Right in front of our eyes

aspect-perception, ethics and the utopian imagination in Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations

pp. 7-35

in: Ben Ware, Modernism, ethics and the political imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter explores Wittgenstein's concern with seeing and vision by focusing specifically upon four questions. First, how do we account for the emphasis which Wittgenstein places upon vision (especially in the later writings), and what does this reveal about his relation to some of the "ocularcentric" traditions of twentieth-century philosophical and aesthetic discourse? Second, to what extent can Wittgenstein's interest in seeing – and more specifically what he terms 'seeing-as' or "the "dawning" of an aspect" (PI II, 166ff) – be understood as having an ethical point? Third, how might the ethical dimension of the Investigations be connected with the work's modernist sensibility and, in particular, with its efforts to bring us to see the everyday or ordinary otherwise? And fourth, what are the potential political implications of Wittgenstein's notion of aspect-perception? In order to approach these questions, it will first be necessary to open ourselves up to the general complexities of Wittgenstein's engagement with the visual. For as he remarks in Part II, section xi of the Investigations: "We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough" (PI II, 181).