What's the point of seeing aspects?

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 97-121

  Baz, Avner ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547723992     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00116     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. PI Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.), tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963)
2. RPPI Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)
3. RPPII Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)
4. LWI Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
5. LWII Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
6. Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (hereafter known as OB), (London: Routledge, 1990)
7. Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (hereafter known as RI), (London: Routledge, 1993)
8. As opposed to ordinary perception, or 'seeing' in its ordinary sense (the first sense of 'seeing' in the first remark of section xi), in which what you see, as William James Earle says, 'is mainly a matter of where you are and what is there' ('Ducks and Rabbits: Visuality in Wittgenstein', in Sites of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 1997), p. 303). If you tell me that you see a house in the distance, it makes perfect sense for me to respond by saying that what you actually see is an old stable
9. Stanley Cavell, 'Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy', Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1969), 89, footnote
10. I have deliberately been trying to invoke, in what I've said so far about aspects, Kant's characterization of aesthetic judgements in the Critique of Judgement. (And, of course, what Cavell says about beauty in the passage I alluded to is meant to interpret Kant.) The peculiarity of aesthetic judgements, constituted by the ungrounded demand for the agreement of others, Kant describes by saying that they 'involve a claim to subjective universality' (Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), section 6, p. 54)
11. This point is also made by Roger Scruton, in Art and Imagination : A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 110. In many ways Scruton's account is more faithful to Wittgenstein than the more recent commentaries. Particularly important, from the perspective of this paper, is that, unlike Mulhall and Johnston, Scruton does not take the dawning of an aspect to show that we have been seeing the object under an(other) aspect all along (p. 114). The most important difference between Scruton's account and mine lies in where we each locate the significance of the seeing of aspects. This difference, in turn, is due largely to the fact that Scruton thinks of the seeing of aspects primarily as an experience, which as such requires an external, third person criteria, no doubt, but which, being an experience, does not need to have a point, whereas I think about it as a move in a language-game; hence, as something that we engage ourselves in; and hence, as something that must have a point if in so doing we are to make sense
12. Cavell makes a very similar point about acknowledging, coming to see, other people in the fourth part of The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (hereafter known as CR), (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1979). He also connects this idea with the seeing of aspects. See in particular pp. 368-9
13. I'm thinking of Strawson's idea that all perception is a 'seeing as' ('Imagination and Perception', in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. Ralph Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982))
14. Ted Schatzki, in a review of Johnston's book, makes the mistake of recognizing only this sense of 'seeing an aspect'. He says that seeing an aspect 'presupposes multiple possibilities of what something can be seen as' ('Inside-out?', Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1995, pp. 43-4). But in order for you to be struck by the resemblance between two faces, there does not need to be another thing that they could be seen as. It only presupposes that before you were struck they were just two faces for you (and Schatzki himself says, contra Mulhall, that it makes no sense to call that a seeing of an aspect (p. 44))
15. Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (hereafter known as W), (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 192
16. Joshua Kenaz, The Way to the Cats (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 87-8, my translation