The Philosophy of Landscape

In this piece, Simmel examines the underdeveloped vitalist aspect of his wurk through a series of reflections on the way landscape, as both a unity experience of nature and as an aesthetic form, is produced by the human gaze out of impressions of discrete objects of nature. In tills process, Simmel suggests that the life that pulsates through our perceptions tears itself away from the homogeneity of nature. The artist, Simmel claims, delineates one part of the stream of nature and conceives and forms it as a unitary phenomenon and as such the landscape is the work of art in statu nascendi. Simmel concludes the piece with a discussion of the significance of 'mood' in relation to the perception of landscape.