"Paradigms and Purposes" Review on the Perspective of “Versailles and Kant”

Choose one perspective from Freeman’s Chapter 2, “Paradigms and Purposes,” that particularly stands out to you and discuss it.

After reading Chapter 2, “Paradigm and Purposes,” I decided to focus on the perspective proposed by Kant, regarding the gardens of Versailles, because I felt his attitude towards gardens and art was intriguing. Kant classified gardens as a form of art in that,

“[L]andscape gardening… consists in no more than decking out the ground with the same manifold variety (grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees, and even water, hills, and dales) as that with which nature presents it to our view, only arranged differently and in obedience to certain ideas.”

I believe Kant’s characterization and criteria of art may have had an influence in the now popular definition that art is a thoughtful rearrangement of elements. Under such a definition, a garden undoubtedly qualifies as art because it is a combination of naturally found items strategically placed by the gardener.

Kant admits that, “it seems strange that landscape gardening may be regarded as a kind of painting,” but after giving the statement some thought, I noticed remarkable similarities between a gardener creating a garden and a painter creating a painting. Despite the fact that each artist is using a different palette, the gardener using a palette of plants and the painter using a palette of colored paints, both are thoughtfully arranging their materials in a way to evoke an emotion or convey meaning.

In my experience, gardens are overlooked as a form of art because they don’t fit the social norm for what we, as a society, perceive as art. One can’t fit a garden the size of the garden of Versailles in a museum, and one is unable to capture its continuously changing aesthetics in a photograph that freezes time. The text conveyed that gardens were not perceived by Kant to be one of the highest forms of art. I disagree with Kant’s viewpoint as gardens, with the exception of animals and humans, are the only other form of “living” art. I refer to gardens as “living” because every garden continuously evolves and progresses with age. The artist is only able to manipulate a garden, as the final masterpiece is ultimately designed with the cooperation of another power regardless if you consider that power to be God, Mother Nature, or the disposition of life in itself. In that sense gardens qualify as a higher form of art and lead me to agree with Horace Walpole’s assessment that gardening is along with poetry and painting as the “three sisters or graces”.

Image Above: Gardens of Versailles