses and their

differences from the more natural cases.

The candidate empirical concept in the case of the

dawning of a similarity of one face to another is, I

suppose, that of bearing (some) visible similarity to a particular, given

face. Being a concept, it is 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionvisible 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.

This leads us to the further point that, as Charles Travis

has taught us to recognize, the concept of 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionvisible similarity to each other, the correct response would

be ‘yes, or no, depending on what you mean’.

I think the above reminders should 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 are paradigmatically applied to cases in

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 essential to at least many of the cases

Wittgenstein discusses that what we perceive something as is

something we are not taking it, let alone claiming it, to be.

This might be thought to be accommodated by Wollheim’s

allowing for possible ‘developments’ of seeing-as (220),

beginning with ‘the simple case’ and moving, in one

dimension, along a series of ‘declining degrees of assent,

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissiondiminishing 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’ (221). But where

exactly in this series should we place Wittgenstein’s case

of being struck by the similarity between two faces? I

submit that the case he 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

imagine (or make believe). If it were, calling upon others

to see what we see, as we characteristically do when an

aspect strikes us, would not make sense. (By this I do not

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionmean 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’ has led

Wollheim, and perhaps some of his readers, to miss the

inaptness of what he means, or must mean given his overall

account, by ‘imagination’.) Second, the aspect may not aptly

be identified with, or in terms of, an empirical concept. If

a concept is something that may contribute to the content of

judgments or Fregean ‘thoughts’, however hypothetically or

even counterfactually entertained; 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 f, and so if

you will a 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionof factive meaning’ (2013, 91). 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’—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).15 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionsuitably 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 is similar to so and so’s face’); and I’m committed to

there being certain objectively establishable features of

the faces that are responsible for the similarity; and I am

committed to being able to identify those features—to

specify in what the similarity consists (‘They have the same

pointy nose’); and so on and so forth.16 If I am not thus

committed, I have not thus judged.

It is true that when I merely imagine that one face

bears a visible similarity to another, I do not commit

myself in the same way. But what I imagine may still be

defined or specified in terms of the same set of

commitments: what I imagine is, precisely, a situation in

which there is an empirically establishable visible

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionsimilarity 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, but I will not always be careful to add

that); 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, is not similarly

situated in the objective world. While my being struck by the

similarity between two faces is an objectively establishable

fact about me, and as such means, factively, any number of

objectively establishable things (mostly things having to do

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionwith me), the similarity between the faces that strikes me 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 (visible)

similarity.

And yet the aspect is not merely subjective. It is

there, in the perceived face. And 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 that they

are missing something about the face if they don’t. A long

tradition, beginning with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 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’—

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissioncould enable us to move from the merely ‘inner’ or

‘subjective’ succession of Vorstellungen to a world sharable

with others (see Kant, 1998, A196-7/B242). Part of what

Wittgenstein has taught us to recognize 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. But as

phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-

Ponty have taught us to recognize, it is extremely difficult

to describe without distortion our perceptual relation to

the not-yet-objective and yet intersubjectively sharable,

and largely shared, world. In particular, it is extremely

difficult to resist the temptation to objectify 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.


4. Aspects as Perceived Internal Relations

Wollheim, as we saw, complains against the tendency to

‘leave judgment external to perception’ (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, it that those cases ‘allow us to

observe how experience and concept change not merely

simultaneously but as one’ (220). I find the main interest

of aspect dawning to lie in its showing almost the exact

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’ (PI, p.

212a). The notion of ‘internal relation’ (interne Relation) is

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionborrowed from Gestalt psychology and is, importantly, a

perceptual notion, not an objective, third personal notion.17

Among elements of the objective world only external

relations may hold. And these are the elements, and

relations, that empirical concepts enable us to grasp.

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: ‘Two colours 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’.18 According to Gestalt psychology, what we

perceive, at the most basic level, is not atomic sensations

that we must then somehow synthesize into significant

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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionoverall perceived significance of that whole, are not

perceptually independent from that perceived significance.

The duck-rabbit provides a simple 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 from your seeing the whole thing as a rabbit.

Perceptually, the ears are ears only when the whole thing is

a rabbit. One important thing this means is that your seeing

the duck-rabbit as a rabbit cannot be explained 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 their being elements of that aspect. At the

same time, if you took the basic elements of our perception

of the duck-rabbit to only have objective, 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 into the

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionrabbit aspect, say, rather than the duck aspect. This shows

that the perception of significant wholes should be taken as

primary.

Wittgenstein gives clear, if also characteristically

non-theoretical, expression to this fundamental feature of

human perception, 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”… Displace a piece and it is no longer what it was…

(RPP, I, 339, check italics).

Another case of gestalt perception, which is at the

heart of Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophical

difficulty, is that of linguistic meaning, or sense. On

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionWittgenstein’s view, which may be seen as a development of

Frege’s ‘context principle’, 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. Phenomenologically—which

means, from the perspective we all occupy as speakers

engaged in discourse (as opposed to theoreticians reflecting

on it academically)—the contribution made by each word to

the overall sense of an utterance is not independent from,

and therefore cannot analytically explain, that overall

sense. ‘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...’ (Phenomenology, 184; see also 408-9). Thus,

in the perception of linguistic sense too analysis

presupposes synthesis and therefore cannot be used to

explain it.

It is important to note that internal relations hold

not just among the perceived elements of perceived objects

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionbut also, and equally fundamentally, between perceived

objects and the background against which they are perceived.

This is likely to be missed by those who mostly focus on the

examples of schematic drawings and deliberately ambiguous

figures. 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 personal,

biological, cultural, and temporal ‘horizons’; and this is

what makes it possible for us to give them significances, or

project different physiognomies on them, more or less at

will (1996, 282). Even here, however, the perceived objects

stand in internal relations to other objects, as

Wittgenstein suggests; 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.

That the analysis of perceptual experience

presupposes its synthesis and therefore cannot explain it

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionwas one of Kant’s fundamental insights and his most basic

objection to empiricist-mechanical 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, according to the

phenomenologists, was the possibility of an intelligible

synthesis that is not (yet) conceptual—a synthesis, in other

words, that is perceived but not (yet) thought. The dawning of

Wittgensteinian aspects brings out especially clearly the

distinction between what we perceive and what we think, and

the reality of pre-conceptual perceptual synthesis.

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 bear

some objective similarity to each other. And so you may look

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionat 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 face. But that would

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionnot 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”’ (PI, p. 213f).)

5. Pre-Conceptual Perception and Perceptual Indeterminacy

As we have seen, judging that one face is similar to

another, or otherwise conceiving of a similarity between

them, is one thing, having the similarity between them dawn

on one another. This distinction shows itself as well in the

less natural cases of Wittgensteinian seeing-as. Thus, it is

one thing to take, or consider, the duck-rabbit 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionthis or that way. Again, 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’

(1996, 34). He appeals to cases where we know, or think, one

thing about what we perceive, but perceptually experience

something else. One of the examples he appeals to is the

Necker cube:

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 (Ibid, 34).

As Wittgenstein notes, seeing something as something

requires that you attend to the object in a particular way, which

is one why it could not be one’s ordinary or habitual

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionrelation to the object, could not be continuous. 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 RPP I, 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 cognitively

take it 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 experience. They have

taken the objective world—the world about which science has

ultimate authority—to be the perceived world, or the world

as perceived. They have thus committed what Merleau-Ponty,

following Husserl and Gestalt psychologists, calls ‘the

experience error’.


The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals the

experience error to be an error. It shows that there are

perceived physiognomic unity and sense that are importantly

different from the unity and sense capturable in Kantian

Erkenntnisse. It shows that the ‘constancy hypothesis’ is

false: there is no one-to-one correlation between the world

we objectively know we perceive and the world as perceived.19

And it arguably shows even more than this. Arguably, it

shows that the perceived unity or sense of the world as

perceived, unlike the unity or sense of the world as

objectively cognized, is importantly indeterminate: the dawning

of a Wittgensteinian aspect is not normally the replacement

of one determinate physiognomy by another determinate

physiognomy. Rather, it is the passing replacement of an

indeterminate physiognomy with a relatively determinate one.

Merleau-Ponty says that ‘We must recognize the indeterminate

as a positive phenomenon’ (1996, 6)—that is, not as due to

some kind of 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

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionaccept. I will not here try to explicate and defend that

idea, which is tied to his characterization of the internal

relation between foreground and background in perception, to

his discussion of the inherent ambiguity in human experience

between the ‘personal’ and the ‘anonymous’, and to his

understanding of the temporality of perception. I do want to

propose, however, that the dawning of Wittgensteinian

aspects may be seen as an illustration of, and at the same

time as lending support to, Merleau-Ponty’s idea.

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 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 have discussed in which

one is all of a sudden struck by the similarity of one face

to another. Here, there does not seem to be any plausible

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissioncandidate 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. Nor would it help to insist here that we had

been seeing the face 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,

Wittgenstein suggests, invariably conflate how we see

something and how we conceive of it; and then they attribute

to the former the determinacy and stability that

characterize the latter.20 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 (auffassen

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionCheck German) it this way, and this change of aspect has never

taken place’ (RPP I, 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,

Wittgenstein says, it will become clear to us that we have

not always seen the face under that aspect (RPP I, 526).

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’ (PI, p. 210e; see also LW, 14-15); it ‘presents a

physiognomy that then passes away’ (PI, p. 210f). 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 face, and

thereby cease to be dependent on how we perceive the object.

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’.

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionIt 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. It is important to note,

first, that this is not always the case. 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. As Juliet

Floyd correctly 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, ands expression of gesture, a

total field of significance’ (2010, 324). (Cases of this

kind are especially telling against the idea that whenever

an aspect dawns on us there is some particular concept that

corresponds to it.)

But let us consider the cases where we seem to have a

readily available description of the dawning aspect. Thus we

may say that we see a similarity between one face and

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionanother, for example, or that we see the duck-rabbit as a

duck, or as a rabbit. Surely, however, ‘a similarity to

another, particular face’ does not capture the particular

physiognomy that has dawned on us. And even the two aspects

of the duck-rabbit, for all of its schematicity, have

physiognomies—‘quite particular expressions’, as

Wittgenstein puts it in the Brown Book—that go beyond

anything capturable by ‘duck’ and ‘rabbit’. (I would go as

far as to propose the following hypothesis: normal human

perceivers cannot see a face, however schematic, and however

unlike a human face, without seeing it as expressive, as

having a particular—if also passing and indeterminate—

expression.)

We could try to describe the dawning physiognomy

further. The duck, we might say, looks serious and somewhat

self-important, like a 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, and

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionat the same time in the thought of the envious gazes of

onlookers. And we might similarly try to describe the

similarity we see between the faces, to say how they are

similar. 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 would exhaust and finally capture the dawning

physiognomy of a face whose similarity to another has struck

us, or even that of the duck or the rabbit. Someone else, or

we at a later moment, could see the duck as loyal and eager

to please but not too intelligent, and the rabbit as stunned

and taken aback by something it faces.21 Any description of

the aspect would be improvable, and even contestable. In

this and other respects, Wittgensteinian aspects—at least

those that strike us in the course of natural, everyday

experience—are akin to Kantian beauty.22

6. Concluding Remark: Aspects and Beauty

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionAs 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 continuous. 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 taking hold with our gaze 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 proposes,

rather suggests that the mostly 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). For beauty, as Kant characterizes it

phenomenologically, is precisely a perceived meaningful

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permissionunity 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).23 What

the natural dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects suggests is

that Kantian beauty is perceptually prior to Kantian

cognitions, and is to be found everywhere.

1Notes

Quoted by Ray Monk in The Duty of Genius (Vintage, 1990), p. 537.

2 Beyond the very narrow sense that Wittgenstein is giving it in one remark of the

Investigations. In Baz (2000) I say what I understand Wittgenstein to be talking about

in that remark. Wittgenstein is talking about something far more specific, and far

less central for him, than what Stephen Mulhall has made it out to be. He is

setting that case aside—distinguishing it from the primary phenomenon he is

investigating—rather than singling it out as the true object of his interest.

‘Continuous seeing’ of an aspect, as Wittgenstein here uses the term, refers to the

state of someone who sees an ambiguous figure—say the duck-rabbit—but is unaware of

its ambiguity. If we then asked him, with reference to the duck-rabbit, "What's

that?", he would say simply "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 his perception (PI 195a, 195h), whereas about what

he calls "seeing--as" he says that it "does not belong with perception" (PI 197a).

I make this point in ‘What's the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ by saying that even the

‘aspect-blind’—defined by Wittgenstein as someone who lacks the capacity to see

something as something—should be perfectly capable of ‘continuously seeing an

aspect’ thus understood.

3 In Baz (2000 and 2009) I argue against Stephen Mulhall’s influential claim that

what he calls ‘continuous aspect perception’ characterizes our normal perceptual

relation to the world and is the focus of Wittgenstein’s interest in his remarks on

aspects.

4 This characterization does not quite capture Mulhall’s account of aspect

perception. Mulhall’s account has the important merit of emphasizing, even if

ultimately mischaracterizing, the distinction between seeing—in the sense in which

Wittgensteinian aspects are seen—and (mere) knowing.

5 I am suggesting that what Juliet Floyd has insightfully called Wittgenstein’s

‘grammaticalizing our talk of the intuitive’ (2010, 316), while it may help us

dissolve any number of philosophical difficulties, may have limitations too.

6 As a result, ‘aspect’ as used by philosophers who present 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. J.

Cottingham & P.M.S. Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony

Kenny, Oxford: OUP, 2010, 366). But how exactly, or in what sense, is the color of

an object or its shape an aspect? And why are aspects, thus understood,

philosophically interesting?

7 That other case is what Wittgenstein calls the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect.

See note 2.

8 Moreover, as I will later point out, despite the schematicity of the duck-rabbit,

its duck aspect and its rabbit aspect each have a physiognomy, or expression, that

goes beyond anything capturable by ‘duck’ or by ‘rabbit’, and which defies any

attempt to put it completely and finally into words.

9 I should say that in a couple of his remarks Wittgenstein also speaks

metaphorically about how, in seeing an aspect, ‘we bring a concept to what we see’

(RPP I, 961) or how the aspect is ‘the echo of a thought in sight’ (PI, p. 212).

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’

(ibid). It does not by itself constitute an account or explication of anything. And

third, it may be that these remarks of Wittgenstein’s, even if taken in context and

with a grain of salt, are misleading or problematic in how they invite us to

understand the seeing of aspects.

10 ‘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.

11 I discuss this fundamental difference between Wittgenstein and both the

tradition of Western philosophy and mainstream Analytic philosophy in Baz (2012)

and Baz (2014).

12 As is evidenced in Margolis and Laurence (1999).

13 The earliest version of this idea is found in Strawson (‘Imagination and

Perception’, in Freedom and Resentment. London: Methuen, 1974). Later versions may be

found in Mulhall (1990 and 2001), Johnston (1994), and Schroeder (2010).

14 See Baz (2003). A powerful and detailed critique of the idea that human

perception is ‘conceptualized’ may be found in Travis (2013).

15 This connects with Kant’s saying that the modality of a judgment ‘contributes

nothing to the content of the judgment’ (1998, A74/B100).

16 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.

17 Schroeder muddles his discussion of aspect perception by speaking of the

similarity that strikes us as at once ‘an internal relation’ (2010, 359) and ‘an

objective feature of the object, namely a relation of likeness between it and some

other object’ (2010, 360). But a similarity thought of as an objective feature

cannot, conceptually, be an internal relation.

18 The Growth of the mind, An introduction to Child-Psychology, second edition, translated by M. R.

Ogden, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1927 (Kessinger Publishing, 2007). p. 221.

19 See Merleau-Ponty (1996, 7-8), who credits the notion of ‘constancy hypothesis’,

as well as the idea that Gestalt changes refute the hypothesis, to Koehler.

20 Those determinacy and stability are still only relative, I would argue, but

that’s a topic for a different occasion.

21 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.

22 I work out the affinity between Wittgensteinian aspects and Kantian beauty in

Baz (2010).

23 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. This is why the way

to try to see an object under some particular aspect is to adopt a bodily attitude

toward it that fits that aspect.

Aspects of Perception

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