There is a diversity of possibilities for defining the concept of landscape, but an essential meaning is that landscape is a third entity between nature and culture, always mindful that dichotomous thinking is a specific conception of Western culture dominated by naturalistic ontology. Landscape is the intermediary and more than a mere symbiosis between the two culturally constructed sides. Landscape is, like the Human, an in-between being, and both appearances can be described through the essence of the horizon, the horizon being that which is and is not at the same time: a threshold, but not a boundary.
The phenomenon of landscape manifests itself in Western culture as a political and artistic concept at a specific time, during the Renaissance, but this fact does not preclude speculating about its pre-conceptual existence. This means that, prior to any explanation of the emergence of the notion or the cultural vision of landscape, there must be an anthropological explanation of its origin, stemming from the bodily and sensory constitution of the human. Thus, it is possible to reveal the primordial character of the phenomenon of landscape through a description of the climatic and physical circumstances that occurred during the first decisive moments of humanization. It is a common assumption that the concept of landscape is a derivative of the aesthetic perception of nature and that it arises through artistic practice, drawing, and painting, and, above all, through the invention or discovery of central perspective.
This position assumes that the notion of landscape is a product or effect of the supremacy of the visual sense, that landscape is a subject of our gaze distanced from so-called Nature, from natural space, and that this distanced vision is at the same time marked by a split between the viewing subject and the viewed object. However, the perception or understanding of a landscape is always a physical experience that involves all the senses and is therefore not, in the first place, an aesthetic disposition, but an aisthetic (αἴσθησις) disposition — that is, a bodily and sensory experience of the landscape. The anthropological definition of landscape does not presuppose a prior separation between Nature and Culture, but demonstrates how landscape is a space of immanence and a between, the moment in which a truly reciprocal process occurred between the traversed and inhabited environment and the hominid inhabitant, unfolding and developing in dialectical dialogue with their technical skill.
Humans, as nomadic, bipedal beings with the full capacity to manipulate, conceptualize, and visualize phenomena, are thus inherently landscape-oriented beings — a way of life whose existential disposition is earthly, that of an itinerant inhabitant emerging from the forest into the savanna, into a landscape open to the horizon. Based on a paleoanthropological reading, the landscape is the space of humanization, the moment of the hominid body’s unfolding into technique and language, intimately linked to climatic changes during the late Miocene, the decrease in forested regions, and thus the increase in savannas. These considerations regarding the human as a landscape-dwelling being do not deny that humans developed, during their culturalization, different conceptions of landscape; yet they simultaneously uphold the conviction that humanity’s cultural heterogeneity is fundamentally grounded in the species’ homogeneity.
Another definition introduced here is landscape as theater, as a stage, though recalling that this conception is modern and analogous to the conception of the world as an image — first the static image and then the moving image. All landscapes have the Earth as their backdrop, this primordial arche, the foundation of an immeasurable totality of landscapes. The Earth, always conceived as a foundation without a foundation of its own, reveals itself only in an innumerable multiplicity of landscapes, aspects, or faces, which are in constant flux, never exactly the same, depending on the influence of cosmic, geological, biological, or, increasingly, anthropogenic forces.
Dirk Michael Hennrich