Review by Robert M Ellis
‘Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature’ was published in 2015, and Barry did a podcast interview with its author, Alva Noë, the same year. So I’m sorry that it has taken me five years to get around to reading this book, but better late than never! I was impelled to do so by writing about art, and reflecting on it further myself. I found this book in some ways helpful for identifying some ways of moving towards a view of art compatible with the Middle Way. However, in other ways it falls short. It gives us an account of art as central to human experience, but at the same time seems to focus only on one aspect of art, and to overstate the ways that aspect is typical of the value of art as a whole.
Noë’s central argument is that art involves a second level of reflection on what he calls ‘organisation’. Humans have all sorts of ways of organising themselves in relation to their goals, and many of these levels of organisation occur at an immediate, embodied level. They involve interaction and development structured over time, but are not simply a matter of choice in response to desire. Rather we are structured by the interactions that we are motivated into by basic functions. Noë gives examples such as a baby feeding at its mother’s breast, conversation, and technology. Technology provides an extension of our embodied organisation, even if it seems external to us (think, for example, of driving a car and how it becomes intuitive).
Art, says Noë, involves reflection and challenge to our organisation, making use of technology but not reducible to it. For example, he claims, painting is a technology (brushes, pigments, techniques etc), but art is something beyond painting that merely uses that technology. It cannot be art, he says, if it takes technology for granted. Instead, art challenges our use of technology in some way.
However, it’s in the area of exactly how, and in what ways, art can challenge us that I began to have difficulties with his argument. In some ways it seems to involve renewed attention, as art challenges us to see (p.102). We may need to break through boredom to experience that challenge (ch.9). However, the overwhelming emphasis seems to be on art as something that stimulates cognitive reflection: we use it to “investigate ourselves” (p.30). It is here that he seems to focus only on a rather particular, and distinctively modern, view of art rather than on the whole spectrum of what art can mean.
Noë’s view of art is clearly normative, because throughout he makes a distinction between what is or is not art, regardless of what we may normally give that label to. He is clear that art is distinct from technology (and hence from craft), and claims that art is ‘useless’, questioning all ends (p.64). He even goes on to claim that art is an ‘enemy of function’. However, he never faces up to the demands of this normativity or really tells us how he wants to justify it. Instead, the book generally takes the form of an analysis – a rather open sort of analysis incorporating lots of personal experience, but nevertheless an analysis. He seems to be trying to tell us what art ‘essentially is’ once we sort our ideas out clearly enough. He discusses the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey with approval, but does not really adopt a pragmatic approach, because he simultaneously rules out all practical justifications for art.
The basic problem here seems to be that Noë is imposing a dichotomy on a spectrum of qualities in experience (in this case a spectrum of functionality), and thus not making use of incrementality (everything about art is a matter of degree). Our understanding of the function of art may be relatively uncertain and relatively long-term, but that does not imply that it does not have a function, only that we need to exercise a lot of care in being sufficiently long-term and integrative when characterising that function.
The context of this seems to be that Noë must spend a lot of his time arguing against reductionists, which he is keen to differentiate himself from. However, in the process he appears to almost totally reject neural and psychological perspectives on art, despite the rich ways that these can support a non-reductive approach to it. It seems clear, for instance, that he has not come across the work of Iain McGilchrist, who actually shows how understanding the brain structure behind our experience of art can provide strong arguments against reductionism. Reductionism, as he shows, can the product of the over-dominance of particular areas of the brain (the linguistic and goal-oriented areas of the left pre-frontal cortex), with its tendency to think it has complete explanations. It is this sense of rational finality in explanation that creates reductionism (along with other forms of absolutisation), rather than the use of neural and psychological evidence per se.
Although Noë’s overall approach at first seems broadly-based and pragmatic, it is in his absolute distinction between ‘useless’ art and ‘functional’ technology that I find his own brand of conceptual reductionism creeping in. Why is it apparently so difficult for professional philosophers to employ spectrums consistently rather than dichotomies? It seems just a matter of bad enculturated habits. Noë claims that his distinction is ‘as real as any distinction can get’, which is apparently a way of eluding and rationalising the fact that that is not very (especially given that ‘real’, unlike any experiential quality, cannot be a matter of degree).
It does not seem so difficult to recognise that all art involves craft and technology (from which it is inseparable) to some degree, and similarly that all craft or technology involves art to some degree. Both art and craft also have a functions. In some ways Noë seems to implicitly recognise this in the very title of his book: the arts are ‘strange tools’, he says, but a strange tool is still a tool. However, the sheer weight of assertion that art has no function in the book obscures this more balanced position.
The overdominance of this dichotomy between art and craft is also reflected in the narrowness of his account of how art works. He rejects the value of aesthetic experience itself, barely mentions the concept of beauty, and says nothing at all about symbols or archetypes. Thus although his idea that art challenges our assumptions seems deeply right to me, he effectively dispenses with or avoids the majority of ways that art has actually done this through the ages. He interprets religious art as either having a religious function that is thus not really art, or (in the case of great Renaissance masters) as actually offering cognitive challenges to our perspective. For instance, he interprets the artistic value of Leonardo’s ‘Lady with an Ermine’, not in terms of its aesthetic or symbolic qualities, but solely in terms of the ways the portrayal of her hand upsets our cognitive expectations (p.105). In the process he takes only one aspect of a complex, multi-faceted work and reduces its value to that! How can he complain about neuroscientists being reductive when he is also busy squashing all the evidence into his theory? In fact, I have seen the ‘Lady with an Ermine’ many times whilst missing the cognitive twist that he points out, yet also found the painting deeply moving. Could that be, perhaps, because it is beautiful, or because it is such a display of painterly skill? Not if we are to believe Noë’s account.
The arts were not invented in the eighteenth century, and the idea that they were is surely an arrogant modernist presumption. Not only do we have the long traditions of religious painting, along with classical and other variations, long before that, but the arts in general all have their roots in folk arts out of which their increasingly refined forms have developed. The ways these forms have developed is also not just a matter of distinctively cognitive challenge, but also of increasing focus on aesthetic experience (think of the simplicity of Zen art, interacting with meditation), or of increasing complexity of symbolism, with its depth of embodied association (think of Christian Renaissance art). Some of this symbolism can also be understood as having archetypal functions, which are long-term sources of inspiration for us in practical experience. Art as a source of inspiration in practice is not just about recognising ‘essential properties’ as Noë puts it in his discussion of icons (pp.162-5), but of combining aesthetic qualities, symbolic association and our sense of the relationship of a symbol to our own potentials – all to create a rich response before we even get onto explicit intellectual challenges. Yet Noë objects to “psychologising the picture, treating it merely as a stimulus for a reaction in the viewer’s mind or visual symbol or brain”: as though this was the most important element psychological reflection could contribute!
Only at one point does Noë seem to start to engage with the value of the aesthetic. He points out that aesthetics are influenced by culture, and that “Aesthetic responses are themselves the question art throws up for us, not something we can take for granted in making sense of art itself” (p.132). But that’s the whole point: aesthetic responses are an important part of the value of art, not because we take them for granted but because it can be part of our practice to produce the conditions for them to occur, and to develop and appreciate them. Noë (following Kant to some extent) wants to reduce them to judgements that we like to think are universal, but that we cannot justify as such. Yet the judgement is justified by the prior aesthetic experience, which is an experience that can be understood experientially, psychologically, neurally, and perhaps mystically. By dismissing whole aspects of the arts, Noë has also dismissed many of the ways we can begin to understand the objectivity of judgements of beauty or creativity: an objectivity that I would argue begins in the experience of gathering attention that experiential openness combined with beauty may help to develop.
Noë asserts that art is philosophical (p.140), but this again typifies his tendency to squeeze art into a cognitive mould. Art can be philosophical, and may be none the worse for that in a few cases, as may find when reading the extraordinarily philosophical abstract explanations of modern artists’ work in galleries. This tendency to reduce art to philosophy has been commented on by Iain McGilchrist, as he relates it to the over-dominance of the left hemisphere in many aspects of modern life. Just as the managerialist expects a new kind of solution to have actually been arrived at by filling in a form that details everything conceptually, so it is a tendency for modern art to substitute the conceptual for the aesthetic, as though it was necessarily of greater value. Sometimes a conceptual approach can nevertheless produce helpful artwork, but most of our embodied experience can very easily become alienated from this approach, and most of the meaning of an artwork as we experience it bodily is missing from a conceptual explanation. So of course some art is philosophical, but much valuable art is not.
I think Noë has got it the wrong way round. As a practitioner of philosophy, I feel strongly not that all art is philosophical, but that philosophy is (or should be) art. Philosophy is one of the forms of artistic challenge, working through the conceptual to produce explicit formulations of the most helpful practice. Like any other art, philosophy thus needs to be creative in its relationship to the technologies it draws on, and to form part of a wider practice in which new meaning is opened to people. However, there is much other art that challenges us in other ways – aesthetically, symbolically, and archetypally – without needing to be remotely philosophical in its use of explicit conceptual formulation.
‘Strange Tools’ also contains discussions of picture making and of music that reflect the approaches I have been discussing so far. Noë argues that pictures are technology rather than art, but that a picture becomes art when “we think it” (p.156). Perhaps what he means by “thinking” here is more in the nature of awareness, in which case he seems right to distinguish the aware from the unaware in our understanding of the relationship between a picture and its object. If we simply identify a picture with its object, this is projection (also the basis of idolatry and representationalism). However, Noë’s account lacks any exploration of the nature of the projection involved and how we can counteract it – even though it is a crucial feature of artistic awareness that both artist and viewer recognise that a picture does not match its object, even whilst the associations are employed.
Noë’s discussion also puts forward the absurd view that popular music is not art but ‘style’ – again, the effect of him following through his absolute dichotomy in the way that only a determined philosopher can do. Of course, there are many features of popular music that reassure or titillate rather than challenge, and Noë is right to point out how much popular concert goers rarely focus on the music as much as the personalities and the style of the occasion. However, much of what he says about popular music also applies almost as much to classical music. There is obviously a big difference in the artistic complexity and challenge of classical music compared to popular, but Noë seems to have merely crunched the incremental differences to squeeze them into his dogmatic formula.
Overall, then, I finished, ‘Strange Tools’ mainly with a sense of disappointment at promise unfulfilled. It’s a book that starts very well and promisingly in its exploration of the relationship between art, technology and the body, but as it continues comes increasingly to be dominated by an inadequate theory of art that merely repeats the unacknowledged prescriptivism of so many previous aesthetic philosophers commenting on what they think art “essentially . What seems to have undermined the enterprise are narrow assumptions on two sides. On the philosophical side, the book is too busy fighting irrelevant battles against reductivism that prevent him from drawing on psychology, whilst at the same time there is a strong use of a normative perspective without any engagement with how the account of art being created relates to the normative. On the artistic side, Noë talks a lot about his experience of the arts in his family background, but this experience seems to have predisposed him towards a narrowly modern view of art, apparently without much sense of the limitations of that view. Not only religion, but also the whole Romantic and symbolist approach to art, or indeed folk art, get short shrift. These omissions are important because without them, a smaller view of art is assumed to be a more general one than it is. We certainly end up with a rather partial and limited account of how art can be a helpful practice, although not an entirely unhelpful one, because it does apply in some ways and in some circumstances.