ABSTRACT
During the development his most important treatise on aesthetics, Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (referred to hereafter as Aesthetic Letters), Schiller was given the opportunity by Johann Friedrich Cotta to write a short review of a forthcoming edition of the Taschenkalender auf das Jahr 1795 für Natur- und Gartenfreunde. First published in October 1794 in the Allgemeine literatur-Zeitung as "Uber den Gartenkalender auf das Jahr 1795," Schiller's essay represents the most extensive and systematic statement of his views on garden art. The central doctrine put forth in this essay is a prescription for a Mittelweg which would mediate between the two dominant modes of eighteenth-century garden design, the French and the English, and allow the garden to rise for the first time to the status of a fine art. Deceptively simple at first glance, this doctrine is in fact a highly complex distillation of a series of binary conceptual structures that were used both in previous work by Schiller and in the simultaneously written Aesthetic Letters. Rather than being a simple argument over style, a closer examination of the Mittelweg reveals that the French/English debate which had characterized German garden theory since the publication of Hirschfeld s five-volume Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779-85) took on greater dimensions in Schiller's hands. Through the locus of the garden, Schiller was able to use the Mittelweg thesis to address the more general question of how it is possible to conceive of the structuring of concepts and the structuring of the environment as analogous operations.
