Jonathan Hale: Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and architecture.

Hello and welcome to episode 15 of season two of AIS for Architecture with me Ambrose Gillick. In this episode I spoke with Jonathan Hale, Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Nottingham, about his book Merlot Ponty for Architects, published by Routledge in 2017 as part of their Thinkers for Architects series. So I think one of Merlot Ponty's key statements, I suppose, is to say that the body is not an object in the world. The body is some kind of orientation towards the world. So the body is actually not an object but it's a set of capacities or a set of abilities to do things in the world that often involve picking up bits of the world and momentarily making them part of our bodies. Literally tools, hand tools, pens, hammers, motor cars, all those kind of technical extensions. And I would say as an architect, including the architectural setting in which particular actions take place and maybe, of course, even the city in which the space is located. You know, all of those are kind of organizations of space that enable things to happen, that couldn't really happen without them and to draw a kind of distinction to say, "No, no, the body ends up the skin and then the world begins end of story." That's problematic. So that's what Merlot Ponty and I think they're both equally important on this are really pushing us to get away from. A is for architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Hello and welcome to another episode of A is for Architecture. I'm here today with Professor Jonathan Hale. Jonathan, would you be a gentleman and introduce yourself to him? Yes. Thank you, Ambrose. Thank you for the invitation to be part of the discussion. Yeah, my name is Jonathan Hale. I'm professor of architectural theory at the University of Nottingham in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, which is now a part of faculty of engineering. My background is as a practicing architect. That was my. I trained as an architect and practiced for several years in London before I started teaching gradually part-time and then moved into full-time teaching. Where did you study? Well, I did my undergraduate part one and part two at the University of Bath, which was at that time very technical, you might say, very kind of technologically oriented, still very much I guess steeped in the kind of modernist tradition. We were taught by a generation of people, the senior staff at that time, where people like Patrick Hodgkinson, who had very fond of telling the story when he met Le Corbusier. When Le Corbusier came to London to receive his RWA Gold Medal and Patrick and another group of students took him out. Somebody I think had an old-fashioned sports car and took him out for lunch in this car. So it felt like we were in a way very close to literally two handshakes away from Le Corbusier. It felt very much like that and it was very technically oriented, the program. There wasn't a lot of theory, architectural theory and philosophy was a kind of marginal discourse, but of course it had a kind of edginess about it, which is one of the things that attracted me and it's why I've ended up focusing on that in my own teaching. And you worked in practice in London, as you said, and so during that time, teaching in London as a tutor, I guess, and then finding yourself turned towards. So this is in the '90s, you're starting to teach. That's right. I graduated in 1989 in the summer of '89 and I had nearly a famous song, but not quite. Yeah. And I was lucky enough, having said, you know, being taught by really, really good people at that bath, and I won the Silver Medal, the RWA Silver Medal. So that gave me a head start in a sense of getting a job, which I considered to be my kind of dream job really, and it certainly turned out that way, which was working for Ted Collinan in London. In on regions can out. That's right. Yeah, initially we were in Camden Town, so not too far from the canal, but but yeah, so the first couple of years working in Camden Town, which was fantastic experience, you know, just thrown straight in. I hadn't lived in London before then. But the reason I guess I ended up there, I mean, well, it's fairly obvious if you know anything about Collinan's approach, a strong focus on building, if you like, and on the lessons that can be learned from hands-on experience, working with materials and the sort of creativity that can come from literally just doing, you know, just sort of working in it almost in a more vernacular kind of way with found materials and the kind of creativity that can emerge from that. And of course, opportunities to teach came up very quickly because Ted was always being asked to go and give lectures and he had taught, you know, over the years. And it always offered opportunities to colleagues, junior colleagues in the office to do that because he couldn't, of course, physically accept all those invitations. So that was fantastic. So I got to go and lecture about the practices work, talking about the sort of back catalog of work, work which I hadn't been involved with directly. But, you know, I was fascinated to kind of tell stories about, if you like, or to kind of build a kind of narrative. And then, usually with a sort of case study of the job that I was working on myself at that time in the office. So it's really out of that. So I was teaching actually outside of London mainly. I did a little spot at the Royal College of Art when Theo Crosby was there. I was working for Ted. I was working on the Fountain's Abbey Visitor Centre in Yorkshire, which again was, you know, a formative experience, really. But I'm very focused on relationships with places and the context and working with, you know, an interesting, really interesting palette of materials often, you know, and local materials and so on. So that was really interesting experience. But then, I started teaching at, back at the University of Bath one day a week. And this was in the early 90s by then, I guess, about 92. And there was a bit of a downturn in the economy. And a lot of architects were shedding staff. You know, there were a lot of people being made redundant. And including at Colonyons, I managed to survive the kind of that moment, if you like, as staying on in the office. But we were offered the opportunity to go out and teach, say, one day or one or two days a week if we wanted to. Because, you know, on the basis that there wasn't enough work in the office to employ us all full time. There probably was. But it was great to have that opportunity. And one side experienced that, I just realized that was probably where I wanted to be in the longer term. You know, teaching and researching full time. I mean, Colonyons is a wonderful studio. I just want to, because you've mentioned this word, material is quite a lot. And we're getting a theme. And this idea of place and context, which brings us to the book that you wrote in 20, so published in 2017 isn't it? Murlow Ponty for Architects, which is part of the Thinkers for Architects series published by Routledge. And there's a lot in that book. It's a wonderful book and beautifully written, as one would expect. But you can see obviously your interest or your perhaps your experience. Perhaps you got a job in Colonyons because you're interested in materials and place, Colonyons, emphasizes it. You teach it and then you, you theorise about it. Maybe that's me making assumptions there. Well, that's, that's, that's, that makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's pretty much how that happened. I mean, I started to get interested in phenomenology, I suppose, just more broadly, while I was still a student. And that was probably more to do with accidental encounters with ideas coming in from outside of the school, if you like, and that's very distinct from this modernist kind of, this high modernist, what two handshakes away from the cobusier kind of thing is it not? Like, how are you, who was starting to bring phenomenological thinking into the, into your, into your experience? Well, yeah, really good question. I mean, to be honest, it was more other students rather than anything we were taught as part of the kind of, you know, the official curriculum at the time, which, as I said, was very, very technically focused, not exclusively, but yeah, largely. So, no, it was literally other students, and specifically actually a couple of American exchange students who came from the University of Kentucky. And I think they'd also been taught by somebody who worked with the cobusier strangely enough, but they were reading people like Norberg Schultz, Christian Norberg Schultz. And they were, you know, they were talking about, wondering why we'd never heard of Norberg Schultz at Bath. And so, I literally went over to a library and dug out Norberg Schultz's book, "Genius Lockeye," a phenomenology of architecture. And I just thought, I should have a look at that, you know, this sounds really interesting, why have we not heard of this guy? And there was a little, I think, on the epigraph of the book, or, you know, a little footnote at the beginning, he says, "The theory of architecture that I apply in this work, I develop in my first two publications, intentions in architecture, and existence, space, and architecture." Now, that combination of words, just immediately, I just, I've never heard those words together, you know, in one sentence before, this sounds fascinating. And I'm also somebody very drawn to kind of building from a firm foundation. So rather than dive in and try and read the book, "Genius Loka," I thought, sure, okay, I need to go back and read intentions and architecture. That may have been a mistake, who knows? So it was about 18 months before I eventually kind of finished that one and got anywhere near to reading "Genius Loka," but it was a formative experience. You know, this was in my third year at Bath. So I very much, I enjoyed that sense of, you know, delving into this world of ideas, which we weren't really doing in any of our lecture courses and bringing that in and just seeing, you know, being a little bit of a sort of provocateur, if you like, in terms of without really knowing what I was doing. But it just, yeah, it just felt really, so there was something really interesting there that we weren't really being taught about. - But Norberg Schultz, and you make this point in your introduction to Merlot Ponty for Architects. - Norberg Schultz, sorry, Merlot Ponty doesn't really talk about architecture, but Norberg Schultz takes phenomenal logical ideas and applies them to architecture. So how did you get, I suppose I'm kind of interested in the journey to the book, like, where does the book come about? How does it come about? Is it, you know, sort of reverse engineering, Norberg Schultz into Heidegger, into Merlot Ponty? - To some extent, yeah. I mean, I think you're right. Norberg Schultz really draws on Heidegger and doesn't really touch. I don't think he mentions Merlot Ponty. You may be much later. But no, that was the dominant sort of thread, if you like, within architecture, that it was phenomenology meant Heidegger and then, as interpreted by Norberg Schultz. But then it sort of runs up against a bit of a barrier and for many architects, it's a kind of mental block there because it seems as though, if you take that Heideggerian strand, you can end up quite quickly stuck in a little bit of a dead end because it seems to be all about looking backwards, trying to unearth some kind of original moment. So that's always where you need to begin. And I think that is a problem with Norberg Schultz is reading of Heidegger. So I don't blame Heidegger completely for that, but partly maybe. But I think what Norberg Schultz does in the concept of genius lockeye is kind of just sort of frees that in a sense as though there is some inner essence to the character of a place. And that's been there from whenever time immemorial and we have to just kind of find it. It's a fixed and static thing. And if we're sensitive enough, we can capture it. And then we just manifest that in our design. In our building, we just kind of project an image or that. That I think is problematic. And I could see the shortcomings of that straight away. But well, fairly quickly. But I wasn't really then to quite how to deal with that. How can we get around that? So it really happened in the next phase of my education, I suppose. I mean, having worked in practice for a few years, realized I wanted to get into teaching full-time. Also then, of course, quickly realizing I needed a kind of specialism to get a job full-time in teaching, needed to be able to offer lectures and so on. And I thought, well, maybe I should teach a construction or something based on my experience at the Cullinans office. That seemed to make some kind of sense. But I certainly felt like I needed a master's degree at that point, if not a PhD. And at that point, early mid-1990s, you could get a teaching post full-time without a PhD. And that's true, but probably not without a master's or with at least some clear expertise in one area. So I managed to then think about, well, OK, maybe I need a stepping stone into teaching. I should go back to university, basically, study for a year or two. And then apply for a full-time teaching. So I managed to get funding to go to the University of Pennsylvania. So that's really where I encounter ideas from Meloponty and a whole lot of other sources. But that was the key experience. Anybody who knows the school at Penn, still, in a way, sort of let's say, oriented towards phenomenology or built from a phenomenological kind of position. Through people like David Leatherbarra, who is still teaching now now, he was already a teacher. I think he was chair of the architecture department then. But the PhD program, which I joined, I was only doing a master's, but you sort of absorbed into this larger group of PhD students, was then run by Joseph Rickwirt, who's, you know, well-known architectural historian. And Marco Frascari, who passed away a few years ago, but that mix, those three characters, you know, they didn't all get on, you know, totally. You know, they each had a very distinct kind of view of the world. But somehow, you know, they built something really quite special, I think, as a body, well, both a body of students, but a kind of a discourse, incredibly rich and fertile, and so on. So Meloponty was one of those names that came up in just in discussions, again, as much from other students. There, one particular student, Terence Galbin, who's now head of architecture in school in Canada. He had been taught, he'd done a master's with Alberto Peres Gomez at McGill University. And Peres Gomez was teaching Meloponty. So it was really Terry that kind of brought that, if you like, to Penn. It came up in a seminar quite early on. And I thought, OK, here's somebody I need to know about. I've never heard the name before. And it's very much became, oh, OK, this is a whole different strand. It's still phenomenology. But here's a very different approach and something I just thought immediately thought, yeah, this is what I'm looking for. So thank you for that, the two things. One, what's phenomenology? And two, how does Meloponty make it specific? I mean, is it like exam questions? And I apologize for that. But I think it's so from-- so I started studying in 1998 at University of Manchester. And there was a strand there which talked about phenomenology, certainly. And then when I went and did my diploma slash masters at Sheffield, there was still this thing. And phenomenology, Gaston Bashelard, and Palasmar, and Norberg Shorts were still kicking around. And the architects that they manifest-- well, we're seen as manifesting their stuff. People like Peterson Theron, Zersen, and I guess, to a certain extent, people like Glen Murkut, as well. And obviously, British examples too. But as I said in my notes to you, it's always remained slightly beyond my grasp. So I would be extremely grateful for you to kind of-- I suppose simply described what this phenomenology, Edmund Husserog's idea of phenomenology and how we get to where we are with it. And then how Murkut, Ponty, and Fletzer? Yeah, yeah, that's a key question, you're right. I mean, I always start in my lectures. I always start with just with the word itself, just as a bit of etymology of the word phenomenology. Because if you just take it apart, simply, it just means, literally, the study of phenomena. And that could be anything, the study of things, if you like. The reason it becomes useful is that then when we explain what we mean by phenomena, it's not just things. If you like, in themselves, the key thing is that it's things as they show up in our experience. So it's really-- the key principle is, yeah, it's a philosophy of experience, let's say. That's what it involves. The analysis-- well, it begins as description, let's say, the key principle-- one of the key principles is that it's often called phenomenological description. It's just a way of describing our experience, describing the way in which the world appears to us. So it's distinct from epistemology and ontology. So it's anotherology. So it's not about the study of knowledge or the study of being, but it's the study of experience. Or does it sit sort of as a footnote to those? Well, I guess it's closer to epistemology, in a sense, because it is the study of the way in which we come to have knowledge about the world. So it is closer to that. Of course, in Heidegger's work, it's very much ontology as well. It's the study of being or the study of things as they are. But Heidegger qualifies that, of course, in his famous term, Darsheim, which means being there. So it's not being in the totally abstract sense. It's about being in a place, being somewhere specific. And that that's where you have to begin philosophizing. You first have to begin with yourself, if you like, as a philosopher, in a place, with a body and in a real physical place. So Heidegger's version of phenomenology is very much related to the American pragmatism, what's called pragmatist philosophy, which is a key principle of which is exactly that. But before we can begin to have philosophical thoughts, we have to first just open our eyes and get a grasp on where we are in the world. That we are alive. We have a body and we're in a place and we can stumble around in it for a minute and eventually get our bearings. And now we can start to think about what just happened, almost literally. And then can we abstract from that some principles and then can we begin to do philosophy? So that's my reading of Heidegger, in a sense. But of course, yes, Heidegger and Meloponte both in his draw so much of their inspiration, at least from Edmund Hussel. And Hussel, very much the father of phenomenology. Let's say 1900s publication, logical investigations is a very convenient landmark of many reasons, you know, convenient starting point. But then you have to, I was again, as a way of introducing what phenomenology is trying to do. I don't tend to spend much time with herself because I find his work still incredibly complex, difficult and somewhat contradictory in a sense. So much less useful, I would say to us as architects, much less useful ban, high digger and mellow ponte. High digger was taught directly by her cell, mellow ponte wasn't, but mellow ponte did go and study at the Hussail archives in Belgium, in Belgium. And in a way, imbibed the same influence really from from Hussail, looking at unpublished manuscripts that Hussail had left. So he wasn't taught by him directly, but you can see him in the same lineage. But to go back to the question, really, what is it that phenomenology, why does it have this label, why does it become a school of philosophy, why is it seen as a new thing, or, you know, kind of an innovation in philosophy. It's basically, I always say, well, it's because it takes up an age old philosophical problem. And part of that problem is the split between the mind and the body, that's one part of it. So of course that we have to go back to the 17th century to say, well, where does that really come from mainly from the work of Descartes French rationalist, so called philosopher, who very clearly and distinctly separates the physical body, if you like. What he calls, you know, extended stuff from mental stuff from from the mind. So he he invents, if you like, that philosophical problem, which then subsequent generations of philosophers have tried to resolve. Now, what what phenomenology tries to do in a sense is have another go trying to put those things back together. And you can trace it back and the other part of that problem, of course, you can go back further to the 18th century to Emmanuel Kant. And and Kant is probably even more so than than than Descartes can to also, you know, has another go trying to solve that that same problem of trying to understand how we can have knowledge of the world, you know, how can we understand anything about the world. I mean, he's trying to resolve a split, which comes about partly through through science really through Newtonian science, you know, and the Newtonian model of the universe is that everything is the same everywhere. There are sort of these key principles that govern the way physical entities behave in space and time. And these rules apply the Newtonian rules apply everywhere, equally, and it paints a world Newton builds a world, which is like a bit like a like a pool table, you know, a bill or billiard balls, you know, being being bashed around on a pool table. And human human beings are just subject to external forces acting on them and apparently have no real free will, if you like, or no, there's no kind of moral aspect to human decision making. It seems as though we're just subject to forces acting on us. Now, of course, that's what Kant is very is reacting against. He said he terrified, as others were kind of terrified by that idea that human beings could just indicate any responsibility for their actions. So he's he just saw that as, you know, kind of denial of any sort of human morality, human ethics. So he tries to resolve that and the Kant's solution to that problem was was basically to say, well, all those Newtonian laws, they're not out there in the world. They're up here in our heads and we we just project those kind of formulas or those principles onto the world in order to give it some sense of order, but they're not actually out there, or at least they might they're probably not or they might not be. But let's say this is just humans way of experiencing the world or the way of our understanding our experience of the world is that we project these Newtonian principles onto the world. And likewise, we project moral principles as well. So that was Kant's way of preserving human life as we know it, if you like, you know, the way preserving human free will and therefore human morality and human responsibility for actions and behavior and so on. So he puts everything inside the head and says here we project everything out onto the world. So that that's one way of resolving, if you like, the mind sort of resolving that mind body problem, but of course it's it's a bit unsatisfactory and it just festers away, if you like that, that problem. So the beginning of the 20th century says more or less is well, you know, let's have another go trying to resolve that, you know, that sort of what was quite revolutionary, obviously in the 18th century, Kant should put this forward as a potential resolution quite revolutionary, but slightly mad at the same time. So Hassel and then Hidegger-Mille Ponte, they're all basically trying to say, well, let's have another go at seeing trying to understand this relationship between ourselves and the world, how can we, how can we have knowledge of what seems like an outside world and ourselves that seem to be kind of locked away inside our heads. So we have this idea, so this Cartesian idea, this Descartes idea, Cartesian idea, which from what, how you're explaining it and how Kant reacts to it, has this, how would I put it, seems to imply that the world, the universe is a moral. And it enables, and I think this is Hannah Aaron's point, it enables a sort of new mode of engaging with both each other, but also the earth. And I guess Kant, looking at the world of the 17th, 18th century, so 17th or 18th century, starting to see the peculiarity of industrialization, the peculiarity of mass urbanization and industrial poverty, probably is reacting in a way to what seems to be the, the implications, although the actions that derive from an amoral, a view of the universe as an amoral and in different space, means that people can, and this is Aaron's point about the discovery of the new world by discovery, sorry, the exploration of the new world by Western Europeans. Or Europeans, is that they encounter it and their reaction to it is one of unadulterated exploitation. And so maybe what Hussle is doing and then Hydro-Gallator is trying to invest the world with a kind, as you say, a morality, because the consequences of an amoral engagement with the world, the Holocaust, the Second World War, the First World War, Victorian urbanization, so on and so forth, are simply too much to deal with. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. But I think one of the complaints about phenomenology is that it seems to get too sidetracked with the individual, philosophizing from the point of view of the individual, and not dealing with those obviously much larger social and sociological cultural and political concerns, which are, of course, contextual. So I think there's an interesting trajectory, certainly within Mellow Ponty's work, where you see an attempt to come to terms with exactly that problem. Yeah, and you talk about in the book, there's two aspects of sort of ethics and aesthetics, which we can get on to. But I was wondering if you, it starts your book, discusses this line that he tries to walk, that Mellow Ponty tries to walk between realism and intellectualism, realism being the world is, well, maybe you would be, you would be the best of enter. Describe that to me. Well, it maps on to a division within, yeah, you've kind of named it already, the division within the history of philosophy, certainly from, from Descartes onwards, what's often called empiricism as well, if you like realism, stroke, empiricism, which broadly, broadly means, you know, we see ourselves as passive agent as human beings, we're basically passive agents subject to information, which is bombarding. It's bombarding us from, from the world, if you like, so we're just passive recipients, absorbing that information, and then try to make some sense of it, that's broadly that realist. And it's physical, it goes back to Newton again, you know, the idea of the physical universe and the billion balls and so on, yes, human beings are just sort of buffeted about by these external forces. The intellectualist, often called rationalist approach, of course, is what really, I guess, begins with Descartes, but reaches an extreme, obviously with that Kantian position, is that we're the opposite of the first one, instead of being utterly passive and just subject to information coming in, we're active, but we're so active that we're producing everything in the sense we're projecting everything out onto the world. So the world just takes on, if you like, a kind of human pseudo. [BLANK_AUDIO] We see ourselves everywhere because we projected ourselves into the into the world. So that intellectualist approach, if you like, is too, is too active. And, and that's the, again, the sort of the split or, as you say, the line between those two is, is what Meloponty is trying to, to explore and, and trying to see how you can result, how can we possibly resolve, you know, resolve those two things? So, I mean, he does it initially in his early work and his most famous work, I guess, the phenomenology of perception, which he publishes in, in 1945, which is a little bit like a pH, it's beyond the PhD, but it's somewhat equivalent in his career to Heidegger's major work, being in time and that occupies a similar role. So he's relatively young and it puts him on the intellectual map, certainly in, in France, gets him, you know, the big job as a professor. But what he does in that is to start from the individual, start from the body. So phenomenology perception is very much about understanding how we are, as perceiving human beings, how do, how do we, in a sense, kind of reach out into the world? So that's where the body, but he begins with the body. That's his, or bodily experience and really trying to understand, take apart the nature of that embodied encounter with the world. First, and so we understand the world through the way that we physically interact it, which we then intellectualize, so to speak, which we then transpose into our minds. So rather than the other way around, of being minds that, okay, right. So, so the bodies then become critical in Merloponti's idea of. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, so it's, it's often described as a philosophy of the body subject, or the embodied subject, you know, to be a human subject is, firstly, primarily, is to be embodied. Now that, of course, counts for all forms of life, if you're like, you know, to be alive, whether you're a plant, an animal, a plant, or a bacterium, you know, to be alive is to have a body, you know, and you, you, there's no way to be alive other than through having a body, however, minuscule that, that is, and you're in a body, in a place. So you're embodied and emplaced by, by definition, that's, that's, that's, that's a principle of any, any form of life. So that's the beginning then, of course, of your encounter with, with, with the world. And to be alive is to be able to respond to the world. So, you know, you can see human intelligence, if you like, as a very advanced stage of the simple, if you can go back to your simpler, simpler forms of life, that are not conscious in the way that we are, self-conscious or self-aware. But nonetheless, you know, even, even a bacterium, you know, has, has some ability to respond to what's going on in, in its environment. So perception, again, is a sort of absolute kind of grounding, building block of, of living, living entities. They have what we call perception, if you like, but some might call it just an ability to react or an ability to respond. They're in some kind of exchange, exchange of information, we often call it, some sort of communication with their environments. Now, of course, the more sophisticated forms of life, eventually, as we know, have things called brains, which are able to handle complex information, but we shouldn't get too carried away with the idea that the brain is the person, in a sense, that everything is going on inside the brain or the brain is making decisions about the, you know, what Melopathy is talking about is a brain which is an emergent property, if you like, or an element of what it is to be a human being, and human intelligence is an emergent property of interacting with the world, you know, being a human being in the world. And our brains, of course, develop and carry on developing rights through our lives, constantly in response to each experience that we have, but we should start there and try to understand experience as learning, basically as learning experience from the beginning. So, so the materials of the world, the things that we encounter, the things that we need to proceed as embodied, in-placed beings, are also in a feedback loop with us. They give to us information about the world that we perceive, so it's not, you know, a pure projection of the mind, we are not just, as you say, just a brain, but through this reciprocity between the stuff of the world and the stuff of ourselves, there's a, as you say, the brain emerges and it, and understands things. Yeah, or the mind, I guess we should probably say accurately, yes, the mind, the brain, we could say, as a biological organ, but you've stopped. But the mind is more than what's going on inside into the environment. I mean, there's a really interesting kind of fuzzy definition. If you think of the mind as being, of course, beyond the brain, then that's the key thing. The mind is both the brain and the body and bits of the world, which we pick up from time to time, and for, you know, as we do with our immediate environment, you know, when we organize a workspace to make our working practice more efficient, those tools help us think as well, you know, as architects, we're used to doing this, we don't often think about it, but picking up a pen to make some notes or to sketch in a sketchbook is seamlessly, you know, a great illustration of that seamless connection, if you like, between ourselves and the world, and to be able to say precisely where the thinking is happening is a really interesting question, you know, because it's not just inside the brain, and it's not just in the sketchbook, but it's somewhere in that nexus of thing, you know, it doesn't, where you take any one of those components away, and the process breaks down, it doesn't work. So the sketchbook and the pen and the brain, well on the hand, it holds the pen and the brain, are equally important, you know, say, and into that thinking process. So the body, I think the key thing with Melopon T is to get away from, from what we inherit from Descartes, which is this idea of the body as an object, or the body simply as another, you know, one amongst all the other objects in the world. So I think Melopon T's key statement, I suppose, is to say that, yeah, the body is not an object in the world, the body is some kind of orientation towards the world. So the body is actually, yeah, not an object, but it's a set of capacities, or a set of abilities to do things in the world that often involve picking up bits of the world, and momentarily making them part of our bodies. Literally tools, hand tools, pens, hammers, high-digger, uses the same example, hammers and so-hours, motorcars, you know, whatever, all those kind of technical extensions, and I would say as an architect, including the architectural setting in which particular actions take place, and maybe, of course, even the city in which the space is located. You know, all of those are kind of organizations of space that enable things to happen, that couldn't really happen without them, and to draw a kind of distinction, to say, no, no, the body ends at the skin, and then the world begins end of story, that's problematic. So that's what Melopon T and high-digger, I think they're both equally important on this, and are really pushing us to get away from. So for Melopon T, I think what's really interesting is how much detail he goes into there, around this idea of the body, what he calls an orientation towards the world, a set of abilities, a set of possibilities that we have to engage with the world around us. So all of that really is part of his first major book, The Phenomenology of Perception, is very much kind of building a picture complex, but I think still a very accessible picture of the so-called body subject, or the embodied subject. Yeah. I think this is really fascinating. It seems to me to imply a sort of moral obligation in the architect to do things, therefore, if the architecture in its component parts, in its details, in its total form, in its urban setting, is in some way, as people encounter it, a collaborator in that human being's beingness identity. Then there's a moral or an ethical obligation embedded in the process of making architecture, such that it doesn't disfigure them and reduce them and enables them to do what they need to do to self-actualize, to be what they need to be. Is that right? Is there any implication of it? I would say so. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that's one of the key issues again for me, and I think a really important aspect of Meloponty's philosophy, which is often overlooked, and I think we would extend beyond the city, let's say beyond the boundaries of the city, let's, we can talk about ethical relationship or what should be, ethical relationship with the environment as such, the global environment, and we can start to build, if you like, an ecological philosophy, a philosophy of sustainability around the interdependent. We are actually dependent on our environments. For a sense of who of who we are. So that's important. People are writing about this now. I mean, it's become thankfully, you know, this has been now becoming a mainstream discourse, which is great. But it's interesting, in that it is kind of questioning a lot of our assumptions about where identity, you know, on what is our identity based, you know, because we talk so much still about the kind of the notion of a kind of inner self, you know, we have an essential self, again, which we can just look deeply enough inside ourselves. We'll find it. But Meloponte, Haidegger and the pragmatist philosophers, likewise, are all in a sense saying, yeah, we it's not about looking inside to find ourselves, it's about looking out. And it's only in our encounter with the world, which is both, you know, a social and cultural world as well as a physical one, a built and a natural world. That's where we really find ourselves. And we do it by making. It's an active making in a sense of self-construction, but we can't do it on our own. You know, we have to take on board networks of actors now, we would say, in contemporary parlance, actor network theory. I was going to say, this seems to prefigure Bruno Latur's actor network theory. Yeah, I would like to think so. Absolutely. Yeah. And Latur is obviously talking about technology. But technology is a complicated thing. It doesn't just mean it doesn't mean internet, but it can mean, as you say, a hammer or a pin, at which point the difference between ANT and what you're talking about, this phenomenology, this melopontean phenomenology is, the difference is very difficult to split, isn't it? Yeah, I think you can see that. There's definitely a lineage there through 20th century French philosophy, let's say, just to be a bit more specific about it. But from meloponte, onto Michel Foucault and other thinkers like Delos, your Delos draws, I think, a little bit more directly on phenomenology, particularly, but on meloponte and others. And then onto Bruno Latur, well, even sociology, Pierre Bordier, I was thinking of, likewise. And the connection with the habitat switch you mentioned. Yeah, well, I think that's another dimension, really. And it comes in in this, what you could call the second part of meloponte's career, if you like. I mean, if we're painting his career in a kind of trajectory, I would say, okay, we close the door on that first chapter, if you like, the major book, Phenomenology of Perception, where we're still in a way talking about from an individual point of view, how do we reach out towards the world? Meloponte himself accepts that there's a limitation in that position, if you like, a starting position, which I think inherits more or less from herself, the idea that there is some kind of opposition between the self and the world. And he still feels a little bit as though he's trapped in that sort of Cartesian universe, you know, of being a thinking mind, reaching out into a, you know, into a physical world. So in meloponte's kind of second phase, he becomes much, much more preoccupied with these larger kind of social structures, which pre-exist the individual, trying to understand how this world, you know, sort of into which the individual seems to be trying to reach, how that world is structured and what impact that has on our experience. And meloponte's sort of prime example of that is language, is to talk about human language, you know, human communication, and to look at the structures that govern the way that language works, and particularly to focus on the extent to which those structures are collective, you know, they're invented by other people, you know, we generally don't get to create a new language for ourselves individually, of course, by definition, nobody else would understand it. So what meloponte does in his sort of middle period, if you like, in his career, tends to be through shorter works. He did start a book, which never quite got finished, but it's, so it comes out in more fragmentary form in a series of essays that are then published together as, as collections, but really focusing on language. And probably the key collection is a book called Signs, or translated into English as Signs, and he was really taking the almost, the opposite perspective, in a sense, the beginning with language, beginning with these kind of social cultural structures, and looking at the way in which they structure, in a sense, the individual, you know, how do we become, instead of the embodied subject, which is the focus of the first phase of his career, we get what could be called the linguistic subject in this second phase. So we get, sort of, we're coming at it, looking down the other end of the telescope now, and we're now seeing the way in which as individuals, we are inevitably subject, to some extent, to structures which pre-exist any of us individually, you know, the structures we inherit, they're in our society, the world that we grow up in, the language that we're taught, you know, from our mother tongues, and, and, and so on. So that, I think, is a really important aspect of, of Meloponty's work, which obviously takes him, in a sense, from phenomenology, almost into structuralism. And the philosophy of structure, I'm sure you've had, you know, another podcast that deals with this, but it's curious, and I say, if you weren't expecting to find this, you know, in, in Meloponty, but he was a very close friend of Claude Levy Strauss, the French anthropologist, and one, again, one of the key figures in the emergence of, of structuralism. And that seems unlikely, initially, you just think what on earth, you know, could Meloponty and Levy Strauss have, have had in common. But you get a sense, I think, because you look at Meloponty's career overall, that he makes the, is really challenging connections, he's really trying to, to, to, to, to, deal with, you know, try and build a comprehensive picture of how experience must be some kind of, coming together of an individual, of course, which experience the world uniquely, we each have a unique point of view on the world. But we, we find ourselves, we discover ourselves, if you like, through our ability to interact with the world, which is already structured for us. And language just happens to be the sort of arch example, if you like, that Meloponty spends most of his time talking about. But I think it's fairly straightforward to extrapolate from that and say, yeah, of course, Meloponty's phenomenology is much more aware of social and cultural structures and politics too. And, you know, he also wrote a lot about politics of, you know, the politics of his own time, you know, on a fairly day-to-day level, you know, who's editing, along with the Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous Sircost father of existentialism, if you like. Also, it's another branch of phenomenology. And they were, they were classmates as students and they went on to, to, to, to launch a political journal in Paris. Of course, fell out massively as French intellectuals often do, didn't speak to each other for whatever the next 10 years. But, you know, you can, you can see, yeah, you can see strands of the interests, you know, you can understand Sartre's work, if you like, in that context, somewhere between Meloponty, Heidegger and so on. But the point about Meloponty's interest in politics, again, is, I think, is important because it's often overlooked, because people tend to think phenomenology is only about the individual, it's only talking about experience, and it seems to be generalizing, if you like, from the experience of one, you know, the sample of one. And, and universalizing that, you know, and assuming that everybody has the same body and everybody has the same, I accept that Meloponty, like other philosophers in the 20th century, were not, you know, were not particularly sensitive to issues of difference, if you like, individual difference and cultural difference and so on. Issues around and gender, disability and so on, excluded by any means in Meloponty's philosophy. And it's left open, if you like, for, you know, for now, for us to kind of read back into what Meloponty's saying about the body and the importance of our embodiment in relation to what we're able to do in the world, what capacities, you know, we have, how are we able to engage. It's open, if you like, now, for us to kind of fill in the gaps, in a sense, and really think about, okay, what are the implications of different forms of embodiment? Because obviously, yeah, we're not, we're not all made, made the same. Meloponty, the same. This is, this is a really interesting idea and I'm glad you picked up. I haven't spoken to anybody about structuralism and I have to because I think it is obviously, as you say, very, very important and in this middle phase of his career, Ponty's intellectual career, the point is out, I was wondering though, so one of the things I think that we most clearly often pick up on a kind of very superficial level in architectural education is the association between phenomenology and material, some materiality, that word that gets bandied around now and is sort of assumed, it's always assumed, very, very little understood, but it kind of, and it also becomes a kind of shorthand for a rather facile way of thinking about architecture, which I think we see realised in a lot of architecture now as well, it's actually become a bit of a detriment, you know, if you stick some materials on it and make a sort of top left hand corner light come into the hallway, you've kind of done phenomenology, or if you've made the rain screen on the outside of your building, create a little bit of fun around the corners then you've done phenomenology because you've kind of disfigured this. But this idea of a morality seems to clash with this idea. So like where do we get like where do this idea of material? So I'm trying to drag it back I suppose to how we encounter phenomenology and the works of Meloponty and other phenomenologists in everyday practice. Like how do we encounter beyond that very superficial reading of the philosophy of phenomenology? How do we encounter Meloponty and ideas I suppose? Who do we see it in? Who do it like which kind of architects are using this? These ideas even now or did? How did they use it? Yeah I think it's really interesting I mean it's a key question I devote more or less a chapter in the book in the Meloponty for architects. A chapter to talk about is because as you say it is one area in which Meloponty's ideas can be I'd say can be seen even if they're not heard you know they're not necessarily being talked about explicitly. You can you can feel them there there's something in the background but it may be that you know what we what we can do with that is just to say you know here's an illustration of something that Meloponty is talking about it's not to say that those examples were particularly driven by specifically motivated by somebody reading Meloponty. I think those those examples are probably few and far between just because yeah Meloponty's ideas have not been has not been taken up you know is directly in architecture as even as Heidegger. Maybe it's just because Heidegger's easier to read because he is quite easy to read Heidegger you know that particularly building dwelling thinking is a I mean I'm not. Yeah you're right. It's not too pretentious but it's kind of an easy read. Well it is on one level yeah I mean there's some abstraction in the language obviously but then he does a lot of etymology you know he is delving into the language in a slightly different way from what Meloponty does with language but yeah it does make the whole piece accessible and obviously it's a short piece and it's very much like this is Heidegger's essay on architecture and and and so it's it's become yeah it's kind of digestible you know in that sense and so no surprise really that it's that it's been so popular and so influential and that's great and there isn't an equivalent to that essay in in Meloponty's work you know you can't say oh here's Meloponty's essay on architecture that's that's the way in you know it's yeah much more difficult I mean phenomenology perception is you yeah is such a kind of in a way an obvious starting point and yet it's really difficult and it's it's enormous you know it's like being in time so I think that's a problem but the general point about materiality what do we mean by that or what can we draw from from Meloponty just to just to kind of address that bit of the question first and I think it goes right back to that in his early work this idea of the way in which we we are if you like as embodied subjects reaching out to to engage with the world and what does that mean so I mean it's it's it's it's in a way more fundamental actually than just this idea of crossing a bridge you know as a we we use the body we we reach out into the world and we kind of lock into something and Meloponty is saying something actually I think more more fundamental than that which is that we the world it's to help really only exists because these occupy space and they made of material you know of human bodies a physical body is a is a physical entity you know we are made of of materials so that or world which is also spatial and material so you you seized up at three key moments in this conversation one when you're talking about other bodies two when you were just about to do that thing that you just said and then again so I don't know if you want to go back to that yeah I mean like literally you started speaking the sentence and then it disappeared so yeah now apologies I I saw my I think my Wi-Fi signal did dip a little bit there yeah I think the important thing really to remember is that so Meloponty is saying something I think a bit more even more fundamental than just this idea that it's through the body either we can then reach out into the world so there is just a kind of bridge that we're trying to cross there the world is its own thing and the body is its own thing and we can care he's suggesting is basically that we can only know the world as a spatial thing as a material thing because we have a body which likewise is both a spatial thing and a material thing so that our understanding of space and materiality is based on a sense a kind of inner sense that we have that we know what it is to occupy space and to be made of a material in our physical bodies are of course material entities in in in themselves so I mean no different ways of describing that I mean I think in one place he even just he even says the body is not in space but the body haunts space which is kind of hinting at it almost a psychoanalytical kind of a understanding of that that relationship I think it's a nice translation in a sense but what I think he's trying to say is a little bit more pragmatic is just that idea that it's only by moving around in space that we begin to build a sense of of three dimensionality you know that there is a three dimensional world that there are objects in the world and there's spaces between objects and that goes back to one of Miller Ponte's sources really which is beyond her soul and the philosophical sources he's very influenced by gist out psychology and the idea that in gist out psychology that we perceive a world of distinct entities and it's the with a distinct holes and that we only perceive anything because it seems to belong to an object and it does that partly because it's it's in front of something else so that there's a horizon behind it if you're like which is obscured by an object and if we walk around behind the object we'll be able to feel that space between the object and the background so that's a key dimension of bodily spatiality which is if you like that from which we get a sense of worldly spatiality so that moving around and this idea that perception is a dynamic thing that we can't just get it by standing still looking which is the more the sort of Cartesian analysis of vision is very much as a sort of passive screen and images are projected in through and hit the back of the retina and they're two dimensional flattened things and then we just kind of try and decode them he's saying that that's not how that's not how perception works it's a three dimensional it's ultimately it's all the senses working together and building a composite sense of a three dimensional space and that comes from movement we have to move in order to perceive properly and so if in phenomenological architecture there's an emphasis on buildings emerging that are the architecture of the phenomenological architecture as distinct say from a a a high modernist architect which presents a kind of cipher building as a kind of avatar of building this we get this idea that architecture has to emerge as we go through it and the materials and the light and the sensory sensual content of the architecture is something that we then encounter in this way so so phenomenological thinking isn't as you put it as you put it in your book it's not a it's not a design method or less a design method more a powerful way of describing discussing and deciding inverted commas about architecture so that's a rather lovely way of thinking about it I think yeah well it really begins there I mean Melo Ponte yeah makes makes that really really clear in the beginning of the phenomenology perception in the preface to that that ultimately he sees the the the beginnings of phenomenology as a sort of project of description and then description analysis if you like but he's really trying to say let's let's just try and understand what it is what's going on what are we encounter you know as we as we move around in in the world let's let's just try and describe that first you know before we try and make you know those philosophical abstractions from it you know before we sort of step outside for a moment kind of draw ourselves back from that and so okay what can we say about what just happened you say let's just be in the moment let's be in the flow let's just try and understand that and of course again I'd say that's another really good point of connection with yeah as you said how we how we think or how we should think as architects you know how to ask how do our buildings unfold as an experience in time because time is just as important as space you know we can only encounter space probably through time you know we have to move moving takes time and and and so on so the counterpart to that of course is where we started the question which was around materiality so the other aspect of that sort of bodily sense of the spatiality of the world is to do with the physicality of the objects that we encounter in the world and again we do that literally sometimes by just you know bumping up against things and and and assessing to what extent they resist, if you like, our kind of encounter with them. You know, what happens is the world push back. And, you know, that's, again, a sort of encounter, which is a kind of a slightly messy combination of the qualities of the thing, whatever the object is that we, that we bump into, and the qualities of our own body, or the capacities of our own bodies. So this has been written about contemporary Meloponte scholar, David Morris, described this as the crossing of the body and the world, which I thought was useful. And I think I quote it in the book, as a useful way, you know, a reminder really about what we often forget, which is, you know, if we, if we think we've encountered an object and we've really understood it, you know, we've drawn some information from it, whether it's, you know, I've just picked up a mug or a water bottle or something, and I put it down again. And I think, okay, I know something now about the weight of that thing, and the temperature, the cold, the resistor, whatever. But actually, what I've really experienced is not really the thing in itself, only what I've experienced is the way in which I interact with it. I've experienced the encounter. So a lot of that information is, is kind of confused in a way, because it's, it's telling me something about the object, but it's telling me something about my body and my bodily capacity to interact with the object. Is it something I can pick up and put in my pocket? Or is it something I can't possibly move on my own? I need somebody to help me? Or is it something I should sit on? Is it a chair or a table? And can I, yeah, is it strong enough to take my weight? Can I stand on it to pin drawings up on the wall? You know, all those things. So we're constantly doing that, but of course we don't often stop to remember that. Remind ourselves that actually what we've just learned, if you like, what we just experienced, is precisely some strange interplay, some strange kind of overlap or interconnection between ourselves, our bodies, our capacities, and some particular bit of the world. Wonderful. I wonder if you might just speak briefly to finish on where you think Merlot, Pontis, theory, philosophy of phenomenology might take us in the future. I mean, I have another paper here by you in the sage handbook of architectural theory on the post-human. And I wonder if there was some kind of connection there with this idea that you've already alluded to, which is the idea of a kind of the way that Merlot Pontis philosophy might help us kind of disestablish this rather what we now see as unrealistic distinction between the mind and the body, between the humans as a very distinct, between the, between humans as a very distinct entity in the world. And I wondered if there might be some way of, yeah, something that you'd like to open up on that. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I certainly suggest that towards the end of the book that I think it's an important aspect of Merlot Pontis' work and his whole outlook, really, is to say that, yeah, it's not because he's often criticized as belonging to historical sort of generation of apparently, you know, humanists, let's say broadly labeled humanist thinkers that seem to still treat the human subject as a kind of sovereign entity, you know, from which everything else begins or through which the world should be seen. And I think it's okay, you know, there are aspects of his work where that does seem to be his position, and certainly in his earlier work. But I think that he absolutely transcends that in his later work. And ultimately, I think we are, yeah, left with a notion, much more interesting, but much fuzzier notion of the human being inevitably kind of enmeshed in a network of things like we mentioned with actor networks here, you know, enmeshed in networks of, you know, technical, material, human and non-human actors, and so on. So one way of translating that into current terminology would be to say, yeah, I could see Merlot Pontis as an inspiration, if you like, for what's called today post-humanist understanding of the human subject, which is yeah, precisely to kind of take the boundaries away for the moment, and to see ourselves as, yeah, utterly enmeshed, utterly reliant on things going on around us, and hopefully in a more kind of equitable balance with our environments, both, you know, natural and built. So I think that's definitely one area, well, a couple of areas they're probably post-humanist thinking in the general sense, but also ecological and sustainable thinking, you know, of course, needing to keep reminding ourselves about how dependent we are on the environment for our definitions of, you know, who we are as individuals and as a species. So I think there's definitely openings there to future, you know, development, if you like, of Merlot Pontis thinking, or good reasons to look back at his work as a basis, you know, for moving forward, as well as some of those perhaps more more perennial themes in architecture that we've touched on, like materiality, tectonic expression in architecture, which if you like, more well established now, and in a sense, more straightforward, I suppose, as applications of both Merlot Ponti and Heidegger, own phenomenology more generally. Fabulous, thank you so very much. It was a wonderful point to finish. Great. Well, thank you. It's been really, yeah, I'm really interesting conversation. Well, that was phenomenal. Thanks to Jonathan for joining me to speak about the book. Please see the podcast description for links to it. To Jonathan's professional profile and social media presence, the short essay on the Body Theory website by Jonathan on Merlot Ponti, which worth a read too. And please like, subscribe, follow, and share this episode. And thanks for listening. Cheers.