ABSTRACT

What is the nature of the relationship between landscape and phenomenology? Phenomenology is a branch of continental philosophy which aims to elucidate and express the meaning and nature of things in the world – of phenomena – through a focus upon human lived experience, perception, sensation and understanding. One element of this aim involves developing an account of culture-nature relations that is radically different from an orthodox scientific conception of ‘nature’ as an external realm, distinct from human thought and practice – a conception which underwrites many contemporary Western attitudes to nature, both academic and lay. Phenomenology is also a diverse and still-evolving tradition, but in terms of its influence upon landscape research, the ‘existential’ phenomenology of two mid-twentieth-century thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has been especially notable. And landscape is … well, to offer an initial definition would be jumping the gun, especially in a volume such as this one, teeming with competing definitions of the word. Instead of doing so, a definition of landscape from a phenomenological perspective will emerge progressively through the course of the chapter. In this chapter, I will propose three answers to my initial question above concerning the

relation between landscape and phenomenology, and discussion of these answers will serve to organize and structure the chapter. In turn, I will consider the following propositions:

that ‘landscape’ and ‘phenomenology’ share a common heritage in terms of romanticism, and are thus deeply entwined together from the outset;

that, if the story of landscape research is really the story of ongoing debates over the definition of landscape, then phenomenology is a persistent questioning presence in such debates, albeit one that researchers have often found difficult to place squarely at the heart of their inquiries;

the pragmatic answer: phenomenology offers a particular approach to the study of landscapes, shaping both what is studied under the heading of ‘landscape’, and how it is studied.