The Entanglement How Art and Philosophy Make Us
P R E FA C E
Life and art are entangled. My aim in this book is to understand this s imple statement and to explore its surprising and far- reaching implications.
To say that life and art are entangled is to propose not only that we make art out of life—that life, so to speak, supplies art’s raw materials—but further that art then works those materials over and changes them. Art makes life new. We become something different in an art world. And crucially, our world has always been an art world.
One upshot: art is very important. We haven’t understood art and its place in our lives, and we haven’t understood ourselves, u ntil we come to appreciate art’s generative, transformational, and, indeed, emancipatory power.
Another upshot: because human nature is the stuff of art, it is, really, a misnomer to speak of h uman nature at all. We are questions, not answers, and in this we are like artworks. We are aesthetic phenomena. To understand and know ourselves, we need to undertake an aesthetic investigation of that work- in-progress that is the self we are.
It is no part of my purpose to say No to science, or even to a science of the h uman. My aim, rather, is to say Yes to art, and to the importance of the aesthetic attitude that art sustains.
In this book I resist the tendency, in evidence across different communities of thought, and in our popular culture, to underestimate style and the aesthetic by associating t hese, erroneously, with fashion on the one hand, say, and something like natural pleasure (if there is such a thing), or mere preference, on the other. If we don’t come up with a better, a richer, a more plausible appreciation of the aesthetic, we c an’t hope to develop an adequate understanding of human being.
Human beings are organized, in the large, and in the small, by habit, custom, technology, and biology. This organization is what lets us have a world and cope with it. Without it, there is no human life; maybe there is no life at all.
But it also constrains us; it holds us captive, defines our ordinary, and confines our intuitions. There is no way of delivering ourselves once and for all from the unfreedom that makes us what we are. Even our bodies, thought of as chemical and nervous processes, are organized for regulation and self-maintenance.
It could seem fanciful and romantic, unscientific, even ridiculous, to hold that art and philosophy have the power to emancipate us, not from the reality of organization altogether, but from the particular habitual modes of being that make us up now. But this is my claim: art and philosophy are the ways that we re-organize ourselves.
Art and philosophy aim at ecstasy, total release from the states that have pinned us. Philosophy targets the understanding, yes. And art aims at aesthetic pleasure. Okay. But t hese are surface attributes. Art and philosophy require of us that we work ourselves over and make ourselves anew, individually and ensemble.
Not long after I started work on the book about art and h uman nature that was to become Strange Tools, which came out at the end of 2015, a friend asked me whether I was giving up philoso- phy of mind. I was startled by the question. It had seemed obvious to me that the problem of art—what it is, how it works, why it matters, and especially the question of aesthetic experience, what that is—is a central problem for the theory of mind. In this book I try to explain why this is so.
A. N.
Berkeley
August 2022
