The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious, commemorative, and so on. But I think that good gardens all signify or exemplify an important truth about the relationship of culture and nature - their inseparability.

In the doctrine of the world and humankind as 'will to power and nothing else', Heidegger identified not an antidote to nihilism, but the completion of it. For what can be more destructive of truth and value than the doctrine that these are simply the impositions on the world of human exercises of power?

The demands of the economy, and more recently those of political correctness and the diktat against ever offending anyone, are not conducive to a classroom or university seminar climate in which genuinely free and critical reflection on how to live prospers.

It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but our own conventions and commitments. They are answerable to a way of things that transcends the reach of our conceptual schemes.

I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and so on - is at the same time a recognition of how we should try to live.

The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is no world beyond the human world. They will, indeed must, have their beliefs and values, but they will recognize that these 'lean upon' - and are answerable to - nothing other than human commitments and purposes. The only fidelity, Rorty remarked, can be to our own conventions.