This post differs from all my others because it consists simply of extracts relating to place and landscape that I have taken from Eric Dardel’s 1952 book L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique (Man and the Earth: The nature of geographical reality). It has no images. It does, however, offer what I consider to be valuable insights into the phenomenological foundations of geography, place and landscape. These directly informed my book Place and Placelessness, and have permeated much of my subsequent writing.

I have recently posted a translation of Chapter One of Dardel’s book on Academia.edu. This chapter is about ‘Geographical Space,” and because the book only has two chapters my translation covers about half of it. I have not translated the second chapter, which is on the History of Geography.

In this post the first two items on ‘Geographicality’ are a précis of several sections of Dardel’s book and they are almost entirely in my words. However the items on Landscape, and on Existence and Geographical Reality, are mostly taken directly from my translation of Dardel’s book, and are, in effect, quotations though I have not used quotation marks. What I have done is to omit long discussions about examples that support his arguments, and selected statements that might be of some value to those interested in place or landscape. If you want to cite something from these two items you should acknowledge them as: Eric Dardel, L’Homme et la Terre: Nature de la Réalité Géographique Presses Universitaires de France, 1952, as translated by Edward Relph, 2022.  

Geographicality versus geometric space
Dardel’s premise is that before and behind all objective, formal and scientific accounts of the world, including those of academic geography, there lies the curiosity and wonder of direct, unmediated experience. For Dardel these beforehand experiences constitute a relationship that he calls “geographicality” (géographicité in French) that binds us to the Earth and the world. It is how we encounter what he refers to as “the Earth” which for Dardel is synonymous with “geographical reality’, and equivalent to what is often simply referred to as ‘the world.”

Geometric space and the space of atlases is “homogeneous, uniform, neutral.” However, the space of geographicality is everywhere differentiated because human initiative gives to each place a distinctive appearance and its own name. It involves a sort of complicity of existence that is expressed in curiosity about places, landscapes and environments. Geographicality involves a mix of perceptions, emotions, our bodies, habits, mobility, that are so taken for granted they are mostly overlooked or forgotten in much the same way that we forget our own physiology. Yet it is there when we contemplate the ocean, enjoy walking in a forest or down a picturesque street, look out over a landscape from a scenic viewpoint, get annoyed by some new development that seems out of context, or admire spring blossoms. It is, Dardel suggests, mostly “hidden yet ready to reveal itself,” something that happens, for instance, when we have to move away from a place we love or through some exceptional environmental experience.

Space in Geographicality
The ways we encounter the world are colored by what Dardel describes as the spaces of geographicality. Space here means almost something like ‘atmosphere’ and the ones he identifies are material, telluric, aquatic, aerial, and built, all of which interact in diverse ways in our experiences of places and landscapes.  

• material space is filled with mountains, rivers, oceans, cities, with distances and directions; it welcomes or challenges human freedom; it is somewhere we can get lost in or find ourselves. I think of it as the space of the surface of the earth as we see it or move across it.
• “telluric” means originating in the earth. Telluric space has density and depth, it provides a foundation for human existence. “Granite is the fundamental substance,” wrote Hegel in his Philosophy of Nature. “The rock stands firm against tempest and erosion; it is unshakeable, unalterable, like the very seat of the world.” We experience telluric space in the sheer mass of  mountains, in canyons, quarries, cliffs, caves, almost anywhere bare, solid rock is exposed.
• aquatic spaces of lakes, rivers, the ocean, are always in motion, often gentle, sometimes still and like a mirror but mostly flowing, and occasionally violent and tempestuous in floods and storms. Telluric space provides a foundation; aquatic space has power to erode, and change.       
• the space of air is atmospheric, “invisible yet always present, permanent yet changing, imperceptible but pulled about by the wind as though insignificant,” varying according to time of day, the season and climate and therefore modifying the geographicality of other spaces.
• Built or constructed spaces are all those those made by people, including fields, terraces, roads, and the range of dwelling places from villages to cities. These differ in their qualities and meanings, constituent, enduring, casually accepted, almost unconscious elements that frame everyday life. Built environments, whether roads or towns or transmission towers on mountain tops, given definition to material space, can rearrange and give meaning to aquatic space, and create their own horizons and atmospheres.

Landscape
The constant interactions of the forms of geographical space are manifest in landscape. Something more than a juxtaposition of picturesque details, landcape is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived-moment. There is an internal bond, an ‘impression’, that unites all its elements. It implicates the totality of what it is to be human and our existential attachment to the Earth, our original geographicality, because the Earth is the foundation and the means of our accomplishments. Landscape is a presence that can be attached or estranged, and yet which is lucid in the way it affects our bodies and minds.

Landscape is not a closed circle but an unfolding that opens beyond what can be seen. … a glimpse of the entire world because geographicality is written in the landscape as an expression of humanity, of how we search for identity and our personal and social intentions. Landscape, in its essence, is not made to be looked at but is rather the insertion of people into the world, a place of life’s struggles, the manifestation of personal and social being. For instance, there are regions of slow death, such as North-East Brazil, where famine imposes its dismal presence on the entire landscape. “Death dominates all the North-East. It is always present. It floats over the landscape. It becomes part of life” (Josue de Castro, Geography of Hunger, p.149). A truth of the landscape stands out not as a geographical theory, nor even as some aesthetic value, but as an expression of existence. It tells of a world in which human existence has been realized in distinctive and circumspect ways.

Existence and Geographical Reality
Geography is not initially a form of knowledge; geographical reality is not at first an ‘object’; geographical space is not a blank space waiting to be colored and filled in. Geographical science presupposes a world that may be understood through geographicality and also that a person may feel and know themselves to be tied to the world as a being called to understand themselves in their earthly situation.

Geographicality does not have an indifferent or detached conception of things; it has to do with what matters to me – my anxieties and concerns, my well-being, my plans, my relationships. Though it usually remains unobtrusive, more lived than expressed, for each person it involves first of all the place they are in, the places of childhood, the environment which summons them to its presence. It is the land where they walk or work, the edge of their valley or street or neighbourhood, their everyday movements across the city. It restricts and encloses life, it is a connection to the land, an horizon imposed on actions and thoughts. Color, shape, the smell of the soil and vegetation mix with memories, emotions and ideas.

Geographicality acts on us through an awakening of consciousness. Sometimes it even operates as a reawakening, as though it was already there before we are even aware of it. It is a particular way for us to be permeated by land, by sea, by distance, to be overwhelmed by mountains, and to be animated by landscape. in this there is something over which we have no control because it intervenes, usually without any awareness, into geographical experience. This enlightening (éclairage), as Merleau-Ponty has called it, can surrounds us and lead us away from the commonplace.

 It is from this ‘place’, as the foundation of our existence, that we renew our awareness of the world, and from here that we leave to confront it or to work in it. To live in a country is first of all to entrust ourselves quite literally to whatever is underneath us. To exist is, conversely, also to go away from there, from something that is deeper than our consciousness, from this foundation. This is not abstract and conceptual, but concrete. Before any choice, there is this ‘place’ that we have not chosen, where the foundations of our worldly existence and human condition establish themselves. We can change places, move, but this is still to look for a place. We need a base to set down our being and to realize our possibilities, a here from which to discover the world, a there to which we can go. Everyone has their own country and their own perspective on the world. Consider the distress of the exile or the refugee for whom their own firm foundation of being has been taken away. They may keep with them in memory some ‘objects’, such as trees, hills, houses, but it is their very subjectivity that is wounded, and no ‘reasoning’ can return to them the lost value of those ‘objects’ for they cannot set them down to establish roots. The fact of being at home exceeds any material contact with the ground, but because the Earth is the most definite yet normal aspect of being at home it is there, where the Earth is most directly implicated, that the very foundations of existence hide themselves. (Emmanuel Lévinas, D l’Existence à l’Existant, p.120).

The Earth as foundation is the advent of the subject that is basic to all consciousness becoming aware of itself. Before any objectivity the Earth blends into all consciousness, and for human beings it is that from which we emerge into being, on which we create, it is the site of our living places, it provides materials of houses, the source of suffering, and it is the Earth to which we have to adapt our intentions for building and doing.

That there is, in the final analysis something inexpressible and obscure in this fundamental relationship with the Earth was shown by Heidegger in his study The Origin of the Work of Art.  He describes the sight of a Greek temple built to overlook the sea: “The building stands as a silent presence on the rock. A human work resting on the rigid supports that the rock provides for it, although the rock by itself is just a shapeless mass piled up without purpose. It stands unshakeable in raging storms and reveals them in all their violence. The brilliance and radiance of the stone, which shines only with the gift of sunlight, gives to the day all its light, to the sky all its immensity, to the night all its darkness. The building dominates; its rigid structure makes visible the invisible space of air. Unshakeable, this building resists waves, and its silence make their roaring reverberate. In this setting the tree, the grass, the eagle and star, the snake and the cicada, take on the distinct form that is theirs, and it is then that they should appear as that which they are. This fact of clarification and opening out in totality is what the Greeks meant by the term Physis. Physis clarified that on which man lays the foundations of his habitat. We call it the Earth.” It goes without saying that in stating it this way the Earth loses its particular geographical sense and refers to the obscure depths from which all beings come into the light. Human effort in constructing a temple consists of pulling stone, shoreline and night from their apathy, from their original obscurity, without ever taking them completely away from the Earth which remains in shadow.  Human beings are involved in an incessant struggle – that between the day which gives to things a meaning and distinctiveness; and that of the night, of the “Earth,” of the depths to which all human endeavours return when they are left abandoned to become again stone, wood and metal.

Some Summary Comments
Dardel’s book is an account of the remarkable and diverse ways in which we experience the world around us when the formal concepts and theories of Geography and other sciences do not intervene. As his starting point he takes experiences of space, and space he understands not in the geometric way that has come to prevail in current geographical thought, but as the diverse and ‘colored’ spaces that are manifest in our unmediated experiences of the world around us, its materials, its depths and heights, its air, aquatic and built places. He considers how these are involved in the ways we see landscapes, and the fundamental role of the various manifestations of geographical reality for existence and being. 

            I think it is helpful to emphasise three aspects of Dardel’s argument. The first, which he mentions several times, is that these direct, often wonderful, experiences come before and lie behind formal, scientific knowledge of the world, and, though they may seem to be of less importance than that, they are in fact, to a greater or lesser degree, fundamental, inescapable aspects of everybody’s existence. And they are constantly implicated in our everyday experiences of the world.

            The second aspect, which is not apparent in the abbreviated account I provide here because I have left out all the examples Dardel uses to support his ideas, is that poets and novelists are important sources for identifying the character of experiences of the Earth and its environments because they often find words to express what we may have felt but cannot articulate well. In effect, poetry and poetic language can make our own experiences real for us.  What Dardel does for me is to clarify many of my own experiences when I go hiking in the mountains or the forest, contemplate the ocean (which happens to be at the end of the street where I live), watch the changing sky at sunset, or walk out into the teeth of a storm to feel its winds and rain. He tells me why these experiences are existential as well as aesthetic.

            The third point is that ‘the Earth’ or the world stands for everything that surrounds us – the land, farms, mountains, rivers, lakes, places and landscapes of all kinds whether cities, villages, oil fields, farms, or container ports. in short, they stand for geography in the broadest sense of the word. Although Dardel’s choice of examples, which I have omitted here, suggest a rural and romantic bias towards natural environments, there is, as he notes, really nothing romantic or sentimental in existential encounters with the places and landscapes of the Earth because these places and my encounters with them define the character of human being and existence.