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Wittgenstein, Aspect Seeing, Rothko

In Part 11 of Philosophical Investigations one of Wittgenstein’s themes is aspect seeing. His best known example is of the duck-rabbit – a puzzle picture that can be seen either as a duck looking to the left, or as a rabbit looking upwards and to the right. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect’. The visual stimulus doesn’t change. The retinal image that we have is presumably also unchanged. Yet we suddenly see what we thought was just a duck as a rabbit. This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be (Hans-Johann Glock in his A Wittgenstein Dictionary p.37  calls this ‘concept-saturatedness of perception’).

What’s This Got to Do With a Course At Tate Modern?

There are parallels between the experience of aspect dawning that Wittgenstein describes and the experience of being jolted into appreciating a new aspect of a work of art. For example, the common experience of Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals in  Tate Modern as tranquil objects of meditative and serene contemplation can be transformed if you learn the degree to which he intended his painting to be Dionysian glimpses into the abyss at the edge of what can be tolerated. For instance, in his biography of Rothko (p.355) James Breslin quotes Rothko (p.355):

‘I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene […] that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.’

Learning this can be the equivalent of suddenly seeing the puzzle picture as a rabbit when you have only previously seen it as a duck. You see the same paintings, but they now have a menacing rather than tranquil air.

For a brief overview of some of the main themes of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, see chapter 26 of the third edition of my book Philosophy: The Classics.

Wittgenstein, Family Resemblance, Art

One of the ways in which we can get bewitched by language is by assuming that if we correctly use a word in a range of contexts, there must be some common essence shared by the things we refer to. Wittgenstein uses the example of 'game'. One approach to defining 'game' would be to look for all the non-trivial features that  are shared by the things we call games. But to assume that there must be some underlying essence of all games, is, Wittgenstein tells us, a mistake. Instead of the single uniting feature, what we find if we actually 'look and see' is a complex pattern of overlapping resemblances between games. He coined the term 'family resemblance' to refer to this pattern: this a reference to the visual resemblances between genetically related members of a family. Often such relations don't share a single distinctive feature, but rather one is like another in hair colour, others have similar eye colour or cheekbones, etc. So that as with games there is simply this complex pattern of overlapping visual resemblances (albeit with an underlying genetic cause). The key passages where he discusses this idea are in Philosophical Investigations (1.66 and 1.67).

This approach is anti-essentialist in that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that all concepts appropriately used refer to a common underlying essence that make that thing what it is. That view was, for example, explicit in Plato's notion of the Forms.

A number of philosophers, notably Maurice Weitz, applied the notion of a family resemblance term to the question 'What is Art?' Weitz diagnosed the difficulty that previous philosophers had had with defining art as arising out of a misplaced quest for the essence of art. An example of a writer who assumed that art must have an essence is Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury critic, who in his book Art (1914) declared that '...either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of 'works of art' we gibber' (p.7-8). A Wittgensteian would point out that this a false dichotomy: that there is a third option, namely that art is a family resemblance term.

For a discussion of neo-Wittgensteinian theories of art, see Nigel Warburton The Art Question (Routledge, 2003) Chapter 3.

These links are useful for an overview of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy:

The Philosophers Magazine

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

Numerous further links at episteme.com

Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy

WIttgenstein' conceived of his later philosophy as showing the fly 'the way out of  the fly bottle' (Philosophical Investigations 1.309). Philosophy, as he put, it often arises from being 'bewitched' by language'or begins 'when language goes on holiday' (1.38)...For him the aim of philosophy is to dissolve philosophical problems by attending to how language is actually used: it is a therapeutic approach, as if philosophy were an illness from which philosophers suffer. This isn't simply an exercises in social anthropology: by mapping language use Wittgenstein purports to show the limits of thought and meaningulness.

The style of his later writing seems to be designed to make the reader think. He is reluctant to deliver conclusions. The concrete examples need interpretation which he doesn't always provide. The fragments link together, and develop, but, like a work of art, require sustained attention from the reader. As he stressed in the Preface to Philosophical Investigations, he doesn't want his writing to spare his readers the trouble of thinking these issues through for themselves. This is the key to reading Wittgenstein: he wants you to engage with the ideas, not just become a disciple (unfortunately he did attract a large number of pale imitators and unthinking disciples).

These links are useful for an overview of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy:

The Philosophers Magazine

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

Numerous further links at episteme.com

Some Wittgenstein Links

These links are useful for an overview of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy:

The Philosophers Magazine

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Wikipedia

Numerous further links at episteme.com

Aims and Suggested Reading for Tate Modern Course: Philosophy in the Gallery: Themes from Wittgenstein

PHILOSOPHY IN THE GALLERY: THEMES FROM WITTGENSTEIN
Led by Nigel Warburton [ticket holders only] For Related Posts on this Weblog, click on 'Philosophy in the Gallery' under 'Categories' in the lefthand column of the front page.

Course Description

AIMS

• To introduce and explore some key themes from Wittgenstein’s later  work
• To discuss these themes in relation to particular works in the Tate Modern collection
• To give everyone the opportunity to discuss and explore these ideas and to engage with and discuss the works of art

No prior knowledge of philosophy is assumed.

Further Reading
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, first published, posthumously, 1953) – it is notoriously difficult to interpret precisely what Wittgenstein is doing at any point in this book, so don’t be put off if you find it hard to make much sense of this.

Commentaries
Hans-Johan Glock A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell, Philosopher Dictionaries, 1996)
Marie McGinn Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (Routledge, Guidebook series, 1997)
Severin Schroeder Wittgenstein: the way out of the fly-bottle (Polity, Key Contemporary Thinkers, 2006)
[All of these are quite difficult.For a brief overview of Philosophical Investigations, see the chapter on Wittgenstein in Nigel Warburton Philosophy: The Classics (Routledge, 3rd ed. 2006)]

Biographical Background
Ray Monk Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Verso, 1990)
David Edmonds and John Eidnow Wittgenstein’s Poker