Existentialism and Geography

The term existentialism was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous of the existentialists, to refer to a range of mid-20th-century European philosophers who studied the conditions of humanity: Sartre, Albert Camus, and Gabriel Marcel in France; Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Buber in Germany; and Oretega y Gasset in Spain, as well as myriad novelists and playwrights who promoted a historical genre based on the “existential condition.” These thinkers shared a belief that established philosophical frameworks were insufficient to understand or improve human conditions. The basic premise is that human beings bring their existence into the world or become human by engaging a world peopled with other humans. A common referent is Sartre's idea that “existence precedes essence,” that is, we make ourselves through our human projects.

There are two significant strands of existentialism in geography: (1) existential phenomenology, associated with Heidegger, and (2) existential Marxism, associated with Lefebvre and Sartre. Existential phenomenology arose during the 1970s to contest the spatial determinism of positivist science by emphasizing the subjectivity of human becoming. Profoundly influenced by the Heideggerian concept of dasein (“being in the world”), the project of recentering the human subject was addressed by scholars such as Ann Buttimer, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Edward Relph, who advocated a “humanistic” geography that linked phenomenological openness to the project of being with the social and cultural acts of creating, giving meaning to, and sustaining places or landscapes. Buttimer emphasized human creativity and intersubjectivity in everyday, experiential geographies, or “life-worlds”; she held human values as a basis for establishing how people care about one another. Yi-fu Tuan sought to understand how being open to the creative possibilities of human beings affects interactions with the surrounding environment and the struggle to make their landscapes. Edward Relph used phenomenology as a basis for assessing the ways in which humans design and give meaning to valued landscapes, emphasizing the connection between care for landscape and care for humanity.

Other scholars have made a direct link between a phenomenology of being and a spatial ontology. Marwyn Samuels drew on Heidegger and Sartre to construct a “biography of landscape” as the physical expression of human spatial relations, looking to Martin Buber to understand spatial relations as the project of overcoming the distance between people and to suggest that the recursive act of setting others at a distance and entering into relations is informed by shared belief systems, or worldviews, that define the qualities and normative values of human societies. The inevitable distance that separates humans is thus actively filled with the project of becoming-for-others. For John Pickles, such a spatial ontology defines the scientific paradigm through which we create geographical knowledge.

The ongoing intellectual influences of these humanistic geographers are profound, including the incorporation of meaning and values firmly within the discipline; highlighting questions of ethics in geography, both as a subject of research in understanding human actions and as a normative framework for conducting research; and laying the methodological groundwork for the discursive turn during the 1990s, which views landscapes as repositories of human meaning and spatial relations as centered on the individual and as constituted through human action through which (to paraphrase Derek Gregory) landscapes are made to mean.

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