7 Gaze into the Landscape: Can Sensory Immersion, Landscape Reading and . . .
91
7.2 An Ongoing Effort to “Read” Terrestrial Landscape
Indicators
7.2.1 Landscape: Inner Reflection of an Outer Reality?
There is a constant threat to anyone undertaking to study a landscape, landscape
designers being the first ones to confront it. The risk is that of missing the point of
one’s research, because landscape is a complex notion: it is an area, as perceived
1 . Not
the theoretical, measurable area of science, but an area which, in the eyes of anyone
visually embracing the world, is a living tableau, a complete and adequate spectacle,
an everyday setting for life, or what ancient philosophies called “world”
2 . At the
time of contemplation, be it supreme from the top of a mountain or by chance at the
corner of a street, a landscape noticed and admired suspends judgement and arouses
emotion. In a glance, the spectacle we refer to as “landscape” thus becomes a whole,
as confirmed by the attempts made to “set” it. Exclamations, written descriptions,
painting and photography, or the popular expression in picture postcard form, present
the landscape as a work of art, with an invitation to lose oneself in it as if nothing else
existed, as if it contained everything of importance, sufficient within itself, the organic
parent of our being
3 . Yet, instantly, any study or attempt to understand the inner
mechanisms that prompt the emotion of landscape enters a process of deconstruction:
the subjectivity on which space imprints landscape emotion. Whereas by definition,
the landscape is above all “within us”
4 , we hasten to give the external elements
of space those objective qualities that will spark off our inner emotion, rather than
deciphering and breaking down their subtle arrangements into single components
to find the formula of the emotional alchemy prompting our admiration. Landscape
designers themselves do not escape this natural tendency to break down and analyse
the organic whole that our perception would appear to create when we come into
contact with things.
1 Today, there is a consensus on the definition. Refer to the European Landscape Convention of
Florence, Council of Europe, 2000, and A. Berque, Médiance, De milieux en paysages, Belin, 2000.
2 For the epistemological difference between the concepts of area and world, we refer to the doctrines
of the philosophical school of phenomenology represented in particular by Husserl, Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty. World is “that always-nonobjectual to which we are subject” in
Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Off the beaten track, translated by Julian Young and
Kenneth Hayes, Cambridge University Press.
3 With landscape, we are “caught up” like a child forgetful of adjacent realities. Our gaze is like
the sixth side closing up a cube forming the scenery of a play. Cf. H.G Gadamer, Vérité et Méthode
(Truth and Method), 2nd edition. Seuil, Paris 1996.
4 This is the “discovery” of philosopher Thoreau during his retreat to the woods at the end of the
1840s. Cf. H.D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Ticknor and Fields: Boston, 1854.
91
7.2 An Ongoing Effort to “Read” Terrestrial Landscape
Indicators
7.2.1 Landscape: Inner Reflection of an Outer Reality?
There is a constant threat to anyone undertaking to study a landscape, landscape
designers being the first ones to confront it. The risk is that of missing the point of
one’s research, because landscape is a complex notion: it is an area, as perceived
1 . Not
the theoretical, measurable area of science, but an area which, in the eyes of anyone
visually embracing the world, is a living tableau, a complete and adequate spectacle,
an everyday setting for life, or what ancient philosophies called “world”
2 . At the
time of contemplation, be it supreme from the top of a mountain or by chance at the
corner of a street, a landscape noticed and admired suspends judgement and arouses
emotion. In a glance, the spectacle we refer to as “landscape” thus becomes a whole,
as confirmed by the attempts made to “set” it. Exclamations, written descriptions,
painting and photography, or the popular expression in picture postcard form, present
the landscape as a work of art, with an invitation to lose oneself in it as if nothing else
existed, as if it contained everything of importance, sufficient within itself, the organic
parent of our being
3 . Yet, instantly, any study or attempt to understand the inner
mechanisms that prompt the emotion of landscape enters a process of deconstruction:
the subjectivity on which space imprints landscape emotion. Whereas by definition,
the landscape is above all “within us”
4 , we hasten to give the external elements
of space those objective qualities that will spark off our inner emotion, rather than
deciphering and breaking down their subtle arrangements into single components
to find the formula of the emotional alchemy prompting our admiration. Landscape
designers themselves do not escape this natural tendency to break down and analyse
the organic whole that our perception would appear to create when we come into
contact with things.
1 Today, there is a consensus on the definition. Refer to the European Landscape Convention of
Florence, Council of Europe, 2000, and A. Berque, Médiance, De milieux en paysages, Belin, 2000.
2 For the epistemological difference between the concepts of area and world, we refer to the doctrines
of the philosophical school of phenomenology represented in particular by Husserl, Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty. World is “that always-nonobjectual to which we are subject” in
Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Off the beaten track, translated by Julian Young and
Kenneth Hayes, Cambridge University Press.
3 With landscape, we are “caught up” like a child forgetful of adjacent realities. Our gaze is like
the sixth side closing up a cube forming the scenery of a play. Cf. H.G Gadamer, Vérité et Méthode
(Truth and Method), 2nd edition. Seuil, Paris 1996.
4 This is the “discovery” of philosopher Thoreau during his retreat to the woods at the end of the
1840s. Cf. H.D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Ticknor and Fields: Boston, 1854.