The Contributions of Philosophy and the Social Sciences to Landscape Conflict Research—A Critical Comparison

Abstract

In recent years, the study of ‘landscape’ has gained importance in both the public and in the sciences. In philosophy and the social sciences, different traditions for dealing with ‘landscape’ have developed—not least based on a common reference point of Georg Simmel’s “Philosophy of Landscape” published in 1913. In this paper, these traditions are examined with regard to their suitability for contributing to the analysis and regulation of landscape conflicts and for providing answers to the landscape-related challenges of the present—both in terms of science and society—exemplified by the challenges of the energy transition. The central points of criticism are, besides an insufficient amount of conceptual work and a ‘forgetting of the individual’ of philosophy and the social sciences, the reduction of the concept of landscape to the concept of nature in philosophical landscape research.

1. Introduction

In the course of the energy transition, with its explicit goal of promoting ‘sustainability’, ‘landscape’ becomes an unavoidable focal point of conflicts that can be ignited by this political project and the accompanying social transformation of many areas of life. This focus on landscape concerns, on the one hand, the changes in physical space that are associated with the necessary landscape interventions and land consumption, which result in land use competitions for scarce spatial resources, and on the other hand, the resulting impairments or disruptions of familiar individual but socially mediated landscape perception patterns, all of which can lead to corresponding conflicts. This means that the inevitability of the factual–spatial as well as symbolic–aesthetic focuses of the energy transition in the focal point of ‘landscape’ inevitably leads to equally inevitable landscape conflicts.

The direct or indirect effects of climate change manifest themselves in material space, for example, in the form of changes in vegetation, the consequences of storms and droughts, or the altered flow regimes of watercourses. The differentiated measures of the energy transition are intended to counteract these effects, which threaten people, but these measures, in turn, also have spatial effects. This is expressed, for example, in the physical manifestations of efforts to reduce the consequences of anthropogenic climate change through adaptation measures or to limit them through mitigation measures. Facilities for the generation, transmission, and storage of renewable energy have a particular landscape presence. These, and other spatial material changes, are partly at odds with everyday individual perceptions of familiar landscape environments. They are also partly at odds with typical social notions of landscape that have developed, that have been handed down and updated over centuries, and that have formative effects on the individuals as a result of socialization. In this way, such landscape interventions become the occasion for manifesting latent conflicts that arise from different interpretations, categorizations, and evaluations of landscape (cf., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]). In addition, there are different scientific views on and about ‘landscape’, which have been differentiated by different scientific disciplines and have meanwhile elaborated correspondingly different facets of the concept of landscape. These views also partly conflict with the aforementioned spatial changes, for instance, with regard to vernacular landscapes, urban landscapes, or hybrid landscapes (for more detail, see [9,10,11,12]). The diversity of different scholarly understandings and interpretations of what landscape is has led not least to a number of survey publications with different disciplinary backgrounds (see, for instance, [13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]). This diversity must be taken into account when considering the ways in which the concept of landscape has a functional or dysfunctional meaning [22] in the relations of humans and society to the non-human world.

We want to deal critically with this variety of understandings of landscape—with a focus on philosophy and the social sciences (including human geography). The common starting point is Georg Simmel’s “Philosophy of Landscape”, first published in 1913, which lays the foundation for a constructivist approach to landscape. Starting from this, we will deal—along the categorial system of the three-world theory of Popper [23,24,25] and the theory of the Three Landscapes [26,27]—with the question which developments in both disciplines have taken with regard to their concepts of landscape.

A crucial aim of our article is to compare the different developments of sociological and philosophical landscape research—starting from Georg Simmel, who is equally considered a philosopher and a sociologist. In any case, we are particularly concerned with the German-speaking world. Firstly, the development of the concept of landscape here goes back to the Middle Ages and thus further back than in other languages. Secondly, this initially linguistically and culturally bound everyday concept of landscape was ‘stylized’ into a scientific concept of landscape and exported from the German-speaking world around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century and became a widespread internationally used term, which was then re-imported from the Anglo-Saxon into the German-speaking world [1,28,29,30,31]. In contrast to German, the English concept of landscape is clearer because it exclusively has subjective aesthetic connotations, whereas the German concept not only addresses the aspect of contemplation (subject), but also becomes an object of contemplation itself. For this reason, landscape philosophy as a form of reflection on an ambiguous concept of landscape is underrepresented in Anglo-Saxon literature in contrast to German literature. A comprehensive international comparison would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor but is beyond the scope of this article. The second goal is to make a basic theoretical contribution to practical problems, namely the expedient analysis and pragmatic regulation of landscape conflicts. As a meta-theoretical and multi-perspectival integrating instance of different approaches and perspectives, we rely on neopragmatism.

In Section 2, we first deal with Georg Simmel’s understanding of landscape, which is still influential for both contemporary philosophical and sociological landscape research. We then outline the current state of research in the social sciences (Section 3) and then philosophical landscape research (Section 4). The case study named “Energy Transition and Landscape Conflicts” (Section 5) addresses the problem of the self-understanding of the respective landscape concept. Afterwards, first, the blind spot of philosophy is presented (Section 6), and then the blind spot of the social sciences (Section 7) is presented with regard to the contribution of both sciences to the practical problem of analyzing and regulating landscape conflicts. In the conclusion (Section 8), the results of the explanations are once again synthesized, and the resulting challenges for social sciences and philosophy with regard to their engagements with ‘landscape’ are formulated.

2. A Common Basis—Georg Simmel’s Understanding of Landscape

An examination of Simmel’s philosophy and sociology with regard to the topic of landscape seems relevant as a starting point for an engagement with the understandings of landscape in the social sciences and philosophy, even after far more than a century after their first publication. Thus, first, Simmel provides, with his 1913 work “Philosophy of Landscape” [32], a central basis for a paradigm shift [33] in landscape research. Secondly, he is a late representative of a separation of sociology and philosophy that has not yet been fully completed. Third, he deals not least in his work “Soziologie der Sinne” (English: “Sociology of the Senses”) [34], as well as in his work “Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung” (English: “Sociology. Investigations on the Forms of Socialization”) [35] with the various senses of humans and, in particular, their social significance. Fourth, Simmel’s approach is strongly phenomenological, drawing attention to the experience of spaces as landscapes (for more detail on this topic, see [36]). This facilitates the return to a common basis in the humanities, beyond cognitivist and empiricist approaches, which characterizes landscape research in the natural sciences. It also reaches beyond, as in quantitative social research or even spatial planning (this will be discussed in more detail later).

The text “Philosophie der Landschaft“ (English: “Philosophy of Landscape”) [32] can be described as a turning point both in Simmel’s reference to landscape and in landscape research in general [37]. “Philosophy of Landscape” differs fundamentally in terms of its understanding of landscape from the text “Florenz”/“Florence” that was published seven years earlier [38]. While the latter is still characterized by an ontologizing understanding of landscape, Simmel emphasizes the constructedness of landscape in “Philosophy of Landscape”. With this, he clearly sets himself apart from the scientific mainstream of his time, which is focused on fathoming the ‘essence of landscape’ (see, for example, [36,37,38]). In “Philosophy of Landscape”, Simmel understands landscape as an aestheticizing synopsis of objects whose guidance is traced back to painting [32] (p. 12). The conventions of the synopsis—founded in painting—are, in turn, the subject of a process of mediation [39]. In this process of mediation, the individual is introduced into the social stock of knowledge about ‘landscape’, whereby this introduction takes place in a culturally and socially differentiated manner, as is already clear in Simmel’s work: “Landscape, we say, comes into being in that a juxtaposition of natural phenomena spread out on the ground is combined into a special kind of unity, one other than that to which the causally thinking scholar, the religiously feeling nature worshipper, the teleologically directed arable farmer or strategist embraces precisely this field of vision” [32] (p. 18). For Simmel, moreover, the aesthetic synopsis of ‘things’ is closely tied to their naturalness, a circumstance that can be singled out as the central problem of the philosophical concept of landscape. In Simmel’s understanding of landscape, therefore, two lines of tradition are already laid out, which were subsequently pursued separately by the social sciences and philosophy: while the social sciences were concerned with the question of the (especially social) construction of landscape, philosophy followed the line of tradition of understanding landscape as (in some way) nature and its design. These two strands can be seen as ‘two sides of the same coin’ [19].

3. The Social Construction of Landscape—Aspects of Social Science Landscape Research

Simmel’s constructivist understanding of landscape currently represents the dominant theoretical conception of landscape on the one hand; on the other hand, current research extends beyond Simmel’s work in some aspects. In the following subsections, we will first outline the basic assumptions of social constructivism, and then we will outline the theory of the Three Landscapes as an analytical tool to be able to more precisely elaborate on the construction processes of landscape (in comparison to space) and to classify different landscape theories.

3.1. Social Constructivism as a Basis for Social Science Landscape Research

Social constructivism is defined by two strands: the interpretive sociology of Max Weber [40] and the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl [41,42]. The connection of these two strands is particularly emphasized by Alfred Schütz [43] when he deals with the sensible construction of the social world. Schütz concludes that perception is the result of “a very complicated process of interpretation” [44] (p. 5), for which “it is true that people act toward ‘things’ on the basis of the meanings these things possess for them” [45] (p. 81). The meanings of ‘things’ arise “from the social interaction one engages in with one’s fellow human beings” [45] (p. 81), although this meaning is not stable, but reversible. Thus, “these meanings are managed and modified in an interpretive process that the person uses in his or her engagement with the things he or she encounters” [45] (p. 81).

In terms of landscape, we can deduce the following (detailed in [20,39,46,47,48,49,50]): landscape is not an objectively given object, but the result of an ongoing process of construction (in Europe since the Middle Ages, in the German-speaking part of Europe, since the early Meddle Ages). There is an individual ‘projection’ of learned patterns of interpretation, typification, and valuation into material spaces. Not only is the concept of landscape subject to change in its historical development, but also the individual construction; thus, “the naïve […] cannot see the landscape, for he has not learned its language” [51] (p. 20). Accordingly, individually, in the production of landscape, recourse is made to culturally bound, socially mediated, and time-bound typifications; after all, “we generally see only what we have learned to see, and we see it as the style of the time demands” [52] (p. 48). Thus, it becomes clear that what is understood as ‘landscape’ in general, and what is understood as ‘beautiful’ or ‘interesting landscape’ in particular, is quite contingent, dependent on social and cultural conventions. But it is also modified by individual experiences and the relation between these, as well as individual preferences.

3.2. Theory of Three Landscapes—Modes of Landscape Construction and Theory Diversity in Social Science Landscape Research

These remarks on the specificity of the social construction of reality can be translated into the theory of the Three Landscapes within the framework of social constructivist landscape theory. Karl Popper quasi-ontologically divides the world into three levels: world 1 of matter, world 2 of individual consciousness, and world 3 of knowledge and cultural content. Humans are not only composed of world 2 but are also part of worlds 1 and 3, and artifacts, such as books and buildings, can also be part of worlds 1 and 3 at the same time. The conception of world 2 is highly abstracted in this terminology; after all, there are as many different worlds 2 as there are people. Every single person (if they have a consciousness) has their own world 2. World 2 is the result of self-generation in confrontation with other parts of world 2, world 3, and world 1. But the result is also that world 2 has, in each case, a specific share in world 3, and it can only survey parts of world 1.

Landscape 3 comprises socially shared patterns of interpretation, evaluation, and categorization with reference to landscape. These are socialized to the individual landscape 2 (here, the social constructivist basic trait of the theory of the Three Landscapes, which goes beyond Popper, becomes clear), whereby innovations can reach landscape 3 from landscape 2. Based on the individual stock of social patterns of interpretation, categorization, and valuation, human beings are able to synthesize (with Simmel, or ‘look into’) landscape 1 into space 1. ‘Landscape’ also represents a subset of space at all levels (spatial objects are selected for landscape synthesis), but not every ‘landscape’ is spatial (as in metaphors such as educational landscape, religious landscape, or political landscape). Moreover, landscape is constitutively tied to level 3, whereas space is tied to level 1.

The socially and culturally differentiated knowledge about landscape is reflected in three fundamentally different modes of landscape construction: the landscape construction in mode a is that of the ‘native normal landscape’. This is constructed in childhood and adolescence, through experiences of space 1 as landscape 1, under the guidance of ‘significant others’ [53], especially members of the family. On the one hand, landscape 1 is strongly emotionally shaped, and on the other hand, it is charged with the norm of stability (especially with regard to landscape 1). A b-mode landscape construction, on the other hand, resorts to a commonsense understanding. This is mediated by school, the Internet, books, television, etc., and draws heavily on aesthetic and increasingly on ecological patterns of interpretation, categorization, and evaluation. Normatively, it is tied to the correspondence of widespread stereotypes (such as ‘the beautiful landscape’). The construction guidance of the c-mode is carried out by a professional preoccupation with landscape, which requires a relevant specialized study (of geography, biology, landscape planning or architecture, etc.). In particular, normative ideas differ significantly (subject-specifically), and fundamental understandings of landscape also differ (for example, between agricultural economics and nature conservation). The result is that—depending on the different modes, but also on individual landscape experiences—very different landscapes 1 are synthesized into the same space 1 (Figure 1).

The c-mode is characterized in a special way by the pursuit of new knowledge or the reorganization of existing knowledge (among many, [29,54,55]). Following this logic, since Simmel’s “Philosophy of Landscape”, not only has the empirically gained knowledge about ‘landscape’ increased, but also the theoretical classification of knowledge. From the essentialist striving to fathom the ‘essence of landscape’ (an overview is provided by the anthology in [56]) to the positivist approach (and especially in natural science landscape research that has been dominant until today; for example, in [57]), especially to capture landscape 1 quantitatively and empirically via already-mentioned constructivist approaches to more-than-representational approaches, landscape research influenced by the social sciences has developed (for an overview, see [13,14,15,17,18,19,20]). An attempt to synthesize these approaches was made by neopragmatic landscape research in the tradition of Richard Rorty [58,59]. In view of the complexity of the object of research, it assumes that not one theoretical perspective can comprehensively illuminate ‘landscape’. Instead, it combines—depending on the specific research question—different theories, but also methods, data, researcher perspectives, etc.; i.e., its focus is not on what separates the perspectives, but on what is complementary (for example, see [60,61,62]).

3.3. Interim Summary

From this brief summary of the current state of research, it is clear that the current social science research on landscape theory goes beyond Simmel’s work in (at least) five aspects (cf. [33]):

• The theoretical approaches to landscape have differentiated and multiplied.
• Landscape understanding at the landscape 1 level has been expanded to include old industrial landscapes, urban landscapes, urban–land hybrids, etc. (see [63,64,65]).
• Simmel’s painting analogy makes it possible to interpret landscape as a construct (landscape 3); at the same time, it complicates the access to multisensory foundations of landscape, as they are frequently addressed in social science landscape research today (see, for example, [66,67,68,69,70]).
• Simmel’s argumentation aims at a construction of landscape (as landscape 3) that presupposes an elaborated state of knowledge of art historical interpretations (today, it is institutionalized in the c-mode). The b- or a-modal reference was, on the one hand, not yet elaborated to this intensity at the time, and on the other hand, it was also not taken into account by Simmel.
• Current social science landscape research integrates the aspect of power in the development of landscapes 1, 2, and 3 (see, among many, [71,72,73,74,75,76]).
• The programs of social constructivist and phenomenological landscape research can be described as ‘two sides of the same coin’ since they focus, on the one hand, on the relations between landscape 2 and landscape 3 (social constructivism), and on the other hand, on the relations between landscape 2 and landscape 1 (phenomenology).

4. Philosophical Understandings of Landscape

Philosophical landscape research can—as mentioned above—also connect to Simmel’s work, particularly to Simmel’s understanding of landscape, not ontologically as an object, but aesthetically as ‘looked into’ material space. Like Burckhardt in the 19th century, Ritter in the 20th century derives the genesis of the aesthetic concept of landscape 3, similarly to Simmel, from landscape painting [77]. This concept of landscape painting was declared as the “pacemaker of our seeing and our landscape experience” [78] (p. 7). This is to be understood as the viewed space, and therefore in a way of a “painterly conception of a section of nature” [79] (column 16). In consequence, “Landscape is nature that is aesthetically present in the sight for a feeling and sensing observer” [80] (p. 150). Accordingly, the origin story of the aesthetic concept of landscape presupposes the separation of the aesthetically viewed space designated as ‘landscape’ from socially appropriated nature, and thus from the realm of labor and social practice. The philosophical preoccupation with the subject of ‘landscape’ in detachment from exclusively art theoretical reflections (cf. [77,81]) was only established in the 18th century. This took place within the framework of aesthetics as a newly established science in the rationalist system of sciences [82] and manifested itself in an ‘aesthetic-philosophical concept’ of ‘landscape’ [79]. Considering the integration (‘viewing together’) of elements of the perceived space by a viewing subject into ‘landscape’, explicitly named by Simmel, this concept of landscape (in the sense of landscape 3) implies, in particular, that it is decisive for philosophy, though until today, it was considered a controversial [83] (p. 21) ‘subject–object distinction’, and it can therefore serve as a guideline for the following explanations.

4.1. Object and Subject of Landscape Observation

The object of landscape observation is firstly determined in philosophical thematizations by the culturally and historically grown separation of the viewed space from the realm of labor and social practice, and secondly by the aesthetically induced equation of nature and landscape. For example, in the scientific system of the 18th century, ‘landscape’ is given a “place in the gradual formation of the understanding” [79] (column 18), in that it “‘awakens certain sensations of a moral and passionate kind’ and guides reason” [79] (column 18). Carl Gustav Carus plays a special role in the context of philosophical understandings of landscape, as he takes up and effectively develops two influential theoretical approaches. First, with his “nature-mystical conception of landscape and landscape art” [84] (p. 265), he takes up the topos of “nature as a sign script”, which was already handed down in his time [85] (p. 270), and thus interprets nature as cipher script of the divine, “as divine revelation” [86] (p. 55). With this, Carus refers, on the one hand, to the tradition of speaking of the ‘book of nature’, and on the other hand, to the later broad discussion about a ‘cipher writing’ of nature (cf. [85]). Secondly, Carus grasps ‘moods’ that show up in the landscape (in our terminology, understood as landscape 1) as objectively understood “stages of nature’s life” [86] (p. 30). Landscape as an object of observation, however, is resubjectivized when it is understood in terms of a “doctrine of signatures” that has its basis in a “communicative concept of nature” [87] (p. 122) that is to be ‘read’. This ‘reading’ points back to a conception of nature as a subject, as exemplified, for instance, in Spinoza’s work (‘natura naturans’), in Kant’s ‘unintentional technique (technica naturalis)’ [88] (p. 321) of nature or in Ernst Bloch’s concept of an ‘alliance technique’ with nature as a ‘subject’ [89], in Wolfgang Kluxen’s concept of a ‘dialogue with nature’ as a dialogue ’partner’ [90], in Gernot Böhme’s concept of ‘co-productivity of nature’ [87] (p. 74), and in the ‘actor-network theory’ [91,92,93] with technical or natural objects as ‘actants’ [94].

The subject of the landscape (2) view marks, following Gebser [95], marks the location-boundness and perspectivity of landscape observation. With Schelling, therefore, in landscape painting, “everywhere only subjective representation is possible, for the landscape has reality only in the eye of the beholder” [96] (p. 138). Correspondingly, Ernst Cassirer describes this act of constitution as an act of construction of the representation of the aesthetic space of the landscape as by no means “merely a passive reproduction of the world; rather, it is a new relationship in which man places himself to the world” [97] (p. 29). The so-called constructive ‘landscape eye’ [98] requires, for its constitution, first, a framing by an ‘image-frame’ [99,100,101], and secondly the development of the central perspective [95]. To summarize it briefly, in our terminology, landscape 1 arises in space 1 when this—interpreted as nature 1—is viewed together with the aesthetic content of landscape 3.

This oscillation between essentialist objectivism and essentialist resubjectivization can also be found in the current discussion of ‘atmospheres’, which reformulates Carus’s talk of ‘moods’ of nature in a new conceptual vocabulary and with a focus on ‘landscape’. Similar considerations can be found in the works by Hegel [99], Burckhardt [102], and Ritter [103]. Simmel considers a specific ‘mood’ to be necessary, which makes it possible, in the first place, to see “a piece of ground with what is on it, as a landscape” [104] (p. 142). Meanwhile, current discussions of the concept of atmosphere strive to mediate the subjectivist and objectivist associations of this concept (e.g., [105,106,107,108]).

4.2. Landscape as a Natural Beauty

The philosophical discourse was traditionally, and is still today, characterized, in particular, by the fact that ‘landscape’ was primarily related to ‘nature’ or the ‘natural beauty’ as an object of contemplation (cf., for example, the critiques of [109,110]). Philosophical landscape aesthetics, therefore, can essentially be traced back to the traditional question of the ‘natural beautiful’, as “God’s handwriting” [111] (p. 78) initially determines the experience of nature as the experience of God. Breaking down this religious experience and what Ritter calls ‘theoria’ [103] collapse, the natural beautiful functions as the supplementary complement to the practically and scientifically appropriated nature. Kant associates a ‘free’ with the natural beautiful, that is, “well-being independent of all interest” [112] (p. 152) or ‘free’ nature that is considered independent of all interest. Hegel orders the natural sublime, in contrast to Kant, who describes it as the triumph of reason over a culturally enclosed nature [88], to the ‘symbolic art form’ as a past and obsolete human relation to nature, since nature is, by now, completely culturally appropriated. The natural beauty merely represents a “reflex of the spirit” [113] (p. 2). It does not indicate an ‘objectively’ existing quality of nature, but a way of nature’s fulfillment by humans.

This supposed loss of the substrate (in our terminology, space 1) of aesthetic landscape (in our terminology: landscape 3) also led to demands for nature conservation in philosophy in the 20th century [87,103,114,115,116]. Previously, in the 19th century, in German-speaking countries, the consequences of industrialization for the native nature and landscape already led to demands for homeland protection; nature protection can therefore also be understood as a continuation of the tradition of homeland protection (cf. [117,118,119,120]). If the difference between socially appropriated nature (urban and agricultural) and free nature (aesthetic landscape) is supposedly leveled by such developments [103,121], and nature or landscape can possibly only be perceived instrumentally [86], then the ‘end of the aesthetic category landscape’ has to be proclaimed [122]. Adorno rejects nature conservation because the beauty of nature is subject to the “totality of the principle of exchange”; therefore, nature becomes “a nature conservation park and an alibi”, and ultimately, an “ideology” [123] (p. 107). Non-philosophers, such as the geobotanist Hansjörg Küster, criticize the confusion of nature conservation with landscape conservation based on the philosophical heritage [124,125,126]; the vegetation expert Stefan Körner accuses Piepmeier and his adepts of a ‘category mistake’ [127], namely to reify “the aesthetic and symbolically charged category landscape” to “an ecological real object” [128] (p. 22).

4.3. Urban Landscape and Landscape Design

Recently, the interpretation of a city as a landscape has also been seen and reflected upon accordingly, and suggestions have been made to release the traditional aesthetic concept of landscape from its separation from social practice and to reintegrate it into social practice within the framework of the concept of landscape design. Even independently of the empirical abolition of the separation of city and countryside through developments at the level of world 1 [129,130,131,132,133,134], ‘city’ as part of world 1 can be seen as landscape 1. Philosophical reflections on this aspect can already be found in Benjamin’s recourse to Baudelaire with the figure of the ‘flâneur’, who, like a walker in the landscape, can also move in the city (cf. [79], column 27); in the work by Martin Seel, who describes the “model of nature” as “the model of the aesthetic city” [135] (p. 232); and in the work by Gernot Böhme, who identifies “the city itself as nature” [87] (p. 71) and understands nature aesthetics as a “part of ecology” [87] (p. 74). Böhme also thematizes nature as a “social product” that is “dependent on ideas for design” [87] (p. 74). This aspect of design was already discussed before Böhme by Lucius Burckhardt [110] and Joachim Ritter [103]; landscape design should reintegrate ‘nature as landscape’ into the “horizon of society” [80] (p. 190). In this way, the historically inherited concept of the ‘aesthetic landscape’ can open up to philosophical approaches of other kinds, such as ecological, social, constitutional–theoretical, or other questions, in addition to an aesthetic approach. This is a complementary relationship, and not a substitute relationship.

4.4. Interim Summary

Currently, it can be noted that little attention is paid to landscape in philosophy and landscape aesthetics, with occasional exceptions (for instance, [14,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145,146]). From the brief summary of the current state of research on philosophical understandings of landscape before and after Simmel, it is clear that current philosophical research goes beyond Simmel in the following aspects:

• The separation of the aesthetically viewed space designated as ‘landscape’ from socially appropriated nature (nature and landscape 3), and thus from the realm of labor and social practice, which is constitutive for the aesthetic concept of landscape, is being questioned. The current aim is to design landscape in the course of its reintegration into social practice.
• The ‘subject–object difference’ guiding philosophical understandings of landscape has recently been questioned, and attempts to overcome it have been made by the phenomenological (especially the connection between landscapes 1 and 2) or actor–network theory (combined with a dissolution of the idea of levels in favor of interacting networks).
• The discussion about ‘moods’ taken up by Simmel has recently been continued as that about ‘atmospheres’ (understood as ‘half-things’ emerging between landscape 1 and landscape 2). It is interesting to note that Simmel is already skeptical of a one-sided interpretation of ‘moods of landscape’. He points out that, since landscape is to be understood as a ‘mental entity’, ‘moods of landscape’ have both subjective ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in the sense of a ‘full objectivity’ on landscape [104] (p. 150). Thus, discussions from more than 100 years ago and long controversies that were “not always on the level of Simmel” [147] (p. 87) have led to today’s discussions about ‘atmospheres’.
• Today’s discussions lament a loss of the substrate of aesthetic landscape (as ontologization from landscape 3 to landscape 1), which has led to calls for conservation in philosophy for several decades.
• In recent decades, philosophy has tentatively and sporadically opened to issues not only of conservation, but also of ecology, urban landscape, and landscape design (integration of the topos of other c-modal landscape 3 understandings).
• Beyond Simmel, the city can now also be seen as a c-modal landscape construct in philosophy.

Philosophy has meanwhile fallen behind the social sciences, which is disadvantageous from a scientific perspective, since social sciences also feed on philosophical categories, which, in the case of the topic of ‘landscape’, have not been further developed or reformulated according to the requirements of the time for decades.

5. Relevance of Philosophy: The Example of Energy Transition and Landscape Conflicts

In the following paragraphs, conflicts in the context of the energy transition, which revolve around all three landscapes in the sense of the Three Landscape theory, are presented as examples of the need for philosophical reflection on different landscape concepts and their uses. This means that our aim is merely to illustrate the need for a contemporary philosophical approach to the concept of landscape, and not to review the extensive literature on the subject of landscape conflicts or to present efforts to regulate conflicts.

The energy transition is associated with numerous material manifestations in space 1, interpreted as landscape, which, in large parts, contradict the a-, b-, and c-modal landscape norms. They contradict the a-modal norm of the stability of the structures of landscape 1, and they contradict classical landscape aesthetic b-modal ideas, although they can correspond to the ecological part of b-modal landscape ideas. They also contradict c-modal ideas if these follow, for example, the paradigm of the ‘preservation of historical cultural landscape’ or the special protection of species, which correspond to the c-modal norms to landscape if these are aligned to the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change [148,149,150].

Here, the initial situation of space 1, where the plants are built, is synthesized as completely different versions of landscape 1 (Figure 2), as studies based on discourse theory, in particular, have shown [151,152,153,154,155]. Thus, a full geomorphological form primarily covered with spruce trees becomes—depending on the perspective—either an ‘ecologically valuable and beautiful forest on a hill shaping the identity of the village community, the essence of which is destroyed by wind turbines’, or an ‘ugly forest with copes untypical of the location on an elevation away from the village, which can only be symbolically evaluated by wind turbines’. At this point, it becomes clear how mutual ideological criticism clashes with each other, and other forms of criticism hardly have a chance to be carried out. For these reasons, conflict regulation in the sense of Dahrendorf [156], or ‘dissent management’, as Hubig [157] describes, or ‘conflict management’, is necessary (see [158]).

When dealing with landscape conflicts, a central problem of landscape research becomes clear from the brief description above. In the self-understanding of one’s own respective concept of landscape, alternative landscape concepts are evaluated (especially c-modal) as deviating from normality; this becomes especially explosive in conflict situations. The consequence is that people use the same word but associate a completely different concept with it. In conflict situations, which tend to dichotomize, the large ‘semantic yard’ is transformed [159] into an archipelago of disjunctive landscape terms with claims to generalization. In this process, the bearers of a- and b-modal landscape terms especially engage in a struggle for recognition. The lack of conceptual clarity in the understanding of landscape in the German-speaking world is particularly topical due to the (generally unexplicit) understanding of landscape as both a material object (landscape 1) and as an aesthetic or ecological normative construct (landscape 3).

These results of social science landscape research also reveal the ‘blind spot’ of social science research, because although it can empirically investigate the different uses of the word ‘landscape’ in connection with different terms and (neopragmatically) classify them into different theory complexes, it lacks the instruments of conceptual critique for working on the different terms, which, in turn, philosophy has at its disposal.

6. The Blind Spot of Philosophy: Nature as a Necessary but Not Sufficient Basis for Landscape

The idea that the concept of landscape should not be understood simply as a subset of the concept of space has already been discussed in Section 3.2 and is illustrated in Figure 1 graphically. In Figure 3, we illustrate that the concept of landscape should not be understood as a subset of the concept of nature, which we will justify in more detail below.

Like the concept of landscape, that of nature is one that cannot be obtained from pure contemplation, but it arises from the relationalization of simple and other complex concepts. This requires a short explanation of our understanding of the relation of concepts: Preconceptually, we understand sensory sensations, such as the sensations of hardness, coldness, smell, and so on. Once these are linguistically grasped, simple concepts emerge. These simple concepts are the result of the body-mediated experience of world 1 through world 2 on the basis of language socialized from world 3. In this respect, these simple concepts are already influenced by world 3. The influence of world 3 becomes greater when concepts are formed from the linguistic version of sensory perceptions that are more synthetically oriented, for example, when a stone, a flower, or a building is generated within the consciousness from the synthesis of optical and haptic stimuli against the background of what has been learned. Here, the world 1 reference is still strongly present. The concept becomes more complex when further syntheses are formed from these syntheses that are directly related to objects of world 1. Here, the influence of world 3 is even stronger, as with the concept of landscape; here, a synthesis of already synthesized objects (and constellations of objects) emerges, like how individual trees (usually standing alone) are used to synthesize ‘landscape’ using the conventions of world 3, but also a ‘forest’ (which already represents a synopsis of trees). A complex concept emerges from the synthesis of a simple concept. Even further from world 1, abstract concepts can be understood, and these can be conceived as concepts about concepts. These abstract concepts are concerned, for example, with how landscape 2 emerges from understandings of landscape 3. Space 1 being synthesized as landscape 1 is incidental to this. This level of abstraction can be understood as the level of theories. Further abstracted, and thus even further removed from world 1, the level of theories about theories (such as the philosophy of science) can be classified, increasing the abstraction—and thus the importance of world 3—here, and then especially in c-modal mode. The a-modal access is found especially at the level of simple to complex concepts, and the b-mode is especially found at the level of complex concepts and (popularized) theories. The concept of landscape draws its contingency not least from the fact that it primarily addresses complex and abstract approaches. It also reaches out from preconceptual sensory perceptions to theory via theories (as a result of the increase in landscape theories), and in doing so, it resorts to a-, b-, and c-modal patterns of interpretation, categorization, and evaluation to varying degrees of intensity (Figure 4).

Accordingly, it can be stated that the concept of landscape is not based on the simple experience of world 1 but emerges in the interplay of world 3 and world 2. This result is then projected into space 1 under the synthesis of syntheses. Just as landscape—beyond world 2—should not be conceived merely as a conceptual subset of space, neither should landscape be conceived as a conceptual subset of nature, even though this is widespread in philosophical conceptualization, as discussed in Section 4 (depicted in Figure 3). There are different reasons for conceptualizing the notions of nature and landscape in the same way (rather than subordinating the notion of landscape to that of nature), As explained, landscapes are understood as nature–culture hybrids in the current c-modal discussion, which also describes urban spaces as urban landscapes. Also, the concept of nature clearly reaches beyond that of landscape, for instance, when speaking of ‘inner nature’ (nature 1), which is a topos that is especially common in critical theory when speaking of the alienation of humans from ‘inner’ and ‘outer nature’ (nature 1) [160,161]. In contrast, as already discussed in Section 4, the concept of landscape certainly includes aspects that can hardly be grasped as ‘nature’, such as the metaphorical meanings of ‘party landscape’, ‘religious landscape’, or ‘educational landscape’. Here, the semantic meaning of the suffix ‘-schaft’ or ‘-scape’ in Germanic languages becomes clear, aiming at the mutual relatedness of elements, as is also evident from words such as ‘Mannschaft’ (English: team, crew, squat) or ‘Vorstandschaft’ (English: executive board; on the etymological conceptual understanding of landscape, see [27,28,29,30,31,77,162,163,164]). Furthermore, with the development of virtual and augmented worlds, the possibility has arisen to expand the framework of contingency with respect to the construction of landscape (see, among many, [165,166,167,168,169]), an extension that would be difficult to derive from an understanding of ‘landscape’ as a subordinate subset of ‘nature’. Accordingly, landscape cannot be fully derived from nature, but it can be shown that nature is a prerequisite for landscape to emerge in the gradative process of reflection. From this course of reflection, it emerges that landscape has an ordering function: it is “an institution that makes nature available for the socially living human being” through “order” [170] (p. 16). However, this organizing function does not guarantee that conflicts will not arise, for example, in the context of the energy transition and in the pursuit of sustainability goals. It is precisely the ‘distance’ of the different landscape constructions and their degrees of abstraction from nature as something supposedly original that promotes the emergence of conflicts due to the lack of a common starting point.

7. The Blind Spot of the Social Sciences—Landscape 2 as a ‘Site’ of Extra-Scientific Expectations and Conflicts

Landscape 2 is of great importance, because landscape 2 does not only represent the link between landscapes 1 and 3, but also world 2, and thus, landscape 2 is—as Popper repeatedly states—also constitutive for the relations between the worlds. Precisely, the preoccupation with world 2 (concretized: landscape 2 and nature 2), however, remains underrepresented in the social and spatial science approach to landscape. This central position of landscape 2 concerns the expectations of individuals, groups, organizations, or interest groups towards science and landscape conflicts, such as conflicts around the energy transition, which are carried out by individuals.

In terms of the philosophy of science, relevant to an analysis and regulation of conflict is the insight that contextualizing the reflection of science in relation to society has become increasingly important [171]. With an understanding of the transition from ‘mode 1’ to ‘mode 2’ that Latour [92] (p. 31) understood as the transition from science to research, a greater overprinting of ‘philosophy of science’ by ‘sociology of science’ also took place. Gibbons et al. [172] and Nowotny [173] state that, with the transition from mode 1 to mode 2a, there is a fundamental epistemological shift that moves away from the exploration of laws of nature (but also the development of basic theories) and moves towards ‘socially robust knowledge’ in interdisciplinary contexts of application (cf. also [174]). This example illustrates the expansion of a social scientific interpretation of the world over a philosophical one, which is also found in the context of landscape research. Landscape research (here, the social scientific and philosophical research) therefore cannot escape the demands of mode 2 science but is confronted with its challenges. Accordingly, the production of scientific knowledge (here, on landscape) is no longer discussed in terms of the theory of science (for example, in the sense of critical rationalism), but takes place from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and science along the lines of the questions of under which social conditions and in which organization of scientific work (socially) robust knowledge is produced; here, it is discussed in relation to landscape (more detail in [171]).

An important gap in such a sociological approach to landscape, however, is the lack of conceptual acuity; after all, the goal of sociological research is to investigate the social construction, meaning, and use of ‘landscape’, and not conceptual critique. This, however, is a core task of philosophy. However, since Simmel’s derivation of landscape from nature, as shown, philosophy has limited itself in terms of conceptual development. Thus, it has hardly become capable of connecting and speaking in the discussion about the meaningfulness of the differentiation between cultural and natural landscape, (also) because its concept of landscape was one-sidedly bound to nature. The same applies to the discussions about the hybridization tendencies of urban and rural versions of landscape 1, the experience of sublimity of old industrial landscapes, or—as the case study could show—the consequences of the energy transition for landscapes 1, 2, and 3.

A description of the philosophical relevance for the sociological determination of landscape 2 can be prepared by the determination of the aspect of nature in the three worlds. ‘Nature 1’ in ‘world 1’ is the animate and inanimate matter, a being in itself, that which is abruptly present for humans, and that which is opposed to a person as a senseless world of the senses, but this is not radically exclusive, for through their body, a human is always already involved in nature and in its eternal cycle of becoming and passing away as well as in its natural causality [115]. At this stage, a human does not yet ascribe to themself nature as recognized nature, that is, they do not yet place themself in a self-relation to nature (cf. [175], §5). With reference to Figure 3, the quality of this reference to nature can be grasped as a preconceptual attention to the world. At the level of ‘world 2’, that is, of individual consciousness, it is to be asked how and as what ‘nature 2’ manifests itself in individual consciousness and whereupon this then develops in the exit from the consciousness of ‘world 2’ to ‘world 3’. An important role is played here by the “existential experience” [135] (p. 303) of the individual in relation to nature. At this stage, however, human beings also become aware of his urgent need for nature as the other of reason. Nature is not only a necessary medium for survival in terms of food and shelter, but it is, above all, a necessary medium for a person’s self-formation. In order to determine oneself, a person needs the demarcation from something that one is not oneself. In the transition from ‘world 2’ to ‘world 3’, the experienced and individually nameable natural phenomenon in ‘nature 3’ acquires conscious meaning for the understanding of well-being and meaning constitution with reference not only to oneself, but above all, to society. Accordingly, the transition from ‘nature 2’ to ‘nature 3’ involves key political and cultural issues that can be addressed less through philosophical discussions of nature than through a formative engagement with nature according to appropriate social purposes. This includes nature composed with knowledge or according to the purposes of reason, which is now called landscape. The gradation of worlds 1–3 shows that only on level 3 there can be an awareness that there is a before and after of the individual experience of nature and that nature advances to landscape as a result of knowing accesses. Landscape (on all levels) thus has meanings for humans [176] (p. 100), which are generated interculturally. These meanings may or may not be derived and interpreted properties of nature. Moreover, at level 3, the “conditions of the possibility of experiencing nature” that were merely lived at level 2 but not yet sufficiently known [175] (p. 54) are reflected anthropologically and theoretically, aesthetically and symbolically, epistemologically, and ethically and religiously [177]. On this level, moreover, “nature can be evaluated as a critical category” that serves as a “corrective to an alienated society”, and in Bloch’s sense, “as a pretense […] of a utopian world” (cf. [89] (p. 70); [178];). This would not yet be a philosophy of landscape, but at least a border between nature and landscape would be drawn, in which it is seen how nature can be used for the education of man, and through this motivated access to nature, an approach to landscape could be derived for philosophy.

The philosophical relevance for the socio-scientific determination of landscape 2 is thus as follows: the blind spot of the factually and descriptively oriented socio-scientific determination of landscape (in our terminology, landscape 3) can be addressed by means of philosophy above all with the property–theoretically determined intensity of the experience of nature and with the awareness of the existential significance of nature for the self-objectification of the individual. For the social sciences, it is true that manifold and very concrete theories and characterizations of landscape 3 especially fall under them. Their disadvantage, however, is that they are not subject to an ordering framework and are therefore negotiated more or less next to each other instead of referring to each other. Philosophy does have such an ordering framework, but it, in turn, has its content—not so much that concerning nature, but above all, that concerning landscape—mediated by the social sciences. Thus, order and content are opposed to each other. Ideally, therefore, a sufficient knowledge of landscape at all would presuppose a mutual complementation of philosophy and the social sciences. For the relation of order or form and content, this means that the order mediated by philosophy and the social sciences are each assigned their own places in the whole of the relational structure of the knowledge of landscape in all of its analogies and differences, particularities and dependencies, etc. Habermas calls this an assignment of place [179] through which the representatives of the individual social–scientific theories can better understand themselves in view of their whence and whereto (definitio and destinatio). Philosophy, on the other hand, would first of all build up and then sharpen its own concepts of landscape via the inductive procedure and the associated derivation of categories, the disclosure of structures, strategies and methods, etc., of landscape determination from the content-rich social–scientific knowledge of landscape (in our terminology, landscape 3), in which it gives the factually found knowledge of the social sciences a superordinate order. The metatheoretical achievement that philosophy would have to perform would be, as Mittelstrass puts it, to give the available knowledge of the social sciences an orientation knowledge of philosophy [180]. According to Mittelstrass, “the rationality that modern developed societies need, do not only have [to] solve problems of Can but also problems of Ought” [180] (p. 37). This is precisely the core competence of philosophy: its “objects […] have […] orienting dimensions” [180] (p. 38). With regard to the potential for conflict, this orientation function of philosophy means that its potential for orientation must flow profitably into the productive settlement of conflicts.

8. Conclusions

Landscape is a complex concept, which is constitutively linked to social and cultural knowledge (landscape 3), which is selectively and individually actualized (landscape 2) in order to be synthesized into material spaces such as landscape 1. In the German-speaking world, in particular—the subject of this article—these three dimensions are not differentiated in everyday language nor generally in academic language. Thus, ‘Landschaft’ is understood to be both an object and an aesthetic and ecological construction. In this respect, social science landscape research in Germany, in particular, has been concerned in recent years with the differentiated investigation of various conceptual dimensions and their social consequences. This essay is an expression of this concern and illustrates the problems that an inadequate conceptual definition of ‘landscape’ can have—also against the background of sustainable development.

There are two key problems that are particularly evident in the development of landscape conflicts: First, the word ‘landscape’ is conceptualized in widely varying ways. The concepts of landscape usually remain unreflective, both pre-scientific and scientific. Thus, one’s own concept is assumed to have a ‘normal’ position, often assigning a universal validity that is frequently (implicitly) grounded in essentialist residuals. Second, ‘landscape’ is highly charged not only with aesthetic norms but also with moral norms. This is a key distinction of ‘landscape’ from ‘space’, which has a more descriptive or analytical meaning. This also becomes clear in the case study (Section 5) on the expansion of renewable energies: the different parties to the conflict each assume the normative normality of their own understandings of landscape. In a-mode, this can concern the stability of landscape 1, and in b-mode, this can concern its preservation or development towards stereotypical aesthetic or ecological norms. However, this can also concern differentiated c-modal approaches, which—depending on the professional perspective, for example, from cultural landscape conservation to climate protection—can turn out very differently. The importance of conceptual work is illustrated in Figure 5. All stages of scientific work, from data, to methods, to methodological considerations, to theories, to the philosophy of science, to epistemology spanning scientific work, are dependent on concepts. If these remain unreflected, the pyramid falters.

The challenge for a reformulation of philosophical concepts of landscape is fivefold: First, it is necessary to remove the traditional link between the concept of landscape and the concept of nature in order to gain access to the current understandings of landscape—not only from the social sciences. Second, the different concepts of landscape, not only in the social sciences, but also in the landscape-related sciences, as well as in the everyday world (a-modal and b-modal), have to be critiqued with regard to meaning, normative content, and (potential) effects. Third, a comparison is needed regarding the complementarity and incommensurability of these terms, which, fourth, could lead to landscape in a meta-theoretical understanding. Fifth, a (complementary) concept of landscape is needed that does justice to the central position of landscape 2 in the construction of landscape, which, however, has hardly been taken up theoretically to date. Philosophy is the discipline predestined for such a task, since it is not focused on landscape 1, like the natural sciences, and not on landscape 3, like the social sciences. From this enumeration, it becomes clear that a neopragmatic meta-theoretical framing is particularly suitable for such an undertaking, since it is oriented, on the one hand, to the multiperspectivity and complementarity of theories and concepts, and on the other hand, to the (also practical) fitness of concepts and theories.

What is required of philosophy is a logic of coordination under which the knowledge of individual theories of the social sciences can be integrated into a dynamic epistemology without being reduced to universal truth. The aforementioned logic must also be expressed in a form that can allow for chance in relation to the multiplicity of possibilities of conflicts and their solutions. Accordingly, the order to be established by philosophy would be an open order in the sense of Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom [58,181].

Another deficit of landscape research (here, especially of a social scientific and philosophical kind, but that also concerns the spatial sciences) is—as shown in this article—the extensive exclusion of world 2 (here, referred to as landscape 2, resp., nature 2). To remedy this deficit, a theoretical approach centered on world 2 (here, landscape 2 or nature 2) is necessary. Given the importance of the individual in the constructions of world, space, landscape, and nature, this could be understood as ‘individual constructivism’. While Simmel, in his work “Philosophy of Landscape” (German: ‘Philosophie der Landschaft’), first published in 1913 [32], only focuses on world 3 and constructivism, in particular, on the connection between world 2 and world 3, Popper generally opens up the focus on world 2. This research gap can be used in landscape research, insofar as it concentrates primarily on world 1 and world 3.

The need for such access arises for four reasons:

(a)

Social conflict has a recursive feedback loop with personal conflict awareness (different versions of world 2).

(b)

Only the individual consciousness is able to experience world 1 and space 1 as a result of its bodily embedding in order to construct landscape 1 and nature 1 in it. Only world 1 is—bodily mediated—able to ensure a preconceptual access to the world, which is the basis of every abstraction.

(c)

Every concept formation is thus constitutively bound to the individual consciousness (world 2). Although this takes place on the basis of social conventions, these concepts are nevertheless individually verifiable with regard to their suitability for all three worlds.

(d)

Individual consciousness (world 2) alone is capable of answering the three Kantian questions, “What can I know?”, “What should I do?”, and “What may I hope?” [182] (p. 25) in all three worlds. As is well known, these three questions coincide in a fourth question: “What is human?” [182] (p. 25). This question names the anthropological aspect of the previous considerations, insofar as the question of ‘human’ traditionally falls into anthropology, as a human is fundamentally distinguished by being able to ask about oneself, their origins and future, their goals and purposes, obligations and imperatives, as well as hopes and prospects (for example, for works introducing anthropology, see [183,184]).

According to these considerations, the individual constructivist approach would have to ask for the meaning of the phenomena of landscape 2 for the subjective constitution of the individual on the neopragmatic foundation of the order of social scientific individual theories and their materials. This could help to extend the meaning of the phenomena of landscape 2 beyond Kant’s initial question of “what can I know?” to the levels of the follow-up questions of “what should I do?” and “what may I hope?” Thus, the target of the ‘orientation knowledge’ (‘Orientierungswissen’) to be obtained through philosophy would be reached.

As Section 2 and Section 3 have shown, the programs of social constructivist and phenomenological landscape research could form a starting point for the development of an individual constructivist theory of landscape in order to meet the demands of a landscape theory that is constitutively oriented towards landscape 2. This is necessary, with regard to the social constructivist basis, to elaborate the innovative relations of landscape 2 to landscape 3 more strongly, and with regard to the phenomenological approach, to differentiate the constructedness of landscape 1 more strongly from the experience of space 1.

With a view to the three decisive dimensions of sustainability—ecology (nature), economy (economy), and social (society)—a primary world 1, world 2, and world 3 relationship can be differentiated, accentuated, and integrated. What is required is a world 1 and landscape 1 sensitivity to natural (physical–material, spatial) conditions, a world 2 and landscape 2 sensitivity as a freedom sensitivity for the ability to connect to the personal freedom of actors, and a world 3 and landscape 3 sensitivity to socially anchored and orientation-creating values, norms, institutions, supra-individual regulations, customs, and traditions in communities, groups, organizations, social subsystems, etc. This may also be seen as a contribution to resolving conflicts between the demands of the three world references.