Abstract

This article deals with the distinction which Erwin Straus (1891-1975) draws, in hismajor philosophical work Vom Sinn der Sinne (1935), between the space of the landscape (landschaftlicher Raum) and geographical space (geographischer Raum). Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's phenomenological comments on the experience of the poetic, the article tries to clarify this distinction by arguing that the space of the landscape is best to be seen as a poetic expression of the spatial organisation of beingin-the-world. Crucialto this understanding is the interpretation of the concept of der Horizont. The horizonof the space of the landscape is not to be considered as a limit of a visual field, but rather as a metaphor for the sensuous, fundamentally rhythmstructured space of the poetic image. In opposition to the spatial-geographicalstructure of the world of the melancholic, the space of the landscape is a 'happy' distortion or radicalisation of the spatial structure of the Empfindung