Change of aspect in everyday life

You look at a drawing and see a duck. Then, suddenly, it is a rabbit. Nothing on the paper has changed, and yet you see it differently. Wittgenstein spent many pages of the second part of the Philosophical Investigations on this experience, which he called noticing, or the dawning, of an aspect. It turns out to be one of the most practical ideas in his work: same facts, different seeing.

Ich betrachte ein Gesicht, auf einmal bemerke ich seine Ähnlichkeit mit einem andern. Ich sehe, daß es sich nicht geändert hat; und sehe es doch anders. Diese Erfahrung nenne ich »das Bemerken eines Aspekts«.

I look at a face and suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”.

Philosophical Investigations II xi (Philosophy of Psychology, a Fragment §113)

What Wittgenstein noticed

The duck-rabbit was not his invention. The psychologist Joseph Jastrow used it in 1899, and it had appeared in a German humour magazine a few years earlier. What interested Wittgenstein was the puzzle it poses. When the aspect changes, do I see something new? In one sense yes: the experience is different, and I would describe it differently. In another sense no: I can see that the lines are exactly the same. A change of aspect, he observed, expresses a new perception and an unchanged perception at once.

He also noted that aspect-seeing is partly up to us. You can try to see the rabbit, and sometimes you succeed. It sits somewhere between seeing and thinking, and it depends on what we know and care about: someone who has never seen a rabbit cannot see the drawing as one. He even imagined people who were “aspect-blind”, who could recognise the drawing but never experience the switch, and asked what they would be missing. The concept page on seeing aspects explains the details.

Why this matters outside a psychology textbook

Much of what troubles us does not come from missing facts. We often know the facts perfectly well. What is stuck is the aspect: the way the facts hang together for us. Wittgenstein said something very close to this about his own work:

Die Arbeit an der Philosophie ist (...) eigentlich mehr die Arbeit an Einem selbst. An der eigenen Auffassung. Daran, wie man die Dinge sieht. (Und was man von ihnen verlangt.)

Work on philosophy is (...) really more work on oneself. On one's own way of taking things. On how one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)

Culture and Value, 1931

Already in the Tractatus he had written a sentence that reads like an early version of the same thought:

Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.

The world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy.

Tractatus 6.43

The same world, differently seen.

Exercises in changing the aspect

Find the second drawing

Take a situation that bothers you and write it down in two or three neutral sentences. Then ask: what else could this be a picture of? A colleague who interrupts in meetings: rudeness, enthusiasm, or fear of being overlooked? You are not deciding which is true. You are practising the switch, so that the first aspect stops being the only one available.

Rearrange the facts

Wittgenstein valued arrangements of familiar material that suddenly make a connection visible. He called this a perspicuous representation, and said it produces the kind of understanding that consists in “seeing connections”, often by finding intermediate cases (PI §122). Try it with a timeline. Lay out a year of your work, or the history of a family conflict, on one sheet. Patterns that memory hides often jump out once everything is side by side.

Look at art slowly

Stand in front of one painting for ten minutes, or listen to one piece of music three times in a row. Notice when something reorganises: a figure becomes background, a phrase suddenly sounds like an answer to an earlier one. Wittgenstein's interest in aspects was tied to his interest in music and in how we understand a face or a melody. It is understanding you cannot get by being told.

In conflicts, art and self-image

Conflicts. In a long-running quarrel, each side is often locked into one aspect of the other: “the controlling one”, “the careless one”. Good mediators often start by making a second aspect visible. You can do a small version yourself: describe the other person's behaviour the way they would describe it.

Self-image. “I quit three jobs in five years” can be seen as a record of failure or as the story of someone who will not settle for work that does not fit. The facts are identical. Which aspect you live with changes what you do next.

Parenting and teaching. A pupil who keeps asking “why?” can be seen as disruptive or as curious. Teachers who can switch between the two at will tend to manage both the class and the pupil.

Online. A post that enrages you can often be read as clumsy rather than hostile. Trying the second reading before replying costs ten seconds.

Limits

A change of aspect does not turn bad facts into good ones. Some situations really are unjust or harmful, and “seeing it differently” must never become a way of explaining harm away, least of all when someone asks you to see their own behaviour more kindly. Wittgenstein also stressed that aspects cannot simply be forced. Sometimes the switch does not come. And reframing is a technique psychotherapists use with training and care; here it is offered as a philosophical exercise, a way of loosening the grip of one picture, not a cure. For scholarly background, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Wittgenstein's aesthetics discusses aspect perception, and the main Stanford entry on Wittgenstein places it in his later work. You can read the remarks themselves in the Philosophical Investigations.