The Chinese University of Hong Kong
In his last writings, Wittgenstein returns time and again to the themes of ¡§seeing-as,¡¨ ¡§aspect-dawning¡¨ and other supposedly related perceptual phenomena. While these discussions have been noted by many commentators, there has been little agreement over their goal and significance. This paper begins with a brief survey of the secondary literature on this topic and favours the account offered by Stephen Mulhall, that these discussions are much more than a critique of a certain theory of vision and that their significance is rather best seen in the domain of language. It will then go on to suggest that what Wittgenstein has accomplished here is a description of how we experience meaning which highlights how meaning is always embodied in its expression and which, most significantly, not only speaks of perceptual meaning but takes it as the paradigm of our experience of meaning. Finally, the paper will attempt to outline a ¡§Wittgensteinian¡¨ notion of expression and note both its proximity and distance from the analyses of expression in Merleau-Ponty¡¦s early works.