Wittgenstein

A Way of Seeing

Judith Genova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317828280
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In Wittgenstein's Way of Seeing, Judith Genova provides a an illuminating introduction to two surprisingly neglected aspects of his work: his conception of philosophy and his search for a style to embody his revolutionary practice. Genova examines the nuances, contours, and texture of logical twists of language. She elucidates Wittgenstein's reliance on the work of Kant and Freud, and presents how words are acts for Wittgenstein.

Part One A Way of Seeing

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view [übersehen] of the use of our words.—Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity [Übersichtlichkeit]. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists of ‘seeing connexions’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.

The concept of a perspicuous representation [der übersichtlichen Darstellung] is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account [Darstellungsform] we give, the way we look at things [die Art wie wir die Dinge sehen]. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?) (PI 122)

Wittgenstein calls his later way of seeing die Übersichtliche Darstellung, or, as the expression is most often translated into English, a perspicuous representation.¹ Initially, he means “way” (die Art) in the sense of method or style.² Way, like form (from Darstellungsform) in the Tractatus, does not so much signify a kind, for Wittgenstein, as it does a means of representation. A perspicuous representation does nothing more than survey, in engineering fashion, a form of life. “Way” also signifies a kind. Its method frames a content; that is, presents a picture which differs from other pictures. And, as I shall demonstrate in Part III, Wittgenstein’s way of seeing is readily distinguishable from that of Modern Philosophy’s, the period extending from Descartes to Kant. Given his antipathy to past philosophy’s psuedo-scientific aspirations, his worry about whether having a way of seeing is tantamount to having a Weltanschauung is not misplaced. As I indicated in my introduction, he would have preferred not to be known for a distinctive or competing way of seeing.

To distinguish his way of seeing clearly from that of a Weltanschauung, Wittgenstein introduces the concept of a Weltbild in On Certainty, his last writings. Das Weltbilt is also a world-picture, but not one invented or imposed by the inquirer. Rather, it is obtained by listening carefully to the language of a form of life, simultaneously imagining other possibilities, in order to discover what everyone already knows, albeit indistinctly. The goal is to describe, or take the pulse of a form of life (Lebensform), not explain it by drawing blood. In this sense, a Weltbild is a Lebensform; the two name the same phenomenon from different perspectives: the epistemological and ontological. The subtle differences between Wittgenstein’s early talk of a “form of account” in the Tractatus and his later choice of “way of seeing,” for the Investigations further differentiate the two kinds of world-pictures. Form, because it is usually tied to function, serves in an explanatory capacity. One easily confuses it with the way things are. Way, on the other hand, is less exact and less exacting than form. It relies more on style than method and is thus ideal for describing a Weltbild. It only provides a channel or space to view a form of life, not a net for interpreting it. Way abandons form’s static, structural take on the world for a dynamic, open-ended shot, which is interestingly more interventionist than theory.

The concept of seeing further elaborates Wittgenstein’s conception of way as means; that is, it responds to the age-old question, How do we know? What equipment do we use to learn? The traditional tools have always been the senses and the mind. In turning to language, Wittgenstein discovers a new avenue for learning: the hand or its extension, the tongue. Learning requires a more interactive and immediate medium than either thinking or seeing provide. To accomodate this insight, Wittgenstein eventually names action as the closest activity of language. However, he first spends a good deal of time worrying about the relations between seeing and thinking.

Die Übersehen is fundamentally a way of looking, not thinking. Yet, such a polarization of thought and sight (or the senses more generally) betrays Wittgenstein’s intentions in the later works. His goal in drawing our attention to the phenomenon of seeing-as is precisely to undermine Modern philosophy’s strict separation of the senses and disrupt the empiricism/rationalism debate as well as mind/body dualism. Seeing-as weaves thinking and seeing together into an inextricable whole making it impossible to distinguish them. Additionally, it focuses attention on the actions of seeing and thinking rather than the states. I would call it “interpretative” seeing/thinking rather than “contemplative,” except that Wittgenstein repeatedly denies the word “interpreting.” Interpretation is too conscious, too deliberate to capture the unconscious actions of seeing-as for him. Yet, if we think of “interpretation” as an internal function of sight itself, the term would not be misleading. Commanding a clear view requires a close seeing that involves imaginative thinking. One has to be close and far simultaneously. In effect, neither objectivity, nor subjectivity solves philosophical problems; rather, activity alone dissolves them.

Chapter 1 Commanding a Clear View

…It disperses the fog to study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words…. (PI 5)

A good way to begin dispersing the fog obscuring Wittgenstein’s use of a perspicuous representation is to compare it with his more primitive form of account in the Tractatus, the view, sub specie aeternitatis. (As Wittgenstein predicted, a better understanding of his later ideas can be achieved by comparing them with his earlier ones.) The main link between these two ways of seeing is the concept of a Darstellungsform or “form of representation.” An Übersehen, whatever else it may be, is first and foremost a form of representation. While many important differences attend the change from form to way, a perspicuous representation remains a kind of “net” for describing reality. And for the Tractatus, everything depends on finding the right net. With the proper net, he claimed, one can describe the world completely.

His sensitivity to painting and music was the foundation for this idea; a visual or musical idea is so perfectly wedded to its embodiment (in the sense of a tautology) that one is not expressible without the other. If philosophy could find an equally suitable net, it too could achieve perfect expression. By net, Wittgenstein literally means the notation, or the actual style or way in which the method is inscribed. What Schubert wanted to say musically is perfectly expressed in the arrangement of notes provided by musical notation. Style for Wittgenstein embodies his method; it gives method physiognomic detail. A way of seeing is foremost a style of seeing, like a style of painting.

By “proper,” Wittgenstein means a net that clarifies, rather than explains or theorizes. Clarity, Descartes as well as Wittgenstein claimed, is the single most important virtue for philosophical understanding:

Typically it [scientific thinking] constructs. It is occupied with building an even more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves. (CV pg. 7)

A clear net not only frees one’s psychologically from doubt and confusion, but objectively makes things perspicuous. Clarity’s main virtue is that it reveals the connections between things and thus provides a view of the whole or the world-picture informing our form of life. A perspicuous representation is not interested in the details of any one particular piece of a puzzle; nor does it seek to penetrate phenomena to find their internal structure. Rather, it shows how things hang together. Wittgenstein’s early search for a view of the whole provides the first clue to understanding his concept of a perspicuous representation.

Concomitantly, it reveals something about the nature of postmodern philosophy. The question that motivates Wittgenstein is not the greek one, “Of what is the universe made?” nor the medieval one, “Who is its maker?” nor its modern replacement, “How does the world work?” but the postmodern quandry, “Why does the world exist at all?”—the that of the world, its meaning. Like Heidegger, his contemporary, he was struck by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?³ Both thinkers, who otherwise seem poles apart, are fascinated with the brute fact of existence, the that, not the how. And they both agree that nothing in science addresses this question (T 6.52). Science reigns supreme in the domain of the how, but it is impotent in the world of the that. God is no scientist. Unlike Heidegger, however, Wittgenstein abandons any pretense of answering this question. The sense of the world lies outside it (T 6.41); no form of representation can comprehend it. The Parmenidian vision of Being (i.e., as one, whole, and everlasting) is a view for the Gods. The most Wittgenstein can do is show the impossibility of such quests, the limits of what can be said. His hope is that by seeing the world as a world, he might explain its meaning. From this perspective, the view sub specie aeternitatis precedes and contrasts nicely with Wittgenstein’s later goal of an Übersehen.

From Eternity to Here

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. (T 6.45)

Near the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wishes for a view of the world sub specie aeterni, a view, as he explains, from the timeless perspective of eternity (T 6.4311). Seeing the world aright: that is, after the scaffolding of Tractarian propositions are kicked away (T 6.54), is seeing it whole—in one glorious vision—instead of piecemeal or as an endless series of pieces. “Limited” reiterates the notion of the whole by emphasizing finiteness. We see the world as bounded and suspended in space.⁴ We would then be in a position to see all the effects of every action as they ripple across the face of the globe: that is, the world waxing and waning as a whole (T 6.43). He compares it to an artist’s view:

But it seems to me too that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni other than through the work of the artist. Thought has such a way—so I believe—it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is—observing it from above, in flight. (CV pg. 5)

Read in conjunction with T 6.44, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” one deduces that the view of the whole reveals the that of the world (its sense) not the how. It is a view for the Gods or for those who see the world from afar.

Yet, the existence of the Tractatus suggests that such an experience, as he refers to it, a feeling of the world as a whole, may be possible if not seeable or thinkable.⁵ Wittgenstein writes from such a feeling. In the early work, Wittgenstein, like Heidegger and pace Kant, renounces thinking to make room for feeling.⁶ Yet one ought not say this too loudly. Unlike the thinkers of the late Nineteenth Century, who no doubt inspired his hope for feeling, Wittgenstein never claims theoretical status for feeling’s capacity for knowledge. A feeling or presentment of the whole adds nothing to our knowledge of the world. Feelings must be felt in silence.

In the Tractatus, logic is the closest thing to Godliness. Since it is prior to the how, it creates a hidden access to the that (T 5.552). To experience the world as a whole, one must experience logic. Its precise, machine-drawn propositions lay bare the form of the world. Like x-rays, logical pictures penetrate the clutter of phenomena revealing the skeletal form beneath. With classic modernist sensibility, Wittgenstein believed that form underlay content, making it coherent. “How things stand” (T 4.5) was perspicuous by inspection of the logical connective tissue underlying content. Logic’s cheat, however, is that it only provides a peek of the whole in miniature and from inside. Instead of leaving the world, and viewing it from afar, logic positions one inside the world swinging one’s feet from a cosmic girder. Wittgenstein himself introduces the spatial metaphors of “inside/outside” and “close/far” to describe the view sub specie aeternitatis:

The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.

In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

Is this it perhaps—in this view the object is seen together with space and time instead of in space and time?

Each thing modifies the whole logical world, the whole of logical space, so to speak.

(The thought forces itself upon one): The thing seen sub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One A Way of Seeing
• Part Two Changing a Way of Seeing
• Part Three Wittgenstein’s Way of Seeing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index