The philosopher Alva Noë’s new book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are is this century’s first major contribution to a full philosophy of art. It offers not only an original and fascinating account of the basic characteristics of the arts and the point of art; but also it places art in determinate relations with other major aspects of human life, gives a revisionary account of the nature of aesthetics as the content of the arts, characterizes the arts together with philosophy as the major ways in which human beings address aesthetics, and finally places all of this within a kind of philosophical anthropology of human life as fundamentally and inescapably fragile and ecstatic. And all of this is done in a little over 220 short pages full of slogans, counter-intuitive assertions, and analyses, and with a good deal of repetition and riffing.
The ambitiousness, striking originality, and systematicity of the book merit extended consideration. First, I’ll begin here with a sketch of Noë’s over-all conception, then in three further posts move to a detailed explication of his central conception, ‘entanglement’, then consider specifically of his account of art, and finally offer some questions, criticisms, reflections, and a counter-proposal for the philosophy of art. In this first part, and only here, I’ll refrain giving quotations from and references in the book, in order to convey only some sense of Noë’s basic claims and how they fit together. Likewise, I’ll postpone extended explication or criticism of his points until the following three posts.
1. Organization as the fundamental characteristic of human life:
Noë treats all aspects of human life—capacities like perception and thought; any and all skills; basic features like walking and talking; making artifacts, and accordingly any techniques and technologies involved; practices like science and design; and the reflective activities of art and philosophy—as kinds, moments, or modes of what he calls ‘organization’. Organization is always an achievement, not a mere given or something passively undergone, and has two aspects: (a) it is part of a human being’s embodied relation to and inter-relation with the world, wherewith a human being gains some sort of access to phenomena, which Noë usually refers to as what ‘shows up’ or what is ‘available’; (b) organization for a human being is always a self-organization, a way producing oneself as a certain kind of being. Noë’s most typical examples of a kind of organization in human life are habits.
2. Structural aspects of organizations:
Organizations and all their aspects are achievements; they come to be at some point within human lives. Note that even the earliest organizations, such as nursing and crawling, arise after birth. Noë does not discuss permanent loss of (an) organization, although surely he would acknowledge such as consistent with his human ontology as whole. His focus is overwhelming on the constant possibility of a person’s passage from a particular organization to a reorganization in that aspect of life.
Most changes within an organization are non-structural and do not induce re-organization. Noe’s typical examples of such changes are in perception and language-use: one perceives something, and then one alters how one perceives it (by looking at it from a different angle, in a different light, from a different distance, through a microscope, by turning it around, etc. etc.) to bring it into better focus with regard to some purpose, or in light of a different purpose. Similarly, in language use one might phrase something differently, ask for clarification, stipulate meanings, produce metaphors, explicate catachreses, etc. etc., in order to bring what’s being said into greater focus. In everyday activity and across a vast range of ordinary types of organization, people make such alterations continually, and part of what it means to be organized is that one is aware of the constant possibility and regular use of such alterations internal to organizations.
3. First-order organizations and philosophy and art as second-order organizations:
All but two kinds of organization are ‘first-order’. Any (first-order) organization is a way gaining access to phenomena, that which ‘shows up’. First-order organizations are oriented toward fulfilling some one or many pre-given and stable functions. It seems to me that Noë’s use of the term ‘first-order’ largely gains meaning by contrasting it with the term ‘second-order’. What is second-order organization? There are two (and seemingly only two) kinds of second-order organizations: philosophy and art. What makes a kind of organization, and by implication phenomena such as habits, skills, and practices, a second-order one is that it ‘displays’ some (other) kind of (first-order) organization. With regard to the arts, Noë’s constant examples are: (the art of) choreography displays (the activity of) dance; (the art of) painting displays (the activity of) depiction and/or design; the arts of language use (poetry, novels, etc.) display everyday language use.
Second-order organizations and associated practices are not rightly understood as somehow floating free from first-order practices, available at whim to display any and all first-order practices. Rather, second-order practices are permanent possibilities, occasionally actualized, within first-order practices. Noë’s typical scenario for such actualization is when something problematic arises within the exercise of a (first-order) kind of organization. Instead of the everyday kinds of internal alterations noted above, a reflection upon the organization arises, as it were from within. This reflection has the character of interrupting, disrupting, and disabling the organization. The organization is (temporarily?) disorganized, and as disruptive such reflection is emancipatory in breaking the chains of habitual perception, thought, and action. In different ways the second-order organization produces a new conception of the (now disorganized) organization. This achieved conception as it were re-enters the initial organization, and re-organizes it. Noë calls this process, from organization to disruption to re-organization, looping, and it is the paradigm of the central topic of the book, entanglement.
However, there are hints in the text that it is not as if first-order organizations are ontologically basic, with second-order organizations as moments within them. Rather, Noë also indicates at a few points that second-order organizations are the condition for the possibility of first-order organizations. At this level of explication Noë seems to pass as it were from phenomenology to existential ontology. I am not at all sure that I (yet) understand these hints, but Noë’s thought seems to be that second-order organizations are fundamentally re-organizational practices, and that re-organization occurs as a kind of response to a basic unfinished and unfinishable character of human life. This ontologically basic character shows itself in the Noë’s description of what he calls ‘the aesthetic predicament’. What is that?
4. The Aesthetic Predicament:
For Noë aesthetics, under a particular conception, pervades human life and all of its modes of organization. On this conception aesthetics has nothing in particular to do with perception, pleasure, or taste. Noë starts from Kant’s conception of an aesthetic judgment where one does not judge according to pre-given concepts, but rather one judges ‘without concepts’, in the sense that one gives a judgment in light of a feeling or sense of fittingness, without being able to offer a rational or conceptual justification for one’s judgment. Aesthetics in this sense is highlighted in the experience of art, but it extends far beyond the realm of art and indeed pervades human life. Noë urges repeatedly that human being is an aesthetic phenomenon, which seems to mean that the aesthetic predicament is omnipresent and never definitively solved or dissolved. Accordingly, at the most fundamental level of ontological description, human beings are embodied things of becoming. Noë seems very close to Heidegger’s Being and Time here, with the claim that human beings (what Heidegger called ‘Dasein’, i.e. existence/being-there) are fundamentally problems for themselves, and that their practices can be explicated as provisional answers to the questions ‘Who am I/are we?’, ‘What are beings?’, and ultimately ‘What is Being?’ Perhaps what Noë is suggesting is that because the questionable quality of existence, as presented in the aesthetic predicament, is basic and ineliminable, and because second-order, re-organizational organizations (habits, practices, etc.) are internal to first-order organizations, the former ground the latter (a) in the temporal sense that second-order re-organizations are prior to the first-order organizations that result from the making and unmaking and re-making processuality of organization, and (b) in the conceptual sense that second-order practices are the results of addressing directly the aesthetic predicament, and the aesthetic predicament is covered up, ignored, or only indirectly and non-radically addressed in everyday, first-order, function-directed organizations. (Again, I’m not at all confident that this last part accurately captures Noë’s thought).
5. Fragility and Ecstasy:
What conception of human life emerges from these analyses of organization? Human being (i) is stylistic, in the sense that any organization presents a particular way of organizing; (b) fragile, in the sense that any organization is always open to disruption; and (c) ecstatic or ek-static, in that human beings are never as it were securely in a single place and at home with themselves, but always driven to ‘stand outside themselves’ in calling into question their particular ways of organizing. The drive to alter is given fundamentally in the pervasive ‘looping’ phenomenon of the entanglement.
Accordingly, in my next post I will try, with full quotation and references, to explicate what Noë means by the entanglement. Once that conception is clarified, we’ll be in a position to grasp (in a third post) Noë’s distinctive conception of philosophy and art.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)