TUAN YI-FU'S EARLY INQUIRIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE AND HIS PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
ZHANG Xiao-ming1,2
1. School of Tourism Management, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China;
2. Center for Tourism Planning & Research, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
Abstract In the historical works of geographical thoughts, a general judgment about humanistic geographers such as Tuan Yi-Fu is that they were profoundly impacted by phenomenology and existentialism. However, in Tuan's Humanistic Geography, there were few clues of such impact from those two philosophical schools. This study collects and analyses Tuan's main works before the publication of Humanistic Geography and summaries his three viewpoints about the researches on human's environmental experience:①he opposes the rigid, quantitative recording in geographical papers, whilst supports the direct, descriptive writing that relies on abundant perception; ② he opposes to interpret human's environmental cogitation with limited models such as image and mind maps, whilst supports the model of schemata that is able to combine the environmental cogitation's processes and outcomes; ③he opposes to regard and use the concept of "environment" in an isolated way, whilst supports the humanist term of "world" that is able to contain the concept of environment within. It is obviously that, his "humanism" is not only a much more radical empiricism, i.e. to emphasize the direct and lived experience of human whilst to refuse the specious "scientific experience" that has been reconstructed by various scientific conceptualization, but also a recognition that this direct and lived experience should be identified as individual, complex, and emergent, and also a call on human geographers to be always methodologically alert to the impulse of oversimplification and systematic construction of human experience from scientific positivism. Therefore, it argues that, to Tuan Yi-Fu, phenomenology is rather a philosophical standpoint than an operational guide or an analytical tool that should be imitated in its form, expressed within its terms, or even solidified by some "final conclusion".
2016, Vol. 31 
