VI

In Remarks on Colour , Wittgenstein asks: "But can I believe that I see and be blind, or believe that I'm blind and see?" (§85). And also this: "Can I teach the blind what seeing is, or can I teach this to the sighted?" (§319). Making fun of epistemologies that demand justification and rational reconstruction for all forms of knowledge, a note (§265) among those in his Zettel reads: "What justifies the blind man in saying he cannot see?"

As a philosopher, I must confess that I cannot find relief—nor indeed do I think I should—from the conviction that the most urgent philosophical questions with regard to vision concern ethics and morality. Wittgenstein's questions—the ones, for example, that we have just read—were doubtless intended to be understood as challenges to contemporary epistemology, contestations of its assumptions, its conceit, its invisible work of construction. But there is an uncanny ambiguity, or say duplicity, hidden within his questions. For what Derrida has called a "double reading," his questions seem readily to permit a certain transposition, a certain dislocation, removing them from a field of discourse where their meaning is clearly epistemological and abruptly situating them within the disquieting provocations of a discursive field where their sense and significance invoke the moral and call with urgency for an ethical response.

Have the glasses on the philosopher's nose, designed of course to improve the conditions of vision, instead caused a certain moral blindness? Wittgenstein examines the epistemology of color blindness with impressive subtlety. He asks us to think about red things and green things. But what about white skin and black skin? In a world deeply divided by racism, what can the philosopher say—what should the philosopher be saying—about discriminations based on the color of skin, and about the color blindness of an ideal justice?

For how long have philosophers overlooked the faces of poverty, the faces of crime, and the victims of violence? How long will the moral dimensions of vision, our capacity to see pain and suffering, hunger and spiritual destitution, continue to be neglected? As the ancient philosophers understood, skepticism is, first of all, and most urgently, the recognition of a moral tragedy, a question of our ethical responsibility for the other, and not a problem for the theory of knowledge.

Philosophers must learn how to see what is in plain view—and they must have the courage to say what they see. But not everything is visible, not everything in plain view. And so philosophers must also learn how to see that which is hidden—and how, then, to speak about this. For things are hidden for different reasons, different causes, and in different ways. Hidden, but not necessarily in the ways that Platonic and Kantian metaphysics had posited, namely, as an invisible reality behind ephemeral appearances. Such hiddenness was, for Wittgenstein, an illusion that his optics could dispel. But there are others ways for things to be hidden, other forms of hiddenness. Thus, there are times when philosophers must read between the lines, penetrate palimpsests, decipher traces, rummage through remnants, enter the darkness of crypts, dig among the ruins, and piece together puzzling fragments.

In a text unmistakably influenced by Benjamin, Adorno once argued that "philosophy is interpretation," the endless task of working with "fleeting disappearing traces" and "ciphers": "only in traces and ruins is it [philosophy] prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality."^[16] His example: the commodity structure. "Like a source of light, the historical figure of commodity and exchange value may free the form of a reality, the hidden meaning of which remained closed to investigation of the thing-in-itself problem, because there is no hidden meaning which could be redeemable from its one-time and first-time historical appearance."^[17] Is the connection between the ragpicker and the commodity structure of late capitalism in plain view? It is, in a sense, right before our eyes—if they are not shut.

There are times when philosophers must be willing to experience the dark night of the soul and bring to light what nobody wants to face. And there are times—times which Herakleitos understood—when philosophers must learn to hide, cover, and protect with a certain invisibility the truth that they see and love.

In a note written sometime in the year 1930, hence before the Holocaust, Wittgenstein consigned to paper, with words that call to mind the ninth of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"^[18] a dark vision, at once looking back to the past and forward, with apprehension, into the future: "I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes."^[19] Here we are engaged, I would say, by a vision entirely different from the one that figures in the rest of his philosophical discourse: this, after all, is not a vision of colors, not a vision of duck-rabbits, not a vision of ordinary objects,

not a vision of human faces that picture the soul, but a vision seemingly capable of seeing the future—a prophetic, or apocalyptic vision. And yet, he does not talk about the vision behind his remark. Is this vision a question of seeing X as Y ? Is it a question of seeing the dawning of an aspect? How could the philosopher argue for this way of looking at our civilization? What is to be said to someone who cannot see it this way?

The vision that is required of the philosopher has always been a difficult vision, immeasurably more ambiguous, immeasurably more paradoxical, than the seeing solicited by the picture of the duck-rabbit, which Wittgenstein deploys to show the reversal of an ambiguous figure-ground relationship and the dawning of a different figure. Could we think of the vision that this picture solicits as a counterexample to the doctrine that vision is always a matter of seeing what is in plain view? And can we see how a certain level of discomfiture in exercising the eyes' natural ability to reverse such figure-ground structures might be related to an inability—or, say, unwillingness—to tolerate and appropriately resolve a certain level of ambiguity, intricacy, and complexity in the moral questions asked of us by life? As Aristotle understood, morality is always to some extent a question of perception—a matter that always makes a certain claim on our capacity for (right) perception. If, as the Frankfurt School studies on fascism were the first to suggest, rigidity in perception could be a symptom of moral rigidity, a symptom of the rigidity of an authoritarian character, then seeing the dawning of a new aspect and seeing a figure-ground reversal are not only matters for the theory of knowledge: though seemingly insignificant, they are also, in fact, matters of the greatest ethical and moral significance. Considered in this light, seeing "the other" (Jews, blacks, aborigines, homosexuals) as "human" may still be a perception deeply corrupted, complicitous in a structure of violence.

Thus the questions of justification that Wittgenstein broaches in his meditations on seeing are not just questions for every theory of knowledge: they are also questions which can turn our thoughts about vision and blindness in the direction of compassion and justice. Wherever compassion and justice are at stake, what we see and what we fail to see are moral questions that call imperatively for a discourse of justification.