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  3. Seeing Wittgenstein Anew
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  • Publisher:
    Cambridge University Press
    Publication date:
    05 June 2012
    15 March 2010
    ISBN:
    9780511750663
    9780521838436
    9780521547321
    DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750663
    Dimensions:
    (228 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.66kg, 412 Pages
    Dimensions:
    (228 x 152 mm)
    Weight & Pages:
    0.5kg, 412 Pages
    • Subjects:
    Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Philosophy
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    Subjects:
    Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Philosophy
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    Book description

    Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is a collection which examines Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing, showing that it was not simply one more topic of investigation in Wittgenstein's later writings but rather a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy's attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. The essays in this 2010 volume open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human consciousness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena of aspect-seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy in a new century.

    Reviews

    '… the articles open a new path of inquiry, one that could not have been opened without the connection to aspect-seeing … the book contains many more successful arguments for seeing Wittgenstein anew.'

    Source: Journal of the History of Philosophy

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    Contents

    Page 1 of 2

    Contents
    • 1 - Aesthetic Analogies
      pp 23-39
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter discusses examples of visual experience and Wittgenstein's remarks about "seeing-as" in Part II, Section 11 of Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein remains preoccupied with differences among concepts of "seeing" and with philosophy's difference from psychology. Yet questions about capacity of "noticing an aspect", and topics of experience and of interpretation, are central concerns of aesthetics and criticism. The questions about experience or interpretation or noticing an aspect can be found to like questions that we encounter in aesthetics. Wittgenstein also considers general statements about perception or visual experience that we might derive from what we say and do in such cases. Traditional conceptions of form in the visual arts are perfectly analogous to Wittgenstein's examples of seeing-as. Kant's account of form, natural and artificial objects, including works of art, may be judged to be beautiful. His account of aesthetical ideas pertains to beautiful art defined as fine arts nowadays.
    • 2 - Aspects, Sense, and Perception
      pp 40-60
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Contemporary interpretations of phenomenology, as well as current theories of perception, define perception (and seeing) in terms of sense. This chapter brings out certain difficulties for the idea of perceptual sense, difficulties raised by Wittgenstein (and Austin). These difficulties come from the specific point of view of ordinary language philosophy. Talk of perceptual sense takes its start in Frege's notion of sense. This notion was the basis for the so-called Fregean readings of phenomenology. The criticisms in Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, though leveled directly at traditional empiricism, are perhaps even more useful today, now that a whole analysis of perception has been worked out in terms of sense. A phenomenon is not a symptom or a sign of something else that is real: on this point, Wittgenstein and Austin agree. Wittgenstein shows that the myth of seeing as an activity is bound up with a myth of seeing as passivity.
    • 3 - An Allegory of Affinities
      pp 61-80
    • On Seeing a World of Aspects in a Universe of Things
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Wittgenstein speaks more often of the mythological than of the allegorical. The immediate reason for using the word "allegory" to characterize this approach is to recapture something of the concepts and argument in Part IV of The Claim of Reason. Cavell's actual claims on behalf of "the allegory of words" are somewhat modest. What Wittgenstein means by "metaphysics" relentlessly tends to picture the world as a universe of things and their properties, or facts and their arrangements. Wittgenstein suggests a connection between "seeing an aspect" and "experiencing the meaning of a word". Cavell develops these connections in ways no one else foresaw and that have proved difficult to make use of. In insisting on using "aspect", Wittgenstein insists that the intimacy of the world, its affinity for us, is not based on its depth.
    • 4 - The Touch of Words
      pp 81-98
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The principal phenomenon Cora Diamond considers in one of her texts is that of understanding our relation to the non-human world of animals, most extendedly the relation or relations in the mass preparation of animals as food for humans, and she approaches it importantly through her responses to a pair of stories by J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee is careful to have various characters voice their disapproval, to put it mildly, of Costello's comparison of the business of mass animal butchery with the Nazi organization of the gassing and burning of Jews. She says, speaking of her concealed and unconcealed wound, that "it is touched on in every word I speak". A striking idea among Wittgenstein's remarks about seeing aspects is his saying that the importance of the concept lies in its connection with experiencing the meaning of a word and with our attachment to our words.
    • II.1 - Self-Knowledge
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter focuses on the epistemological intuitions that import into the proceedings from the outset expectations about what conditions must be satisfied in order to arrive at a true proposition with self-revelatory content. It highlights that it is easy, when reflecting in a preliminary way about the kind of autobiographical understanding that comes from a grasp of one's past, to conceive of the problem as a polarized epistemological dichotomy. Iris Murdoch emphatically asserts that the past, properly understood, should be "unfrozen", and that one has no less than a moral obligation to "re-think". The chapter further talks about two pole models. In the first one the narrative self is indeed a narrative construction, and in the second one the narrative self is one that is constituted not by present active retrospection but rather by the passive, factually constrained accurate memory of those past episodes of one's life.
    • 6 - The Bodily Root
      pp 120-140
    • Seeing Aspects and Inner Experience
    • View abstract

      Summary

      From the very beginning of his philosophical work, Wittgenstein was concerned with "seeing". This chapter shows that the generalized blindness involved in Frazer's stance and extended by Wittgenstein to the traditional philosophy is a main concern behind the exploration of "seeing aspects". Trapped in the scientific attitude, Frazer assumed that ritual practices result from empirical beliefs or opinions, and so he was unable to see them as any more than superstitions or incipient attempts at science. Wittgenstein argues that Frazer was bound to miss their significance insofar as he attempted to understand and explain them in terms of their external relations of rationality or causality. Wittgenstein's proposal involves change in attitude, deliberate grammatical openness and receptivity to the natural gesturality of language and the underlying, pulsating activity of the body.
    • 7 - (Ef)facing the Soul
      pp 143-161
    • Wittgenstein and Materialism
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Wittgenstein is unrelenting in his attempts to turn us away from an "occult" or "magical" conception of the mind, as a place or realm where meaning happens, where reference is effected, where explanations come to an end not with satisfaction, but out of desperation. This aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophy is, of course, what brings upon it the charge of behaviorism, and one reason why Cavell, for example, declares that Wittgenstein's philosophy "takes the risk of apsychism. According to the eliminativist, the conceptual repertoire of folk psychology is a kind of hypothesis concerning the internal workings of human beings. The eliminativist, by casting our ordinary psychological concepts in the role of a theory about the inner workings of the human body (treating joy, for example, as an "inward thing"), denies precisely the kind of transparency Wittgenstein attributes to the face.
    • 8 - Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency
      pp 162-180
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Consciousness or awareness is possessed by a wide range of higher chordates. Genuine discursive consciousness is possessed, at least in its complex forms, only by human beings. Aspect-seeing centrally involves doing something: mastering a technique and acting according to it (or extending it), as a result of "taking to" joint attentional interactions. Wittgenstein's treatment of aspect-seeing offers us a way of thinking about human discursive consciousness that is neither mentalist, nor materialist, nor social constructivist, nor any kind of explanation. It is rather an elucidatory redescription of what we do when we employ concepts within acts of seeing. Wittgenstein is defending both the priority of practice over theoretical representation and the irreducibility of agency to material processes. Neither conceptual practice nor anyone's actively "taking to it" can be reduced to independent and self-subsistent material or mental processes.
    • 9 - The Philosophical Significance of Meaning-Blindness
      pp 183-203
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter explores how Wittgenstein's investigations of aspect-seeing and related topics in Part II, Section 11 of Philosophical Investigations contribute to our understanding of his views on the nature of philosophical conflicts and confusions, of his diagnosis of our "tendency to sublime the logic of our language", and of his own critical methods. In the course of examining the role of images in the perception of aspects, Wittgenstein points out that seeing aspects require a capacity for imagination, for example, for relating the object seen to other objects not currently in view. Wittgenstein, then, delivers no direct answers to the questions we want to pose about meaning-blindness. The meaning-blindness may prove incapable of modifying familiar concepts, or of improvising on novel occasions, or even of making judgments that involve projecting a word with its customary meaning into new, non-stereotypical situations, of seeing new uses as extensions of old ones.
    • 10 - Wanting to Say Something
      pp 204-224
    • Aspect-Blindness and Language
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The mystery of why Wittgenstein takes an interest in the concept of aspect-seeing may be trumped only by the enigma of why he introduces the concept of aspect-blindness. We can find our way with aspect-blindness most easily if we begin by noting what aspect-blindness is not. The experience of having an aspect dawn, or of being struck by something, or of seeing the familiar in a new light, is thus as intimately and pervasively joined to the human form of life as talking. In this chapter, the author suggests that Wittgenstein's interest in the concept of aspect-blindness develops out of a preoccupation (found in Part I of the Investigations) with our attraction to the familiar philosophical ideal of perfect, mutual intelligibility that is the prize we would gain with the "solution" to the problem of meaning.
    • IV.1 - Therapy
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The real difficulty in coming to terms with Wittgenstein's teaching emerges when philosophers turn from talking about that teaching to actually doing philosophy that's supposed to proceed in its light. This chapter illuminates the nature of the difficulty by attending carefully to the way it manifests itself in a recent article by Stephen Mulhall on Wittgenstein's remarks on seeing aspects. It argues that Wittgenstein's remarks are meant to bring us back to, or project us into, situations of speech, or anyway situations in which words are called for particular words whereby we are meant to discover things about the meanings of the words we utter, things that we cannot have failed to know, and yet things that are, for some reason, hard to see. Mulhall's interpretation looks to find in Wittgenstein's remarks a very different kind of satisfaction, or peace, from that which they are designed to enable.
    • 12 - The Work of Wittgenstein's Words
      pp 249-267
    • A Reply to Baz
    • View abstract

      Summary

      This chapter restricts itself to defending the coherence of the author's reading against Avner Baz's critique. There is a structural obstacle in the way of determining exactly what weight to attach to the precise forms and general organization of Wittgenstein's remarks in Part II, Section 11 of Philosophical Investigations, and indeed of the writing that constitutes the whole of that part of the book. Despite the fact that the author's discussion begins by explicitly distinguishing three implications of Wittgenstein's remarks, Baz's summary of it simply runs them together. The strategy of the author's writings on seeing aspects is to reduce our sense of puzzlement about aspect-dawning by relocating it in the broader context of our lives with pictures; that context is hidden from us (and by us) because of its simplicity and familiarity, and it evades our notice precisely because it pervades our form of life.
    • 13 - On the Difficulty of Seeing Aspects and the “Therapeutic” Reading of Wittgenstein
      pp 268-288
    • View abstract

      Summary

      The distinctive character of Wittgenstein's manner of writing, early and late, must play an important role in accounting for the diverse ways in which it has been approached and engaged. When thinking of Wittgenstein on seeing aspects it is natural to think first and primarily of the remarks in Part II, Section 11 of Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein (often) writes in response to a sense that the possibility of various phenomena, for example, meaning, understanding, naming, following a rule, knowing another, has become mysterious to us, and that our efforts to account for their possibility, for example, by supposing underlying mental acts, universals, a pure logical order, only make matters more mysterious. He directs our attention differently to what is evident: the ordinary circumstances of phenomena of which we are aware but which we, for various reasons, dismiss as merely incidental or irrelevant.
    • 14 - Overviews
      pp 291-313
    • What Are They of and What Are They For?
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Wittgenstein's counsel to seek overviews has negative and positive sides. The negative is comparatively straightforward and comprises what Brian Clack refers to as the "prohibition on explanation". The term "synoptic sensibility" refers to the satisfaction taken in overviews, irrespective of any contribution they might make to the explanation of the phenomena of which they afford a perspicuous view. It is obvious that the heuristic rationale does not exhaust the appeal of overviews for Wittgenstein. The case for a synoptic, non-explanatory rationale for Goffman's dealings with presentational phenomena is even stronger than in the case of Wittgenstein's dealings with ritual. The aim of a self-clarificatory overview is to achieve a clearer realization of what it is that constrains the course of our thoughts on certain matters and confers on our recurrent ruminations their distinctive character.
    • 15 - On Being Surprised
      pp 314-337
    • Wittgenstein on Aspect-Perception, Logic, and Mathematics
    • View abstract

      Summary

      Wittgenstein's remarks invoking aspect-perception highlight his overall development as a philosopher. Like Kant, Wittgenstein hoped to reorient the notion of "discovery" as it plays a role in discussions of logic, mathematics, and philosophy, critiquing the idea that the mathematician or philosopher uncovers surprising novel facts and objects. Unlike Kant, Wittgenstein replaces this with the idea that the mathematician allows us to "see the value of a mathematical train of thought in its bringing to light something that surprises us". Wittgenstein therefore points toward the importance of active arrangement of concepts and symbols, open-ended self-discovery, pleasure, and absorbed intuitive preoccupation with diagrams and symbols as ineradicable features of our philosophical, logical, and mathematical activities. There is nothing objectionable per se, on Wittgenstein's view, with relying on pictures, diagrams, and other visible symbolic and representational structures.

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