Art and its resonance with interbeing: Playing the score of Alva Noë’s The Entanglement

Noë’s recent book The Entanglement (2023) offers a philosophical framework for thinking about how we encounter art and its power to transform our habits of being and perceiving. This paper uses the book as a conceptual lens through which to articulate a situated aesthetic experience, that is, listening to and understanding a jazz piece for flute by celebrated contemporary jazz artist Naïssam Jalal. The goal is to explore what becomes phenomenologically accessible when we not only think but also experience with Noë’s work, “catching ourselves in the act of making ourselves” (Noë, 2023, p. 24). The paper articulates how, through the experience of art, we come to understand and resonate with our shared co-embodied existence, thereby challenging and reorganizing the ways we negotiate prereflective and reflective modes of knowing. The article is part of a special issue marking the 20th anniversary of Alva Noë’s book Action in Perception (2004).