Some years ago, I was talking with an artist. He asked me about the science of visual perception. I explained that the vision scientists seek to understand how it is we see so much–the colorful and detailed world of objects spread out around us in space–when what we are given are tiny distorted upside-down images in the eyes. How do we see so much on the basis of so little?
I was startled by the artist’s reply. Nonesense! he scoffed. That’s not the question we should ask. The important question is this: Why are we so blind, why do we see so little, when there is so much around us to see? –Alva Noë
The quote above is from the Preface of Alva Noë’s latest book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. Noë is a philosopher at UC-Berkeley who focuses his research on mind and cognition. I have been a fan of his work for the last year or so, so I was excited when he came out with this latest book which deals with a subject that I concern myself with in my own work. His work initially caught my attention because he already does very well what I seek to do to some degree: blurring boundaries between disciplines and shattering harmful ideologies. After all, is this not necessary if we are to advance thought?
It turns out that there is a lot that Noë and I agree on concerning art, and there was even more for me to learn concerning the relationship between art and philosophy more generally. He argues that both art and philosophy are transformative in that they force us to look at the world in different ways. As he explains in Chapter 8, a good work of art carries the message “See me if you can!” One cannot understand it with one simple glance. It takes a timely process of organizing and reorganizing our conception of a work of art to fully understand it, just as we must organize and reorganize many aspects of our lives. It is not until we understand the work to this degree that we are qualified to make a critical judgment about it. Art is a transformative tool, like philosophy or language, for shaping our understanding and expression of reality and of ourselves.
In one of his previous works entitled Out of our Heads, Noë makes a convincing and nearly irrefutable case that we are not merely our brains. There is more to consciousness than neural functioning inside the brain. When we confine the mind to the brain, we leave out a crucial part of our being. We are not mere “lumbering robots” as Richard Dawkins argues. We have rights, responsibilities, and the power to make conscious decisions. What exactly is beyond our brains, whatever its nature, is still up for debate. Regardless, this transformation is not something that happens in the art itself, nor does it happen in us, as in, in our brains, as neuroaesthetics would suggest. Rather, art, and also philosophy, happen to us. Yes, there will be correlative changes in brain functioning, but those are merely byproducts of our active engagement with the work.
Art is to the artist as philosophy is to the philosopher. It is the beginning of a conversation that can cause controversy or enlightenment. It might make us uncomfortable at first because it causes us to question our perception as philosophy forces us to question our beliefs. But, it is later humbling, rewarding, and intellectually engaging. It is a tool for thinking critically, and it is strange because it is difficult to understand. Art and philosophy are both Strange Tools.
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