This chapter addresses the second main challenge to Kant’s conception of autonomy: the sense that the opposition between nature and freedom renders the actuality of freedom unintelligible. Turning to the Inaugural Dissertation and the three critiques, the second chapter shows that tackling the problem requires us to first overcome a widespread misunderstanding of Kant’s notion of the intelligible world. The intelligible world is not a given world available to theoretical cognition but initially accessible only through practical cognition as a world that ought to be. The chapter develops a new interpretation of Kant’s use of the principle “ought implies can” to show how the moral self-consciousness of the ought provides the realm of freedom with a first degree of actuality that, however, remains insufficient on its own. For freedom to be truly realized, we have to realize our freedom in the natural world by endowing it with a different purposive form. The third Critique offers unrecognized resources to explain how such a realization may be possible. By means of its account of natural purposiveness and the feeling of life, it redescribes external and subjective nature in such a manner that we can see how freedom may take root in them. By means of its account of fine, Kant specifies the general form of processes through which we can transform given nature and produce a second nature expressive of ideas. The chapter closes by considering why Kant did not fully develop these resources and why freedom remains ultimately unreal in his own account, something especially obvious in his discussion of the highest good.

Chapter 4 analyzes the concept of the unnameable or ineffable in ritual and art. The ineffable refers to the difficulty of comprehending specific contexts of intense individual and collective experience that frequently arise during the ritual process. The ensuing totality or emptiness of meaning emerges as a challenge to account for that which eludes logical representation within the social order. The chapter also explores how the experience of the ineffable manifests in the realm of art and aesthetic experience, investigating how this problem has been addressed within continental philosophy, particularly within phenomenology and poststructuralism. Finally, the chapter analyzes poetry’s role as a privileged means of accounting for that which lacks a name and apparent meaning, and of presenting itself to consciousness’s immediacy. Through poetry, it becomes possible to preserve the transient process of the experience of the hidden and unnameable in its existential and anthropological dimensions.

The Introduction presents the book’s general argument. It describes the main objectives and central themes related to the conceptualization of not-knowing. It argues for an anthropology of that which remains nameless in anthropology, lost in the gaps between culture, structure, and process. Not-knowing refers to the difficulty of accounting for certain intense individual and collective experiences that often arise in ritual, spiritual, and religious contexts and, in many ways, defy any attempt at complete rationalization. It deals with situations in which meaning is broken, forcing anthropologists to think beyond reason. It describes how an otherness of a radical nature unfolds before the anthropologist’s gaze, both in its experiential dimension and ethnographic and argumentative construction, as well as the discipline´s blind spots. The Introduction also describes the book’s structure, the organization of each chapter, and its contribution to anthropology.

Chapter 9 moves the discussion from not-knowing to not-doing in the acts of everyday life. Here, the focus is on people’s willingness and purpose to stop knowing, to pause, or to put a stop to the meaning of the world by engaging in subversive acts of not-doing. This concept is derived from the work of the controversial anthropologist and ethnographic fiction writer, Carlos Castaneda. This chapter centers on various forms of deliberate immersion and transportation of subjects into the negative and enigmatic realm of not-knowing. Therefore, we perceive not-doing as purposely creative, devising practices with the intention of altering consciousness in order to introduce individuals to experiences commonly referred to as paranormal, esoteric, mystical, divine, artistic, and subjunctive.

This chapter examines a remarkable effort to memorialize ‘Alamgir in the decades after his death. This enterprise is noteworthy because it was unprecedented in Mughal history: no other emperor, not even ‘Alamgir’s much-admired great-grandfather Akbar (r. 1556–1605), was eulogized with the same intensity and for so many decades after his death. In its early stages this project was led by a small group of noble ‘Alamgir loyalists. In time, however, the effort extended to other parts of the rapidly disintegrating empire as well as, unexpectedly, to groups that had either been only nominally under Mughal rule or had actively opposed it. The end product was a trove of histories, administrative manuals, collections of orders and correspondence, and miniatures depicting ‘Alamgir. Although the participants’ motivations for eulogizing ‘Alamgir varied, the results point to a broad consensus about his greatness, among both Muslims and Hindus, across much of northern and central India that lasted until the late eighteenth century and the onset of British colonial rule.

The Prologue gives examples of various kinds of hiddenness, focusing especially on the way the artist or the author is both indicated by and hidden behind a work.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

The Introduction offers an overview of the main themes of the book, focusing especially on Hegel’s claim that our sensuous experience of beauty offers a distinctive access to metaphysical truth. The basic nature and parameters of this sensuous aesthetic experience – what Hegel calls “sensuous intuition” – are explored to set the stage for the analysis that follows. In anticipation of the book’s main claim about the distinctive sort of ontological truth that artworks in particular serve to reveal on Hegel’s account – namely, that they put us in touch with the transformative event of spirit’s birth in and through nature – the chapter includes a sketch of the path of the book from the ontology and aesthetics of nature through to the ontology and aesthetics of artworks.

Race-making is an inherently embodied activity, rooted in the senses and predicated on corporeality. As a result, visuality and materiality are central to processes of race-making, and studies of ancient visual and material culture therefore have much to contribute to modern scholarship on ancient race-making. This chapter explores what can be learned from visual and material culture about processes of race-making in the ancient Greek world, considering a series of examples. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, these examples demonstrate a variety of potential approaches, as well as highlighting some of the key challenges and limitations of working with visual and material culture.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

Sellars’s quest for a comprehensive philosophy led him to consider the possibility and desirability of somehow fusing or joining two distinct ‘images’ of humanity-in-the-universe: the manifest image of common sense and the scientific image that has come to rival it. Against this, Rorty urges a conception of “vocabularies” that we use to engage in self-fashioning and self-transformation. I argue that we should reject the identification of the manifest image with common sense in order to make room for what Rorty calls “abnormal discourses.” Abnormal discourses play an important role in how we change our conception of what we are. However, I agree with Sellars that the scientific image does tell us something about how things really are. I conclude that we should not want to fuse or join the two images, because they have distinct roles to play in human life.

Chapter 6 (Mishnah ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4 and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I analyze the existing scholarship on the much-discussed narrative of Rabban Gamliel in the Bathhouse of Aphrodite in m. ‘Abodah Zarah 3:4. I then propose that Rabban Gamliel’s response to Proclus within the story is, in fact, best understood as a deployment of the “Bad Faith Argument.”