Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle

McManus, Denis (2018) Vision, norm, and openness: some themes in Heidegger, Murdoch, and Aristotle. In, Beaney, Michael, Harrington, Brendan and Shaw, Dominic (eds.) Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty. Taylor & Francis, pp. 173-198. (doi:10.4324/9781315732855).

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ makes vivid that, when we encounter the world around us in all its concretion, that encounter is also saturated-or penetrated-by conceptual norms: when we see, we see-as. This is a realization that can provoke philosophical disquiet. It can suggest that the ways in which we deal with the world have been-in some way-already settled or prescribed. This, in turn, can provoke a sense of detachment from the world, a sense that we are not truly open to it, but only to a ‘pre-processed’, idealized version of it. A sense of its concretion as a kind of alienness-in its heterogeneous and as-yet-unanticipated ways-dawns in a recognition of what then seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that alienness: we have in some way abdicated a proper responsiveness to that world and, hence, a kind of responsibility for our actions in that world, by letting our responsiveness-and through it, our actions-be governed by norms, at whose credentials we now look askance. Do they merely represent the ways that my society, period, class, and so on understand the world? Is there some kind of unavoidable myopia imposed on us by the very need to think conceptually, to always see-as?

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