Carlos Astrada and Tetsurō Watsuji on the Phenomenology of Landscape (original) (raw)
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Philosophy of Landscape : Think, Walk, Act
2019
This landmark collection of essays on landscape offers a much-needed comprehensive exploration of an important dimension of our human environment. Landscape is different from such environmental topics as the forest, the city, and the sea. Unlike other subjects of environmental inquiry, landscape is strangely situated, giving it a compelling significance. For landscape is not a place that can be clearly demarcated. It is not a natural object like a mountain or a river, nor is it a location such as a valley or an island. In fact, landscape is no thing at all. Etymologically speaking, landscape is an expanse of the perceived environment: a scene, a region, surroundings as viewed by an observer. This gives landscape unique standing in environmental experience because landscape cannot be considered alone: it is, in effect, defined by and in relation to human perception. Landscape is a relationship. We can think here of the Claude glass, so called because it was an optical device, invented by the seventeenth century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, through which an artist or a traveler in the countryside could look and adjust in order to frame a pleasing aspect of the scenery, arranging the view through the glass to resemble what a painter would depict with brush and paint. This exemplifies how what is designated as a landscape depends on the viewer, a point of exceeding importance. For there is no landscape "out there", so to speak, no independent object or place. Recognizing this has dramatic implications, for it demonstrates how landscape is actually a complex synthesis of viewer and environment. Recognizing this led me to entitle my first extended discussion of environment, "The Viewer in the Landscape", and that same understanding underlies many of the essays in this volume. Moreover, landscape has been used metaphorically in ways that do not always suit a visual meaning, such as 'earthscape' and 'spacescape' and even in referring to memories of one's previous home as an internal landscape.-Filosofia da Paisagem. Estudos, 2013. A compilation of essays by Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, the principal investigator of the project. Organized in four chapters: "Anthropology and Philosophy of Nature"; "Nature and Art: The Composite Categories"; "Landscape and Environment. A theoretical debate" and "Problems of Philosophy of the Landscape", the book reflects on the essence of Landscape as idea and reality, being and manifestation. 'A piece of nature' is, as such, an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is removed from this wholeness, it is no longer nature, precisely because it can only be 'nature' within that unlimited unity, as a wave of that global flow. 2 19 Spazio limitato il paesaggio, ma aperto, perché, a differenza degli spazi chiusi, ha sopra di sé il cielo, cioè lo spazio illimitato; e non rappresenta l'infinito (simbolicamente o ilusionisticamente), ma si apre all'infinito, pur nella finitezza del suo essere limitato: costituendosi come presenza,
EXPERIENCING LANDSCAPE. A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
In this paper, I draw on a possible conception of landscape from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Starting from an overview of the two main positions regarding landscape within the continental philosophical tradition (Simmel and Ritter), I consider the use of the term 'landscape' in Merleau-Ponty's thought, without wishing to claim that the French philosopher presents a philosophy of landscape within his works. I want to show that important elements for the outline of a phenomenological conception of landscape emerge from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. According to Simmel, landscape is seen as the product of a spiritual act, and in Ritter's perspective, landscape emerges from a detached contemplation of nature proper to humans in the modern era. Contrasted with these views, a consideration of Merleau-Ponty's original works allows to draw on a conception of landscape in which the experiential and perceptual dimensions are fundamental. This view enables us to consider landscape in its centrality for human experience, and leads to a better understanding of the strong ontological commitment between humans and nature.
Introduction to New Work on Landscape and Its Narration
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2012
Introduction to New Work on Landscape and Its Narration By the time Fredric Jameson stated that our "daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time" (Postmodernism 47), he could already rely on a whole tradition in the humanities to back his bold claim. From the 1980s onwards, scholars in the humanities recognized increasingly the arbitrary nature of their former, predominantly temporal, explanatory models of "progress," "evolution," or "history" and reached the conclusion that cultural phenomena are just as well, or perhaps better, explained by analyzing their material, spatial context. This shift of emphasis was first referred to explicitly as the "spatial turn" by Edward Soja in his Postmodern Geographies (see also Lungu). Following Michel Foucault's Of Other Spaces, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space, Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, and US-American cultural theoreticians who propagated the work of French thought (e.g., Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson) the production of modern culture in concrete living conditions became a systematic object of study. As a phenomenon that is fundamentally "produced" space was understood to mirror daily cultural praxis, social hierarchies, collective mentalities, and personal experiences. Thus the study of "lived space" came to occupy center stage in this line of research allowing for the examination of otherwise hard-to-detect phenomena such as collective identities or social power relations. Such phenomena could now be studied in a situated manner, as part of the experience of individuals' contextualized places and quotidian practices. Once the inhabited and built environment was thus considered indispensable for trying to grasp the modern (or, for some, "postmodern" or "late modern") condition, inquiry into the experience and production of landscapes, cities, and architectures came to boom, along with the field of "urban studies." It is within the framework of these developments that the Ghent Urban Studies Team http://www.gust.ugent.be/ took the initiative of compiling the articles in New Work on Landscape and Its Narration. Contemporaneous with the spatial turn, the humanities also came to be marked by the so-called "narrative turn," which puts forward the idea that the situated production of human culture is to a great extent indebted to (often culturally determined) narrative ways of making sense of the world. Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, argued that "man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal" (216; see also Taylor). In a similar vein, Yuri Lotman advanced that our cultural information often passes through the gates of narrative: "The more people acquire freedom from the automatism of genetic planning, the more important it is for them to construct plots of events and behavior" (170). Increasingly, an idea took root that is perhaps most explicitly rendered in Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds: the notion that we do not only see the world from a rational, logico-scientific viewpoint, but also from a spontaneously narrative one, and that "the two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another" since each provides "distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality" (11). If the formation of cultural and personal identities is often a matter of narrative construction, then, it is hardly surprising that the spatial turn found a natural ally in the narrative turn. Both enable us to delve into the situatedness and experientiality of modern culture, and show how cultural and personal identities are embodied in narrative and spatial constructions. More than one research institute was called into existence in order to explore this common ground of the narrative and the spatial. In addition to individual contributors, represented in New Work on Landscape and Its Narration are the research teams of "Littérature et architecture" (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), "Narrascape" (University of Cambridge), "Space in Ancient Greek Literature" (University of Amsterdam), and the Ghent Urban Studies Team (Ghent University). However divergent the narrative media addressed in the contributions to this journal, all are imbued with the notion that our spatial surroundings and built environment are not so much empty containers or inert background décors as they are thoroughly informed by active perceptions, temporal developments, emotions, memories, and ideological values-all of which tend to be constructed through and by narration. Against this backdrop, contributors to New Work on Landscape and Its Narration concentrate on the phenomena of space and landscape understood as constructed narratively. As culturally relevant spaces connected closely with matters of identity and experience, landscapes are particularly suitable for demonstrating the relevance of the
The central issue of Heidegger's thought is the question of being. More precisely, it is the question of the relation between being and human being, the relation, that is, between Sein and Dasein (see WhD 74/WCT 79; GA 55:293; GA 16:704). This article addresses the so-called turn (Kehre) in Heidegger's thinking of this relation. In particular, it shows how this turn entails a shift from a transcendental-horizonal projection of world to " an indwelling releasement [inständige Gelassenheit] to the worlding of the world " (GA 77:151/CPC 99). Although a wide range of pre-and post-turn texts are referenced, since this shift is explicitly thematized in Heidegger's Country Path Conversations, these three fictional conversations from 1944/45 take center stage in this study.
Contributions to Geography? The Spaces of Heidegger's Beiträge
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2005
In this paper I provide a reading of Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [the contributions to philosophy (of propriation)] as a contribution to geography. This collection of manuscripts, written between 1936 and 1938, is extremely important in terms of the development of Heidegger's work, his political career, and his rethinking of the relation between space and time. This rethinking is one of the key themes discussed, along with the political and geographical implications of Heidegger's notion of calculation. In order to situate these insights, I first provide a discussion of the context within which Heidegger wrote the work. After outlining this biographical, intellectual, and political situation, I move to the geographical contributions, suggesting ways in which Heidegger's thought can impact on our thinking of environment, nature, globalisation, and measurement.
We have lost an important connection with the landscape, a way of seeing and understanding its profound significance in our everyday life and culture. This gap in our knowledge is the consequence of a rationalist paradigm that continues to dominate western thinking, a conceptual void that threatens the landscape in the face of 21st century challenges. An alternative philosophical approach argues that refocusing attention on materiality and re-evaluating the relationship communities have with the land would be an important step towards addressing the problem, but it does demand a very different role and agenda for philosophy. This chapter illustrates the potential of a new way of thinking about landscape, consciousness and design and aims to initiate a new discourse by abandoning the philosophical filters that currently obscure a meaningful engagement with the built environment. This would help to establish an expanded definition of landscape as a vital means of achieving a better quality of life and robust sustainable development.
"Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways"
Nader El-Bizri, "Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways", in Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places , ed. Erik Champion (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 123-143., 2018
Preamble This chapter aims at investigating the question of the being of place and space from a phenomenological standpoint that is orientated by selected Heideggerian directives in thinking, and as these are specifically set against the background of the unfolding of the essence of modern technology, while also taking into account the existential analytic of Dasein's being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). While I am guided by Heideggerian notions throughout this chapter, my inquiry is not presented merely as a dense exegetical or hermeneutic interpretation of Heidegger's handling of the question of the being of place and space. I rather aim at extending the phenomenological analysis of place and space beyond the immediate particulars of Heidegger's own thoughts by way of evoking selected Heideggerian leitmotifs in my own reflection on advancements in technology as they unfolded after his era, and within our current 21st century epoch. Such endeavor connects the phenome-nology of place and space with architectural thinking about the built and natural environments, including the simulated conditions under which lived experiences can take place within sensory-enhanced virtual spaces or through engaged ocular-motor and various perceptual interactions with them. This inquiry accounts for some of the situated determinants of the embodied lived experience of being-in-the-flesh, which characterizes the architectonic and topological attributes of dwelling in physical concretized places, while also extending their application to thinking about immersed embodiments within mathematically determined artificial spaces that generate sense-stimuli parameters through plenoptic projections and haptic sensors etc. Dwelling and Things To address the question of the being of place and space from a Heidegge-rian standpoint, our gaze turns towards Heidegger's own meditations on dwelling as set in his Bauen Wohnen Denken, Building Dwelling Think
Landscapes of Human Experience
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2015
This essay begins with some observations concerning the interaction between nature and art. Relying on these reflections, in the second part experience of landscape will be interpreted as a model for the human stance within the natural as well as the historical world. In the third part some consequences for an ethics and politics of saving the conditions for individual as well as social well-being will be drawn.