Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

Noë (Out of Our Heads), a philosopher specializing in perception and consciousness, explores aesthetics from an unlikely starting point: activities like breastfeeding, reading a sign on a wall, driving a car, opening a door, or conversing with a friend. We “lose ourselves in the flow” of these “organized activities,” as he calls them—an expression of our biological and existential condition. But the myriad activities that organize and constantly reorganize our lives are difficult to untangle, and as Noë gets caught up in them, the reader gets lost. Art, like philosophy, the author argues, “is a practice for bringing our organization into view.” Noë explores this conceit through a range of topics as they relate to art, such as the importance of boredom, the role of criticism, and the impossibility of neuroscience explaining art, with analogies from baseball to barkeeping, and help from the work of philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and John Dewey. In relating complex problems in perception and consciousness, which have long filled pages in philosophy journals, Noë mostly forgoes jargon and citations in favor of mercifully plainer prose. Still, the book meanders through a lot of conceptual ground despite tilting toward the visual arts—Western and modern at that—and away from music, film, poetry, and fiction. Agent: John Brockman. (Sept.)