Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

Abstract

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging book. Here are some of its central claims. Human life is pervaded by ‘organized activities’, which are activities in which human agents interact with the environment and other agents, sometimes deliberatively but more typically semi-automatically, yet always intelligently and responsively, exercising the cognitive powers such agents are naturally endowed with or naturally develop (Chapter 1). ‘Technologies’ are patterns of use of a thing, or a ‘tool’, thanks to which organized activities have the structures that they do (Chapter 3). For example, breast-feeding, dancing and perceiving are all organized activities, and the lullaby the mother might sing to soothe the baby, the slings she might use to hold him securely, the body of the dancer, the system of postures and movements, a pair of spectacles, and photographic images are all ‘tools’ the patterns of whose use are technologies that structure these activities. Ordinarily, we do not or practically cannot stop and think about the nature of the organized activities we engage in or of the technologies we deploy in engaging in them. But we can take a step back and ‘investigate’ them, as a result of which they get ‘reorganized’. Art and philosophy are both ‘methods of research’ (17) into them or practices of reorganizing them (Chapters 2, 8 and 11). These second-order practices of critical reflection (this is my own expression) are in some sense parasitic on, and emerge from, the first-order organized activities (and the technologies involved in them), but not only can the former ‘loop back down’ (31, 59) and change the latter, there is a sense in which the former is ‘not ancillary’ (41, 42) to the latter: the sense in which the possibility of taking up ‘the writerly attitude’ (42)—the critical reflective attitude of investigating into and reorganizing spoken language by means of a system of writing it—is already there in the organized activities of language use from the beginning, even at the chronological stage where the language is only spoken and not yet written (Chapter 4; in Chapter 5 Noë argues that a similar relation obtains between the ‘pictorial attitude’ and organized activities of seeing). Thus art and philosophy are both ‘bent on the invention of writing’ (xiii, 36, 43, 47).