Aspects of Perception

Draft (forthcoming in a volume on Seeing As).
Please do not quote without permission
Aspects of Perception
Avner Baz
The topic of this paper is what Wittgenstein calls seeing something as something or the
seeing of aspects, and Richard Wollheims 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-aswhat phenomenon or
set of related phenomena he means to refer to with this expression. And it seems to me
that Wollheims 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
methodwhat it is we are after, or ought to be after, in philosophy, and how it may best
be pursued. Wittgenstein, 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
(Wittgensteins) 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
Draft (forthcoming in a volume on Seeing As). Please do not quote without permission
in part by the sense that that difficulty has not been aptly appreciated by some prominent
readers of Wittgensteins remarks on aspects.
Since the above is my topic, I will ignore the broader context of Wollheims
discussionnamely, his theory of artistic (mostly pictorial) representation, and the
distinction he draws between what he calls seeing-as and what he calls seeing-in. I
will begin with a characterization of the phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, that I
understand Wittgenstein to be investigating in his investigation of seeing-as, or the seeing
of aspects. Wollheim takes himself to be offering an account of essentially the same
phenomenon (cf. 209). I will argue that he is not. And the real problem with this is not
that Wollheim has lost touch with Wittgensteins topicafter 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 matterwhatever it is he means to
be talking aboutunclear. Or so I will try to show.
At the same time, I think the motivation behind Wollheims 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 Wittgensteins remarks on aspect perception, is motivated 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 suchof 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 it to
characterize (normal) human perception as such, have failed.3 In this paper I will argue
that Wollheims 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, Wollheims 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 Kants account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, I will
propose that the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals our power to perceive non-
or pre-conceptual, but at the same time inter-subjectively shareable, unity and sense.
In proposing a broader lesson about human perception that I think may be drawn
from the dawning of aspects, I will be going beyond what may plausibly be found in
Wittgensteins remarks. In this respect, I will be doing what many other readers of
Wittgensteins remarks on aspects have doneat 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 Wittgensteins 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 Wittgensteins general approach to
the understanding and dissolution of philosophical 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
discoursewhich mostly focuses on the objects of our experience rather than on our
experience itselfthen 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 of 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 faceswhere 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 seeing as or aspects, is that he characterizes his subject
matter both grammaticallyin the Wittgensteinian sense of that termand
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
Wittgensteins later philosophical practice. At the root of any number of traditional
philosophical difficulties, Wittgenstein identified the tendency to suppose that our
wordsincluding philosophically troublesome words such as see, understand,

know, think, mean, intend, pain, and so onrefer 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 privatein the sense that
each of us may only directly be acquainted with her or his objectsthe tendency has
been to suppose that such an investigation must either take the form of introspection, or
else take the form of theoretical inference from mere behavior to what best explains it.
What Wittgenstein tries to get us to see is that the model, or picture, of object and
designation (PI, 293) is misguided and misleading when it comes to those words, and
that what we end up producing, when we attempt to elucidate the nature of the objects
to which they are supposed to refer, are philosophically constructed chimeras
structures of air, as he puts it (PI, 118)that we erect on the basis of nothing more than
pictures that we have formed for ourselves of those objects.
Wittgensteins 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). Dont try to analyze your own inner experience (PI, p. 204e; see also PI, p. 206c).
The question, he writes, is not what happens here, but rather: how one may use that
statement (RPPI, 315, check translation). So he reorients his readers attention away
from his or her own experience and toward the use of relevant wordshere, 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 aspectsor 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
Wittgensteins remarks on aspects with which I am familiar, and equally of attempts such
as Wollheims to offer accounts of seeing-as that are more or less independent from
Wittgensteins, is that they fail to heed this Wittgensteinian call altogether. The use of the
relevant termswhere that importantly includes the philosophers use of themtends 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(ones) particular experience of it. In contrast, someone may look at
an object, see 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 themin order to teach her, precisely, something about
the external world. The other person, in Wittgensteins 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 contextsas opposed to the artificial
ones of the lab or studythe 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 third 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
worldthe world that may be defined by its independence from any(ones) particular
experience of ithas not changed.
So much, for now, by way of grammatical characterization of what Wittgenstein
calls aspects. All of this grammar notwithstanding, the dawning (or noticing) of a
Wittgensteinian aspectunlike thinking, or knowing, or intending, or understanding, or
meaning, or reading this or thatis, 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 perceptionin favor, once again, of theoretical commitments
and ambitions.
An important merit of Wollheims 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 Wollheims theoretical commitments prevent him from doing justice
to that experience.
The phenomenology of noticing an aspect is fairly easy to give an initial
characterization of, though no characterization would be much good to anyone not
familiar with the experience, and any form of words with which the experience might be
characterized could also be understood in such ways that it would not aptly characterize
the experience. This is why the phenomenology and grammar of aspect perception are
intimately connected, and why both are needed for an understanding of what
Wittgenstein is talking about. When we notice an aspect everything changes and yet
nothing changes (see RPP II, 474). We see (in the objective sense of that word, the first
of the two uses of it that Wittgenstein speaks of) that the object has not changed, and yet
we see it differently (in what Wittgenstein refers to as the second use of see). All of the
objects 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 of 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 seein 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 and thereby identified
geometrically), but, say, the rabbit aspect? What do you see when you see the duck-
rabbit as a rabbit? The obvious answer would seem to be a picture-rabbit (or maybe a
rabbit) (PI, p. 194). Now, if you were asked what that (i.e. a picture-rabbit, or a rabbit)
was, you could point to non-schematic pictures of rabbits, or to real rabbits, etc. (Ibid).
But note the important sense in which saying rabbit or picture-rabbit, or pointing to a
non-ambiguous rabbit, whether flesh and blood or depicted, as a way of specifying what
you saw, would be misleading: it would suggest that you were somehow unaware of the
ambiguity of the figure and of the possibility of seeing it as a duck, and unaware of the
active role you play in casting the rabbit aspect onto the figure, so to speak, whereas we
are here supposing that this is not the case.7 What you see when you see the duck-rabbit
as a rabbit (say) is, therefore, well, this (and now one would like simply to point to the
duck-rabbit, perhaps with the addition of hints to help the other see the rabbit aspect, if
for some reason she has not yet been able to see it).8
The grammatical-phenomenological characterization I have just given of
Wittgensteinian aspects is fairly specific; and yet it allows for quite a range of cases that
differ from each other in more or less significant ways. Let me mention some of them:
seeing a similarity between two faces; seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck or as a rabbit;
seeing a figure such as the famous Necker cube as oriented one way or another in space;
seeing the double-cross as a white cross against a black background, or vice versa; seeing
a triangleeither 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); theres
the aspect we may be said to see when something strikes us in a picture of a running
horse and we exclaim Its 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 which everything strikes us as unreal (RPPI 125-6)
An important thing to note is that aspects may be seen in non-ambiguous figures:
for an aspect to dawn on us, there need not be, and often there is not, two (or more)
competing, determinate aspects under which the object may be seen. Thus, for example,
there is no clear, determinate aspect that competes with the similarity of one face to
another, and which that similarity, when it strikes us, might plausibly be thought to have
replaced. Even in cases where it seems that there are two or more determinate aspects
under which an object may be seen, 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 under
some particular, determinate aspect or another.
Another important point is that in some of the above cases, the aspect corresponds
to no objective judgmentwhat 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 aspectgiven 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 onno such
judgment is actually made by the perceiver of the aspect; and in the typical case, the
perceiver of the aspect makes it clear that what she sees the object as is not something
that she takes it to be. This is why we normally invite the other to see the aspect, rather
than demand that she does, and why we do not take her to be mistaken if she cannot see
the aspect we see. This is going to matter when we turn to Wollheim, for whom the
typical, or anyway basic case of seeing-as is one in which the object is judged, or
believed, to be what it is seen as.
2. Wollheim on Seeing-As
According to Wollheim, seeing-as is an essential part of the capacity for
straightforward perception, which he explicates in terms of the capacity that we
humans and other animals have of perceiving things present to the senses (217). A little
later on he similarly proposes that seeing-as partially is, partially is a development out
of, an aspect of straightforward perception (219). How so? Wollheim explains:
Whenever I straightforwardly perceive something, which ex hypothesi is present to the senses, my
perception of it is mediated by a concept, or in perceiving it I subsume it under a concept. For any x,
whenever I perceive x, there is always some f such that I perceive x as f. But it is crucial to an
understanding of seeing-as to recognize that my seeing x as f is not just the conjunction of my seeing x and
my judging it to be f. Such a view, which has gained currency amongst perceptual psychologists who talk
of perception as hypothesis, errs in that it leaves the judgment external to the perception. It was just this
view that Wittgenstein tried to combat when he asked us to consider cases where we switch from seeing
something or other as this to seeing it as that. For the relevance of such cases is that they allow us to
observe how experience and concept change not merely simultaneously but as one [T]he fundamental
point is that, when I see x as f, f permeates or mixes into the perception: the concept does not stand
outside the perception, expressing an opinion or conjecture on my part about x, and which the perception
may be said to support to this or that degree.

The claim that for any perceived object x, whenever I perceive x, there is always
some concept f such that I perceive x as f is a very strong claim. So it is worth noting that
Wollheim in effect retracts it no sooner than he has made it. For he goes on to describe
cases where for one reason or another one cannot at first tell what one sees, and only
comes to see the object as f when told by someone else that it is (an) f, or when finally
recognizing it to be (an) f after considerable effort (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 Wollheims basic claim that we cannot see
something as something it (or its counterpart) could never have been (222), seems to fly
directly in the face, not only of some of Wittgensteins examplesin what sense could
the letter F have been facing right, or left?but also of some of Wollheims 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 womans 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 womans 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 Wollheims general account could somehow be made to
accommodate the cases he regards as less simple will become significantly less
important. The simplest case, Wollheim says,
is when the concept arises in the mind along with the perception, and having thus arisen, what it does is
to give content to a belief. The concept f enters the mind along with the perception of x, blends with this
perception, and stays in the mind to form the belief that x is f. So I look out of the window of a train and see
a tree which I straightaway see as an oak, which I thereupon believe it to be (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 ithow his words are to be understood. But as far as I can
see, all we get from Wollheim in this respect is the highly metaphorical talk of a concept
entering the mind and blending with the perception, or of a concept permeating or
mixing into the perception.9 Do we understand this talk, or does it only give us the
illusion of sense?
In order to even begin to understand Wollheims 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 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 peoples employment of it. But if this is roughly what concept ordinarily and
normally meanswhat we ordinarily and normally mean by itthen 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 Wollheims 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 Wollheims
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 concepts, 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
wordsincluding, importantly, philosophically troublesome wordsin 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 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 exemplars and ways of measuring an items 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 bethe more one packs
into ones 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 objectthe 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 like, 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, lets 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 conditionsand what Travis calls thinkers. The latter, unlike the former, know, at
least to some extent and with respect to very many types of objects, what makes objects
count, in general or in given contexts, as objects of those types, and are capable of
judging that a particular objectfor 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 Traviss sense). It may be that much of our talk about the
world is drawn from us by the world as it presents itself to uswhere this refers not just
to the world we speak of, but also, and importantly, to the world we speak inwithout
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
judgment. If so, however, then Wollheims (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
Wollheims simple casethe case of perceiving something that we immediately
recognize, know, to belong to some particular type, or, if you will, to fall under some
particular conceptcannot 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 Wittgensteins 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 into 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 by
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
Wollheims 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 Wittgensteins 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 generally 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 visible similarity to that face, there could always be another face that is
visibly distinguishable from all of those faces and yet may correctly be judged to bear
visible similarity to the first face. One could go a step further and argue that any two
faces may, in some contexts, correctly be judged to bear some visible similarity to each
other. 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 visible 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 lets 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 Wollheims 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, diminishing from belief through likely supposition,
informed guess, outside bet, to the case where there is no commitment at all to the
satisfaction of the concept by the object and imagination or make belief takes over (221).
But where exactly in this series should we place Wittgensteins case of being struck by
the similarity between two faces? I submit that the case he describes fits nowhere in
Wollheims 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.
Wollheims 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 mean to say that no role is played in the dawning of an
aspect by something we may call imagination. I actually suspect that a certain
equivocation on imagination 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 worldwithin what Charles Travis calls networks of factive meaning (2013,
91). A particular faces 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 systemthe system Kant calls naturethey 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 suitably positioned to recognize this; and I am committed to holding those who
deny the similarity to be mistaken, and to be liable to err practically as a result; and I am
committed to taking it that each of the two faces, or some feature(s) of it, may be pointed
to as a way of giving someone (some) information about the other face (The escaped
suspects face is similar to so and sos face); and Im 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 featuresto 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 similarity between the
faces, where that means a situation in which the two faces are such that normal and
competent perceivers who are suitably positioned may rightfully be expected to find them
similar to each other (given a suitable context, 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 featuresidentifiable by normal and competent perceivers who are suitably
positionedthat 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 with 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 dont. A long tradition,
beginning with Kants 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 conceptsthought of as systematically inter-related
rules for the unification and organization of the sensible manifoldcould enable us to
move from the merely inner or subjective succession of Vorstellungen to a world
sharable with others (see Kant, 1998, A196-7/B242). Part of what Wittgenstein has
taught us to recognize is that what may sensibly be called the application of concepts to
cases could itself only truly be understood in terms of inter-subjectively shared practices
into which we are initiated, and in which we participate, in a world that is, to some
degree, always already shared with others. But as phenomenologists such as Husserl,
Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have taught us to recognize, it is extremely difficult to
describe without distortion our perceptual relation to the not-yet-objective and yet
intersubjectively sharable, and largely shared, world. In particular, it is extremely

difficult to resist the temptation to objectify the perceived world, and to think of our
relation to it in terms of the very same empirical concepts whose application may only be
understood, if Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists are correct, against the background
of that very relation.
4. Aspects as Perceived Internal Relations
Wollheim, as we saw, complains against the tendency to leave judgment external to
perception (219). The whole point of Wittgensteins 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 twoa 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 borrowed 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 overall 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 rabbit 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 isnt 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 Wittgensteins
understanding of philosophical difficulty, is that of linguistic meaning, or sense. On
Wittgensteins view, which may be seen as a development of Freges context principle,
the basic unit of linguistic sense is neither the isolated word, nor the isolated string of
words, but an utterancea human act performed against the background of the history of
the language, the culture, and of the individual participants. Phenomenologicallywhich
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 but 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 was one of Kants 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 aboutconstituting, as the
phenomenologists later came to saythe unity of our experience. What Kant missed,
according to the phenomenologists, was the possibility of an intelligible synthesis that is
not (yet) conceptuala 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 at a face and see (first sense), or have
someone point out or demonstrate to you, that there is some visible similarity between it
and another, where seeing that need not involve, or bring about, any change in how you
visually experience the face youre 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 youre looking at changes; and what dawns on you here is an internal relation
between the one face and the other precisely because the perceived relationof
similarityis 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 facesa similarity that may simply be known to be there, and
which does not depend on anyones visual experience of the face. But that would not be
the seeing of a Wittgensteinian aspectthe 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 this 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 ones ordinary or habitual
relation 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
somethinghow it organizes itself under your gaze, so to speakand 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 perceivethat is, objects of sight of Wittgensteins first category:
determinate objects determinately situated in the objective worldto 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 worldthe world about which science has
ultimate authorityto be the perceived world, or the world as perceived. They have thus
committed what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl and Gestalt psychologists, calls the
experience error.
The dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals the experience error to be an
error. It shows that there are perceived physiognomic unity and sense that are importantly
different from the unity and sense capturable in Kantian Erkenntnisse. It shows that the
constancy hypothesis is false: there is no one-to-one correlation between the world we
objectively know we perceive and the world as perceived.19

And it arguably shows even more than this. Arguably, it shows that the perceived
unity or sense of the world as perceived, unlike the unity or sense of the world as
objectively cognized, is importantly indeterminate: the dawning of a Wittgensteinian
aspect is not normally the replacement of one determinate physiognomy by another
determinate physiognomy. Rather, it is the passing replacement of an indeterminate
physiognomy with a relatively determinate one. Merleau-Ponty says that We must
recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon (1996, 6)that is, not as due to
some kind of contingent limitation of our cognitive or perceptual powers. This is one of
the most difficult ideas in his account of perceptiondifficult both to understand and to
accept. 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-
Pontys 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
Wittgensteins 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 candidate for the competing aspect under which the
face had been seen up until right before the dawning of the new aspect. We had been
seeing the face all right, but not as having some particular, determinate overall expression
or physiognomy. 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 Check 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 weve always seen a face, he further suggests, then we
should try to say what that aspect ishow weve 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. It is undeniable that in some cases we are readily
able to describe the dawning aspect well enough to get other people to (see whether they
can) see it. 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 another, 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 physiognomiesquite particular expressions, as Wittgenstein
puts it in the Brown Bookthat 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 particularif also passing and indeterminateexpression.)
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 nave 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 at 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 aspectsat least those that strike
us in the course of natural, everyday experienceare akin to Kantian beauty.22
6. Concluding Remark: Aspects and Beauty
As we have seen, it is one thing to see something as x and quite another thing to conceive
of it as x, or judge it to be x. And seeing something as xI mean, the perceptual

phenomenon Wittgenstein investigates under that titlecannot 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 determinacya particular way of momentarily taking hold with our gaze of what
encounters us in our experience.
Wittgensteins 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 unity that
is not, and cannot, be captured by any available concept or set of concepts, is in this sense
indeterminate, and yet for all that is experienced as genuinely perceived and as inter-
subjectively sharable (see CJ 240-1, 287, and 292). 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.
Notes
1
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 asidedistinguishing 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 figuresay the duck-rabbitbut
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-blinddefined by
Wittgenstein as someone who lacks the capacity to see something as somethingshould be perfectly
capable of continuously seeing an aspect thus understood.
3
In Baz (2000 and 2009) I argue against Stephen Mulhalls influential claim that what he calls continuous
aspect perception characterizes our normal perceptual relation to the world and is the focus of
Wittgensteins interest in his remarks on aspects.

4
This characterization does not quite capture Mulhalls account of aspect perception. Mulhalls account has
the important merit of emphasizing, even if ultimately mischaracterizing, the distinction between seeing
in the sense in which Wittgensteinian aspects are seenand (mere) knowing.

5
I am suggesting that what Juliet Floyd has insightfully called Wittgensteins 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: Wittgensteins 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 tentativesomething 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 Wittgensteins, 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 Kants 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 thats a topic for a different
occasion.
21
This illustrates the way in which the perceived physiognomy an object presents may change in
accordance with its perceived, or imagined, background, which is one important source of perceptual
indeterminacy.
22
I work out the affinity between Wittgensteinian aspects and Kantian beauty in Baz (2010).
23
Where Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Kant, and beyond virtually everyone else in the tradition of Western
philosophy, is in bringing out the way in which this pre-conceptual and largely indeterminate unity of the
world is a unity for and in relation to, not our disembodied cognitive powers, but, precisely, our body. The
perceived world is a field of actual and potential embodied engagement. This is why the way to try to see
an object under some particular aspect is to adopt a bodily attitude toward it that fits that aspect.

Aspects of Perception

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Draft (forthcoming in a volume on Seeing As).

Please do not quote without permission

seeing of aspects, and Richard Wollheims discussion of seeing-as in a supplementary

that it is not altogether clear what Wollheim means by seeing-aswhat phenomenon or

readers of Wittgensteins remarks on aspects.

discussionnamely, his theory of artistic (mostly pictorial) representation, and the

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

make clear what phenomenon, or set of related phenomena, he means to refer to by

Wittgenstein Wollheim has rendered his own subject matterwhatever it is he means to

be talking aboutunclear. Or so I will try to show.

what he calls seeing-as should be taken seriously. Whereas Wittgenstein deliberately

readers of Wittgensteins remarks on aspect perception, is motivated by the conviction

lighting up (dawning, Aufleuchten) of an aspect, and though he says at various places

be, revelatory of (normal) human perception as suchof what Wollheim calls

straightforward perception. Specifically, these philosophers have come to hold one

perception can, and ought to, be understood as the perception of aspects.

Wittgensteinian aspects is revelatory of a fundamental feature of human perception. The

perception from the phenomenon Wittgenstein investigates in his remarks on aspects, is

Wittgensteins remarks on aspects have doneat the cost, I have argued, of

the understanding and dissolution of philosophical 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

dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is a level of human experience that is pre-conceptual

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

explicitly to light in a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation. Its essence will not be

I begin with what I take Wittgenstein to mean by seeing (perceiving) something as

II of the Investigations are a good place to seek initial orientation:

Two uses of the word see.

the likeness which the former did not see.

of what Wittgenstein means by seeing as or aspects, is that he characterizes his subject

matter both grammaticallyin the Wittgensteinian sense of that termand

Wittgensteins later philosophical practice. At the root of any number of traditional

philosophical difficulties, Wittgenstein identified the tendency to suppose that our

wordsincluding philosophically troublesome words such as see, understand,

to which they are supposed to refer, are philosophically constructed chimeras

pictures that we have formed for ourselves of those objects.

Wittgensteins appeal to the use of philosophically troublesome words, or to what

himself) not to try to understand aspect perception by way of introspection of what

any other concept of experience (Erfahrungsbegriff, PI p. 193e)we need to do more

relevant termswhere that importantly includes the philosophers use of themtends to

be neglected in favor of theoretical commitments and ambitions.6

What can we say about the grammar of (noticing) Wittgensteinian aspects?

independently of any(ones) particular experience of it. In contrast, someone may look at

understands by teaching something and by the external world. In particular, the

it must be subjective (inner, metaphysically private) needs to be resisted; for it may be

is at least sometimes misguided and misleading. Given the common philosophical

understanding of objective and subjective, the aspect is, importantly, neither.

object while failing to see the aspect.

In giving voice to the seeing of an aspect, we accordingly normally seek, not to

experience of ithas not changed.

So much, for now, by way of grammatical characterization of what Wittgenstein

Wittgensteinian aspectunlike thinking, or knowing, or intending, or understanding, or

experience with a distinct phenomenology. Wittgenstein in no way denies this. On

aspects so interesting and at the same time so difficult to come to a satisfying

which I am familiar, is that they either neglect or misrepresent the distinct

phenomenology of aspect perceptionin favor, once again, of theoretical commitments

An important merit of Wollheims 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

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

or expression changes, and changes wholly.

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