Journal of the History of Philosophy

Kant's dismissive reference in the Critique of Judgment to landscape gardening as "nothing but the ornamentation of the ground" (CJ § 51) is puzzling since, as an art that seems like a product of nature, the garden should be a paradigm case of fine art. Additionally, it runs counter to a growing academic interest in garden theory in the late 1700s, as Michael Lee documents in this often overwrought but useful volume. After Kant, German academic philosophy was bedevilled by irresolvable oppositions between reason and sensibility, and art and nature, that demanded mediation. This was paralleled by the efforts of German garden theorists to find a Mittelweg ("middle-path") between the formal French-style and the irregular English garden. After a historical (and sociological) consideration of the rise of garden theory in the German academies in chapter 2, Lee explores the neglected philosophical importance of the garden, especially for K. H. Heydenreich and F. C. S. Schiller (chapters 3–5), and then considers Kant's critical philosophy in light of these analyses (chapters 6–7). [End Page 476]

Lee's treatment of Heydenreich's and Schiller's garden theories is well-executed and informative. The perspective of the "moving stroller" provides the focus of Heydenreich's account of aesthetic response: though a given view in a garden might be compared to a landscape painting, the experience of strolling through a garden can be compared to viewing a succession of scenes, complete with panoramic vistas and controlled transitions. The resulting combination of these successive views through the Phantasie of the observer is accompanied by a unified feeling or mood. Kant's Third Critique is evidently an important influence on Heydenreich's account, yet his focus on the unique spatial (panoramas) and temporal (successive scenes) aspects of that experience extend Kant's sparse account in suggestive ways. Lee concedes, however, that Heydenreich's designation as a Mittelweg theorist is problematic, given that Heydenreich rejects the very opposition between regular and irregular styles of design on which such a theory is based. Nonetheless, Lee finds that Heydenreich is unable to escape the "framework of binary opposition and mediation," claiming that his account of artistic creation is "an exercise in mediation at every turn" (135). Drawing on Kant's account of genial creation and aesthetic ideas, Lee claims that the Totalbild in the mind of the genius constitutes a mediation between concept and intuition, and between the mechanism of nature and moral agency (since it tokens the presence of discursive understanding without being fully exponible within it). Lee also considers Schiller's garden theory as presented in a brief review, "Über den Gartenkalendar auf das Jahr 1795." Relying on the contemporaneous Aesthetic Letters, Lee casts Schiller's Mittelweg garden as a synthesis of the merely agricultural garden and the highly formalized French garden, just as the play drive mediates between the sense and form drives. Lee denies that this implies that Schiller simply favors the English garden, and here he relies on Schiller's account of the phases of history, in which a version of the last, mediating phase is glimpsed earlier in the process. This provides an appropriate context for Schiller's piece; however, it hardly justifies Lee's claim that "Schiller's garden theory is substantial in its own right" (6).

In addition to documenting the growing German philosophical interest in the garden, Lee draws a methodological point from these expositions. Rather than being an architechtonic unity—a rigid, top-down, hierarchical arrangement of elements in accordance with a concept—the unity of the garden is founded on the ineffable Totalbild and allows for wandering horizontal as well as vertical relations among elements. Lee uses this to gain perspective on Kant's critical philosophy in chapters 6 and 7. Kant's dismissive treatment of the garden is made understandable given what Lee (misleadingly) labels his "object-centered aesthetics" (193), that is, his prioritizing of discretely-conceived...