Two perspectives on “looking at”

At first, I thought it was a rabbit, but because it was

 swimming in the water, I realized that it was a duck.

Look at the figure above. I think that most readers will know that it can be seen either as a rabbit or as a duck but never as a rabbit and a duck at the same time. We can look at the figure either from a subjective point of view, also called the first-person perspective, or from an objective point of view, also called the third-person perspective. In the former case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure, in the latter case we focus our attention on my looking at the figure as such. I want to explain the difference with this figure:

                  

The left oval represents the first-person perspective; the right one represents the third-person perspective. That the words “the figure” are not enclosed by the left oval does not mean that the figure is ignored in the first-person perspective. One cannot “look at” just like that but one can only look at something. The theme of the first-person perspective in this example is, nonetheless, my looking. Likewise, the I as a subject is not covered by the third-person theme, but being the one who looks, I am involved in the analysis from the third-person point of view.
When I am looking at something (to be distinguished from just seeing), implicitly or explicitly I ask questions about what I watch. Such questions can be:
Q. What is the figure like for me?
And a possible answer is:
A. I see a sketch of a rabbit.
And then:
Q: Why does the figure represent a rabbit?
A: The two protrusions at the left are two ears and the little dent at the right is a mouth.
These questions and answers are questions from the first-person perspective, for they concern my subjective view. From the third-person perspective, one would ask questions like:
Q: What kind of figure is that?
A: It is an ambiguous figure representing both a rabbit and a duck, drawn for experimental purposes.
Q: Why do some see the figure as a rabbit and others as a duck?
A: That’s what your brain makes you think, on the basis of the light impulses that it receives from the piece of paper in front of you and your antecedent cognitive state, educational background and frame of mind.
In questions and answers from the third-person perspective my seeing and interpreting the figure as a subject is no longer present, but they concern the objective brain structures and processes and the input of these processes that take place “independent of me” by way of speaking. The first-person perspective is about what the figure means for me and which reasons I have for this interpretation, while the third-person perspective is about the objective causes that determine my perception of the figure as a certain thing and which I normally don’t know about.
It is not so that it is not possible that I, the first person that I am, take a third-person perspective towards myself. Nor is it so that another, a third person, has no access to my first-person perspective, no matter how. For taking a perspective is approaching a general theme in a certain manner by highlighting either the subject or the object, guided by questions of a certain type. And there is no reason why I (the first person) cannot ask the same questions about myself that another (a third person) asks about me or that I ask about another from the third-person perspective. On the other hand, there is also no reason why another cannot ask the same questions about me that I ask about myself. However, unlike me, the other has no direct access to the answers on these questions and therefore his or her knowledge of my first-person perspective can only be found via more or less complicated ways of understanding. Here I can’t elaborate such ways of understanding (see bij de Weg 1996), but what this analysis in terms of questions of the two perspectives makes clear is that these two ways to look at what is around us and to understand and explain what is around us are not contradictory in the sense that only one perspective is correct at the cost of the other, but that the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective are alternative ways of looking at something. The perspectives represent different standpoints characterised by different types of questions. As Karl-Otto Apel worded it in his “complementarity thesis” (1979, pp. 12-13):

1.    The perspectives supplement each other: what is known, experienced or observed from one perspective cannot be known, experienced and observed from the other perspective.
2.    The perspectives exclude each other: they have different intentions, expressed in different types of questions. The first-person perspective is subject directed; the third-person perspective is object directed.
3.    For both reasons, the perspectives cannot be reduced to each other.
It’s already more than forty years ago that Apel developed these ideas and presented his analysis, and both perspectives are still either confused or it is so that one perspective is idolized at the cost of the other (and usually it is, in science at least, that the third-person perspective is seen as the only right method). But is it so difficult to see that different types of questions lead to different types of answers and isn’t it quite authoritarian to forbid some types of questions being asked? 

References
Apel, K-O 1979b, “Types of Social Science in the Light of Human Cognitive Interests”, in: S.C. Brown ed., Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, Brighton, Sussex etc.: Harvester Press etc., pp. 3-50.
Weg, Henk bij de 1996, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen, Kampen: Kok Agora.