Simmel and the Landscape

In his 1913 essay, ‘The Philosophy of Landscape,’ Georg Simmel was the first to characterise the modern Naturgefuhl as marking the point in history where landscape emerged as a distinct concept. Simmel emphasised that the concept’s emergence is conditional on a distance from the practical use of nature, on a contemplative relationship with nature. He juxtaposed the scientist’s, the farmer’s, and the military strategist’s interest-driven, pragmatic use of nature with the disinterested enjoyment of nature for itself, assigning an aesthetic quality to the construction of landscape, following Kant. A peculiar blind spot in Simmel’s thinking is his addition of ’the religious sentiments of a worshipper of nature’ to the list of those approaching nature in a pragmatic manner, suggesting that he failed to realise that the religious or quasi-religious contemplation of nature is no less significant than the aesthetic contemplation of it.