Nature As Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding

Human interaction with the natural world has created serious environmental problems. In "Nature as Landscape", Kraft von Maltzahn examines the "unnatural" relationship that has developed between human beings and nature. Drawing on evidence from philosophy and the history of science, he argues that humans have become estranged from nature and shows how this estrangement has evolved. Von Maltzahn focuses on how we experience aspects of nature in terms of their outer appearance, such as landscape, and contends that the naturalistic scientific tradition has taught us to divorce ourselves from the natural world, to become impartial observers rather than participants. He examines the nature of the human life-world and describes the process of self-deception that has led to the contemporary dismissal of that life-world as merely subjective. Drawing on phenomenology, semiotics, visual thinking, gestalt psychology, and Polyani's arguments about tacit knowing, he offers an alternative way of perceiving the natural world that would reunite humans and nature. Given the current state of the global environment, it is crucial that the debate on the relationship of human beings and nature take place on many levels.