On Wittgenstein’s Notion of a Surveyable Representation: Rituals, Aesthetics, and Aspect-Perception

ABSTRACT

I demonstrate that analogies, both explicit and implicit, between Wittgenstein’s discussions of rituals, aesthetics, and aspect-perception have important payoffs in terms of understanding his notion of a ‘surveyable representation’ (übersichtliche Darstellung) as it applies to phenomena that are not exclusively grammatical in nature. In particular, I argue that a surveyable representation of various anthropological and aesthetic facts allows us to see, qua form of aspect-perception, internal relations and formal connections, so that the inner nature of a ritual or the solution of an aesthetic puzzle is exhibited. This particular form of seeing both explains why Wittgenstein thought that hypothetical explanations about the origins of a ritual are irrelevant to appreciating its meaning and elucidates his understanding of rituals, which involves seeing ‘internal relations’ and ‘formal connections’. The upshots of the account for work in anthropology are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• aesthetics
• anthropology
• aspect-perception
• perspicuous representation
• surveyable representation
• Wittgenstein

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This quote summarizes Moore’s own impressions from Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures. The verbatim text of Moore’s notes, published recently and referenced as MWL II (see ‘References’ for a full list of abbreviations), strengthens this claim: for example, on May 26^th 1933, Wittgenstein intertwines remarks on aesthetics with remarks about Frazer’s Golden Bough [MWL II 356–7]. In these lectures, Wittgenstein also notes similarities between aesthetics, Frazer’s Golden Bough, and psychoanalysis, but I will not be discussing the latter in the current paper. I discuss Wittgenstein's notion of a surveyable representation in relation to psychoanalysis in Ben-Moshe [forthcoming].

2 The German ‘übersichtliche Darstellung’, which used to be translated as ‘perspicuous representation’, is now translated as ‘surveyable representation’ in the latest (revised fourth) edition of Philosophical Investigations.

3 I do not wish to imply that the phenomena in question are, in some strong sense, non-linguistic or non-conceptual. Rather, contrary to philosophical investigations, these phenomena are not exclusively linguistic or conceptual.

4 For an excellent discussion of the negative and positive sides of Wittgenstein’s philosophical methodology and the close relation between them, see Kenny [1982].

5 The ‘Bird’s-Eye View Model’, is perhaps most associated with Baker and Hacker [2005: 326–34]. See Martin [2016] for an excellent discussion of the difference between these models.

6 As Hacker [2001: 75] notes, PI §122, the section about a surveyable representation, was taken from remarks that Wittgenstein wrote about The Golden Bough in 1930–1 and transformed into a comment on philosophical method.

7 This is a reference to Goethe’s notion of the primal plant (Urpflanze) and his attempt to describe parts of plants in reference to an archetypal leaf-form. Indeed, in his Cambridge lectures, Wittgenstein discusses Goethe’s Metamorphose der Pflanzen in relation to Frazer’s treatment of the Beltane Festival [MWL II 352]. For an excellent discussion of Goethe’s influence on Wittgenstein, see Klagge [2003].

8 The English phrase ‘connecting links’ is the translation of the German term ‘Zwischenglieder’. This is also the German term that appeared in PI §122 and was translated in that case as ‘intermediate links’.

9 Indeed, Wittgenstein argues that Frazer’s historical explanations also ultimately appeal to a tendency in ourselves: their apparent explanatory power is not in the alleged historical roots of the ritual that they invoke, but rather in the connection of the phenomenon in question to us, to our psychology and sensibilities [GB 127, 137–9, 147].

10 A version of the tension between the objective and subjective components in Wittgenstein’s remarks is noted by Cioffi [1998b: 81–3], who argues that Wittgenstein might not be aware of their distinctiveness, especially since he does not signal a clear transition from one to the other. One of my aims in what follows is to resolve this tension.

11 Some commentators emphasize this aspect. For example, Cioffi [1998c: 180] argues that ‘the predominant value of Wittgenstein's remarks [on rituals] is not their contribution to the explanatory tasks of anthropology or pre-history but … the light they shed on our relation to exotic practices'. McGuiness [2002: 231-2] notes that ‘understanding the ritual of a primitive people involves bringing in an inclination we ourselves feel’. He adds that ‘this is nearly always possible: it is as if we have already in our minds the principle underlying the whole diversity of primitive usages’. Rhees [1971: 21] argues that ‘we need not go in search of new facts, nor conjecture them, to understand how there came to be such forms of magic and of ritual’; rather, ‘all that we need for this is with us in our language, in our ways of thought and feeling’.

12 When he discusses the Beltane Festival, Wittgenstein also talks of ‘a multiplicity of faces with common features which continually emerges here and there’, and adds that ‘one would like to draw lines connecting these common ingredients’ [GB 143].

13 See also Mulhall [1990: 6–34], although, contrary to him, I will remain neutral regarding the question of whether aspect-perception is a ubiquitous phenomenon.

14 I understand aspect-perception and internal relations as involving an objective feature of what is seen. Here I am following Bar-Elli [2006: 247], who develops this Wittgensteinian position and applies it to musical understanding qua understanding that ‘results from our ability to “hear the aspect in the notes”, very much like our ability to “see objects in the (lines of the) drawing”’, thus ‘reveal[ing] what Wittgenstein referred to by [an] “internal relation”’. I am thus disagreeing with, for example, William Day [2017: 15–19], who argues that, in contrast to Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, talk of ‘internal relations’ in connection with rituals and aesthetics is ‘a figure of speech’ and is not meant to denote ‘a connection that is established or grounded by anything beyond the experience of connection itself’. It is not obvious how this type of account can provide a ‘justification’ that ‘consists in appealing to an independent authority’ [PI §265], for that would presumably require shared ‘conceptual or grammatical structures’ [Mulhall 1990: 131].

15 Baker and Hacker [2005: 320–1], who make an analogy between Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer and his views on aesthetics vis-à-vis the methodological error of using causal explanations, argue that, ‘because ritual is symbolic’, a surveyable representation ‘can resolve certain forms of perplexity where a developmental hypothesis cannot’.

16 These observations are tied to Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism (e.g. [CV 7e, 64e, 69e, 70e]), which questions both the epistemological assumption that all knowledge must be scientific knowledge and the methodological assumption that the scientific method is the only way to gain knowledge [Beale 2017: 63]. The flip side of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism is his emphasis on ‘preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding’ [Monk 2005: 101]. I am essentially arguing that scepticism about the relevance of the scientific method cannot explain why causal-hypothetical explanations are irrelevant for understanding rituals and aesthetics; rather, it is Wittgenstein’s scepticism about the relevance of scientific knowledge in these contexts that provides the explanation. Furthermore, our understanding of the ‘non-scientific form of understanding’ can be enriched by conceptualizing it as a form of aspect-perception.

17 Clack [1999: 148–54] suggests that Wittgenstein’s intention is both to argue that the sinister quality of the festival is the result of those people taking part in it and to point to the fact that we have inherited these violent propensities. While I generally agree with these observations, it is worth emphasizing that the sinister meaning of the ritual should not be reduced to mere non-normative psychological reactions, either in those people taking part in it, or in us.

18 When presenting his Neglected Aspects Model, Baker [2004: 35] clearly has in mind Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-perception, as he discusses, among other things, the duck-rabbit diagram.

19 In an introduction to Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, Rhees [1971: 18] writes that ‘clearly [Wittgenstein] is not discussing history or anthropology’, but, rather, his interests are primarily in the ‘mythology of our language’. I believe that Rhees is overstating the point, but I will not make the case for that claim in the current paper.

20 Ginzburg [1991: 15–16] declares that he attempted to follow, but ultimately abandoned, Wittgenstein’s method, since he

was dealing not with circles and ellipses … , but with men and women. … Human history does not unfold in the world of ideas, but in the sub-lunar world in which individuals are irreversibly born, inflict or endure suffering and die.

My discussion shows that this is a false dichotomy. Needham [1985: 169–70] argues that the meaning of a ritual is ascribed to the festival by its practitioners and that Wittgenstein is wrong in claiming that the character of a ritual is to be elicited from our own experience. My discussion shows that the meanings in question are not ascribed, in any straightforward sense, by either practitioner or spectator, but are rather part and parcel of the practice itself.

21 When Wittgenstein claims that ‘one must only correctly piece together what one knows, without adding anything’, I take him to mean not that no fieldwork is required, but rather that the anthropologist should aim to see ‘something that already lies open to view’ and does not lie ‘beneath the surface’, as he put it when presenting his meta-philosophy.

22 One can also finds hints of the importance of the imagination in Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer—for example, in his suggestion that we could ‘invent’ certain rituals (although even here he is careful to note that this is possible because the rituals have a ‘common spirit’) ([GB 151]; see also [GB 127]). Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s (perhaps unfair) claim that Frazer was unable ‘to conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time’ [GB 125] might be interpreted as a criticism of Frazer’s not sufficiently utilizing his imagination when examining the rituals of interest.

23 The anthropologist who comes closest to appreciating Wittgenstein’s lessons is Wendy James. In her book The Ceremonial Animal [2003], she defends the importance of the anthropological imagination and builds on Wittgenstein’s ideas in order to provide non-reductive explanations of the ceremonial character of human life. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to discuss the upshots of Wittgenstein’s view for anthropology.

24 I am grateful to Amichai Amit, Gilead Bar-Elli, Yemima Ben-Menahem, David Finkelstein, Nicholas Koziolek, and Michael Kremer for invaluable comments on various drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank audiences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, McMaster University, and the University of Chicago for their feedback. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous referees for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, whose excellent comments were of great help in improving the paper.