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.

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic appeal of inanimate nature, plants, and animals. Hegel’s ontological privileging of living beings, and especially of animal bodies, comes hand in hand with their aesthetic privileging, and so particular focus is given to the beauty of animateness, and especially to that of animal bodies. It is argued that, while most appearances of animal life serve to disclose their finitude, and so their ontological dependency, there are striking moments in which their remarkable animateness stands out as such. And given that Hegel gives us good reason to think of life, in its ontology, as an essentially infinite and autonomous movement, this conspicuousness of animation provides us with an ephemeral glimpse of a more profound beauty. As the various dimensions of animation and its ways of appearing are explored in some detail, the chapter comes to argue, somewhat counter to Hegel though for Hegelian reasons, that it is particularly in animal movement – as opposed to the more static shape of the animal body, which is largely Hegel’s focus – that the full splendor of animateness is revealed.

Developing the previous chapter’s focus on the artistry involved in imitation, Chapter 6 focuses on how young women’s skilful use of make-up palettes and other beauty practices can simultaneously transform their physical appearance and social status. The chapter follows young women’s efforts to evoke a particular urban feminine beauty ideal, which is summed up not in one particular ‘look’ but rather in the ability to constantly transform the self. While appearing effortless, this cosmopolitan aesthetic requires young women to navigate confusing make-up markets and the undesirable effects of fake cosmetics, as well as the infrastructural and social stresses that shape the beauty salon experience. It also requires them to avoid being instantly ‘made down’ by the gazes of other young women. Showing how young women’s beauty practices not only sit within an ever-shifting social and material terrain but also actively contribute to the inconsistencies and ambiguities of urban life, the chapter argues that beauty and uncertainty, far from being incongruous concepts, play a significant role in shaping each other in Calabar.

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.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

I begin with the bodily good of health, which perfects our organic functioning beyond the rudimentary level required for life. I detail how such functioning operates at different bodily levels, e.g., within cells, tissues, vessels, glands etc. I then move on to bodily abilities, which (not being autonomic functions) reflect the exercise of agency or voluntary control. Such abilities can be divided into active and passive powers, these affording a wider relation to the world in virtue of their intentionality. The third topic is bodily beauty. I argue that this is not a bodily perfection, since it is beholden less to our bodily powers or their configuration than to judgements of character and the social context in which our bodies operate. Finally, I explore body alteration. This constitutes a spectrum, from (perfective) medical intervention to (imperfective) mutilation, with what I call mere body ‘modification’ in the middle. I conclude with two cases that are difficult to place on this spectrum: namely male circumcision and cosmetic ‘surgery’. I argue that the former is likely a bodily imperfection or bad and the latter likely bound up with further imperfections.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

This chapter focuses on those parts of animals that are deformed, useless, harmful, or ‘weird,’ and that thereby challenge Aristotle’s teleological view that the sublunary world and the animals in it are beautiful on the grounds that they are functional, and that they are therefore worthy of our study as well. My account will present three different types of teleological failure that Aristotle identifies in the production processes of animals with such ‘bad’ parts, one of which attributes ‘genuine’ mistakes or oversights to the formal natures crafting these animals. The chapter argues that especially this third type of mistake signals a methodological weakness in the explanatory project of the Parts of Animals as a whole, namely that it overextends Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology to features that could have been explained more satisfactorily by reference to chance or necessity alone.

Hume writes that it is “no inconsiderable part of science barely to know the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder, in which they lie involved, when made the object of reflection and enquiry.” He describes this branch of knowledge as “mental geography.” Yet while his mental geography of thought is now well understood, his mental geography of feeling—specifically, of the non-sensory “secondary impressions” or “impressions of reflection” that he discusses in Books 2 and 3 of A Treatise of Human Nature—has not been. This essay seeks to clarify Hume’s doctrines in these two Books by explaining the nature and classification of the five kinds of secondary impressions that Hume distinguishes: (1) sensible agitations (i.e., “emotions” in one sense of that term); (2) feelings of or from mental operations; (3) volitions; (4) passions (both calm and violent); and (5) sentiments of taste.

Nathalie Carnes takes a fine selection of concrete examples from different times and cultures to show that material objects, icons, images, and art can be a natural extension of Christian worship. Through the incarnation and its continuation, they can carry a set of meanings that enhance and clarify the liturgy and make it a sensory reality in complementary ways.

Schiller develops a Leibnizian sense of perfection as the unity of unity and multiplicity, and draws out its political implications. He defends a republican order of spontaneous beauty, emergent in freedom, against imposed perfection. In addressing the problems of the incipient modern division of labour and the prospects for political community, he defends variety against uniformity, while distinguishing historically progressive from regressive types of diversity. Schiller insists on processes of aesthetic self-formation and determinability, which make possible a mutual adjustment of interests as an achievable practical outcome, rather than as a metaphysical presupposition. Interests in modern civil society are diverse and troublingly fragmentary, but potentially reconcilable.