Culture de la nature au XVIIIe siècle : le sens dans le jardin

Abstract

The art of gardening stems from an ontological paradox whereby man as creature turns into a creator using nature for his own ends and perfecting it. In this sense the development of landscape gardening in the XVIIIth century signals the advent of man as master of nature. The paradox is tentatively solved when another sort of nature is put forward by idealist thinkers who try to promote intellectualist aesthetics to explain how nature can be naturalised, i.e. rendered more natural through the application of intellectual archetypes to the raw materials of landscape. The gardener of the late XVIIth and early XVIIIth centuries thus becomes the agent whose role is to bring nature to perfection through the application of culture. This first paradox is complemented and inverted by a second owing to the success of sensualist aesthetics in the age of the Enlightenment. The development of Locke's epistemology is characterised by the emergence of sentiment as a faculty of judgment whose decisions supersede reason in when they are seen as the expression of the voice of a nature now conceived of as predominantly interior. From Shaftesbury to Gilpin's or Price's picturesque gardens, an interior landscape appears which shows the mastery of the master of nature effected by this new interior nature. Eventually, nature wins as, following the winding path that leads from intellectual sense to sensualist sentiment, it invades the representations and the very nature of the gardener.