The German 'Mittelweg': Garden theory and philosophy in the time of Kant (Immanuel Kant, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich)

The central contribution of German garden theory in the late eighteenth century was the idea of a Mittelweg garden, or "middle path" garden. First proposed by C. C. L. Hirschfeld in 1779, then elaborated in its three principal versions by K. H. Heydenreich, F. Schiller, and J. C. A. Grohmann, the Mittelweg was on the surface a merely stylistic, even nationalist, attempt to reconcile two dominant forms of garden composition, the "English" and the "French," by proposing a mediating term that would be uniquely "German." But at a deeper level, it was a strategy for coming to terms with an entire range of dualisms that had vexed German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century---and, ultimately, for overcoming the problem of dualism itself. The thinker who made this enterprise possible was Kant, and the various forms of the Mittelweg developed in the 1790s were all carried out within the conceptual and institutional framework of his Critical Philosophy. These garden theories developed under the pervasive influence not only of Kant's system as a whole, but of the Critique of Judgment in particular, which, significantly, was Kant's own attempt to bridge the various dualisms engendered by his system. In addition to investigating the question of dualism within the specific realm of the garden, these Mittelweg theories also pointed unexpectedly toward a significant feature within Critical Philosophy itself: the need for Kant's conception of philosophical system as architectonics to include a complementary conception of its topographical arrangement and grounding.