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 Please do not quote without permission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 Please do not quote without permissionWittgenstein, who first brought to philosophical attention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 Please do not quote without permissioncharacterization of the phenomenon, or set of related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.
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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.
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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.
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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:
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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.
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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’.
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on ‘Seeing As’). Please do not quote without permission
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
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