Chapter 1 - Seeing Aspects

Summary

The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something – and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? – Would this defect be comparable to colour-blindness or to not having absolute pitch? – We will call it “aspect-blindness”– and will next consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.) —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I want now to look at three ways to think past, against, and sometimes with the myth of rigging and thus toward both the political possibilities and limits of actually existing democracy. And, in thinking toward and hopefully past those limits, I want also to think about the relation between democracy understood as a set of real and sometimes incommensurate historical facts and democracy understood as a set of variously wrought and deployed conceptual forms – forms that must, after all, limit and shape what will seem real to us about our political lives. Insofar as democracy exists not only in its practical instantiations but also within the imaginative frames or ideological horizons on which it at different moments depends (and which it, in turn, helps to shape), thinking about democracy also means thinking about thinking, which is to say, thinking about all the ways in which we think and struggle to think about the meaning of lives lived with other people while also living exactly the lives we’re thinking about. The need to think about the possibilities and limits of a system while dwelling within that same system makes any serious effort to understand democracy also a critical effort; and, at a moment when most societies identify themselves as democratic even – or even especially – when they are not democratic, the effort to identify a standpoint from whence we might perceive, understand, and perhaps think beyond our conceptual limits – to think otherwise about our democratic norms and expectations – is essential.¹