Alva Noë’s book, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, has garnered attention in both philosophical and art-critical circles. But rather than offer a review or summary here, I want to focus on a single idea that stood out—one that, I believe, reveals something vital about the power of aesthetics today.
The publisher puts it this way: “Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon—and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselves.” Noë’s book explores that claim from multiple angles, but one of the clearest formulations appears in Chapter 10, titled “Reorienting Ourselves.” The idea of reorientation—borrowed from Edmund Husserl and developed further with the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein—is not only central to Noë’s argument but also vital for rethinking what aesthetics is and what it does.
The Lifeworld and Its Grip
Noë begins the chapter by introducing Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). He writes:
“This is the known milieu that we take for granted; it is pregiven, as he puts it; we can think of it as the place where we find ourselves before we pose questions and do natural science; it is the ordinary world that we know before we take up physics or philosophy. We are residents in the lifeworld. It is the very context of our lives.” (p. 187)
We don’t step outside of the lifeworld to reflect on it from a neutral vantage point. We live within it. We speak its language. We make our judgments, ask our questions, and live our lives in its grip. That might sound trivial. But the implications are anything but.
The lifeworld is not just the background to thought and perception—it structures them. And yet, because it is so fundamental, it often disappears from view. We rarely reflect on it unless something goes wrong, or unless some experience—a work of art, a philosophical encounter, a personal rupture—forces us to see it anew.
This is where aesthetics comes in.
What It Means to Be Reoriented
To be “reoriented,” in Noë’s account, is not simply to change one’s opinion or adopt a new worldview. It is a deeper, more embodied kind of shift. It’s akin to turning around in a familiar room and suddenly seeing the whole space differently—not because the room has changed, but because you have. Noë draws from Wittgenstein’s idea of aspect perception, the classic example being the duck-rabbit image. What’s notable is not the image itself, but the fact that we can suddenly see it as something else—a duck, now a rabbit, now a duck again.
That kind of shift is not just conceptual. It involves attention, bodily orientation, and a subtle restructuring of how we take the world in. Reorientation, then, is not just about acquiring new information. It is about transforming how we are situated in the world—how we see, how we move, how we respond.
This is where aesthetics and philosophy converge.
Noë argues that art and philosophy function not by delivering facts or affirming what we already believe, but by making us aware of the frameworks and assumptions we live within. They do this not by explaining the lifeworld from the outside, but by staging interruptions within it—exposing its fragility, its history, its constructedness. Art and philosophy don’t help us escape the lifeworld; they help us become conscious within it.
Aesthetics as Inquiry, Not Decoration
Noë’s broader aim in The Entanglement is to reposition aesthetics as an essential mode of inquiry. He pushes back against the common assumption that art is primarily about making or evaluating objects, and that aesthetics is a matter of taste or beauty. Instead, he insists that the aesthetic is bound up with self-understanding—and that art is a practice of exposure rather than expression.
It exposes how we see and what we miss. It makes us question the taken-for-granted. It offers us, in other words, a chance to reorient.
That reorientation can be intellectual, but it’s rarely only that. It is bodily, spatial, affective. It can happen while standing in front of a Rothko, walking through an unfamiliar city, listening to a piece of music that disorients your sense of time, or reading a philosophical passage that shakes your confidence in language. These are aesthetic experiences—not because they are pretty or well-designed, but because they shake loose our grip on the familiar.
Why Reorientation Matters
At ARL, we see this concept of reorientation as central to the value of aesthetics—not only in the arts, but in business, design, education, and leadership.
So many organizational and personal problems arise not from a lack of intelligence or skill, but from stuckness—being trapped in a particular mode of seeing or thinking, unable to imagine an alternative. Aesthetic thinking, in Noë’s sense, is a method for loosening that grip. It invites disruption not for its own sake, but as a way to open space for renewal and transformation.
This is why aesthetic insight can be so catalytic for leaders. It’s not about trends or appearances. It’s about becoming aware of what structures your perceptions, assumptions, and decisions. It’s about attending to the frame, not just the content. In aesthetic terms, that’s where meaning is made—or remade.
Living Philosophically, Seeing Aesthetically
To live philosophically, Noë suggests, is not to live abstractly. It’s to live attentively, reflexively, with a heightened sensitivity to context and to the invisible structures that shape our experience. The same can be said of aesthetic living. It is not about curating a lifestyle or refining one’s taste. It is about staying open to reorientation. It’s about maintaining a posture of inquiry, even wonder, toward the world we inhabit.
Art and philosophy, then, are not elite activities reserved for experts. They are public, participatory practices. They belong to all of us—because all of us are entangled in the lifeworld, and all of us need tools for seeing it differently.
Conclusion: Aesthetics as a Practice of Freedom
Alva Noë’s idea of reorientation gives us a compelling way to think about the role of aesthetics today—not as a luxury, but as a necessity. In a world marked by distraction, rigidity, and fragmentation, we need practices that help us become conscious of how we see and how we live.
Aesthetics is one of those practices. It invites us to look again—not just at what’s around us, but at the very act of looking. It reminds us that human nature is not fixed, but formative. And it offers, again and again, the possibility of change—not by leaving the lifeworld, but by learning to inhabit it with new eyes.
*For more: I was fortunate to discuss Alva Noë’s previous book, Learning to Look, organized by The Philosopher. You can watch that discussion here.