The Philosophy of Landscape

On innumerable occasions we will have walked in open nature and taken note, with varying degrees of attentiveness, of trees and water-courses, meadows and cornfields, hills and houses, and of the myriad changes in light and clouds. But just because we pay closer attention to one particular item or bring together in one glance a variety of differing ones, this does not amount to our being conscious of perceiving a ‘landscape’. For that to occur, our attention may not be captured by just one item within our field of vision. For there to be a landscape, our conscious- ness has to acquire a wholeness, a unity, over and above its component elements, without being tied to their specificity or mechanistically composed of them. If I am not mistaken, we are rarely aware that a landscape is not formed out of an ensemble of all kinds of things spread out side-by-side over a piece of ground and which are viewed in their immediacy. The peculiar mental process that generates a landscape out of all this, I will here try to analyse in reference to its preconditions and forms.
To begin with, that the visual objects on a spot of earth are part of ‘nature’, and they may even include human creations (which, however, would need to integrate themselves into it, as opposed to city streets with their department stores and automobiles), this in itself is not sufficient to turn this spot into a landscape. By nature we mean the infinite inter- connectedness of objects, the uninterrupted creation and destruction of forms, the flowing unity of an event that finds expression in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence. When we designate a part of reality as nature, we mean one of two things. It can mean an inner quality marking it off from art and artifice, from something intellectual or historical. Or we intend it as a representation and symbol of that wholeness of Being whose flux is audible within them. To talk of ‘a piece of nature’ is in fact a self- contradiction. Nature is not composed of pieces. It is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is parceled out from this wholeness, it is no longer nature pure and simple since this whole can be ‘nature’ only within that unbounded unity, only as a wave within that total flux.
We relate to a landscape, whether in nature or in art, as whole beings. The act that generates it for us is immediately one of perception and feeling, and it only gets split into these separated constituents through subsequent reflection. An artist is someone who carries out the formative act of contemplative perception and feeling in such a pure form and with such vigour, that the given material gets completely absorbed and then, seemingly out of its own, comes to be created anew. While the rest of us remain more tied to this material, and still tend to note only this or that separate part, only the artist really sees and creates ‘landscape’.