B (4:54)

Yeah, so you came to philosophy sort of after you'd done a lot of other things.

C (4:58)

Yes, that's right, that's right, yeah. And, and they've all fed into my philosophical interests in really important ways.

B (5:05)

Yeah, well, I noticed that the psychiatry and, and the Buddhist philosophy and all those sort things appearing in your resume and your interests. Has art influenced your academic work?

C (5:17)

Yeah, I think so. I really have always had a passion for art and love the fact that it gives us a non conceptual way of just looking at the world and asking those questions that, you know, that we may not normally ask. And you know, I think it's really another aspect of disclosing the hidden sides of things, you know, that can surprise us, that can delight us, that can horrify us and also perhaps motivate us to political action. I think, you know, art can be highly political, so I think that's really, really important. With my master's Thesis. I worked with Jocelyn Dunphy Blomfield, and she introduced me to Merleau Ponty. So that's been, you know, a massive influence on my work because I just. I love reading him. Every time I go back to his work, I'm discovering hidden layers and. And more things that are inspiring different ways of thinking. And one of the things that I've been looking at, particularly with regard to perception, one of, you know, he get. Has these quotes, and you just think. You unpack the quote and there's just so much in it. And he says that attentive perception transform. Is transformative. So it transforms the object that you're looking at as well as the. The perceiving subject. And I think that's so true, you know, because then the object perceived becomes meaningful. So you've. You've already. You've established a relationship with the object, and it becomes meaningful within your own world. But I would say also it also transforms the sense of the subject's sense of subjectivity, particularly in the case of when you're perceiving other subjects. So it's a triply transformative kind of process in attentive perception. So I've been very, very interested in that idea of attention and perception. And as you will know, Buddhism is very much, you know, concerned about developing our attentive capacities. Things happen when you start paying attention. I don't know if you've ever done a Buddhist retreat, but I think fascinating to do. And some of them can be quite challenging and difficult. But what happens is when you start slowing down the conceptual processes, that you can drop to a level where your attention can be very refined and things look amazing, you know, they really, really sort of open up to this whole new world. I was thinking that with Kandinsky, the abstract Russian artist, apparently when he was in. Back in Moscow, after having been in Paris or something, he went to an exhibition of Monet and was looking at the haystacks, a series of haystacks. And he just kept looking and looking. And eventually he said that the whole idea, the concept of haystack completely evaporated. And he was just engaging with the color, the shapes, the forms that were on the canvas. And that was a really groundbreaking moment for him in terms of, you know, determining how he wanted to paint from there on in as well. So I thought that was really quite nice that, you know, he made that discovery. And I think, you know, that's also why Merleau Ponty was interested in the work, particularly of Paul Cesar, because he did the same thing you know, he was doing phenomenology with the art. He would say things like, you know, when he had to paint something, he had to research, do massive amount of research, not just about the sense data, the visual data that was on offer, but the history, the context, the geology, the background of the people he was painting before he could actually even paint. One quote that Merleau Ponty uses often, and a quote that I really, really appreciate, is each brush stroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. And I think that's absolutely right.

B (9:18)

That anecdote about Kandinsky, I think, really does help to illustrate sort of what Merleau Ponty is talking about.

C (9:24)

I think, you know, one of the things that Merleau Ponty was so interested in Cezanne for was that, you know, he was doing the phenomenology and he was also giving us the experience, the perception of an object that was pre digested in a way, because as soon as we see something, we start sort of putting labels on it. We sort of organize it. We visually organize it in a certain way, make a distinction between figure and background and all of that, and give it a perspective. So this is all part of our cognitive apparatus. And what Cezanne was doing was just giving it. Giving the object in undigested way, you know, unconceptually digested way. So it was like seeing something fresh for the first time. And I've had that experience when you go into a gallery and it's got some of his artworks and you just sort of attend to them in a while and you start getting that sense and you can feel, and you want to reach out and grab the apples that are going to fall off the painting, you know, or rearrange something, or you could feel things that, you know, the textures of things, rather than just the visual data is given to you. So it's really rich. And I can understand why Meliponte found that really philosophically interesting.

B (10:44)

You've spoken already a bit about the relationship between Buddhism and attention and meditation and aesthetic appreciation. Do you think that an encounter with an artwork is sort of inherently meditative if you're doing it properly?

C (11:02)

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, you do have to pay attention and you've got to be present. You can't just be thinking, you know, silly things like, you know, oh, that color reminds me of my teapot. Or, what am I going to do after this, visiting the gallery? I'm going to be doing this. You know, you really have to just be there at that moment and Be with the. The artwork for it to speak to you in any meaningful way. And I think, you know, certain. Certain artworks are better at that. And I think, you know, my writings on aesthetics, I've talked about the comparison with representationalism and Impressionism. And, you know, that representationalism, even though it can be really fantastic and really detailed and accurate, it's got a story behind it. So it's got this whole agenda that it's trying to communicate to you rather than sort of the later artwork of the Impressionists and Cezanne and abstract artist art sense. So, you know, I think that's an interesting thing. So we're moving more from the conceptual kind of appreciation of art to one that is direct, directly perceptual. And, you know, Melaponti defends this philosophical idea of the direct perception thesis. And I think it's true that our initial engagement with the world is directly perceptive, and then it gets overlaid with concepts and such.

B (12:34)

I mean, you've talked already about your kind of introduction to phenomenology and how that. How you were introduced to Merleau Ponty and you found him, his work very rich. For me, I think he's the philosopher of body par excellence. From what you're saying, it sounds like the overarching theme that you see in Merleau Ponty is perception or maybe attention. But there might also be. He's the philosopher of aesthetics. Some people might say it's philosopher of language and communication. Is there something that you think is the kind of the dominant idea or overarching theme of Merleau Ponty's work?

C (13:09)

Well, I think you're absolutely right. It begins with the body. And so this is a big challenge to analytic philosophy, you know, that, you know, we're bringing the body back, we're bringing perception back into philosophical respectability. Whereas, you know, there's been that tendency to, you know, prioritize reason and rationality and, you know, conceptual, propositional kinds of approaches to philosophy. So he's really groundbreaking in that way. And also, as you've noted, you know, there's so many dimensions to his work, and it. It goes into various domains and cognitive science and philosophy of mind and stuff like that. So all of those. I don't think I can sort of say there's anyone that I now focus on, because I'm sort of going here, there, everywhere. And I think that's part of the richness of what he's doing.

B (14:06)

Do you think there is a continental analytic divide in philosophy? What do you think that Divide is.

C (14:12)

Well, I think the divide is mostly political these days. And I think it's. And I'll call it out, I think there's hegemony there, that analytic philosophers have been controlling the whole field for far too long and, you know, getting the plum positions, the publications, the grants, all of that and, you know, sort of dismissing the European traditions. I hate the word continental and I think, you know, it's a name that was given to us by bloody analytic philosophers. So, yeah, it's problematic for me. So I usually just say European because that's where, you know, a lot of the philosophy I work with originates. And phenomenology, and phenomenology is, appears as a really important corrective IC to analytic philosophy and the overly rationalistic, conceptual kind of approach. And I think, you know, it's really proving its value at the moment and really challenging some of the key tenets. And you, you, you can observe that some of the analytic philosophers who were, you know, you know, hardcore analytic philosophers are now sort of drifting slowly towards more phenomenological perspectives. And whether they own it or not is another question. But yeah, it's highly political. I think.

A (15:37)

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B (17:05)

I wonder if there is a better term than certainly a continental or even a European. I wonder if it is to the extent that there is a real divide, whether it's analytic and synthetic or analytic and concrete, perhaps situated.

C (17:19)

I've wondered about the analytic synthetic idea, but I think, you know, phenomenologists also conduct analysis. All philosophers analyze. It's sort of a bit like saying, well, we're going to bags the name human. You can be continental or something, you know, like, kind of like that. Or you can be Australian or something. You know, really limiting what all philosophers actually do. You know, that we, we do conduct analysis. We do have synthetic approaches, some more than others. You know, phenomenology, I think, and particularly Merleau Ponty is a real case in point for that because he synthesizes so many different perspectives and also across disciplines. So he's, he's amazing like that, really amazing. But, you know, the political thing is that, you know, there's been this really dismissive attitude on the part of the analytic philosophers towards people working in European philosophy. And it continues, unfortunately. I've just read a recent paper, I'm not going to say whose it was, but, you know, a very respectable philosopher at Oxford and, you know, his again, a young person still replicating those kinds of discriminatory comments about philosophers who work outside the Anglo American traditions. I think it's a big problem. We should all come together and be, you know, more civil and also appreciative.

B (18:56)

I think there is. So I agree with everything you've said. There does seem to be a, I wonder if it's a, if it's a distinction of style more than anything else.

C (19:08)

Yeah, I think sometimes a bit of style, but also I think in terms of fundamental ontological commitments as well. And methodology is, is really at the core. But, you know, I, I, it just appalls me how many times I have heard analytic philosophers just dismiss the whole, you know, European tradition. Like one person sort of making the contrast between, oh, well, you know, analytical philosophers are very rigorous, but, you know, those continental people are involved in fanciful thinking. How's that? It's just so disgusting, really awful. But there's a lot of that about. And I think sometimes the, the discrimination goes the other way too. And There are some aspects of analytic philosophy that are absolutely fantastic and so we should appreciate them as well. I just wish the whole divide would just combust and get out of the way.

B (20:12)

You've written extensively about what might make perception and the gaze human or inhuman. You also have an article in the review Capture called A Strange Kinship, in which you write about art being a way to convey something of the lives and worlds of animals. Can you tell us a bit about art and inter animality?

C (20:31)

I was very lucky. When I was doing my doctorate at Melbourne University, I had also Marita Harney philosopher Marita Hani. She works a lot in animal cognition and bio semiotics and all of those kinds of areas. So she was also a really important person to enrich my thinking through that. And she was incredibly patient through the whole doctoral process. So, you know, there's lots of things. So, you know, because of that, you know, I've worked into, done work in animal cognition and also animal ethics is really, really important as well. And you know, just questioning that human centric position that we tend to take and sort of thinking, okay, so there are other ways of being in the world that can challenge our central vantage and sort of say, hey, have another look, look what we're seeing, or look at how we're interacting, what's going on here, or what is our relationship with animals. So that's also really important as well. So that quote does come from Merleau Ponty. He talks about a strange kinship of inter animality. So he wants to break down those sharp divides between humans and animals. And he's, you know, presenting the idea that, you know, that there can be another way of seeing the world, engaging with the world. And in. Yeah, and I think particularly he sort of launches that kind of thinking in engaging with the work of Leonardo da Vinci and that, you know, Leonardo was both a scientist and an artist and each of those fed into each other. So, you know, his science informed his art and his art informed his science. So he comes to some of his scientific understandings through the observation of animals. So, for example, you know, his work on the flight of birds was particularly relevant to him. And he feels, you know, a strong relationship to the, the little creatures, the birds, and watches them as they're taking off in flight and interacting. And so that, and he paints that in order to understand it. And you know, sort of one of the aspects that I suppose was predominant in investigations of animal worlds is, is that process of movement, how to capture movement in art. And you know, his observations of animals were really key to that. I think there's. He. He said that, you know, with any kind of movement, you've got sort of some kind of a flexuous line that runs through the movement and that kind of, like, locates the animal in a particular position or gearing towards a particular action. That is. And so I think that's. That's really interesting. He also did do dissections on, I think, humans, but I'm not sure. I'm assuming animals as well, so. And I'm assuming also that they would have been dead already, because I think. I understand he was a vegetarian, but that's not absolutely clear, but it's. It's quite likely he was. So, yeah, animality, I think it just sort of brings us back. It takes us out of our head, I suppose, when we are engaging with animals. And I think, you know, in artwork sometimes, you know, you will see some of the representations of animals. They're really quite confronting. Like, I'm thinking here of. What's his name? Jericho. What's his first name? Theodore Jericho. That's right. I saw, you know, an exhibition of his work in Lyon when I was living there, and just amazing. And he was doing all these depictions, particularly of war during the, I think, the Napoleonic Wars. And the horses in those paintings were really, really powerful. And you could see, you know, they were expressing fear and distress and panic, basically. But, you know, he'd captured that through the painting. So, yeah, I think it's just sort of. It sort of nudges us out of our assumed, I don't know, exceptionalist viewpoint, our perspective as human beings to, you know, see these animals. Yeah. And I think, you know, with Merleau Ponty's work and Husserl, too, there's that engagement with the work of Vonukscu, the ethologist, and his observations of animal worlds as well. And that, of course, fed into Husserl's notion of the life world, which has been really, really central to the later work that Husserl produced and had been taken up by Merleau Ponty and also Heidegger, and is also currently extraordinarily relevant to some of the work that I'm doing at the moment, trying to look at indigenous life worlds. And one of the professors at utas, Professor Maggie Walter, she has drawn on Husserl's notion of life well to articulate a particular view of indigenous lifelines, which is really, really provocative and interesting.

B (25:51)

In your paper, Merleau Ponty's Aesthetic Interworld in the journal Philosophy Today, you build on the thought of Maurice Merleau Ponty to claim that the elements of a painting, the colors, the shapes, the textures, are deciphered not at the level of thought, but in the very blood, breath, flesh and bones of the living, conscious body. And these elements are the meaning. But I'm wondering, what does this mean for art that seems to attempt to convey thoughts or ideas, even political convictions? I'm thinking about an artwork like Pablo Picasso's anti war painting Guernica.

C (26:25)

I think that painting is kind of interesting in terms of Sartre's response to that painting, Guernica, because initially he said, oh, you know, this painting is never going to motivate anyone to political action. And then few years later, maybe after Mille Ponty had died, he suddenly revised his view and he said, oh, no, it's really politically important. So it's kind of interesting. And I think Sartre becomes much more Merleau Pontian towards the end of his life. And, you know, I was reading some of the later work and going, oh, this is, you know, this is perfectly acceptable. You know, it's really attuned to the Merleau Pontian view that I had. Okay, so the bodying forth to sense is also another key quote that comes actually from Kant and really highlights the fact that, you know, even though Kant sort of seems like to be, you know, a rationalist philosopher, nonetheless when it comes to his aesthetics, he recognizes that there is sort of another element that does involve the body. And I think Merleau Ponty picks up on that and takes that forward. So I think so, I think, you know, the conceptual level can just sort of drop away until we have this direct perceptual engagement with the work that can be very embodied. Perception already implies body. Bodies already implied perception. So you can't get one without the other. And so the interpretation, the feeling or the meaning of the artwork is felt rather than being, you know, conceptually interpreted. And so I think that's the same with, you know, the Guernica. And, you know, in the Guernica image, there's just so much happening around. You know, of course, the Spanish Civil War and the. Just the brutality of the images.

B (28:26)

So I guess I'm wondering, how do we share an idea about an artwork? How do we. How do we see it in. Motivated in a similar way or get the same message from it? Is it because we share a basic form, a basic perceptual apparatus and embodiment?

C (28:44)

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think this is something that I sort of worked on, particularly in that paper, in engaging with Kant's interpretation of aesthetics, that, you know, he says that there's a universal voice. We can all sort of agree when we recognize a great artwork, but there's also something very personal and subjective. And I think, you know, the key is definitely that we are humans living in a shared world, and so the things that are important to us transcend time and space because of that, and also in virtue of being perceptual creatures.

B (29:28)

What are you currently working on?

C (29:30)

Okay, currently, as I mentioned earlier, I'm currently working on this notion of the Indigenous life worlds and particularly how that can inform investigations into mental health. When the outcome for the referendum arrived landed, it just horrified me. I was just so upset about that. I was just profoundly upset that people could be so ignorant not to even grant this, just this small gesture of recognition to our Indigenous people who have gone through so much. It was deeply, deeply disturbing. So I thought, you know, I've got to do something about this. And so, drawing on the work of Maggie Walter, she's got the notion of life worlds that she works on, as well as she's got this idea of the dual intersubjectivities, where they are the longest surviving Indigenous culture in the world, and at the same time they are marginalized and discriminated against. So there's kind of like this, these two worlds that are having to be juggled. Some of the key ideas from that exchange is that, you know, there's the connecting point of life worlds. And even though Hu se sort of coined the phrase in European phenomenology, nonetheless it was a lived experience for Indigenous people for millennia. And also notion of relational ontologies is another thing that is shared with Indigenous people. And also pattern thinking, which is, you know, it's an Indigenous notion of interconnectedness between everything. So that's also within phenomenology and keys in quite nicely to Sean Gallagher's pattern theory of self. Been looking at that and looking at working with philosophers and psychiatrists, particularly who work in Indigenous cultures, like, for example, Lawrence Kirmeyer in Canada and one of his colleagues, and also Sean Gallagher, and particularly looking at his pattern theory of self, and also bringing in the important work of the psychologist Professor Pat Dudgeon and her work on the social and emotional wellbeing framework, and so sort of bringing that all together.

B (31:41)

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Anya. Listeners can find links to Dr. Daly's work and some of the art we've discussed on the concept art website. Dr. Anya Daly, thank you for joining Concept art.

C (31:53)

Thanks so much, Pat.

B (32:10)

Concept art is produced on Mooneena country, La Truita, Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.