Uncertain certainty¹: The naearest of the far. vaux-le-vicomte vs. versailles

I would like to challenge Allen Weiss's assertion that Versailles is a ‘grandiloquent betrayal, a deficient, proportionless, hyperbolic imitation’⁴ of Vaux. Essentially, I would argue, Weiss has failed to consider what Versailles is, how it is experienced and what those experiences imply in relation to what it sets out to do. Rather, he judges it in relation to what it is not through a negativity that calls his indictment into doubt. Essentially, he is misjudging the failure of one garden by the success of another and his writing is guilty of straying into the realm of what Kant disdainfully refers to as commentary rather than critique.⁵ But Versailles and the intentions behind it are in direct opposition to those of Vaux; in fact, the very reasons Versailles could be understood as a success are the very reasons Weiss says that it is deficient. For what Weiss implies and desires but does not provide is a set standard of criteria by which even two gardens can be judged, or, much more ambitiously, by which all gardens can be judged. Rather, he praises Vaux and then criticizes Versailles in light of Vaux's praise.