The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon - and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselves.

In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva No explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.

Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, No argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeated with the aesthetic. Indeed, human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art - our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic - is the truest way of understanding ourselves. All this suggests that human nature is not a natural phenomenon. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology. In making these provocative claims, No explores examples of entanglement - in artworks and seeing, writing and speech, and choreography and dancing - and examines a range of scientific efforts to explain the human.

Challenging the notions that art is a mere cultural curiosity and that philosophy has been outmoded by science, The Entanglement offers a new way of thinking about human nature, the limits of natural science in understanding the human, and the essential role of art and philosophy in trying to know ourselves.

Reviews

"Winner of the Outstanding Monograph Prize, American Society for Aesthetics"
"What No shows is how that essential act of making art is more than just an act of pleasure. What it really encompasses is a radical act of inquiry into our entanglement."---Adam Frank, Big Think
"Art is at the heart of philosophy and the fusion of the two with a range of subjects can help us better understand what makes us human. . . . Alva No has introduced his thesis that is bound to generate enough debate on the antidote supplied by art and philosophy that 'makes us what we are,' a state where the people, surrounded by music, art, sculpture, poetry become creative enough to break out of the codified social organisation into a more liberated and an inspirationally fulfilling life infused with the aesthetic."---Shelley Walia, The Hindu
"For a half-decade, Ive been puzzling through arts functionless function with Alva No. . . . [The Entanglement] digs into the difference between the pictures and objects humans use every day, to shop on Amazon.com or to call on their gods, and the pictures and objects we use as works of art."---Blake Gopnik, New York Times

Author Bio

Alva No is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a member of the Center for New Media, the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and the Program in Critical Theory. His many books include Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World.