Book Review

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, by Alva Nöe. New York: Hill and
Wang, 2015. Pp. xiii + 285.
Like all of his work, Alva Nöe’s latest book Strange Tools is written with
passion and intelligence. It is fresh and incisive, and defends the fascinating
idea that art and philosophy play similar rôles in our lives. According to Nöe,
they are both essentially reflective or critical activities. Each of the arts reflects
on, ‘displays’, and ‘investigates’, a distinctive human activity, such as story-
telling, dancing, or picture-making, in roughly the way that philosophy, as
Nöe sees it, reflects on science.
This is a doubly unorthodox position. It combines an unorthodox view
about the arts with an unorthodox view about philosophy.
First, regarding the arts, the orthodox view is that epic poetry is a kind of
story-telling, ballet is a kind of dance, and painting is a kind of picture-
making. The artistic activity may be especially preoccupied with, and there-
fore especially sensitive to, the aesthetic potential of its medium, perhaps even
to the point where its original practical function is neglected or set aside. But
although the Iliad is a different kind of narrative from a military dispatch, it is
still a narrative; and although Balanchine’s Serenade is a different kind of
dance from the All Blacks’ Haka, it is still a dance.
Nöe rejects this traditional conception of the arts. He distinguishes be-
tween two levels of thought and activity:
Level 1 is the level of the organized activity or the technology. Level 2 is the level
where the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and
investigated. At level 1, we have activities like talking, moving, dancing, making
pictures, singing, etc. … Correspondingly, at level 2, we have the different arts:
poetry and fiction, choreography, painting and photography, music, and so on.
Level-2 practices play with and reshape level-1 activities. (p. 29f )
For example,
When a choreographer stages a dance, he is representing dancing. That is, he puts
dancing itself on display. Choreography shows us dancing, and so, really, it displays
us, we human beings, as dancers; choreography shows us dancing; choreography
exhibits the place dancing has, or can have, in our lives. (p. 13)
Choreography […] is not dancing, it is an engagement with dancing as a
phenomenon. (p. 15)

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Turning to philosophy, according to one traditional view, philosophy is

the most fundamental, or alternatively the most general, part of science. For
example, in Descartes’ famous image, which appears in the preface to the
Principles of Philosophy, the whole of science is like a tree: ‘The roots are
metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk
are all the other sciences’. In the twentieth century, Russell held that the
propositions of logic are supremely general truths about the most pervasive
features of reality, while Sellars made the vague but much-quoted claim
that the aim of philosophy is ‘to understand how things in the broadest
possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of
the term’.
Again, Nöe rejects this conception of philosophy. He prefers the view that
philosophy is a critical or reflective activity. This is not as radical a departure
from tradition as Nöe’s conception of the arts. In modern philosophy, Kant is
its pre-eminent exponent, although Nöe’s version of it owes more to
Wittgenstein.
‘Philosophy ’, Nöe insists, ‘is not just “more science”’ (p. 220). ‘[It] doesn’t
yield positive nuggets of information that you can take away and put to work
in this or that area of your life, the way physics, mathematics, or economics
does’ (p. 115). He quotes Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus: ‘The word
“philosophy” must mean something which stands above or below, but not
beside the natural sciences’ (4.111).
Putting these ideas about the arts and philosophy together, Nöe’s view is
that they are similar kinds of activity:
Philosophy stands to … reasoning, argument, belief formation, and, crucially, the
work of science in the same kind of relation that, say, choreography stands to
movement and dancing, or painting as an art stands to picture-making activities as
these flourish in our lives. (p. 29f )
Both philosophy and choreography aim at … a kind of understanding that, in
Wittgenstein’s phrase, consists in having a perspicuous representation —but they
do it, so to speak, in different neighborhoods of our existence. (p. 17)
I have some sympathy both with Nöe’s conception of the arts, and with his
conception of philosophy. I shall comment on them in turn.
First, regarding art, the distinction between level 1 activities and level 2
activities does not seem to me helpful, and to be fair, Nöe himself expresses
some unease about it. He says that ‘the idea that choreography is metadan-
cing, or that art practices are, as I have been suggesting, metalevel, is too
simple’ (p. 30). Whatever else figurative painters do, they certainly make
pictures; and whatever else Homer did, he did tell stories. So the idea that
their work reflects on picture-making without being picture-making, or re-
flects on narrative without being narrative, cannot be right.
But Nöe is right to suggest that artists, at least the artists who shape the
artistic traditions to which they belong, are bound to reflect critically on the

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medium in which they work, and often challenge established ideas about its
potentialities and limitations. And this is not an accidental feature of the arts.
Every work of art communicates thoughts, feelings, and perceptions in a
specific medium, with specific materials and techniques. And its interest and
value as a work of art always depend on its sensitivity to the communicative
possibilities of the medium—of the materials and techniques that it employs.
So the practice of making art, at least when it is imaginative to some degree,
necessarily involves reflecting on the nature of the medium, and on its ex-
pressive potential. This isn’t just a feature of the subversive art of the twen-
tieth century, it is a feature of art in every tradition, because it is part of what
makes a practice of making pictures, or narratives, or dances, count as art.
(This reflective or reflexive nature is one important difference between art
and science. For example, physics in the seventeenth century was simultan-
eously engaged in searching for the laws of motion and in searching for the
right way to search for the laws of motion. But this isn’t an essential and
universal part of physics: physics since the eighteenth century hasn’t had this
dual nature.)
Nöe is so concerned to underline the importance of this aspect of art that
he sometimes suggests that the whole purpose and meaning of art consists in
this reflective and critical attitude to the artistic medium. ‘A work of art’, he
says, using a phrase that gives the book its title, ‘is a strange tool; it is an
implement or instrument that has been denuded of its function. Art is the
enemy of function, it is the perversion of technology. This is why architecture
has a problematic standing among the arts’ (p. 98).
This is surely an exaggeration. First, every, or almost every, work of art has
a communicative function, and many works of art have other functions as
well. So art is not an enemy of function, in any plausible sense of the phrase.
Second, it is true that there is nothing intrinsic about buildings that makes
them works of art. (If the Vikings had done aesthetics, architecture would not
have been included in their conception of the arts, but shipbuilding would.)
But there have been times in the history of every civilization when buildings
have been the most important artefacts that express values in a sensuous and
symbolic form, and when painting and sculpture have been subordinated to
architecture. So a theory of art that implies that architecture has a problem-
atic standing among the arts is a problematic theory of art.
However, despite the exaggeration, works of art are strange tools, because
they combine a communicative function with a peculiar absorption in the
medium in which they communicate. The most poignant image of this ab-
sorption, of its profound and disturbing power, is Shakespeare’s image of the
dyer’s hand:
[…] my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed.

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Turning to philosophy, again I agree partly with Nöe’s view. That is, I
agree that philosophy is not the most fundamental or the most general part of
science. And I agree that philosophy is a reflective and critical discipline. But
unlike Nöe, I do not want to deny that philosophy is an integral part of
natural science, just as I do not want to deny that painting is picture-making,
and epic poetry is narrative.
Nöe contrasts philosophy on the one hand with physics and mathematics
on the other. As mentioned above, he says: ‘Philosophy is not just “more
science”’. ‘[It] doesn’t yield positive nuggets of information that you can take
away and put to work in this or that area of your life, the way physics,
mathematics, or economics does’. I think this is a mistake. In fact one
good way to understand the place of philosophy in science is to compare
philosophy and mathematics.
Is mathematics part of science? It is not hard to understand the reasons for
saying no. Mathematical theorems are not proved or disproved in the way that
scientific theories are confirmed or disconfirmed, by conducting experiments
and making observations—with telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes, or the
naked eye. Besides, mathematics is as deeply involved in other aspects of our
lives as it is in science—in finance and gambling, for example.
Nevertheless, there is an obvious sense in which mathematics is an indispens-
able part of science. Modern science is unimaginable without mathematics.
Physical theories are formulated in mathematical terms, and the observations
that confirm or disconfirm them are expressed in numbers. And mathematics is
also part of science in a more general, cultural sense, because it is pursued for
the sake of enlarging knowledge and understanding, independently of the ways
in which it can be used to solve practical problems.
However, the distinctive rôle mathematics plays in science has not always
been properly understood. For example, it is a mistake to conceive of geom-
etry, as Descartes did, as the most general science of matter, or to believe, as
Kant did, that geometry and arithmetic are a priori bodies of knowledge
about space and time. Mathematics is not one of the special sciences; it is
not the most fundamental science; and it is not the most general science. Its
special task is to explore, extend, codify, and correct all of our thinking and
reasoning about quantities and magnitudes. So it permeates every part of
science where this kind of thinking and reasoning occur, which today means
every part of science. The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man may be the
last scientific masterpieces which do not include any mathematical reasoning
or mathematical ideas.
In my view, the relationship between science and philosophy is similar to the
relationship between science and mathematics. Mathematics is and always has
been largely constructive, whereas philosophy is and always has been largely
analytical and critical. In other words, philosophy aims on the whole to under-
stand, criticize, and reform existing systems of concepts rather than to devise
new ones. But like mathematics, philosophy is an a priori discipline. And like

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mathematics, philosophy has made an indispensable contribution to the devel-

opment and revision of scientific ideas. For example, Special Relativity is just as
dependent on Einstein’s revolutionary analysis of the concept of simultaneity as
it is on nineteenth century developments in geometry. Self-conscious philosophy,
deliberately focused on the analysis and criticism of concepts, probably began
with ethical and religious concepts. But wherever it begins, it is bound to ramify
through our intellectual lives, and scientific concepts—together with ethical,
logical, and psychological concepts—have been at the heart of philosophy
throughout the modern period.
So, returning to Nöe’s distinction between level-1 and level-2 activities,
does philosophy belong to level 2? Is it about concepts rather than the phe-
nomena we use concepts to think about? The answer is that this is a false
opposition. This is more obvious in the case of ethics, aesthetics, and political
philosophy, because human behaviour is partly guided, and societies and
institutions and the arts are therefore partly shaped, by ethical, political,
and aesthetic ideas. But it is also true of the philosophy that is concerned
with concepts used in natural science. Understanding the phenomena—sci-
ence, in the broadest sense of the word—is a complex achievement, which
depends on a number of different activities: devising theories, testing them
experimentally, inventing and making scientific instruments, devising the
mathematical and computational techniques which are used to develop the-
ories and interpret experimental data, and inventing the new concepts and
understanding the existing concepts in which theoretical ideas are expressed.
In conclusion, art and philosophy are quite strange. They are essentially
reflective and critical activities, in a way, or to a degree, that the rest of science
is not. But I do not believe that either art or philosophy is quite as strange as
Nöe thinks they are, or quite as similar.

The Queen’s College, Oxford JOHN HYMAN

doi:10.1093/mind/fzw060

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