11 - On Learning from Wittgenstein, or What Does It Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?

Summary

Like Freud's therapy, [Wittgenstein's writing] wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change.

Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy”

INTRODUCTION

Many who write about Wittgenstein these days speak of his philosophy as a form of therapy that does not present us with some heretofore unknown truths, but rather aims at dispelling confusions and at returning us to a knowledge that we couldn't have failed already to possess. I suppose that at this level of generality there is nothing incorrect in this characterization. The real difficulty in coming to terms with Wittgenstein's teaching, I find, emerges when philosophers turn from talking about that teaching to actually doing philosophy that's supposed to proceed in its light. And that difficulty seems to me to tell, perhaps more than anything else, of the kind of teaching that Wittgenstein's teaching is.

My procedure in this paper will be to attempt to illuminate 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. I find Mulhall's interpretation of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects to be a good example for a reading of Wittgenstein that takes itself to be alive to the question of the nature of Wittgenstein's teaching, but that in effect represses the kind of work undertaken by Wittgenstein's remarks. The purpose of the first part of this paper will be to characterize that work more precisely, by looking closely at Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects.