Having summarized the ontology of human life Alva Noë presents in his new book, I turn now to a more extended consideration of his central concept, entanglement. The book’s subtitle, How Art And Philosophy Make Us What We Are, rightly indicates that for Noë both art and philosophy are central aspects of entanglement, and he states that art and philosophy are entangled with life. (202) Readers of Noë’s earlier, path-breaking book on art, Strange Tools, are familiar with his sometimes enchanting, sometimes dismaying manner of presentation--a mix of slogans, careful analyses, over-statements, counter-intuitive shockers, re-workings of motifs from the philosophers John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the psychologist J. J. Gibson, and occasionally breath-taking insights—that can leave the reader fascinated, stimulated, and likely dumb-struck. I’ve come to think that Noë’s thought is best approached through some consideration of his sources, and through comparison of his accounts with those of relevantly similar philosophers. In this way one can get his distinctive views into focus; one can thereby see what he has appropriated and re-worked, but also what he has dropped. Now, Noë has made it clear that his conception of entanglement is indebted to the work of the philosopher Ian Hacking that centered on the concept of ‘looping’: “Looping concepts give us a clear instance of the phenomenon at the heart of our investigation, namely, entanglement.” (153, italics in original). So what is looping?
1. Hacking on ‘looping’:
In the early 1980s the philosopher Ian Hacking, who had previously published books on probability, on the importance of language in recent philosophy, and a major work in the philosophy of science, turned his attention to historically recent classifications of abnormal mental states and conditions, such as schizophrenia, transient madness, and multiple personalities. He initially presented and reflected upon some of these studies in an epoch-making lecture in 1983 entitled ‘Making Up People’. There he suggested that the phenomenon he had discovered was most appropriately conceptualized within a framework he called ‘dynamic nominalism’, whose central claim is “that a kind of person came into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.” (Hacking (2002), 106) Put alternatively, “[t]he category and the people in it emerged hand in hand.” (ibid., 107) The central idea is that there are startling many cases in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries of a peculiar phenomenon in classifying people: as soon as some new concept of a person with a disorder—the hysteric, the narcissist, the schizophrenic, etc. etc.—is proposed, people to whom this novel conception are ‘made up’, that is, some of those who are (potentially) named really are so named, as they experience, act, and are treated in light of the new conception. Hacking cites Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous claim that all action is under a description, and in a range of cases the new conception describes an emergent way of acting, and so of being. In the 1990s Hacking elaborated his conception of dynamic nominalism while simultaneously restricting its scope. He distinguished two great classes of ‘kinds’, interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. The former, but not the latter, exhibit the phenomenon that Hacking, and then Noë following him, will call looping: when a new classification is introduced, the people named by the new term will (in some cases) adopt the term, and thereby change something of who they are, how they conceive of themselves, how they act, and how they think of their field of possible action. With interactive kinds, naming is dynamic and changes the thing named. With indifferent kinds, a new term may be introduced, but the thing named remains the same; Hacking’s example of this is quarks. Hacking suggests that interactive kinds are largely coextensive with the subject matter of the human sciences, and unsurprisingly indifferent kinds with the subject matter of the natural sciences. In his new book Noë cites Hacking’s formulation from the 1990s as the stimulus or source of his own conception of looping.
However, this was not the end of Hacking’s reflections upon looping, although Noë ignores Hacking’s last statement upon it. In 2006 Hacking delivered a British Academy lecture wherein he markedly altered and re-framed his prior quarter of a century of investigations. He begins by summarizing his earlier conceptualization: “I coined two slogans. The first one, ‘making up people’, referred to the ways in which a new scientific classification may bring into being a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a person. The second, the ‘looping effect’, referred to the way in which a classification may interact with the people classified” (Hacking (2007), 286). However, he renounces his earlier distinction between interactive (human) kinds and indifferent (natural) kinds, because he no longer thinks they are two such well-defined types of kinds: the idea of distinct natural kinds has collapsed under recent scrutiny by several philosophers, and the idea of human kinds is “totally confused,” (ibid, 291) Still, although there are no interactive kinds, there are ‘interactive effects’, that is, the phenomenon of looping. Already in 1983 Hacking had asserted that there could be no general theory of ‘making up people’, because each case involved many factors and was different in significant ways from any and all other instances of such making. In this last consideration Hacking offers a 5-part framework that must be invoked in any account of making up people: in every case one must consider (a) the particular classification; (b) the specific individuals and peoples so classified; (c) the institutions wherein the new kinds of ways in which the novel classification is adopted and within which relevant actions take place; (d) knowledge about the kinds of peoples; (e) and the experts involved who at least initially propose the new classifications. Finally, Hacking adds the point that dynamic nominalism is also historical nominalism, in that the dynamics of the five factors involve extended historical changes among shifting conjunctions of the factors, as well as broader historical shifts in sociological phenomena such as the authority of experts, the emergence and decay of institutions, the vicissitudes of individualism, and the rise of social movements that might adopt, contest, or transform the new classifications.
2. Noë on entanglement and looping:
Noë argues that the phenomenon (or activity?) of entanglement is both central to all human life, in that it is bound to the basic existential-ontological characterization of human beings as stylistic, fragile, and ecstatic (as briefly described at the end of my previous post). Entanglement is also pervasive in human life, in that it characterizes many, and perhaps all, major spheres of human life: art and philosophy are entangled with life; writing is entangled with speech; gender and sex are entangled; etc. In order to explicate Noë’s conception of entanglement, I introduce a claim and a small set of distinctions; I am by no means sure that Noë would agree with these moves. First, I will interpret Noë’s statements about entanglement as statements about the existence of looping: where there is entanglement, there is the phenomenon of looping; and if there is no looping, there is no entanglement. Second (here Noë would surely wince), I will divide his statements about entanglement into three types: (i) very general and (seemingly) sloganistic claims, such as ‘art and philosophy are entangled with life’; (ii) stricter statements, where ‘entanglement’ refers to the looping that arises from the nature of first-order organizations (habits, practices, etc.) and the second-order dimension ‘within’ those first-order organizations, which when activated takes the form of philosophy or art; (iii) a sub-set of (ii), where Noë describes the looping effects proper to the arts: the looping of choreography and dance, of artistic depiction and ordinary depiction, and of the writerly attitude and ordinary language. Here I ignore the statements of (i) and focus on (ii) (I’ll consider (iii) in my new next post).
Hacking’s account of looping develops and sharpens over a quarter of a century, but at all times is quite distinct from Noë’s conception. For Hacking, looping is a recently phenomenon, and a relatively rare, or at least non-pervasive, one in human life. And in no case can looping be understood without placing the phenomenon in the five-factor analysis and with further consideration of broader socio-historical phenomena. Contrastingly, Noë’s conception of looping is part of a fundamental ontology of human life. Recall Noë’s central characterization of looping: habits are first-order kinds of organization, and second-order kinds of organization exist as potentials within all first-order kinds. Noë adds the point that first-order organizations are guided by models and conceptions (something like Anscombe’s point), and that these models and conceptions are products of second-order re-organizations, and so in this sense second-order organizations ground, or are more conceptually basic than, first-order practices. Second-order organizations are further responses to the pervasive ‘aesthetic predicament’ of human life, where human beings lack as it were stable and definitive organizations. The aesthetic predicament pervades human life, and though uniquely addressed by the second-order activities of art and philosophy, the predicament is in principle never resolved or dissolved.
When did the predicament start? Noë argues that the phenomena and characteristics he discusses—entanglement, looping, art and philosophy, etc.—are coeval and characteristic of human life. He notes the standard point that biologically human beings seemed to have emerged 150-200,000 years ago, but that the basic characteristics of human life as described by Noë seem to have emerged together around 40-50,000 years ago. Noë oddly claims that consideration of evolutionary factors, such as how distinctively biological human beings emerged, and how the species of such beings evolved (biologically and/or culturally) in their first 100,000 years causes the phenomenon he’s interested in to vanish; for Noë, human life is all or nothing, and all of a piece. The dates that Noë gives for the beginning of (full) human life are those that are more typically referred to by anthropologists and archeologists as the beginnings of ‘cultural modernity’, which is usually characterized as the beginnings of ‘symbolism’, and in particular of the arts (there is direct evidence of the visual and musical arts, and more indirect evidence of linguistic and theatrical arts).
3. Questions for Noë’s ontology:
One immediate effect of Noë’s methodological decision to treat human (‘culturally modern) life as emergent all at once, and to claim that the core phenomenon of looping characterizes human life from 50,000 years ago to the present, is to eliminate history from consideration. Likewise, this methodology eliminates consideration of practices (as organized individual and social phenomena that develop, combine, decay, etc), institutions, and political life generally (except in the etiolated contemporary sense of self-other distinctions in terms of gender and skin color). But can an account that treats practices, institutions, and history generally as adventitious make sense of the arts, which are not atypically characterized as essentially historical? And consideration of the effects of this methodological decision potentially casts light on another peculiarity of Noë’s account. Common-sensically, and indeed also on Noë’s own account, ‘entanglement’ involves (at least) two distinct factors; otherwise, what’s entangled? On this fundamental point Noë’s characterizations seem inconsistent. For Hacking always, and sometimes for Noë, looping is a temporal and historical phenomenon; in Strange Tools one of his central examples is clothing: people dress in such-and-such a way, their dress is displayed in artistic painting, which brings into focus their dress and suggests new models for dressing, then these models guide new ways of dressing. Yet in many of his formulations Noë describes the phenomenon in terms of dimensions that are somehow active and interactive, and as such take place continuously across human life for the past 50,000 years. I’ll return to this problem, and suggest ways of altering Noë’s account, in my final post.
Next I’ll address what is for me the chief concern, Noë’s distinctive account of the arts. Much of what he says in the new book is quite close to his views in Strange Tools, but some formulations have been dropped, the phenomenon of style moves to the center, and the account is now embedded in the larger framework of entanglement. Is this an improvement?
References:
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (1957)
Ian Hacking, ‘Making People Up’ (1983) in Historical Ontology (2002)
-----‘The looping effects of human kinds’, in Dan Sperber et al (eds), Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach (1995)
-----The Social Construction of What? (1999)
-----‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’, Proceedings of the British Academy (2007)
Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023)
-----Strange Tools (2015)