The Entanglement – How Art and Philosophy Make us What we Are

The subtitle is it a good indication of the argument of this interesting interdisciplinary book exploring the inseparability of life, art and philosophy in the context of an entangled reality enabling a fresh understanding of human nature where the aesthetic plays a central role; we need to appreciate ‘art’s generative, transformational, and, indeed, emancipatory power.’ (p. xi) For the author, this means that we are questions, not answers – we are like artworks where the self we are becoming is a work in progress. He sees us as organised by culture in terms of habit, custom, technology, and biology – spirituality is notable by its absence from this list.

The author quotes RG Collingwood as stating that ‘art is the primary and fundamental activity of the mind.’ He sees this in terms of reflection and resistance, arguing that’s art is not more technology but rather a disrupting and emancipatory force of reconfiguration and self-organisation.’ He develops this in a series of chapters showing how dance, vision, and speech are respectively entangled with choreography, pictures, and writing. Within this context, philosophy is also a ‘making activity’ representing thoughts or scores in writing. In discussing Thomas Nagel in relation to science, the author remarks that we are a dynamic locus of entanglement, a problem to ourselves – he agrees with Collingwood that science depends for its very existence on non-scientific understanding and values; for him this underpinning is the aesthetic attitude. Science is an effective and distinctive way of working towards truth and gaining knowledge, but art and philosophy are other such ways, as Iain McGilchrist also argues; physics is entangled with philosophy. In the final analysis, art is primordial ‘as the very work of consciousness itself’ and our most direct grappling with the aesthetic reality of our own nature and that of nature itself.’ (p. 224) This is an original and liberating phenomenological perspective in relation to existential self-making and world-making.