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8 - Wittgenstein on Aspect-Seeing, the Nature of Discursive Consciousness, and the Experience of Agency
- By Richard Eldridge
Edited by William Day, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, Victor J. Krebs
Book:

Seeing Wittgenstein Anew

Published online:

05 June 2012

Print publication:

15 March 2010, pp 162-180
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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.