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Nordic Wittgenstein Studies
Series Editor: Niklas Forsberg
Avner Baz
The Significance
of Aspect
Perception
Bringing the Phenomenal World
into View
Volume 5
Series Editor
Niklas Forsberg, Centre for Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Pardubice,
Czech Republic
Editorial Board Members
Sorin Bangu, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Marin Gustafsson, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
Lars Hertzberg, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
Kjell S. Johannessen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Oskari Kuusela, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Yrsa Neuman, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
Bernt Österman, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Alois Pichler, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Simo Säätelä, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, University of South Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Thomas Wallgren, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Cato Wittusen, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
Advisory Editors
Maija Aalto-Heinilä, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland
Hanne Appelqvist, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Avner Baz, Tufts University, Medford, USA
Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Steen Brock, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
David Cockburn, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK
James Conant, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
Cora Diamond, Professor Emeritus, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Alberto Emiliani, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Juliet Floyd, Boston University, Boston, USA
Gottfried Gabriel, Professor Emeritus, Jena, Germany
Dinda L. Gorlée, The Hague, The Netherlands
Herbert Hrachovec, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria
Allan Janik, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
James Klagge, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA
Michael Kremer, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
Camilla Kronqvist, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
David Levy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Denis McManus, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Felix Mühlhölzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Jean Philippe Narboux, University of Bordeaux, Pessac, France
Joachim Schulte, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK
Stephen Mulhall, Oxford, UK
Antonia Soulez, Paris, France
David G Stern, University of Iowa, Iowa, USA
Nuno Venturinha, Lisbon, Portugal
David E. Wellbery, Chicago, USA
Edward Witherspoon, Colgate University, New York, USA
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13863

Avner Baz
The Significance of Aspect

Perception
Bringing the Phenomenal World into View
Avner Baz
Tufts University
Medford, MA, USA
ISSN 2520-1514 ISSN 2520-1522 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-38624-5 ISBN 978-3-030-38625-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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Acknowledgments
The eight papers collected here were written over the past 20 years. The publication
of this collection is therefore an opportunity to express my gratitude for all of the
philosophical friendships that have left their marks on these papers and to acknowl-
edge philosophical debts, more or less in the order in which they were incurred.
I would like to thank, first and foremost, Stanley Cavell, to whose memory I
dedicate this book, for his characterization, in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern
Philosophy,” of the grammar of judgments of beauty and its affinity to the grammar
of the philosophical appeal to “what we say when,” for exemplifying a way of doing
philosophy that—just like judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant—is at once
inseparable from its particular occasion and universal in its insights and appeal, and
for much, much else; Eli Friedlander, my MA thesis advisor at Tel-Aviv University,
for introducing me to Cavell’s work and for early conversations on Kant and
Wittgenstein; Leonard Linsky, for leading the reading group of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations at the University of Chicago whose discussions
prompted the writing of “What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?”; Peter Hylton, my
dissertation adviser at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who worked with me on
that paper and whose unique combination of critical, analytic astuteness and encour-
agement was just what I needed; Bill Day and Victor Krebs, for inviting me to write
what turned out to be “On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does it Take to See
the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?” for a collection that became Seeing Wittgenstein
Anew (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and for numerous conversations about
aspects and other topics over the years; Bill, again, for generously reading closely a
complete draft of this collection and giving me many penetrating comments and
suggestions; Jim Conant, for helping me see, when that invitation from Bill and
Victor came, that I had more to say about aspect perception than I had realized and
for his friendship and support over the years; Stephen Mulhall, for graciously
responding to my early criticisms of his reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on
aspects—a reading whose phenomenological truth I only later came to appreciate;
Martin Gustafsson and Jean-Philippe Narboux, my philosophical brothers, for much
needed moments of laughter during those early years at the University of Chicago
and occasionally since then, and for many (but never enough) conversations over the
v
vi Acknowledgments
years—on aspects, philosophical method, language, and many other topics—that

were always philosophically inspiring and humanly reassuring; Martin, again, for
reading through the penultimate draft of this collection and pressing me to clarify
important issues that needed to be clarified; Juliet Floyd, for many conversations on
aspect perception and for her encouragement and support; Marie McGinn and
Oskari Kuusela, for inviting me to contribute what became “Aspect Perception and
Philosophical Difficulty” to the Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford
University Press, 2011); Dan Dennett, for playing the role of the “aspect denier” in
conversations that led to “Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty”; Kelly
Jolley, Keren Gorodeisky, and Arata Hamawaki, for organizing the conference on
beauty at Auburn University for which “The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar
between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell” was first written and for many conversa-
tions on aspects, beauty, Kant, and Wittgenstein, during that conference and in sub-
sequent years; Gary Kemp, for inviting me to contribute what became “Aspects of
Perception” to Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation (Routledge,
2016) and for several conversations about that paper and aspect perception more
generally; Craig Taylor and Andrew Gleeson for organizing the conference on
Wittgenstein and Ethics for which “Motivational Indeterminacy” was written;
Reshef Agam-Segal for responding critically to my work on aspects over the years,
thereby prompting me to clarify and further develop key moments in that work;
Christian Martin, for organizing the conference for which “Wittgenstein and the
Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying” was written and for helpful
comments on that paper; Sebastian Sunday Gréve, for inviting me to contribute
what became “Bringing the Phenomenal World into View” to Wittgenstein on
Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and for
helpful comments on that paper; Charles Travis for serving (without choosing to) as
one of my main philosophical interlocutors over the years, both on the topics of
language and philosophical therapy and on the topic of perception; the Philosophy
Department at Tufts, for being a wonderful place to do philosophy; and the students
in two seminars on perception and aspect-perception that I recently taught at Tufts:
Shantel Blakely, Hanwen Hu, Lutai (Michelle) Ju, Jonatan Larsson, Michael
Mitchell, Kiku Mizunu, Brad Pearson, Hannah Read, Jussi Silliman, Estelle Tcha,
and Michael Veldman. Thank you also to Michael Mitchell, again, for going over
the final version of the whole manuscript, making any number of good suggestions,
and for helping me generate the index.
Contents
1 Introduction�� 1
2 What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?�� 13
2.1 Introduction�� 13
2.2 Seeing and (Merely) Knowing �� 17
2.3 The Grammar of Wittgenstein’s ‘Aspects’ �� 21
2.4 Can Wittgensteinian Aspects Be Seen Continuously? �� 26
2.5 Aspects and Representation�� 30
2.6 Soul Aspects? �� 33
2.7 Conclusion: The Scope of Aspect Perception�� 34
3 On Learning from Wittgenstein; or What Does It Take
to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects?�� 35
3.2 Learning from Wittgenstein I: The Work of Wittgenstein’s
Remarks on Aspects �� 36
3.3 Learning from Wittgenstein: II�� 43
4 Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty�� 53
4.2 Background�� 58
4.3 ‘A Quite Particular’�� 61
4.4 The Intransitivity of Aspects�� 63
4.5 Aspect Perception, Aspect Blindness, and Philosophical
Difficulty�� 65
4.6 Aspect Perception and Things That Speak to Us �� 69
5 The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar Between Kant,
Wittgenstein, and Cavell�� 71
5.2 Cavell’s Two Proposals; and an Important Methodological
Difference Between Kant and Wittgenstein �� 72
5.3 Kantian Beauty and Wittgensteinian Aspects�� 76
vii
viii Contents
5.4 Why Pleasure? The Allure of the System�� 80

5.5 ‘Subjective Universal Validity’ Without Pleasure�� 83
5.6 Kantian Beauty, Wittgensteinian Aspects, and the Application
of Concepts�� 85
5.7 The Sound of Bedrock�� 89
6 Aspects of Perception�� 93
6.2 The Grammar and Phenomenology of Wittgensteinian
Aspects �� 96
6.3 Wollheim on Seeing-As�� 102
6.4 Aspects and Concepts�� 106
6.5 Aspects as Perceived Internal Relations�� 112
6.6 Perceptual Indeterminacy �� 117
6.7 Concluding Remark: Aspects and Beauty�� 121
7 Motivational Indeterminacy�� 123
7.2 The Assumption of Motivational Determinacy�� 125
7.3 Motivational Indeterminacy �� 133
7.4 An Illustration�� 142
7.5 Concluding Remark: Problems and Riddles�� 145
8 Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes
Without Saying�� 147
8.1 Introduction: ‘Form of Life’ and the Conditions of Sense�� 147
8.2 Stage Setting: Kant and the Difficulty of Understanding
Our Relation to the Worldly Conditions of Sense�� 150
8.3 Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of Doing Justice
to Our Relation to the Background�� 153
8.4 Bringing the Phenomenal World into View by Way
of Aspect Perception�� 155
8.5 The Natural Attitude and the Limitations of the Wittgensteinian
Grammatical Investigation �� 161
9 Bringing the Phenomenal World into View �� 169
9.1 Introduction: Travis’s ‘Fundamental Question of Perception’
and the Repression of the Phenomenal World�� 169
9.2 Travis’s (Kantian) Answer to the ‘Fundamental’ Question�� 175
9.3 The Difficulty Posed by Wittgensteinian Aspects to Travis’s
Account of Perception�� 179
9.4 Sense Perception�� 187
9.5 Travis, McDowell, and Two Ways of Missing a Hole
in the Wall�� 190
Index�� 197
Abbreviations for Works of Wittgenstein Cited
BB The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.

PR Philosophical Grammar. R. Rhees (ed.), A. Kenny (trans.), Oxford:
Blackwell.
RPPI Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. E. M. Anscombe
and G. H. von Wright (eds.), tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1980).
RPPII Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. E. M. Anscombe
and G. H. von Wright (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
CV Culture and Value, G. H. von Wright (ed.), Winch, P. (tr.) (Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Z Zettel, Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H. (eds.). Anscombe,
G. E. M. (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
LWI Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, G. H. von Wright
and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).
LCAPR Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious
Belief, Cyril Barrett (ed.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.
LWII Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, G. H. von Wright
and H. Nyman (eds.), tr. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992).
PI Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and
Joachim Schulte (trans.) (Malden, MA: Basil-Blackwell, 2009).1
RPMI Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, G. H. von Wright,
R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe (eds.), G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.)
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
PPF Part II of the Philosophical Investigations.
1
The early papers in this collection, and occasionally the later papers too, use the original
Anscombe translation of Parts I and II of the Investigations, as opposed to the more recent Hacker
and Schulte revision of that translation. Where I saw no reason to update Anscombe’s original
translation, I didn’t.
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract The Introduction describes the main respects in which my thinking about
aspect perception, and about Wittgenstein’s remarks on the subject, has changed
over the years. What has changed most significantly is not my reading of
Wittgenstein’s remarks, but rather the extent to which I find the treatment of aspect
perception in those remarks satisfying. While I still find useful and fecund
Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation of what he calls ‘aspects’, I have come to
think that the experience of aspect perception also calls for a phenomenological
understanding that situates that experience within the broader context of our
essentially-embodied, pre-reflective and pre-conceptual perceptual experience of
the world. And the Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation, I now believe, suffers
from significant limitations in this respect.
Keywords Aspect perception · Grammatical investigation · Phenomenology
The eight papers collected here, more or less significantly revised and in some cases
expanded from their originally published version, were written over a period of
roughly 20 years, but in no way consecutively: in some cases, several years elapsed,
and a significant amount of philosophical writing on other topics was done, between
the writing of one of them and the writing of the next. They are unified by the fact
that they each concern, or else draw upon in one way or another, Wittgenstein’s
remarks on the perception of what he called ‘aspects’.
With the exception of the first paper, the writing of each of the papers was
prompted by an invitation to contribute to some conference or edited collection of
papers; and each of those papers was written under the assumption that it would be
my last on the subject of aspect perception. Though I was retrospectively grateful in
each case for the opportunity to come back to the topic of aspect perception, in each
case I came to it from a different perspective and with a different underlying con-
cern. I had not thought of myself at the time as having, or developing, a comprehen-
sive and unified view on aspect perception. Nor, I should hasten to add, do I believe,
or have ever believed, that Wittgenstein had a comprehensive and unified view on
the subject. What Wittgenstein did have is a general approach to the understanding
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

A. Baz, The Significance of Aspect Perception, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies 5,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_1
2 1 Introduction
and dissolution of philosophical difficulties—an approach that he sought to apply to

the case of aspect perception. And what unifies the first four papers in this volume
is that they were all written in (what I took to be) faithfulness to that approach and
with the aim of elucidating and defending it.
By contrast, in the last three papers, and largely under the inspiration of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology, I am moving away from Wittgenstein—both in the sense
of finding less use for his remarks on aspects and sometimes finding them mistaken,
and in the sense of no longer abiding by, and at certain points stressing the limita-
tions of, (what I take to be) his general approach. The fifth paper marks a transition
in this respect between the first four papers and the final three. To the still-rather-
limited extent that I now have something like a comprehensive view of aspect per-
ception and its significance, it is to be found in papers five through eight. And, in
certain critical respects, that view goes beyond anything I have found in Wittgenstein.
I still find my early interpretation of what Wittgenstein means by ‘(seeing an)
aspect’, as broached in the first paper collected here and elaborated and refined in
later papers, to be broadly correct; and I find my early understanding of Wittgenstein’s
general philosophical approach, as broached in the second and third papers and
elaborated and refined in subsequent papers, to be broadly correct as well. What has
changed most significantly over the years is that I no longer find fully satisfying
Wittgenstein’s understanding of aspect perception. Even more significantly, I now
see certain important limitations in Wittgenstein’s general approach to the under-
standing and dissolution of philosophical difficulties, in particular when it comes to
aspect perception and to perceptual experience more generally.
By way of introduction to this collection, let me describe in some detail what I
see as the most significant transformations in my thinking about aspects since I
began writing on the subject almost two decades ago. One disagreement with my
earlier self that encapsulates, in a way, the arc of my thinking about aspect percep-
tion over the years, has to do with the philosophical significance of what Wittgenstein
calls ‘the dawning (or lighting up, Aufleuchten) of an aspect’—the striking, momen-
tary experience that is expressible by saying that what we see has wholly changed,
even though we know (and, in another common sense of ‘see’, see) that it has not
changed. More specifically, it has to do with what, if anything, the dawning of
aspects may teach us about (normal) human perception in general. On this issue, I
now find that I did a certain injustice in my early papers to other interpreters of
Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects—primarily Stephen Mulhall, but also Paul
Johnston. These philosophers were arguing that the dawning of Wittgensteinian
aspects was philosophically interesting, and interested Wittgenstein, first and fore-
most because it was a manifestation of some other, more basic and pervasive, per-
ceptual relation that we have to pictures, words, stretches of human behavior, and
arguably (on Mulhall’s view) to other things as well—but, at any rate, to anything
that can be perceived under this or that aspect. They argued that this other percep-
tual relation is what Wittgenstein refers to by ‘continuous aspect perception’. The
dawning of an aspect, Mulhall and Johnston proposed, may only properly be under-
stood—its apparent ‘paradoxality’ ‘dissolved’, as Mulhall has put it—against the
background of what Wittgenstein calls ‘continuous aspect perception’.
1 Introduction 3
I thought then, and still think today, that Mulhall’s and Johnston’s interpretation
of Wittgenstein was forced (I argue this in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’). I
also thought, and still think today, that their proposed understanding of aspect dawn-
ing—and more precisely the kind of understanding they were offering—was foreign
to Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach (this is argued in the first part of ‘On
Learning from Wittgenstein’). And, finally, I thought then, and still think today, that
even apart from whether it is faithful to Wittgenstein, their proposed understanding
of aspect dawning does not work—it only gives us the illusion of understanding that
experience (this is argued in the second part of ‘On Learning from Wittgenstein’). I
leave the detailed presentation of Mulhall’s and Johnston’s accounts, and the details
of my criticisms of those accounts, to the first two papers in this volume. But, for all
that, I now find that Mulhall and Johnston were onto something true, and important,
in their (forced) reading of Wittgenstein.
In my first serious engagement with Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, and simi-
larly to Mulhall and Johnston, I found in those remarks more than just a ‘therapeu-
tic’, merely ‘negative’ response to various conceptual confusions and entanglements.
The experience of noticing, or being struck by, an aspect, and the ‘language-game’
of giving voice to that experience and inviting others to share it, seemed to me
humanly significant and philosophically interesting; and with a certain undeniable
youthful, romanticist naiveté, I tried, in ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, to
bring out and elucidate those significance and interest. But my Wittgensteinian
skepticism of anything that has the form of a theory in philosophy, together with
my—again, Wittgensteinian-inspired—failure to appreciate the depth of insight
attainable by properly-carried-out phenomenology, had kept me for quite some time
from recognizing the way in which the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects does
reveal something about (normal) human perception.1 In a word, I now think it
reveals the role we play in bringing about and maintaining, ‘constituting’ as phe-
nomenologists like to say, the unity and sense, which in turn need to be understood
in terms of motor and affective significance, of the phenomenal world—the world
as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought (or talked!) about.2
And it also reveals our capacity for more or less playful, more or less creative, pro-
jection of perceivable sense onto some given object, or situation—the capacity that
Merleau-Ponty refers to as the human being’s ‘genius for ambiguity’ and takes to be
essential to normal human perception and behavior.3 So even though I still believe
1
Mulhall, I should note, did not think of himself as offering a theory of aspect dawning (and aspect
perception). He took himself to be offering a Wittgensteinian dissolution of an apparent puzzle by
way of the deliberate assembling of ‘reminders’. For reasons discussed in ‘On Learning from
Wittgenstein’, I believe he was unclear about the nature of his own account.
2
Note that the ‘as’ here is not the ‘as’ of ‘seeing x as y’! The phenomenal world is not an aspect,
but rather is the home of all aspects, and the background against which they dawn on us.
3
Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.) (Routledge, 1996), 189/195. References to
the Phenomenology of Perception will henceforth be given by ‘PP’, with the page number of the
pre-2002 editions of the Smith translation, followed (as in the present case) by the page number of
the 2012 Donald Landes translation. I have chosen to primarily use the pre-2002 Routledge edition
of Smith’s translation, while consulting, and sometimes following, the Landes translation, because
4 1 Introduction
that Mulhall was forcing Heidegger’s phenomenology onto Wittgenstein’s remarks,

and still believe that Mulhall’s Heidegger-inspired ‘dissolution’ of the ‘paradox’ of
aspect dawning does not work, I have now come to think that Mulhall was right in
sensing that a phenomenological understanding was called for in the case of aspect
dawning, and also right in sensing that aspect dawning reveals something important
about normal human (and quite possibly not just human) perception. ‘Aspects of
Perception’—a more recent paper in which I respond critically to Richard Wollheim,
who also proposes that seeing aspects, or ‘seeing as’, as discussed by Wittgenstein,
characterizes all (normal) human perception—is where I first present, and begin to
reflect upon, that important change in my thinking about aspect perception.
This brings me to another important change in my thinking about aspect percep-
tion. Part of the peculiarity, and source of philosophical difficulty, of what
Wittgenstein calls ‘aspect dawning’ (or the ‘lighting up’ of an aspect) is that it is a
particular kind of perceptual experience. This particular kind of experience may be
identified and investigated phenomenologically; but it may also be identified and
investigated grammatically—in Wittgenstein’s sense of that term. A grammatical
investigation of aspect dawning—of the experience of ‘noticing an aspect’ (PPF,
113)—would seek to elucidate ‘the concept [of noticing an aspect] and its place
among the concepts of experience (Erfahrungsbegriffen)’ (PPF, 115); and, as I
emphasize at various points in the papers collected here, it primarily proceeds from
a third person perspective, and by way of the elicitation of (Wittgensteinian) crite-
ria: asking such questions as, ‘When would we say (=by what criteria would we tell,
in this or that sort of context) that someone (else) was struck by an aspect, or was
seeing something as something?’, or ‘When would we say that someone was
(merely) interpreting what she saw one way or another, or treating it one way or
another, as opposed to seeing it one way or another?’. And it’s important that these
sorts of questions are meant to bring into view not just particular utterances (or other
ways of expressing the experience of having been struck by an aspect) but the
broader contexts in which those utterances have their sense and would (normally)
be criterial for certain mental states, processes, and activities.
The later Wittgenstein, as I read him, though sometimes moved to give phenom-
enological descriptions in his reflections on aspects, was generally suspicious of
phenomenology, and skeptical of its capacity to lead to philosophical enlighten-
ment. As I point out in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes
Without Saying’, these suspicion and skepticism come out clearly and explicitly in
his remarks on aspects. In my early papers on aspect perception, I followed
the 2002 edition has many typos, and because, despite occasional imprecisions, I find the Smith
translation superior to Landes’s in three important respects: it better preserves the poetic qualities
of Merleau-Ponty’s French; it does not break Merleau-Ponty’s long paragraphs into shorter ones
(which sometimes results in real distortion of meaning); and, in faithfulness to Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological account of language, it translates the French ‘sens’ context-sensitively, rather
than always translating it by the English ‘sense’. Another important advantage of the Smith transla-
tion is that it uses footnotes, rather than endnotes, thereby making it easier not to miss those of
Merleau-Ponty’s notes that are substantive, as quite a few of them are.
1 Introduction 5
Wittgenstein in focusing on grammar and leaving phenomenology more or less to

the side—though without ever denying that the dawning of an aspect is, grammati-
cally, a perceptual experience. I thought then, and still think today, that quite a few
readers of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects have gotten themselves confused, and
into trouble, by failing to attend properly to the grammar of what he calls ‘aspects’.
As I argue in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, Wittgenstein’s
suspicion of phenomenology, and the shift to the third person perspective, are well
motivated, and serve him well, when it comes to the sorts of concepts, and phenom-
ena, on which he focuses in the first part of the Investigations: understanding, learn-
ing, meaning (one’s words one way or another), thinking, naming, reading, following
a rule, intending, and so on; and they are also useful in elucidating the concept of
‘(noticing an) aspect’ and its place among our concepts of experience. But I now
believe that Wittgenstein’s general approach serves him less well, and sometimes
leads him astray, when it comes to the experience of aspect dawning and its relation
to other moments, features, and dimensions of human perceptual experience. The
philosophical danger of being misled, or handicapped, by confining oneself to
Wittgensteinian grammar is no less real, I now believe, than the danger of getting
confused, and lost, as result of its neglect. I now believe that, at least when it comes
to aspect perception and to perception more generally, the Wittgensteinian
grammatical- conceptual investigation should be complemented by properly-
executed phenomenology, and vice versa.
A striking feature of the majority of the commentaries with which I am familiar
on Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects is that they shirk at once both the
Wittgensteinian work of grammatical investigation—which aims at placing the con-
cept of ‘noticing an aspect’ (and thereby the concept of ‘aspect’) in relation to other
concepts of experience—and the difficult work of phenomenology, which, as I’ve
already noted, Wittgenstein himself also for the most part shirked. As a result, the
insights afforded by a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigation are missed, the
conceptual confusions and entanglements it is designed to help us dissolve remain
undissolved, and at the same time claims are made in those commentaries about
‘human perception’ or ‘normal human perception’—of pictures, stretches of human
behavior, stretches of human discourse, everyday mid-size objects, or what have
you—where it is entirely unclear what is supposed to be the basis of those claims,
and where little reflection often suffices for revealing their phenomenological
crudeness and implausibility. Is it plausible to think that (normal) human beings
have some one, particular sort of perceptual relation, or attitude, toward cutlery, for
example—a relation that, contrary to what Wittgenstein seems to be saying (PPF,
122), may aptly be described as ‘the continuous seeing of an aspect’, and which
holds irrespective of whether the perceiver is using the knife and fork for eating
(while focusing on her food or on the conversation around the table), or is using
them creatively for some other purpose, or is setting the table, or is observing the
setting of the table, or is setting the knife and fork aside, perhaps together with a
bunch of other things, in order to make space for something else, or is examining
the knife and fork for rust, or is having one’s glance momentarily fall on the knife
and fork, or is merely having them lie somewhere within one’s field of vision while
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CHAPTER XVII
Rhythm and Metre

. . . when it approaches with a divine hopping.
The Joyful Wisdom.
Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition, and
expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it
fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation. As a
rule this anticipation is unconscious. Sequences of syllables both as
sounds and as images of speech-movements leave the mind ready
for certain further sequences rather than for others. Our momentary
organisation is adapted to one range of possible stimuli rather than
to another. Just as the eye reading print unconsciously expects the
spelling to be as usual, and the fount of type to remain the same, so
the mind after reading a line or two of verse, or half a sentence of
prose, prepares itself ahead for any one of a number of possible
sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself for
others. The effect produced by what actually follows depends very
closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists largely of the
further twist which it gives to expectancy. It is in terms of the
variation in these twists that rhythm is to be described. Both prose
and verse vary immensely in the extent to which they excite this
‘getting ready’ process, and in the narrowness of the anticipation
which is formed, Prose on the whole, with the rare exceptions of a
Landor, a De Quincey, or a Ruskin, is accompanied by a very much
vaguer and more indeterminate expectancy than verse. In such
prose as this page, for example, little more than a preparedness for
further words not all exactly alike in sound and with abstract
polysyllables preponderating is all that arises. In short, the sensory
or formal effect of words has very little play in the literature of
analysis and exposition. But as’ soon as prose becomes more
emotive than scientific, the formal side becomes prominent.
Let us take Landor’s description† of a lioness suckling her young
—
On perceiving the countryman, she drew up her feet gently, and squared her
mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with content; and they looked, he said,
like sea-grottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awakening fear and
stilling and suppressing it.
After ‘obscurely green’ would it be possible (quite apart from sense)
to have ‘deeply dark’ or ‘impenetrably gloomy’? Why, apart from
sense, can so few of the syllables be changed in vowel sound, in
emphasis, in duration or otherwise, without disaster to the total
effect? As with all such questions about sensory form and its effects,
only an incomplete answer can be given. The expectancy caused by
what has gone before, a thing which must be thought of as a very
complex tide of neural settings, lowering the threshold for some
kinds of stimuli and raising it for others, and the character of the
stimulus which does actually come, both play their part.
Even the most highly organised lyrical or ‘polyphonic’ prose raises
as it advances only a very ambiguous expectation. Until the final
words of the passage, there are always a great number of different
sequences which would equally well fit in, which would satisfy the
expectancy so far as that is merely due to habit, to the routine of
sensory stimulation. What is expected in fact is not this sound or
that sound, not even this kind of sound or that kind of sound, but
some one of a certain thousand kinds of sounds. It is much more a
negative thing than a positive. As in the case of many social
conventions it is easier to say what disqualifies than to say what is
required.
Into this very indeterminate expectancy the new element comes
with its own range of possible effects. There is, of course, no such
thing as the effect of a word or a sound. There is no one effect
which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic literary characters. None
are either ugly or beautiful, intrinsically displeasing or delightful.
Every word has instead a range of possible effects, varying with the
conditions into which it is received. All that we can say as to the
sorting out of words, whether into the ‘combed’ and ‘slippery’, the
‘shaggy’ and ‘rumpled’ as with Dante, or in any other manner, is that
some, through long use, have narrower ranges than others and
require more extraordinary conditions if they are to change their
‘character’. What effect the word has is a compromise between some
one of its possible effects and the special conditions into which it
comes. Thus in Shakespeare hardly any word ever looks odd until
we consider it; whereas even in Keats the ‘cold mushrooms’ in the
Satyrs’ Song give the mind a shock of astonishment, an
astonishment which is full of delight, but none the less is a shock.
But with this example we have broken down the limitation to the
mere sound, to the strictly formal or sensory aspect of word
sequences, and in fact the limitation is useless. For the effect of a
word as sound cannot be separated from its contemporaneous other
effects. They become inextricably mingled at once.
The sound gets its character by compromise with what is going
on already. The preceding agitation of the mind selects from a range
of possible characters which the word might present, that one which
best suits with what is happening. There are no gloomy and no gay
vowels or syllables, and the army of critics who have attempted to
analyse the effects of passages into vowel and consonantal
collocations have, in fact, been merely amusing themselves. The way
in which the sound of a word is taken varies with the emotion
already in being. But, further, it varies with the sense. For the
anticipation of the sound due to habit, to the routine of sensation, is
merely a part of the general expectancy. Grammatical regularities,
the necessity for completing the thought, the reader’s state of
conjecture as to what is being said, his apprehension in dramatic
literature of the action, of the intention, situation, state of mind
generally, of the speaker, all these and many other things intervene.
The way the sound is taken is much less determined by the sound
itself than by the conditions into which it enters. All these
anticipations form a very closely woven network and the word which
can satisfy them all simultaneously may well seem triumphant. But
we should not attribute to the sound alone virtues which involve so
many other factors. To say this is not in the least to belittle the
importance of the sound; in most cases it is the key to the effects of
poetry. This texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments,
surprisals, which the sequence of syllables brings about, is rhythm.
And the sound of words comes to its full power only through rhythm.
Evidently there can be no surprise and no disappointment unless
there is expectation and most rhythms perhaps are made up as
much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and
betrayals as of simple, straightforward satisfactions. Hence the
rapidity with which too simple rhythms, those which are too easily
‘seen through’, grow cloying or insipid unless hypnoidal states
intervene, as with much primitive music and dancing and often with
metre.
The same definition of rhythm may be extended to the plastic
arts and to architecture. Temporal sequence is not strictly necessary
for rhythm, though in the vast majority of cases it is involved. The
attention usually passes successively from one complex to another,
the expectations, the readiness to perceive this rather than that,
aroused by the one being either satisfied or surprised by the other.
Surprise plays an equally important part here; and the difference in
detail between a surprising and delightful variation and one which
merely irritates and breaks down the rhythm, as we say, is here, as
elsewhere, a matter of the combination and resolution of impulses
too subtle for our present means of investigation. All depends upon
whether what comes can be an ingredient in the further response, or
whether the mind must, as it were, start anew; in more ordinary
language, upon whether there is any ‘connection’ between the parts
of the whole.
But the rhythmic elements in a picture or a building may be not
successive but simultaneous. A quick reader who sees a word as a
whole commonly overlooks misprints because the general form of
the word is such that he is only able at that instant to perceive one
particular letter in a particular place and so overlooks what is
discrepant. The parts of a visual field exert what amounts to a
simultaneous influence over one another. More strictly what is
discrepant does not get through to more central regions. Similarly,
with those far more intricate wholes, made up of all kinds of imagery
and incipient action of which works of art consist. The parts of a
growing response mutually modify one another and this is all that is
required for rhythm to be possible.
We may turn now to that more complex and, more specialised

form of temporal rhythmic sequence which is known as metre. This
is the means by which words may be made to influence one another
to the greatest possible extent. In metrical reading the narrowness
and definiteness of expectancy, as much unconscious as ever in
most cases, is very greatly increased, reaching in some cases, if rime
also is used, almost exact precision. Furthermore, what is anticipated
becomes through the regularity of the time intervals in metre
virtually dated. This is no mere matter of more or less perfect
correspondence with the beating of some internal metronome. The
whole conception of metre as ‘uniformity in variety’, a kind of mental
drill in which words, those erratic and varied things, do their best to
behave as though they were all the same, with certain concessions,
licences and equivalences allowed, should nowadays be obsolete. It
is a survivor which is still able to do a great deal of harm to the
uninitiated, however, and although it has been knocked on the head
vigorously enough by Professor Saintsbury and others, it is as
difficult to kill as Punch. Most treatises on the subject, with their talk
of feet and of stresses, unfortunately tend to encourage it, however
little this may be the aim of the authors.
As with rhythm so with metre, we must not think of it as in the
words themselves or in the thumping of the drum. It is not in the
stimulation, it is in our response. Metre adds to all the variously
fated expectancies which make up rhythm a definite temporal
pattern and its effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in
something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves.
With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and
swings, setting up as it does so extraordinarily extensive sympathetic
reverberations. We shall never understand metre so long as we ask,
‘Why does: temporal pattern so excite us’? and fail to realise that the
pattern itself is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a
tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.
The notion that there is any virtue in regularity or in variety, or in
any other formal feature, apart from its effects upon us, must be
discarded before any metrical problem can be understood. The
regularity to which metre tends acts through the definiteness of the
anticipations which are thereby aroused. It is through these that it
gets such a hold upon the mind. Once again, here too, the failure of
our expectations is often more important than success. Verse in
which we constantly get exactly what we are ready for and no more,
instead of something which we can and must take up and
incorporate as another stage in a total developing response is merely
toilsome and tedious. In prose, the influence of past words extends
only a little way ahead. In verse, especially when stanza-form and
rime co-operate to give a larger unit than the line, it may extend far
ahead. It is this knitting together of the parts of the poem which
explains the mnemonic power of verse, the first of the suggestions
as to the origin of metre to be found in the Fourteenth Chapter of
Biographia Literaria, that lumber-room of neglected wisdom which
contains more hints towards a theory of poetry than all the rest ever
written upon the subject.
We do great violence to the facts if we suppose the expectations
excited as we read verse to be concerned only with the stress,
emphasis, length, foot structure and so forth of the syllables which
follow. Even in this respect the custom of marking syllables in two
degrees only, long and short, light and full, etc., is inadequate,
although doubtless forced upon metrists by practical considerations.
The mind in the poetic experience responds to subtler niceties than
these. When not in that experience but coldly considering their
several qualities as sounds by the ear alone, it may well find two
degrees all that are necessary. In Chapter XIII we saw an analogous
situation arising in the case of the discrimination of colours. The
obvious comparison with the difference between what even musical
notation can record in music and the player’s interpretation can
usefully be made here.
A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists
of the pitch relations of syllables. The reading of poetry is of course
not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There is no
question of definite pitches at which the syllables must be taken, nor
perhaps of definite harmonic relations between different sounds. But
that a rise and fall of pitch is involved in metre and is as much part
of the poet’s technique as any other feature of verse, as much under
his control also, is indisputable. Anyone who is not clear upon this
point may compare as a striking instance Milton’s Hymn on the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity with Collins’ Ode to Simplicity and both
with the second Chorus of Hellas discussed in Chapter XXVIII. Due
allowances made for the natural peculiarities of different readers, the
scheme of pitch relations, in their contexts, of
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss;
and of
But com’st a decent maid,
In Attic robe array’ɖ,
are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s

control in this, as there is nothing arbitrary or out of his control in
the way in which an adequate reader will stress particular syllables.
He brings both about by the same means, the modification of the
reader’s impulses by what has gone before. It is true that some
words resist emphasis far more than perhaps any resist change of
pitch, yet this difference is merely one of degree. It is as natural to
lower the pitch in reading the word ‘loss’ as it is to emphasise it as
compared with ‘our’ in the same context.
Here again we see how impossible it is to consider rhythm or
metre as though it were purely an affair of the sensory aspect of
syllables and could be dissociated from their sense and from the
emotional effects which come about through their sense. One
principle may, however, be hazarded. As in the case of painting the
more direct means are preferable to the less direct (see Chapter
XVIII), so in poetry. What can be done by sound should not be done
otherwise or in violation of the natural effects of sound. Violations of
the natural emphases and tones of speech brought about for the
sake of the further effects due to thought and feeling are perilous,
though, on occasion, they may be valuable devices. The use of
italics in Cain to straighten out the blank verse is as glaring an
instance as any. But more liberties are justified in dramatic writing
than elsewhere, and poetry is full of exceptions to such principles.*
We must not forget that Milton did not disdain to use special
spelling, ‘mee’, for example, in place of ‘me’, in order to suggest
additional emphasis when he feared that the reader might be
careless.
So far we have been concerned with metre only as a specialised
form of rhythm, giving an increased interconnection between words
through an increased control of anticipation. But it has other, in
some cases even more important powers. Its use as an hypnotic
agent is probably very ancient. Coleridge once again drops his
incidental remark, just beside yet extremely close to the point. “It
tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general
feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the
continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of
curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed
to be at any moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become
considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated
atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act
powerfully, though themselves unnoticed.” (Biographia Literaria,
Chap. XVIII.) Mr Yeats, when he speaks of the function of metre
being to “lull the mind into a waking trance” is describing the same
effect, however strange his conception of this trance may be.
That certain metres, or rather that a certain handling of metre
should produce in a slight degree a hypnoidal state is not surprising.
But it does so not as Coleridge suggests, through the surprise
element in metrical effects, but through the absence of surprise,
through the lulling effects more than through the awakening. Many
of the most characteristic symptoms of incipient hypnosis are
present in a slight degree. Among these susceptibility and vivacity of
emotion, suggestibility, limitations of the field of attention, marked
differences in the incidence of belief-feelings closely analogous to
those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can induce, and some degree
of hyperæsthesia (increased power of discriminating sensations)
may be noted. We need not boggle at the word ‘hypnosis’. It is
sufficient to say, borrowing a phrase from M. Jules Romains, that
there is a change in the regime of consciousness, which is directly
due to the metre, and that to this regime the above-mentioned
characteristics attach. As regards the hyperæsthesia, there may be
several ways of interpreting what can be observed. All that matters
here is that syllables, which in prose or in vers libres sound thin,
tinny and flat, often gain an astonishing sonority and fullness even in
verse which seems to possess no very subtle metrical structure.
Metre has another mode of action not hitherto mentioned. There
can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated with
dancing, and that the connections of the two still hold. This is true at
least of some ‘measures’. Either motor images, images of the
sensations of dancing, or, more probably, imaginal and incipient
movements follow the syllables and make up their ‘movement’. A
place for these accompaniments should be found in the diagram in
Chapter XVI. Once the metre has begun to ‘catch on’ they are
almost as closely bound up with the sequence of the words as the
tied ‘verbal’ images themselves.
The extension of this ‘movement’ of the verse from dance forms
to more general movements is natural and inevitable. That there is a
very close connection between the sense and the metrical
movement of
And now the numerous tramplings quiver lightly
Along a huge cloud’s ridge; and now with sprightly
Wheel downward come they into fresher skies,
cannot be doubted whatever we may think of the rime.

It is not less clear in
Where beyond the extreme sea wall, and between the
remote sea gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep
death waits,
or in
Ran on embattell’d Armies clad in Iron,
than it is in
We sweetly curtsied each to each
And deftly danced a saraband.
Nor is it always the case that the movement takes its cue from the
sense. It is often a commentary on the sense and sometimes may
qualify it, as when the resistless strength of Coriolanus in battle is
given an appearance of dreadful ease by the leisureliness of the
description,
Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy arm doth lie
Which being advanc’d declines, and then men die.
Movement in poetry deserves at least as much study as

onomatopœia.
This account, of course, by no means covers all the ways by
which metre takes effect in poetry. The fact that we appropriately
use such words as ‘lulling’, ‘stirring’, ‘solemn’, ‘pensive’, ‘gay’ in
describing metres is an indication of their power more directly to
control emotion. But the more general effects are more important.
Through its very appearance of artificiality metre produces in the
highest degree the ‘frame’ effect, isolating the poetic experience
from the accidents and irrelevancies of everyday existence. We have
seen in Chapter X how necessary this isolation is and how easily it
may be mistaken for a difference in kind. Much which in prose would
be too personal or too insistent, which might awaken irrelevant
conjectures or might ‘overstep itself’ is managed without disaster in
verse. There are, it is true, equivalent resources in prose—irony, for
example, very frequently has this effect—but their scope is far more
limited. Metre for the most difficult and most delicate utterances is
the all but inevitable means.
CHAPTER XVIII
On Looking at a Picture
Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee,
Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew?
Don Juan.
The diagram and account given of the processes which make up the
reading of a poem may be easily modified to represent what
happens when we look at a picture, a statue or building, or listen to
a piece of music. The necessary changes are fairly obvious, and it
will only be necessary here to indicate them briefly. Needless to say
the importance to the whole response of different kinds of elements
varies enormously from art to art; so much so as to explain without
difficulty the opinion so often held by persons interested primarily in
one of the arts—that the others (or some of them) are entirely
different in nature. Thus painters often aver that poetry is so
different, so indirect, so second-hand in the way in which it produces
its results, as hardly to deserve the name of an art at all. But, as we
shall see, the differences between separate arts are sometimes no
greater than differences to be found in each of them; and close
analogies can be discovered by careful analysis between all of them.
These analogies indeed are among the most interesting features
which such scrutiny as we are here attempting can make clear. For
an understanding of the problems of one art is often of great service
in avoiding misconceptions in another. The place of representation in
painting, for example, is greatly elucidated by a sound
comprehension of the place of reference or thought in poetry, just as
a crude view on this latter point is likely to involve unfortunate
mistakes upon the first. Similarly a too narrow view of music which
would limit it to an affair merely of the appreciation of the pitch and
time relations of notes may be corrected most easily by a
comparison with the phenomena of colour in the plastic arts.
Comparison of the arts is, in fact, far the best means by which an
understanding of the methods and resources of any one of them can
be attained. We must be careful of course not to compare the wrong
features of two arts and not to find merely fanciful or insecurely
grounded analogies. The dangers both of too close assimilation and
too wide separation of the structures of different arts are well
illustrated in criticism, both before and since the days of Lessing.
Only a thorough psychological analysis will allow them to be
avoided, and those whose experience leads them to doubt whether
analogies are of service, may be asked whether their objection is not
directed merely to attempts to compare different arts without a
sufficient analysis. With such an analysis, comparison and the
elaboration of analogies involve no attempt to make one art legislate
for another, no attempt to blur their differences or to destroy their
autonomy.
In analysing the experiences of the visual arts the first essential
is to avoid the word ‘see’, a term which is treacherous in its
ambiguity. If we say that we see a picture we may mean either that
we see the pigment-covered surface, or that we see the image on
the retina cast by this surface, or that we see certain planes or
volumes in what is called the ‘picture-space’. These senses are
completely distinct. In the first case we are speaking of the source of
the stimulus, in the second of the immediate effect of the stimulus
on the retina, in the third we are referring to a complex response
made up of perceivings and imaginings due to the intervention of
mental structures left behind by past experience, and excited by the
stimulus. The first case we may leave out of account as a matter of
purely technical interest. The degree of similarity holding between
the second and third, between the first effect of the stimulus and
the whole visual response, will of course vary greatly in different
cases. A perfectly flat, meticulously detailed depiction of
conventionally conceived objects, such as is so often praised in the
Academy for its ‘finish’, may be very nearly the same from its first
impression on the retina to the last effort which vision can make
upon it. At the other extreme a Cézanne, for example, which to the
eye of a person quite unfamiliar with such a manner of painting may
at first seem only a field or area of varied light, may, as the response
develops, through repeated glances, become first an assemblage of
blots and patches of colour, and then, as these recede and advance,
tilt and spread relatively to one another and become articulated, a
system of volumes. Finally, as the distances and stresses of their
volumes become more definitely imagined, it becomes an
organisation of the entire ‘picture-space’ into a three-dimensional
whole with the characters of the solid masses which appear in it,
their weights, textures, tensions and what not, very definitely, as it
seems, given. With familiarity the response is of course shortened.
Its final visual stage is reached much sooner, and the stages outlined
above become, through this telescoping, too fleeting to be noticed.
None the less the great difference between the first retinal
impression and the complete visual response remains. The retinal
impression, the sign, that is, for the response, contains actually but
a small part of the whole final product, an all-important part it is
true, the seed in fact from which the whole response grows.
The additions made in the course of the response are of several
kinds. They may, perhaps, for our present purposes be spoken of
without misunderstanding as images, or image-substitutes (see
Chapter XVI). The eye, as is well known, is peculiar among our
sense organs in that the receptor, the retina, is a part of the brain,
instead of being a separate thing connected with the brain more or
less remotely by a peripheral nerve. Moreover there are certain
connections leading from other parts of the brain outwards to the
retina as well as connections leading inwards. Thus there is some
ground for supposing that through these outgoing connections
actual retinal effects may accompany some visual images, which
would thereby become much more like actual sensations than is the
case with the other senses. However this may be, the process
whereby an impression which, if interpreted in one way (e.g. by a
person measuring the pigmented areas of a canvas), is correctly
counted as a sign of a flat coloured surface, becomes, when
differently interpreted, an intricately divided three-dimensional space
—this process is one of the intervention of images of several kinds.
The order of these interventions probably varies from case to
case. Perhaps the most important of the images which come in to
give depth, volume, solidity to the partly imagined and partly
perceived ‘picture-space’ are those which are relicts of eye
movements, kinæsthetic images of the convergence of the eyes and
accommodation of the lenses according to the distance of the object
contemplated. When, as it seems, we look past an object in a
picture to some more distant object, seeming in so doing to change
the focus of our eyes, we do not as a rule actually make any change.
But certainly we feel as though we were focussing differently and as
though the convergence were different. This felt difference which
mainly gives the sense of greater distance is due to kinæsthetic
imagery. Correspondingly the parts of the ‘picture-space’ upon which
we seem to be focussing, upon which we are imaginally focussing,
become definite and distinct, and parts much nearer or much more
distant become to some extent blurred and diffused. This effect is
probably due to visual images, simulating the sensations which
would normally ensue were we actually making a change of focus.
The degree to which these last effects occur appears to differ very
greatly from one person to another. Insufficient attention to the
great variation in the means by which these images are involved by
the painting is responsible for much bad criticism. Thus artists can
commonly be found who are quite unable, when looking at
paintings: in which the means employed are unlike their own, to
apprehend forms over which less specialised persons find no
difficulty. In general most visitors to Galleries pay too little attention
to the fact that few pictures can be instantaneously apprehended,
that even ten minutes’ study is quite inadequate in the case of
unfamiliar kinds of work, and that the capacity for ‘seeing’ pictures
(in sense three), an indispensable but merely an initial step to
appreciating them, is something which has to be acquired. It is
naturally of great assistance if many works by the same painter or of
the same School can be seen together, for then the essential
methods employed become clearer. In a general collection it is
difficult not to look at too great a variety of pictures, and a confusion
results, perhaps unnoticed, which is a serious obstacle to the
coherent building up of any one picture. The fashion in which most
Old Masters are hidden away under grime and glass and the efforts
which are necessary in order to reconstruct them are additional
obstacles. The neglect of these obvious facts is the chief explanation
of the low level of appreciation and criticism from which the art of
painting at present suffers.
Following upon the visual images are a swarm of others varying
from picture to picture: tactile images giving the appearance of
texture to surfaces, muscular images giving hardness, stiffness,
softness, flexibility and so on to the volumes imagined—the lightness
and insubstantiality of muslin, the solidity and fixity of rock being
matters of the intervention of images due originally to the sensations
we have received in the past from these materials. This muscular
imagery is of course called up in differing ways in different cases.
Primarily it is due to the imitation by the artist of subtleties in the
light given off by the materials, or characteristic peculiarities in their
form, but there are, as we shall see, more indirect but also less
stable, less reliable and less efficacious ways by which they may be
evoked. The same applies to the other images, thermal, olfactory,
auditory and the rest, which may be involved in particular cases.
There is a direct and an indirect way in which they can be evoked.
They may spring up at the visual appeal or they may only respond at
a later stage as a result of roundabout trains of thinking. Thus a silk
scarf may look soft and light; or we may imagine it as light, it
looking all the while iron-hard and heavy, because we know that it is
a scarf and that scarves are soft and light. The two methods are
very different. The second is a reversal of the natural order of
perception and for this reason the condemnation so often heard
from painters, of the literary or ‘detective’ approach to pictures, of
which this would be a representative specimen, is well merited. We
must, however, distinguish cases in which there is this reversal from
those in which it does not occur, those namely in which by a process
of inference we arrive at conclusions about the represented objects
which could not possibly be directly given. But this question may be
deferred until we come to discuss representation.
Hitherto in considering the growth of the three-dimensional
imagined picture-space we have not explicitly mentioned the part
played by colour nor the equally important effect of this growth in
modifying the original colours of the first retinal impression. But not
only may colour be the chief factor determining form, i.e. the three-
dimensional organisation of space, but it is itself most vitally
modified by form.
Colours as signs, that is to say even at the most optical and least
elaborated stage, have certain very marked spatial characters of
their own. Red, for example, seems to advance towards the eye and
to swell out of its boundaries, while blue seems to retreat and to
withdraw into itself*. Degree of saturation may also give recession in
obvious and in more recondite ways. Pure colours in the foreground
and greyed colours in the background are a simple example.
Similarly opposition of colours is one of the main means by which
the stresses and strains of volumes may be suggested.
These characters of colours, especially when they reinforce and
co-operate with one another, may be made to play a very important
part in determining the way in which the picture-space is
constructed when we look at a picture.
Equally important are the less direct effects upon our picture-
space imagining of the emotional or organic responses which we
make to different colours. Individuals vary greatly in the extent to
which they notice and can reflectively distinguish these responses,
and probably also in the degree to which they actually make
different responses. To persons sensitive in this respect, the colours
excite each a distinct, well-marked emotion (and attitude) capable of
being clearly differentiated from others. The sad poverty and
vagueness of the colour vocabulary, however, misleads many people
with regard to these. Each of the ‘puces’, ‘mauves’, ‘magentas’ etc.
has to cover numbers of distinguishable colours, often with strikingly
different effects upon us. Thus people who are content to say that
pink is their favourite colour, or that green always suits them, are
either quite undiscriminating in their attitude towards colour or little
attentive to the actual effects produced upon them. A similar
obtuseness or insincerity is evidenced when it is maintained, as is
often done, that pink and green do not go together. Some pinks and
some greens do not, but some do, and the test of a colourist is just
his ability to feel which are which. Few if any, in fact, of the colour
relations with which the painter is concerned can be stated with the
aid of such general terms—‘red’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, ‘grey’, ‘primrose’,
etc.—as are at present available. Each of these stands for a number
of different colours whose relations to a given colour will commonly
be different.
Taking ‘colour’ in this sense to stand for specific colours, not for
classes or ranges of varying hues, sets of colours, where in certain
spatial proportions and in certain relations of saturation, brightness
and luminosity relatively to one another, excite responses of emotion
and attitude with marked individual characteristics. Colours, in fact,
have harmonic relations, although the physical laws governing these
relations are at present unknown, and the relations themselves only
imperfectly ascertained. For every colour another can be found such
that the combined response to the two will be of a recognisable
kind, whose peculiarities are due probably to the compatibility with
one another of the impulses set up by each. This compatibility varies
in a number of ways. The result is that for every colour a set of
other colours is discoverable such that the response to each of them
is compatible with the response to the tonic colour in a definite
way.* A sensitive colourist feels these compatibilities as giving to
these combinations of colours a definite character, which no other
combinations possess. Similarly relations of incompatibility between
colours can also be felt such that their combination yields no ordered
response but merely a clash and confusion of responses. Colours
which just fail to be complementary are a typical example. Similarly
the primary colours in combination are offensive; should this precise
kind of offensiveness be part of the artist’s purpose, he will, of
course, make use of them.
The fact that roses, sunsets, and so forth are so often found to
present harmonious combinations of colour may appear a little
puzzling by this account. But the vast range of close gradations,
which a rose petal, for example, presents, supplies the explanation.
Out of all these the eye picks that gradation which best accords with
the other colours chosen. There is usually some set of colours in
some harmonious relation to one another to be selected out of the
multitudinous gradations which natural objects in most lightings
present; and there are evident reasons why the eye of a sensitive
person should, when it can, pick out those gradations which best
accord. The great range of different possible selections is, however,
of importance. It explains the fact that we see such different colours
for instance when gloomy and when gay, and thus how the actual
selection made by an artist may reveal the kind and direction of the
impulses which are active in him at the moment of selection.
Needless to say in the absence of a clear nomenclature and
standardisation of colours the task of describing and recording
colour relations is of great difficulty, but the unanimity of competent,
that is, sensitive persons as to which colours are related in specific
ways to which, is too great to be disregarded. It is as great as the
unanimity among musicians as to the harmonic relations of notes to
one another. The great differences between the two cases are not
likely to be overlooked. The presence of physical laws in many cases
connecting notes harmonically related and the absence of similar
known physical laws connecting colours is a glaring difference. But it
should not be forgotten that these physical laws are, as it were, an
extra-musical piece of knowledge. What matters to the musician is
not the physical connections between notes but the compatibilities
and incompatibilities in the responses of emotion and attitude which
they excite. The musical relations between the notes would be the
same even though the physical relations between the stimuli which
arouse them were quite different.
Naturally enough the analogy with the harmonic relations of
music has been the chief guide to those who have systematically
investigated colour relations. Whatever may be the precise limits to
which it may profitably be carried, for anyone who wishes to form a
general conception of the emotional effects of colours in combination
it is of very great value.
Colour is of course primarily the cause and controlling factor of
emotional response to painting, but, as we have said, it may, and
commonly does, help to determine form. Parts of a picture which are
through their colour out of all emotional connection with the rest of
the picture, tend, other things being equal, to fall out of the picture
altogether, appearing as patches accidentally adhering to the surface
or as gaps through which something else irrelevant is seen. This is
the extreme instance, but the influence of colour upon form through
the emotional relations of colours to one another is all-pervading
Sometimes colour strengthens and solidifies the structure,
sometimes it fights against it, sometimes it turns into a commentary,
as it were, the colour response modifying the form response and
vice versa. The great complexity of the colour and form interactions
needs no insistence. They are so various that no rule can possibly be
laid down as to a right relation for all cases. All depends upon what
the whole response which the painter is seeking to record may be.
As with attempts to define a universal proper relation of rhythm to
thought in poetry (e.g. the assertion that rhythm should echo or
correspond to thought, etc.), so with general remarks as to how
form and colour should be related. All depends upon the purpose,
the total response to which both form and colour are merely means.
Mistakes between means and ends, glorifying particular techniques
into inexplicable virtues are at least as common in the criticism of
painting as with any other of the arts.
One other aspect of the picture-space needs consideration. It is
not necessarily a fixed and static construction, but may in several
ways contain elements of movement. Some of these may be eye
movements, or kinæsthetic images of eye movements. As the eye
wanders imaginally from point to point the relations between the
parts of the picture-space change; thus an effect of movement is
induced. Equally important are the fusions of successive visual
images which may be suggested by drawing. As we watch, for
example, an arm being flexed, the eye receives a series of
successive and changing retinal impressions. Certain combinations of
these, which represent not the position and form of the arm at any
instant, but a compromise or fusion of different positions and forms,
have an easily explicable capacity to represent the whole series, and
thus to represent movement. The use of such fused images in
drawing may easily be mistaken for distortion, but when properly
interpreted it may yield normal forms in movement. Many other
means by which movement is given in Painting might be mentioned.
One means by which colour, may suggest it, for example, is well
indicated in the following description by Signac of Muley-abd-er
Rahman entouré de sa garde: “la tumulte est traduit par l’accord
presque dissonant du grand parasol vert sur le bleu du ciel, surexcité
déjà par l’orangé des murailles†”. It need hardly be pointed out that
the response made to the picture-space varies enormously according
to whether the forms in it are seen as in rest or in movement.
So far we have merely discussed what may be described as the

sensory elements in the picture, and the responses in emotion and
attitude due to these elements. But in most painting there are
further elements essentially involved. It has been asserted that all
further elements are irrelevant, at least to appreciation; and as a
reaction to common views that seem to overlook the sensory
elements altogether the doctrine is comprehensible and perhaps not
without value. For too many people do look at pictures primarily with
intent to discover what they are ‘of’, what they represent, without
allowing the most important thing in the picture, its sensory
stimulation through colour and form, to take effect. But the reaction
goes too far when it denies the relevance of the representative
elements in all cases. It may be freely granted that there are great
pictures in which nothing is represented, and great pictures in which
what is represented is trivial and may be disregarded. It is equally
certain that there are great pictures in which the contribution to the
whole response made through representation is not less than that
made more directly through form and colour. To those who can
accept the general psychological standpoint already outlined, or
indeed any modern account of the working of the mind, the
assertion that there is no reason why representative and formal
factors in an experience should conflict, but much reason why they
should co-operate, will need no discussion. The psychology of
‘unique æsthetic emotions’ and ‘pure art values’ upon which the
contrary view relies is merely a caprice of the fancy.
The place of representation in the work o different masters varies
enormously and it is not true that the value of their works varies
correspondingly. From Raphael and Picasso at one extreme to
Rembrandt, Goya and Hogarth at the other, Rubens, Delacroix and
Giotto occupying an intermediate position, all degrees of
participation between non-representative form and represented
subject in the building up of the whole response can be found. We
may perhaps hazard, for reasons indicated already, as a principle
admitting of exception, that what can be done by sensory means
should not be done indirectly through representation. But to say
more than this is to give yet another instance of the commonest of
critical mistakes: the exaltation of a method into an end.
Representation in painting corresponds to thought in poetry. The
same battles over the Intellect-Emotion imbroglio rage in both fields.
The views recently so fashionable that representation has no place
in art and that treatment not subject is what matters in poetry
spring ultimately from the same mistakes as to the relation of
thinking to feeling, from an inadequate psychology which would set
up one as inimical to the other. Reinforced as they are by the
illusion, supported by language, that Beauty is a quality of things,
not a character of our response to them, and thus that all beautiful
things as sharing this Beauty must be alike, the confusion which
such views promote is a main cause of the difficulty which is felt so
widely in appreciating both the arts and poetry. They give an air of
an esoteric mystery to what is, if it can be done at all, the simplest
and most natural of proceedings.
The fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry
and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value
depends, are alike. The means by which they are brought about are
unlike, but closely analogous critical and technical problems arise, as
we have seen, for each. The misapprehensions to which thought is
liable recur in all the fields in which it is exercised, and the fact that
it is sometimes more easy to detect a mistake in one field than in
another is a strong argument for comparing such closely allied
subjects.
CHAPTER XIX
Sculpture and the Construction of Form

Thus men forgot
That All Deities reside in the Human breast.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The initial signs from which the work of art is built up psychologically
in the case of sculpture differ in several respects from the initial
signs of painting. There are of course forms of sculpture for which
the difference is slight. Some bas-reliefs, for example, can be
considered as essentially drawings, and sculpture placed as a
decorative detail in architecture so that it can only be viewed from
one angle has necessarily to be interpreted in much the same
manner. Similarly some primitive sculpture in which only one aspect
is represented may be considered as covered by what has been said
about painting, although the fact that the relief and the relation of
volumes is more completely given and less supplied by imaginative
effort is of some consequence. Further, the changes, slight though
they may be, which accompany slight movements of the
contemplator have their effect. His total attitude is altered in a way
which may or may not be important according to circumstances.
With sculpture in which a number (four for example) of aspects
are fully treated without any attempt to fill in the intermediate
connecting aspects, the whole state of affairs is changed, since there
arises the interpretative task of uniting these aspects into a whole.
This connection of a number of aspects into a whole may be
made in varying ways. The signs may receive a visual interpretation
and the form be mainly built up of visual images combined in
sequences or fused. This, however, is an unsatisfactory method. It
tends to leave out or blur too many of the possible responses to the
statue and there is usually something unstable about such
syntheses. The form so constructed is insubstantial and incomplete.
Thus those sculptors whose work primarily asks for such a visual
interpretation are commonly felt to be lacking in what is called a
‘sense of form’. The reasons for this are to be found in the nature of
visual imagery and in the necessarily limited character of our purely
visual awareness of space.
But the connection may be made, not through visual
combination, but through combination of the various muscular
images whereby we feel, or imaginatively construct the tensions,
weights, stresses, etc. of physical objects. Each sequence of visual
impressions as we look at the statue from varying standpoints calls
up a group of these muscular images, and these images are capable
of much more subtle and stable combinations than the
corresponding visual images. Thus two visual images which are
incompatible with one another may be each accompanied by
muscular images (feelings of stress, tension, etc.) which are
perfectly compatible and unite to form a coherent whole free from
conflict. By this means we may realise the solidity of forms far more
perfectly than if we rely upon visual resources alone, and since it is
mainly through the character of the statue as a solid that the
sculptor works, this muscular interpretation has, as a rule, obvious
and overwhelming advantages.
None the less a place remains for sculpture whose primary
interpretation is in visual terms. Looking at any of the more recent
work of Epstein, for example, a feeling of quick and active
intelligence on the part of the contemplator arises, and this sense of
his own activity is the source of much that follows in his response.
By contrast a work of Rodin seems to be not so much exciting
activity in him as active itself. The correlation of visual aspects, in
other words, is a conscious process compared with the automatic
correlation of muscular image responses. The first we seem to be
doing ourselves, the second seems to be something which belongs
to the statue. This difference as we have described it is of course a
technical difference and by itself involves nothing as to the value of
the different works concerned. A similar difference may be found in
the apprehension of form in painting.
These two modes are not as separate as our account would
suggest; neither occurs in purity. Their interaction is further
complicated through the highly representational character of most
sculpture, and through the interlinking of different interpretations
due to the congruences and incompatibilities of the emotional
responses to which they give rise.
With sculpture perhaps more than with any other of the plastic
arts we are in danger of overlooking the work of the contemplator’s
imagination in filling out and interpreting the sign. What we
transport from Egypt to London is merely a set of signs, from which
a suitable interpreter setting about it rightly can produce a certain
state of mind. It is this state of mind which matters and which gives
its value to the statue. But so obscure to ordinary introspection are
the processes of the interpretation that we tend to think that none
occur. That we interpret a picture or a poem is obvious upon very
little reflection. That we interpret a mass of marble is less obvious.
The historical accident that speculation upon Beauty largely
developed in connection with sculpture is responsible in great degree
for the fixity of the opinion that Beauty is something inherent in
physical objects, not a character of some of our responses to
objects.
From certain visual signs, then, the contemplator constructs,
muscularly as well as visually, the spatial form of the statue. We
have seen that the picture-space is a construction, similarly the
statue-space is a construction, and the proportions and relations of
the volumes which in this statue-space make up the statue are by no
means necessarily the same as those of the mass of marble from
which we receive our signs. In other words, the scientific
examination of the statue and the imaginative contemplation of it do
not yield the same spatial results. Thus the process of measuring*
statues with a view to discovering a numerical formula for Beauty is
little likely to be fruitful. And the work of those, such as Havard
Thomas, who have attempted to use this method, show the features
which we should expect. Their merits derive from factors outside the
range of the theory. The psychological processes involved in the
construction of space are too subtle, and the differences between
the actual configuration of the marble and the configuration of the
statue in the statue-space are brought about in too many ways for
any correlation to be established.
Among the factors which intervene in the building up of the
imaginative form the most obvious are the lighting, and the material.
With change of lighting, change of form follows at once through
change in the visual signs, and since stone is often a translucent not
an opaque material, lighting is by no means such a simple matter as
is sometimes supposed. More is involved than the avoidance of
distracting cast shadows and the disposal of the brightest
illumination upon the right portions of the statue. The general aim
should obviously be to reproduce the lighting for which the sculptor
designed his work, an aim which requires very sensitive and full
appreciation for its success. An aim, moreover, which in the case of
works transported from North to South and vice versa is sometimes
impossible of realisation.
The interpretation of form is an extraordinarily complex affair.
The consequences of the asymmetricality of space as we construct it
must be noted. Up and down have distinct characters which differ
from those of right and left, which differ again from those of away
and towards us. A measured vertical distance does not seem to us
the same as an equal horizontal distance. Nor does a equal distance
away from us seem equal to either. These effects are modified again,
sometimes reinforced, sometimes reduced, by effects due to quite a
different source, to the relative ease or difficulty with which the eye
follows certain lines. The greater and less compatibility of certain eye
movements with others is the cause of much of what is confusedly
called Rhythm in the plastic arts. After certain lines we expect
others, and the success or failure of our expectation modifies our
response. Unexpectedness, of course, is an obvious technical
resource for the artist. The intervention here of the representational
factor cannot be overlooked. An eye movement which encounters
difficulty for any of a number of possible reasons, among which so-
called rhythmical factors deserve special notice, is interpreted as
standing for a greater distance than an equal but more easy
movement. This is only a rough rule, for yet other psychological
factors may come in to nullify or even reverse the effect; for
example, an explicit recognition of the difficulty. Yet another
determining condition in our estimation of intervals of space is the
uniformity of their filling. Thus a line one inch long hatched across
will generally seem longer than an equal line unhatched, and a
modulated surface seem larger than a smooth one.
These instances of the psychological factors which help to make
the imaginatively constructed statue-space different from the actual
space occupied by the marble will be enough to show how intricate
is the interpretation by which we take even the first step towards the
appreciation of a statue. Our full response of attitude and emotion is
entirely dependent upon how we perform the initial operations. It is
of course impossible to make these interpretations separately,
consciously and deliberately. Neural arrangements over which we
have little or no direct control perform them for us. Thanks to their
complexity the resultant effect, the imagined form of the statue, will
vary greatly from individual to individual and in the same individual
from time to time. It might be thought therefore that the hope that
a statue will be a vehicle of the same experience for many different
individuals is vain. Certain simplifications, however, save the
situation.
Form, we have seen, is, through our selection among the
possible signs present, within certain limits what we like to make it.
As it varies, so do our further or deeper responses of feeling and
attitude vary. But just as there are congruences and compatibilities
among the responses we make, in the case of colour, which tend,
given certain colours, to make us pick out of a range of possible
colours one which will give us a congruent (or harmonious)
response, so it is with form. Out of the multitude of different forms
which we might construct by stressing certain of the signs rather
than others, the fixing even temporarily of a part of the form tends
to bias us towards so interpreting the rest as to yield responses
accordant with those already active. Hence a great reduction of the
disparity of the interpretations which arise, hence also the danger of
an initial misapprehension which perverts the rest of the
interpretation.
This Chapter, like the last, is intended as an indication, merely, of

the ways in which a psychological analysis may assist the critic and
help to remove misconceptions. The usual practice of alluding to
Form as though it were a simple unanalysable virtue of objects—a
procedure most discouraging to those who like to know what they
are doing, and thus very detrimental to general appreciation—will
lapse when a better understanding of the situation becomes general.
None the less there are certain very puzzling facts as to the effects
of forms when apprehended which in part explain this way of
talking. These are perhaps best considered in connection with Music,
the most purely formal of the arts.

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years—on aspects, philosophical method, language, and many other topics—that

5.4 Why Pleasure? The Allure of the System������������������������������������������ 80

BB The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958.

Keywords Aspect perception · Grammatical investigation · Phenomenology

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and dissolution of philosophical difficulties—an approach that he sought to apply to

that Mulhall was forcing Heidegger’s phenomenology onto Wittgenstein’s remarks,

Wittgenstein in focusing on grammar and leaving phenomenology more or less to

Rhythm and Metre

We may turn now to that more complex and, more specialised

are clearly different. There is nothing arbitrary or out of the poet’s

cannot be doubted whatever we may think of the rime.

Movement in poetry deserves at least as much study as

So far we have merely discussed what may be described as the

Sculpture and the Construction of Form

This Chapter, like the last, is intended as an indication, merely, of

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