西美尔：风景哲学

http://tcs.sagepub.com/ Theory, Culture & Society http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/24/7-8/20.citation The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084465 2007 24: 20Theory Culture Society Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Landscape Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University can be found at:Theory, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: What is This? - Mar 19, 2008Version of Record >> at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from The Philosophy of Landscape Georg Simmel T RANSLATOR’S NOTE: Originally published as ‘Die Philosophie der Land-schaft’, in Die Gueldenkammer, vol. 3, issue 2 (Bremen), 1913; also in Brückeund Tür: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft, Michael Landmann and Margarete Susman eds, Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler Verlag, 1957, pp. 141–52. The tenor of the central question that Simmel poses here concerning the possibility of landscape is essentially Kantian, but the answer he gives seems to be inspired by a line from Goethe: ‘Is not the core of nature already inside the heart of human kind?’ The essay therefore anticipates his longer study from 1918, ‘Kant and Goethe: On the History of the Modern Weltanschauung’ (Josef Bleicher trans., Theory, Culture & Society 24(6) 2007). The present essay allows Simmel to bring to the fore a hitherto underexposed strand in his work concerning the oneness of humanity and nature within the all-pervading Life that continuously creates, sustains and reforms them. The term ‘landscape’ denotes both an object of art and its representation in which the artistic process and the object mutually constitute one another. As in his account of ‘cityscapes’ in the pieces on ‘Rome’ (1898), ‘Florence’ (1907) and ‘Venice’ (1908), translated in this issue, Simmel is concerned here with the emergence of social forms out of everyday activity, and with the analysis of the objectification of spirit (Geist), often with tragic consequences. In his essay on Rodin, Simmel explicitly connects his aesthetic interest in landscape with the problem of modernity: The essence of modernity as such is psychologism, the experience and interpretation of the world according to our internal reactions. It is in fact turned into an internal universe, the dissolution of all fixed contents into the liquid element of the soul from which all substance has been extracted and whose forms are only forms of movement. . . . Therefore, the specifically modern achievement in painting is the land- scape, which is an état d’âme. Its colourational and segmental-partial character has less of the firm logical structure of the body or of figural composition. (Philosophische Kultur [1919], in Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14, Rüdiger Kramme and Othein Rammstedt eds, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 346) The German Bild, which appears on its own and in various combinations throughout the essay, denotes an ‘image’ or ‘depiction’, artistic or otherwise, as well ■ Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 24(7–8): 20–29 DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084465 020-029 084465 Simmel 1 (D) 6/2/08 11:24 Page 20 at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from as a ‘portrait’ or ‘picture’. The term Landschaft, like the earlier word for landscape painter, Landschaftler, has its root in the verb schaffen, and indicates a creative achievement. Thus, the artist’s own spirit (Geist) and vitality (Lebendigkeit) encounter a pre-formed object, so to speak, whose own inherent spirit and vitality stimulate, delimit and direct the artistic process. * * * ON INNUMERABLE occasions we will have walked in open natureand taken note, with varying degrees of attentiveness, of trees andwater-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. As far as landscape is concerned, however, a boundary, a way of being encompassed by a momentary or permanent field of vision, is quite essen- tial. Its material foundation or its individual pieces may simply be regarded as nature. But conceived of as a ‘landscape’, it demands a status for itself, which may be optical, aesthetic or mood-centred. There needs to be a unique, characterizing detachment from that indivisible unity of nature in which each piece serves as a transit-point for the totality of the forces of Simmel – The Philosophy of Landscape 21 020-029 084465 Simmel 1 (D) 6/2/08 11:24 Page 21 at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from existence. To conceive of a piece of ground and what is on it as a landscape, this means that one now conceives of a segment of nature itself as a separate unity, which estranges it from the concept of nature. This seems to me to be happening when someone shapes a field of apperception into the category of ‘landscape’: a self-contained perception intuited as a self-sufficient unity, which is nevertheless intermeshed with an infinite expansiveness and a continual flux. It is contained within bound- aries that do not apply to the intimation of the oneness of God, the whole- ness of nature, which continuously re-shapes and dissolves the self-imposed boundaries of a given landscape. Torn away and standing on its own, a land- scape is permeated by an opaque awareness of this infinite interconnected- ness. In the same way, the work of a human being stands as an objective, self-contained construct that nevertheless retains an interconnectedness, though one hard to express, with the whole soul, the full vitality of its creator, sustained and still perceptibly permeated by it. Nature, which in its deep being and meaning knows nothing of individuality, is transfigured into an individuated ‘landscape’ by the human gaze that divides things up and forms the separated parts into specific unities. It has frequently been stated that an actual ‘feeling for nature’ [Naturgefühl] emerged only in modernity, arising out of lyricism, Romanti- cism, etc. I consider this a superficial view. Rather, it is the religions of more primitive epochs that seem to me to reveal a particularly deep feeling for ‘nature’. It is only the sensibility for that particular formation, a ‘land- scape’, that emerged quite late; and that is because this creation necessi- tated a tearing away from that unitary feeling of the whole of nature. The individualization of the internal and external forms of human existence, the dissolution of primordial ligatures into differentiated and self-contained entities constitutes the grand formula of the post-medieval world. This formula also resulted in our coming to recognize landscape within the realm of nature. It is no surprise that, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was no awareness [Gefühl] of landscape, since this object as such had not yet come into being with that inner resoluteness and with its self-contained contours, which eventually came to be confirmed by the rise of landscape painting that, as it were, capitalized on this gain. That one part of a whole should become a self-contained whole itself, emerging out of it and claiming from it a right to its own existence, this in itself may be the fundamental tragedy of spirit. This condition came into its own in modernity and assumed the leading role in the processes of culturalization. Underlying the plurality of relationships that interconnect individuals, groups and social formations, there is a pervading dualism confronting us: the individual entity strives towards wholeness, while its place within the larger whole only accords it the role of a part. We are aware of being centred both externally and internally because we, together with our actions, are mere constituents of larger wholes that place demands upon us as one-dimensional parts in the division of labour. Yet, we nevertheless want be rounded and self-determining beings, and establish ourselves as such. 22 Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8) 020-029 084465 Simmel 1 (D) 6/2/08 11:24 Page 22 at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from Out of this arise countless struggles and disunities in our social and technical-practical, intellectual and moral lives. Yet, that same form, in relation to nature, produces the conciliatory richness of landscape. Here is something individual, contained, self-contented, that at the same time continues to adhere to the whole of nature and its oneness without contra- diction. It cannot be denied, however, that landscape only comes into being in a process whereby the Life that pulsates within our perceptions and emotions tears itself away from the homogeneity of nature. The specific object thereby created and transposed onto quite a new level then, so to speak, from within itself opens up again towards that total-Life [All-Leben] and re-absorbs the infinite into its still intact boundaries. What kind of law, we need to ask further, determines this selection and composition? Whatever it is that we can take in through just one glance or from within our momentary field of vision is not landscape but, at most, the raw material towards it. In the same way a row of books placed next to each other does not by itself add up to ‘a library’ – until and unless, and without a single book being added or removed, a certain unifying concept comes to encompass and give a form to them. However, the subliminal formula that generates landscape as such cannot be evidenced in an equally simple way, and in principle may not be so at all. The raw material of land- scape provided by bare nature is so infinitely varied and changes from case to case. Consequently, the points of view and the forms that compose its elements into a sense-perceptual unity will also be highly variable. The route towards gaining an approximate idea at least, seems to me to lead through landscape as an art-form in painting. This is because an under- standing of the problematic at issue revolves around the following theme: landscape, as a work of art, comes about as the progressive continuation and cleansing of a process in which a landscape, in its ordinary sense, grows out of mere impressions of discrete objects of nature. An artist delineates one part within the chaotic stream and infiniteness of the immediately given world, and conceives of and forms it as a unitary phenomenon. This now derives its meaning from within itself, having severed all threads connect- ing it to the world around it and having retied them into its own centre. We follow the same procedure – only in a less developed, less fundamental degree, and in a fragmentary way unsure of its boundaries – as soon as we perceive a ‘landscape’ in place of a meadow, a house, a brook and passing clouds. What this reveals is one of the most profound determinations of all mental and productive life. Everything we call culture is comprised of a series of autonomous entities which have positioned themselves in their self-sufficient pureness beyond the entanglement of everyday life that runs its practical and subjectively oriented course. As examples, I refer to science, art and religion. These can certainly demand to be pursued and comprehended in accordance with their own autonomous ideas and norms, freed from the turbidness of the randomness of Life. But there exists yet another route towards their understanding, or rather, a route to yet another Simmel – The Philosophy of Landscape 23 020-029 084465 Simmel 1 (D) 6/2/08 11:24 Page 23 at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from kind of understanding of them. It is the case that our empirical life, un- directed as it is by principles, so to speak, contains throughout the rudiments and constituents of those formations which struggle to raise them- selves out of it and towards their very own development that crystallizes around its very own ideational core. It is not as though these creations of mind were already in place and that our life, as it proceeds on the basis of whatever kind of desire and goal, merely appropriated particular segments of these creations and incorporated them. What I wish to refer to here, however, is not this permanently occurring process, but one that runs in the exactly opposite direction. Life, in its continuous flow, does generate sentiments and modes of behaviour one could call religious – even though they are in no way experi- enced as falling under the concept of religion or indeed belong to it. Love and impressions of nature, spiritual uplifts and dedication to the wider or narrower communities of mankind, these frequently enough are bathed in this light – which, however, is not reflected onto them by a fully fledged ‘religion’. Instead, religion itself comes about in that this characteristic element, which arises in the course of such experiences and co-determines their experiential mode, elevates itself into its own state of being. Tran- scending its substance, and in an act of self-creation, this element then condenses into the purified formations that bring it to expression, namely, the Deities, irrespective of any truth-content or significance this formation may possess in its self-existence and detached from all those pre- figurations. Religiosity sets the tone for the way we experience innumerable sentiments and fateful events. It does not derive or, so to speak, emerge out of religion at a later stage, but rather the reverse. Religion grows out of religiosity, insofar as the latter comes to create substantive meanings out of itself, rather than merely shaping and modulating those already available in life and woven further into life. The same applies in the case of science. Its methods and norms, in all their untouched superiority and assumed grandeur, are but the forms of everyday cognition that gained an independent and absolute status. Ordinary cognition is a mere practice-oriented, ancillary means, somehow accidentally enmeshed with the empirical totality of life. In science, however, cognition has become its own end, a realm of the intel- lect ruled by its own legislature. Yet this immense transposition of its centre and meaning is still nothing more than the cleansed and prin- cipled version of knowledge that is distributed throughout life and the everyday world. A banal enlightenment approach tries to glue together the ideal provinces of value out of the baser elements of life. It aims to deduce religion from feelings of fear and hope and ignorance, and it considers knowledge as deriving from empirical chance events, serving only the senses. We need to realize, however, that idealist energies from the outset coexist with prac- tical ones that shape our lives. Provinces of value coalesce around the purified state of particular ideas in that these idealist energies assume 24 Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8) 020-029 084465 Simmel 1 (D) 6/2/08 11:24 Page 24 at Peking University Library on May 9, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from legislative control over their own realm and create their own substantive meanings instead of just adapting themselves to external material. This is also the essential formula of art. It would be entirely foolish to derive it from the impulse to imitate, to play, or other extraneous psycho- logical sources, even though these may intermingle with its true wellspring and have a part in influencing its results. But art as art can only rise out of an artistic dynamic. It is not that art had its starting-point in the completed work of art. It emerges out of Life, but only because and to the extent to which everyday life already contains these formative powers. What we call art is their purified, autonomous outcome which determines its own subject- matter. To be sure, there is no concept of ‘art’ involved in everyday speech or in gesturing, or when one’s perception forms its object according to criteria of meaning and coherence. Yet in all these there are operative form- ative modes which in retrospect, as it were, we have to call artistic. If they form an object by themselves, autonomously and detached from all ancil- lary connections with life, one that is exclusively their own production, this then forms a ‘work of art’. It is only after traversing this wide terrain that our interpretation of landscape gains its justification with reference to the ultimate grounds that form our conception of the world. Whenever we really do see a landscape, over and above an aggregate of separate natural objects, then we have a work of art in statu nascendi. It is noticeable how often we hear from non- artists, who are impressed by a landscape they are looking at, the wish that they were able to paint in order to capture this view. This is more than just a wish for a permanent reminder, which is just as likely to arise in the case of many other impressions of a different kind. It is rather more the case that, in this very act of beholding, the artistic form that is alive within us, however embryonically, has come to realize itself. While not endowed with enough creative capacity itself, it at least vibrates in the wish for it and its internal anticipation. There are a number of reasons why one’s artistic potential reaches a degree of realization precisely in relation to a landscape which is higher than when one beholds a human individual, for example. First, we approach a landscape with a degree of objectivity, which cannot be achieved as easily and immediately in the case of another human being, and which benefits the art