GEOGRAPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE

STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE

YI-FU TUAN
University of Minnesota

GEOGRAPHY, as one popular textbook puts it, is organized knowledge of the earth
as the world of man.* Phenomenology is the description and clarifying of pheno-
mena. Human nature is the object of perennial curiosity, scientific and narcissistic.
The theme of the paper is geography as the mirror for man. The approach is
phenomenological; for my purpose I take this term to mean a philosophical perspec-
tive, one which suspends, in so far as this is possible, the presuppositions and method
of official science in order to describe the world as the world of intentionality and
meaning.? Phenomenology is concerned with essences : what, for example, is the
essence of man, space, or experience?
Geography reveals man. At one level this is a commonplace fact: a wheat field
says something about economic man. But the evidence can be read more deeply.
Geography reveals deeper levels of human nature. A phenomenologist may say that
the essence of human nature is not a thing that can be uncovered by objective science
- or by pure introspection. Consider introspection: if we draw the blinds and turn
out the world so as to contemplate our inner nature, it is likely that we shall be
rewarded with mere oblivion - that is, fall asleep. Consciousness has only a ghostly
existence apart from the world, which is never entirely private. Even the fantasies of
a madman are made of elements some of which, at least, others can also perceive: to
that degree they are public and objective. Moreover, the structure of fantasy (the
way the elements are put together) can often be intuitively understood by another.
Geography, to repeat the definition, is organized knowledge of the earth as the
world of man. It needs only a slight recasting and expansion to cover my own
position: knowledge of the earth elucidates the world of man; the root meaning of
world ( w e r ) is in fact man; to know the world is to know oneself.
A specific example may clarify the position further. Consider the house as mans
environment and his world. The structure of the house obeys physical laws. The walls
have to be of a certain strength in order to rise to a certain height and bear the roof
of a certain weight. Economic constraints place limits on some aspects of the house:
for example, its size, the kinds of materials used, its site and location, Within these
physical and economic constraints the owner of the house has the freedom to establish
his world, his scale of values and meaning. He may want to do this by painting the
walls an unusual colour, by arranging the furniture geometrically and leaving the front
door always unlocked. It is of course stretching the metaphor to say that the house
is the man since a mans world is far more than his house; but we readily accept the
idea that a careful reading of the house can tell us much about the occupant -beyond
his biological and economic needs to his intentions and aspirations.
Geography mirrors man. My aim here is to develop the theme so that it is more
than a summary assertion, but not to the point where one takes up a specific house or
181
CANADIAN xv, 3, 1971
GEOGRAPHER,
182 THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER

landscape for the purpose of exemplifying a particular human state. What I attempt
in this paper at the general level may provide clues as to how one can approach and
organize the data of detailed studies: it is the bridge between the bare statement
and detailed exemplification. I shall consider five topics which are different perspec-
tives on the theme that geography mirrors man. They differ somewhat in the degree
of abstraction, and I shall proceed from the less to the more tangible compacts be-
tween man and his world. The topics can be stated briefly as follows.
First, geographical concerns reff ect fundamental human concerns and thought
patterns. The geographers ways of establishing contact with the world are au fond
of two types - two approaches to meaning that are common to humanity. Second,
and at a lower level of abstraction, I wish to consider two types of mental space,
ethnocentric and egocentric. Both strive for symmetry but in this the individual is
far less successful than the group. The individuals perception of space is strongly
influenced by the structure of his body, which is asymmetrical. This leads to the third
topic which shows how the asymmetry of the body and of egocentric space has
implications or the organization of geographic space, giving the example of back
region and front region. The fourth topic is still more specific: it illustrates how
human response to the world tends to be binary and dialectical, giving the example
of home and journey. Finally, attention is drawn to a topic of great importance
to existentialists, the question of authenticity. Clearly the experience of nature can
be examined as to authenticity no less than the relationship between man and man.

CATEGORIES OF RESPONSE : INTELLECTUAL AND EXISTENTIAL

Geographical concerns are of two types: nomothetic and ideographic. In order to

examine them from a somewhat different perspective I need to introduce two parallel
but not identical categories which, for lack of neologistic inventiveness, I shall call
environmentaIism and existentialism. Environmentalism operates in a world of
objects; existentialism in a world of purposeful beings. In geography environmentalist
thinking has traditionally sought to establish lawful relationships between physical
nature and man: at a very simple level, for example, it shows how climate affects the
slope of the roof and the orientation of windows. Although the environmentalists
questions are often naively framed and can lead to misleading conclusions, the motive
behind them is venerable: it is the search for general laws. More recently, environ-
mentalism in geography has taken the form of deIimiting the spatial-economic con-
straints on human action. Given a marketing system the marketing area must be of a
certain size and the settlements in it must display a certain hierarchical order. The
proof of the rule lies in its disobedience: thus, when ideology in Communist China
led the authorities to establish integrated economic regions greatly in excess of the
marketing areas, the venture failed.3
In the study of nature the earliest and most impressive nomothetic success occurred
in astronomy: the sun, the planets, and the distant stars were found to move in regular
orbits and appear to obey simple laws. From ancient times in the Western World,
and in other cultures as well, the cyclical motions of heavenly bodies - dramatic and
discernible to the eye -have been taken as the prime symbol for order and harmony
in the universe. Laws in astronomy which can be stated in elegant equations and
 GEOGRAPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND H U M A N NATURE 183
predict the planetary motions precisely stand for all that is virtuous in science.
Terrestrial nature, by contrast, is chaotic. Little that one can perceive reveals any
evident order. Spatial disorder is particularly prominent in physical geography:
climates are not arranged in tidy zones; water surface greatly exceeds land surface;
large land masses in the Northern Hemisphere are not balanced by continents of
comparable size in the Southern Hemisphere, as our sense for symmetry would
require; moreover, the shape of the continents defies geometric characterization;
and mountains - lacking any semblance of harmony in shape - lack, further, the
redeeming feature of being centrally placed on the continent^.^ Such imbalances
worried thinkers at one time; they still irritate. Our mind seeks to remove the irrita-
tion. One way, not a satisfactory one, is to impose a spatial symmetry on phenomena
that lack this quality. Another way is to classify the phenomena, arranging them in a
symmetrical or hierarchical order; and a third is to turn to the study of processes - that
is, to see terrestrial features as the result of the balances of forces. In recent years
geographers have sought, once again, peace of mind in the contemplation of spatial
symmetries, not in the physical features, but in the human landscape of settlements,
marketing areas, and land-use zones. A consequence of this attention to geometry is
to neglect process.
There are reasons for neglecting process. The most important is that, unlike
physical features, elements of the human landscape cannot be explained as the
product of simple sets of forces. Economic laws, postulating rational man, can inter-
pret a large part of the spatial regularities - particularly those that are more or less
stable; but they cannot explain the landscape from which the spatial regularities are
abstracted. The landscape is somewhat analogous to the interior of the house in that
its totality reveals purposes and ends that have directed human energy. The means to
the ends can be rational (though they often are not) but the ends themselves are
neither rational nor irrational: they lie in another realm of discourse - the realm of
the will and of the search for meaning. This is the existentialist realm, and the method
appropriate to it is phenomenological.
Geographers have tried to extend the environmentalist perspective - in the sense I
have given it - to the world of man, with commendable results. Together with other
scientists, geographers have greatly increased our understanding of the human con-
dition in the two aspects of fate and destiny. These are portentous words. We do
not expect to find them in science, and yet they appear in science under the guise of
deterministic and probabilistic laws, which explain every facet of the world except
the world as the sphere in which human beings establish meaning. Fate and
destiny are perennial human concerns. The landscape itself can hold no deep
interest for us unless we can discern in it the traces of fate and destiny, that is,
unless we can see in it the effects of deterministic and probabilistic laws; or unless the
landscape is - like an old letter - revelatory of the people who wrote it. At this
point I may be expected to interpret a particular landscape phenomenologically, but
this exercise must yield to my present purpose, which is to show how geography
illuminates human nature at a more general level.
The compact between man and his world is most tenuous at the level of pure intel-
lection. Geography is the act of intellection by the geographer. It is the search for
meaning by a people who happen to possess certain geographical skills. Meaning
184 LE G ~ O G R A P H ECANADIEN

implies two things. One is order or harmony. We find meaning when we can discern
order or harmony in the chaotic world of facts and remove the irritation and insecurity
that chaos generates. Meaning also implies significance: a phenomenon has meaning
because it is a sign to something beyond itself, to its own past and future, and to other
objects. The significant object or event has the seeming capacity to condense the
diverse strains of the universe into a thing within human reach. It is this attribute
which enables anyone who beholds, or participates in, a thing or event to respond to
it personally and meaningfully.
The search for a type of objective order of intellectual and aesthetic beauty and
the search for something with which we can respond personally appear to be universal
aspirations. According to L6vi-Strauss, primitive people do not seek merely an
I-thou relationship with the world that is emotionally satisfying but also knowledge
in itself - that is, the satisfaction of marshalling facts, as many as their minds
can retain without the aid of writing, into taxonomic systems. It is well known that
primitive people must have a precise knowledge of their country in order to sur-
vive; it is less well known that this knowledge extends far beyond that which is
required for mere survival.5 Again, many of us associate totemism with the mystical
and emotional bond between natural objects (animal, plant, or mineral) and kinship
units, but are less aware that totemism can also be a taxonomic device enabling the
native thinker to comprehend the natural and social universe as an organized whole.6
The totem is from one perspective a numinous object that bears close physical and
psychological affinity with a person; from another it is a unit in the natural order which
corresponds formally with a human group. Modern man responds to his world in
analogous ways. A zoologist, for example, treats his pet porpoise almost as if it were
human; yet he recognizes it also as a member of the genus Phocaena and as a mammal
related to the whale.
The geographers concerns can now be restated. Under environmentalism he
seeks meaning in order - and finds a largely determined, timeless and tidy world;
under existentialism he seeks meaning in the landscape, as he would in literature,
because it is a repository of human striving.

ETHNOCENTRIC AND EGOCENTRIC SPACES

I have broached the topic of mans need to discern order. The urge for symmetry has
promoted the myth of the southern continent, a myth that was not entirely dispelled
even by the voyages of Captain Cook; and the proven existence of Magellans Strait
has led navigators to postulate its counterpart, the Northwest Passage, in the Arctic.
Symmetry is also an expression of ethnocentrism. All people display the tendency to
organize the world around themselves. Ethnocentrism seems to be a common, if not
universal, trait. Its spatial manifestation is symbolized in cosmographic diagrams and
maps of peoples all over the world. Small non-literate communities like the Yurok
of northern California and the Ostiak of the Yenisei basin, complex civilizations like
Egypt and Greece, Persia and China, all envisaged worlds, mostly circular and in-
variably symmetrical, in which they put themselves at the centre. The archetypal
world consists of the centre, the circular land, and beyond it the unknown as repre-
 GEOGRAPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND HUMAN NATURE 185
sented by the circumambient waters. Such a diagram reflects the human need for
symmetry and self-aggrandizement. The ethnocentric world-view is a delusion but,
up to a point, it is supported by facts. The Ostiak fishermen and hunters believed not
only that they were located at the geometrical centre of the cosmos but also at its
population centre: their experience told them that fewer and fewer people could
be seen away from their own settlements. Greenland Eskimos, when they first
encountered European explorers, thought - like the Chinese emperor receiving the
British emissaries - that they had come to learn from a superior culture. A com-
munity can be more or less self-sufficient; it is therefore possible for the community
to build a world around itself without being subjected to frequent disillusioning
confrontations with reality.
Egocentrism bears obvious resemblances to ethnocentrism: the cosmographic
diagrams are, after all, conceived in the minds of individuals and are drawn by
individuals. But the differences are important, especially from the standpoint of
spatial behaviour and organization. One difference is that, however much a person
may wish to put himself at the centre of his world, he is constantly reminded of his
dependence on others. Unlike the community, no individual person can be self-
sufficient for long in all his biological, cultural, and psychological needs. Often he is
compelled to acknowledge that he stands at the periphery of anothers world. Some-
times, as in an encounter with another person, all his perspectives may be turned
inside-out. Gabriel Marcel, the French existentialist philosopher, considers these
points in his Metaphysical Diary: his reflections are worth quoting at some length.

Each of us ... becomes the center of a sort of mental space, arranged in concentric zones
of decreasing interest and decreasing adherence, and to this decreasing adherence there
corresponds an increasing non-disposability. This is something so natural that we forget
to give it any thought or any representation at all. Some of us may have happened upon an
encounter which in some fashion broke up the lines of this personal egocentric topography
... From a stranger, casually met, may come a call too strong to be resisted: suddenly all
our perspectives are turned inside-out; what seemed inseparably near is suddenly at an
infinite distance, and the distant near. Such experiences are fleeting ... yet they have this
inestimable benefit; they force us to become sharply aware of the accidental character of
what I have called our mental space. [They deprive] the distinction between the far and
the near of its qualitative value.7

BACK REGION - FRONT REGION

Symmetrical space cannot be persistently maintained about the individual for another
reason. Space is perceived through the senses: the eyes can discern objects and the
mind postulates space as their matrix and frame. At a deeper level the notion of space
is derived from the experience, beginning with infanthood, that we are free to move
the body and parts of the body. These motions give us the feel of direction, dis-
tance, and space long before we are capable of analysing them abstractly. The
instrument for perceiving the world is the body, but the body is not symmetrical. Or
rather the organs of the body visible to the naked eye have essential left-right
symmetry but not back-front symmetry. The left-right symmetry of the internal
organs is very rough: the heart is on the left side and the anatomy of the left half of
186 THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER

the brain is perceptibly different from that of the right half. Kinaesthetically, left and
right are nearly identical, and most people have to pause before they can follow
directions given in these terms, Symbolically, they are opposed: the root meaning of
left is weak and worthless, whereas that of right is straight, upright, and
regal. The right side is the side of honour. There exists a rich and esoteric litera-
ture that interprets the symbolism of right and left in different cultures.
The front-back asymmetry is so obvious that we hardly pause to consider its
implications. Follow your nose is the clearest direction we can give to the lost.
Going forward is easy; going backward is not. Walking backward is physiologically
difficult, but the idea of turning back is psychologically unpleasant, suggestive as
it is of error and defeat. Front and back have different values. In most cultures it
is unseemly to turn ones back on another person, particularly if the other person is
superior in dignity. Given this asymmetry of back and front, what impact does
it have on human spatial behaviour and organization? I have already pointed to the
contrasting experiences of going forward and turning back. The route A to B is a
different route depending on whether one is going forward or turning back on it.
Somatic and psychological asymmetry is projected into space, which acquires the
meaning and value of back and front. The asymmetrical designation of space
occurs at different scales. Most rooms have a front entrance and the furniture is
arranged with respect to it. The typical lecture hall is sharply regionalized. The lectern
or blackboard is in the front: it is the focus of the room and lecturers know well how
audiences have a way of receding from this focus into the back rows. Regions within
space may be defined by external relationships rather than by internal arrangement.
Thus a bedroom may be symmetrical but if one door opens out to the sitting room
and another closes on the bathroom it is not experienced as undifferentiated space.
Most spaces, however, are differentiated by perceptible signs. Ervin Goffman has
noted how public buildings and private houses have clearly demarcated front and
back regions. People may live in the same city, even work in the same building, and
yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into
separate circulatory routes and work areas. The distinction between back and
front is sharpest in a middle-class house. The front tends to be relatively well
decorated, well repaired, and tidy; the rear tends to be relatively unprepossessing.
Correspondingly, social adults enter through the front, and often the socially incom-
plete - domestics, delivery men, and children - enter through the rear.s
The spatial organization of sacred structures presents a special problem in meaning
and experience for the pilgrim. On the one hand the sacred structure symbolizes the
navel or centre of the world; to fulfil this function its shape should be circular or
square or some other isometric figure. On the other hand, man is asymmetrical and
it is confusing for him to enter a space that has neither front-back nor length-breadth.
Sacred and symbolic structures that cannot be entered may be perfectly symmetrical
without causing undue confusion. Indian shrines (stupas), for example, are solid
and isometric - including the magnificent stupa of Barabudur in Java. But temples and
churches not only stand in space but enclose space. Greek temples are rectangular;
Christian churches frequently take the form of a cross - the anisometric Latin cross
rather than the equi-dimensional Greek cross. All roads lead to Rome. St Peters is
 GEOGRAPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND HUMAN NATURE 187
the navel of the world. Ideally, its plan should be a circle or perfect polygon topped
by a soaring dome. Early plans of the basilica were in fact isometric, but subsequent
changes - involving the lengthening of the nave - turned it into the shape of the Latin
cross. Berninis colonnade further dramatized the frontality of St Peters; and the
final step in the elevation of the front came with the recent removal of buildings before
the colonnade so that the pilgrim, approaching the basilica from the Tiber, could rest
assured that he was on the royal path.
Can a city be said to have a front entrance and therefore, by implication, a rear
door or side gates? Old cities very probably had front entrances. Only one route was
the royal route and a magnificent gate stood over it. During Antiquity and the Middle
Ages the main portal served as the natural ideogram for the entire city; its monu-
mentality symbolized the divine power invested in the ruler of the State. In the
traditional city of China we have perhaps the most striking illustration of how a large
space, symmetrically organized, shows clearly front and back regions. The south is
the front, the north the rear. The palace compound is at the centre; the principal
avenue leads to it from the south through a series of imposing gates, as in the case of
Peking. The area north of the palace compound is the rear of the city; no ceremonial
gateways or avenue appear there. An ancient canon of city building even required the
profane activities of commerce to be located in the back, although it is improbable
that this rule was ever followed. Does the idea of front and back apply to the
modern, economic city? The answer would seem to be no at the conscious level:
the modern city has no processional routes, no ceremonial gates, and its boundary is
often arbitrary, marked by an inconspicuous signpost giving, as in the United States,
the name and population of the borough. Yet the sense of front and back is
perhaps not entirely absent. The width of the highway and the volume of traffic are
indicators of whether one is entering the city from the front or from the rear. Front
and back, then, are no longer clearly demarcated static spaces: they are related to
the direction and volume of traffic flow. One wonders whether the front or main
entrance of a modern town is not simply the side that is linked to the largest city - or
would it be the side that is linked to the political centre?
Although most cities in America have only a vaguely defined sense of front and
back, certain cities have deliberately assumed the sense and status of front by
designating themselves as gateways. Thus, St Louis is the Gateway to the West,
San Francisco is the Gateway to the Far East, and Grand Portage in Minnesota is the
Gateway to Isle Royal National Park. In a book on the nicknames of American cities,
I count no less than 183 urban places that claim to be at the front of something - that
boast the title of Gate or Gateway.lo
Finally, it is tempting to raise the question as to whether an entire nation may be
said to have a front and a rear. In the United States, most people probably view the
northeastern seaboard as the nations front. This is where history began; from the
east coast population spread westward into the backwoods. New York, in particular,
has come to mean the front portal. Among the citys dozens of nicknames it is known
as the Front Office of American Business. But more important than New Yorks size
and business power is the symbolic role that it has played, particularly from the end
of the nineteenth century, as the main port for immigrants to enter the Land of
188 LE GBOGRAPHE CANADIEN

Promise. The Southwest is the locus of the Spanish entrada: but it remains the back-
waters for most Americans, and even a foreign country to some. California is
Americas biggest state in population. Yet, apart from Californians, it seems im-
probable that Americans now view the west coast as the nations front to the world.
In myth, if not in history, the Golden Gate Bridge is the last stop in the westward
movement across the continent: it symbolizes departure as much as it does entry.

HOME AND JOURNEY^^

Back-and-front is one antinomic pair, among many, in mans categorization of his
world. It is a distinction that all people make because it rests, fundamentally, on a
biological fact. There are other fundamental binary oppositions such as alive-dead,
male-female, light-darkness, and self-society. In addition, binaries exist that
are not universal but are important to the majority of mankind: for example, garden-
wilderness, city-countryside, and home-journey. It is the essence of these
binaries that though the two elements of each pair are opposed they are nonetheless
necessary to each other for meaning. To be alive implies the awareness of its nega-
tion; garden implies the wilderness beyond it; the city depends on its counterpole the
countryside, not only for provisions but for the sharpness of its own image - and
vice versa. In the more basic binaries the two elements correspond to the positive
and negative poles: they are not felt to be of the same value whatever the rationaliza-
tions as to their necessity to each other: alive is positive in all societies, as is light.
But with the less basic and universal oppositions the values are more ambivalent: the
city of the Western World has been judged harshly often by its intellectuals but it has
also eloquent defenders; wilderness, as opposed to garden, has both negative and
positive connotations.
The discovery that a culture world can be analysed into component structures
which bear symmetrical or mirror-image relationships to each other is a discovery of
the structuralist school in social science. We can study the binaries from the struc-
turalists viewpoint.12But the position I am taking up here is phenomenological: it is
to explore the experience that individuals undergo under certain conditions. What
can one say about back-and-front as a component of meaning in a personal world?
Or home-and-journey? Home has no meaning apart from the journey which
takes one outside of home. A problem in understanding the personal world is that it is
taken for granted. Few would want to dispute or explore further a statement such as:
the home is qualitatively different from all other locations. Yet it can easily be pressed
to yield new lines of inquiry. Consider George Macdonalds observation that only of
the home do we readily use the terms in and out; of other places we think of going
in or coming out but seldom both with equal emphasis.13 If this observation is hard
to envisage, think how a person normally recounts the events of the day: I left home
at eight oclock to go to the office; I made calls at X and Y, went to Hotel Z for cock-
tails and then returned home. In common usage leave and return apply to the
home, rarely to other places. The reason would seem to be that unlike the home
places serve simple ends. One goes to the barber for a haircut, to the hotel for dinner,
to the conference room for a meeting, etc. Places are identified with specific needs
 GEOGRAPHY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND HUMAN NATURE 189
that can be quickly satisfied. Going there is important; entering is important; but
departure is largely a physical act. The home is not a place in so far as one does not
identify it with clearly specifiable functions: it is that special place to which one with-
draws and from which one ventures forth.
The meaning of home clearly varies with different people and in different
cultures. The French word maison is more physical in connotation than the
English home, even though its root meaning in Latin (manere) is to remain,
dwell. Heim is not the exact translation of home for it has more the sense of refuge
and asylum. The English word home is enormously varied in shades of meaning;
perhaps no single term in another language covers a significative field of comparable
scope. Some of the meanings of home are: a dwelling place or house, a village or
town, a collection of dwellings (Old and early Middle English); the place of ones
nurturing, with the feelings which naturally and properly attach to it; a place, region,
or state to which one properly belongs, in which ones affections centre, or where one
finds refuge and rest.
Home is opposed to abroad. Englishmen abroad think of England as home -
the mother-country. Home is domestic as distinct from foreign: England has a Home
Office and a Foreign Office, a Home Secretary and a Foreign Secretary. The sense of
nurturing, of rest, is strongly associated with home. To live, one has to labour,
work, and take risks in alien places. Home as refuge is the reverse of challenge and
strain. Notice how the root meanings of travel, journey, and voyage depart
from the purely spatial sense of movement and distance. The word travel is a close
cousin of travail, that is, hard labour. And travail is still used of woman giving
birth; the woman is in labour but so is the infant as it makes its way - as it travels -
from the safety of the womb into a far less accommodating world. Journey means
day, a days work or travel. And voyage is derived from viaticum, Latin for
provisions or money for the journey. To travel is to take risks, to be aware of inhos-
pitable lands and circumstances; the experience of insecurity, by providing contrast,
intensifies the identification of home with security and rest.
All human societies have home bases where the weak may stay while the fit move
out to gather, hunt, or fight. In this important respect human behaviour departs from
that of other primates. Unlike man, baboons, other monkeys, or apes do not have
such a nurturing base. When the primate troop moves out on the daily round, all
members must move with it or be deserted. Human identification with the familiar
and nurturing place has a biological basis. It can be so strong that when people are
forced to leave home for some reason they may fall sick and even die. In 1688
Johannes Hofer, a medical student, coined a word of Greek roots nostalgia (literally,
return and sorrow) for the well-known symptoms of homesickness or Heimweh.
Nostalgia was accepted as the technical term for a disease that should be treated by
members of the medical profession. The rootless modern man may find it difficult to
see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, well-to-do Europeans could actually
fear extended sojourns away from home because they were conscious of the threat of
n0sta1gia.l~If nostalgia means anything today, it is more likely for a point in time -
the condition of childhood - than for a point in space. Modern travel is no longer
travail. In the first-class cabin of a jetliner - and perhaps in no other place - the
190 THE CANADIANGEOGRAPHER

adult can retreat into the hedonistic and pampered world of an infant. The image of
home weakens as the image of the freeway, with its regularly paced oases of rest, gains
force. Even to an Englishman and a man of letters, F. L. Lucas, the symbol for
happiness is not the sound of kettle boiling in a cottage, but the contented hum of a
car engine on a country road.lj

AUTHENTICITY

Words like home, neighbourhood, journey, and wilderness are very far from
being signs with one-to-one correspondences to aspects of reality; what they mean
echoes the accumulation of past experiences. They have also become sentimental
clichCs which people use because society approves of them, and because they fore-
stall the need to examine present experiences for content and value in the stream of
life-projects that are authentic.lBThe dictionary meaning of authentic is really pro-
ceeding from its reputed source or author and the real actual (as opposed to the
pretended) .,I7 Reality is rarely experienced direct. We perceive and act upon it
through the intermediary of words and ready-made conventions. In fact, to most
people most of the time words themselves are little more than a conventional mode
of behaviour. Words are simultaneously a means of establishing contact with the
world and of putting it at a distance, like a gesture - a wave of the hand - with which
we recognize an acquaintance and dismiss him. It is because words bear so little of
the weight of actuality that politicians can act, whether this is to bulldoze slums for
urban renewal or to partition a continent into spheres of influence. For the same
reason, but in a context that sensitive people can approve, nature-advocates push for
programs based on, at best, hazily examined relations between man and nature, health
and organic food, quality of life and wilderness-experiences.
Words substitute for the pungency of experience, and when attempts are made to
describe an actuality - quality of life, for example - it is seldom done in other than
tired words and fresh, but not always relevant, statistics. Few park rangers now
believe that body-counts in their domain are a meaningful measure of interest in
nature. Tourists are known to drive hundreds of miles to a National Park and yet not
explore it beyond what can be seen, and captured in a snapshot, a half mile from the
road. In contemporary American society, going to the wilderness is largely a social
convention; and we may well ask whether a person is any more likely to make
authentic encounters with nature in a National Park than with people in a cocktail
party. What is the nature of experience? To what extent is experience related to
exposure to a setting? Bodily presence may be necessary but it is clearly not sufficient
to guarantee experience. Urban-perception studies have shown that the commuter
may drive through a part of the city regularly and yet his image of it is no clearer than
that of the occasional visitor.ls
Bureaus and agencies are accumulating data on the demand made for certain types
of natural amenity, and some information is also available as to what people say they
want and expect of nature. Such data are necessary to planning. Plans are made and
actions are taken in answer to social demand; likewise, manufacturers produce sedans
of a certain size to meet the peoples choice. What constitutes the experience of
driving a high-powered car in the city and on the freeway? What are the rewards
 GEOGRAPHY7 PHENOMENOLOGY, AND HUMAN NATURE 191
of this type of experience? We have little information. But then we hardly know more
what constitutes nature experience. The phenomenon man-in-nature, what it
really means, is lost in the statistical thicket, in the unreflective acceptance of societys
conventions, including reflex responses to words.

CONCLUSION: PHENOMENOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY

Phenomenology and existentialism are two prominent and related schools of Euro-
pean thought that have made practically no impact on geography. This is not
surprising. In the first place the framework of objective science seems fully satisfac-
tory to geographys modern practitioners, because space is the one dimension of
reality that the analytical tools of science can most readily manipulate: time is the
real problem unless it is conceived as reversible like distance. Geographers have
latched on to a good thing in space for it is strictly measurable: the further one
departs from the elementary concepts of space the more difficult it is to relate the
measure to what is measured. Secondly, much of European Continental philosophy
is written in difficult German and in not-much-clearer French. Moreover, Husserl at
one time characterized phenomenology as psychological description; and fami-
liarity with the works of the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty suggests that
this type of thinking has little to say to physical science; it is directly relevant to
psychology and literature in so far as these fields are concerned primarily with the
nature of experience and with the meaning of being human. Such interests seem rather
remote from the workaday concerns of the geographer: yet it ought not to be, for
the phenomenologist studies neither man in the abstract nor the world in the
abstract but man-in-the-world. The approach is clearly of importance to anthro-
pology, and in fact anthropologists have made substantial use of the phenomenologi-
cal perspective in studying the nature of cultural experience.l9 The perspective is no
less important to the geographer for his quest - broadly conceived - is also the
understanding of man-in-the-world.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. J. 0. M. Broek and John W. Webb, A Geography of Mankind (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1968), p. 6. I wish to thank my colleague, P. W. Porter, for planting some of the ideas in my
head; he is of course not responsible for their wayward efflorescence.
2. For a short and lucid account of phenomenology and existentialism, see Mary Warnock,
Existentialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). This little book takes the view
that existentialism is a phase between the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and
structuralism in anthropology. Among the enormous literature on phenomenology and
existentialism I find the following of special interest from the standpoint of a geographer:
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge 8: Kegan Paul,
1962); The Primacy of Perception, edited by James M. Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern
University Press, 1964) ; J. Kockelmans, Merleau-Pontys View on Space-Perception and
Space, Rev. Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, IV, 1 (1964); Erwin W. Straus, The
Primary World of Senses (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), and Forms of Spatiality, in
Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 3-37; 0. F. Bollnow,
Lived-Space in N. Lawrence and D. OConnor, eds., Readings in Existential Phenomen-
ology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963); E. Minkowski, Vers m e psychopath-
ologie de lespace V ~ C Uin
, Le temps vdccu (Paris, 1933); Calvin 0. Schrag, Experience and
Being (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), especially chapter 11, The
Temporality and Spatiality of Experience.
192 LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN

Phenomenology is barely broached in the geographical literature. David Lowenthals

classic paper, Geography, Experience, and Imagination: Towards a Geographical Episte-
mology, Ann. Assoc. A m . Geog., 5 1 (1961), 241-60, illustrates the phenomenological
perspective. See also Edward Relph, An Inquiry into the Relations between Phenomenology
and Geography, Can. Geog., 14, No, 3 (1970), 193-201. What we need are applications of
the phenomenological method to the description and analysis of landscape, region, nature,
space, etc., perhaps along the lines of Gaston Bachelards The Poetics of Space (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969), but not restricted to the evidence of the accepted canons of literature.
The present paper is an attempt to apply the phenomenological method to a few general types
of geographical experience, namely the experience of back region, front region, home,
and journey.
3. William G . Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part 111, J . Asian
I

Studies, 24, No. 3 (1965), 382.

4. I have developed this theme at length in The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of G o d
(Toronto: Universitv of Toronto Press, 1968).
5. Claude LBvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 4-8,
154.
6. Ibid., 153.
7. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having (London: Fontana, 1965); part I, A Metaphysical Diary,
pp. 78-9. Canadian readers will want the original: Chacun de nous devient ... le centre dune
sorte despace mental qui se dispose suivant des zones concentriques dadhtrence decroissante,
dintkr&tdtcroissant, et 8 cette adherence dtcroissante correspond une indisponibilitk crois-
sante. I1 y a 18 quelque chose qui nous parait tellement nature1 que nous negligeons de nous
en former la moindre idee, la moindre reprksentation. I1 a pu arriver B certains dentre nous
de faire telle ou telle rencontre qui brisait en quelque sorte les cadres de cette topographie
personnelle et tgocentrique; ... Dun inconnu rencontre par hasard monte un appel irrtsistible
au point de renverser soudain toutes les perspectives; ce qui paraisait immtdiatement proche
semble soudain infiniment lointain, et inversement. Ce sont 18 des experiences transitoires ...
je crois cependant que ces experiences ... ont cet avantage inappreciable de nous faire prendre
brusquement conscience du caractire contingent de ce que jai appelk notre espace mental ...
[Elles destituent] la distinction du loin et du prks de sa valeur qualitative. Etre et avoir
(Aubier, editions Montaigne, 1935), pp. 102, 104.
8. E. Goffman. The Presentation o.f Self. in Everyday .~ Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor, 1959), p. 123.
9. A. F. Wright, Symbolism and Function: Reflections on Changan and Other Great Cities,
J . Asian Studies. 24. NO. 4 (1965). 671.
10. J . N. Kane and G: L. Alexander, Nicknames of Cities and States of the United States
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1965).
1 1 . For another perspective on this theme, written by a geographer, see Ben Wisner, Proto-
geography: Search for the Beginnings, Discussion Paper for Assoc. Am. Geog. Annual
Meeting, August 1970 (mimeographed) : Journey and Exploration, pp. 11-14.
12. See the works of Claude IRvi-Strauss, particularly Structural Anthropology (New York:
Basic Books, 1963) ; and a critical evaluation of the importance of structuralism to psychology
and social science by Jean Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
13. George Macdonald ( 1824-1905), Scottish moralist and author, has exerted strong influence
on English writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R . Tolkien. Concerning home he wrote:
Home is the only place where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into,
and places you can go out of, but the one place, if you do but find it, where you can go out
and in both, is home. I cannot trace the source of this quotation; it is given in W. H. Auden,
A Certain World (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 184.
14. Jean Starobinski, The Idea of Nostalgia, Diogenes, 54 (1966), 81-103.
15. F. L. Lucas, The Greatest Problem and Other Essays (London: Cassell, 1960), p. 266.
16. John Wild, Authentic Existence: A New Approach to Value Theory, in J . M. Edie, ed.,
A n Invitation to Phenomenology (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), pp. 59-77.
17. Oxford Universal Dictionary, rev. ed. (1955).
18. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).
19. The philosopher Grace A. de Laguna commends the works of anthropologists in On Exis-
tence and the Human World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); see particularly
chapter 9, The Lebenswelt and the Cultural World, pp. 2 12-3 1 .