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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.
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.
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.
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.
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