How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.

How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to reflect a culture - ways of painting nature, for example, or representing nature in literature, or of course making gardens.

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for whom there is nothing beyond a world that is relative to human interests and conceptual schemes; and 'ineffabilists', like myself, for whom any describable world indeed exists 'only in relation to man', as Heidegger put it, but for whom, as well, there is an ineffable realm 'beyond the human'.

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.

Certainly each side - the 'absolutists' and the 'constructivists' or 'humanists', as I've labelled them - accuses the other of hubris, and lays claim to humility. I see hubris on both sides: a pretence that we could ascend to an objective account of the world, on the one hand, and a pretence that we have the resources to live and act without a sense of there being something to which we answerable, on the other. So both sides are 'villains'.

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger also gave up on the prospect that schools and universities would nurture the kind of reflective openness to the way of things that, certainly by the 1940s, he identified with authentic thinking. The authentic person is not the Promethean, iron-willed figure that pops up in Nietzsche, but someone more like the Daoist sages whom Heidegger admired.