The Aesthetic Instinct
Millennia before Picasso, humans crafted spectacularly refined forms. Were they true artists, or something less?
ENLARGEIn his strangely blunt-edged new book, the philosopher Alva Noë takes a long time to claim not just that art can raise questions but that art is philosophy: It makes us think about what it is to be human. The publisher's cover copy sums up the book more swiftly and clearly than the author ever does: "A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves." Picasso said it still swifter and better: "Computers are useless. They can give you only answers."
No doubt art can raise questions about what it is to be human, but so can tourism, museums, play, sport, religion, history, sociology, psychology or just plain solitary thought. We can think about what it is to be human while watching Roger Federer at play or ants at work, and we can respond intensely to much art without reflecting about human nature.
Mr. Noë's monotonic and metronomic emphasis on art as philosophy limits what he has to say about both "art and human nature," as the subtitle has it. He skimps or ignores so much of what this promises: art's origins; its variety and range and influence outside modern Western high art and recent pop music; its relation to religion and other social contexts; the isolation and diffusion of artistic traditions; the competition for attention within and between arts and with other non-urgent activities; the individual and social costs and benefits of creating and attending to art, in the past and in the present; and much more.
About human nature, Mr. Noë writes too much that is uninteresting, untrue, unargued or trivial. Indeed, he often writes as if to rack up as many untenable ideas per page as he can. "Art presupposes technology and can be understood only against that background," he declares. What of millennia of oral stories? "It is art that gives us pictures, and it is pictures that make the aesthetic sense possible." Blind people can have no aesthetic sense? Humans before picture-making, but with song, dance and body decoration, had no aesthetic sense? Why and how, then, would our ancestors have ever bothered to make pictures?
Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature
By Alva Noë
Hill & Wang, 285 pages, $28
For Mr. Noë, "art, and philosophy, are activities bent on the invention of writing." Whenever writers write about "human nature," I welcome the inclusive "we." But Mr. Noë's repeated "we" excludes most human beings: all humans before the invention of writing and all not yet literate. "Our very thought about and experience of language . . . is shaped by our prior grasp on writing as a method of representing language." Do those in the world of Homer, or 12th-century Swahili poets, or Maori orators before European contact, not share human nature?
Between discussing jet flight and the latest software, he opines: "Take away the technology and you are left not with us, but with, at most, something like distant cousins of ourselves." Why then do we jet-hopping Facebookers, Twitterers and Chatterers feel such immediate kinship with Leopold Bloom, Anna Karenina, Hamlet, Odysseus or the maker of a spectacularly carved spear-thrower in Mas d'Azil 14,000 years ago?
Mr. Noë thinks "exactly right" Bruno Latour's claim that "we think of the visible world on the model of the still life" and adds: "We cannot choose to see things differently." But since the first still lifes were painted at the end of the 16th century, and were seen by only a small proportion of the population in the West, and have still been seen by only a small proportion of non-Western populations, this would mean that most people in the history of the world, and most children before they see their first still life, do not see as "we" do. How can such hollow claims persuade anyone? And how do they explain either art or human nature?
Mr. Noë makes inexhaustible subjects feel rather exhausting. Not because he does so much but because he does so little, so slowly. He writes easily and slackly: "Music is the stuff of human activity. . . . And there is rhythm, to be sure, just as there is when we talk and walk and do anything. This is the stuff of music." He blurs argument with fuzz words: "The point of this example is that technologies are coordinate with who and what we are, with what we know how to do," he writes at one point. At another: "Choreography makes a contribution to the biology of human organization." At least if he never reaches the height of one of his masters, the American philosopher John Dewey, he never sinks to the depth of the other, the German profundist Martin Heidegger—although Mr. Noë cites with conviction Heidegger's claims that "the equipmental quality of equipment was discovered" and more in that bathetically bathyspheric vein.
Central to "Strange Tools" is the idea that art makes human behavior strange by allowing us to distance ourselves from what we take for granted in life. Mr. Noë seems unaware that, a century ago, what has ever since been one of the most influential and widely discussed theories of art, Formalism, placed estrangement (ostranenie) at its heart. The literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky proposed that Tolstoy does not depict human behavior in common terms (love, jealousy) but instead describes the micro-responses of his characters, so that we see and feel and suddenly recognize them with a visceral vividness utterly unlike our automatic acquiescence to ready-made abstractions.
The Formalists zeroed in astutely on one aspect of art, and especially Tolstoy's, but they made too much of it. So does Mr. Noë, in his vaguer way: "Art sets us free," he writes. "It lets us break out of the myriad ways our movement, our thought, our conversation, our perception, our consciousness, are organized or held captive." Art can do this, but it can also be conventional. It can reinforce a society's preconceptions—as in much religious art or routine romantic verse—and it can even be a means of enforcing them, as in tribal initiation ceremonies.
To pick up "Strange Tools" for invigorating ideas would be as misguided as traveling to England for hot summer weather. But sun can break through the cloud. When, in Chapter Seven, Mr. Noë describes some recent art installations and the dislocations they offer, he writes with enthusiasm: Works like these—by Tino Sehgal, Robert Irwin, Anri Sala—do make things strange, in haunting ways, often using the technology behind the "tools" in his title. The other place where the book shines, curiously, is the acknowledgments, which include a brief autobiography that starts with Mr. Noë's childhood in Greenwich Village.
According to Mr. Noë, "Art isn't a phenomenon to be explained." It is, actually, but don't come here for an explanation.
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