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.