This chapter examines the role of beauty and desire in judgment – how eros both motivates and obstructs inquiry. It focuses on the Lydian and Babylonian narratives, both of which foreground the problem of beauty. Herodotus begins his narrative proper with his version of the Gyges and Candaules tale – which begins with the explicit statement that the “eyes are better than the ears,” that seeing is better than hearing – before problematizing this basic precept. Through this, Herodotus both kindles a desire within his audience to inquire, to look at what is not their own, and warns them of the difficulties of seeing clearly. This meditation on the aesthetic quality of judgment has serious political implications – for the despotism, in particular, impedes the attempt to see the beautiful clearly. This informs Herodotus’ praise of what he considers truly beautiful: the equality fostered by Babylonian marriage laws.

Chapter 1 traces the conceptual history of judgments of perfection from Leibniz and Wolff to Kant, clarifying their significance for art criticism. In rationalist aesthetics, perfection was identified with beauty, and judgments of perfection were considered aesthetic judgments governed by rules. Kant’s rejection of this view marked a decisive break with the rationalist tradition, but his transformation of the concept has been largely overlooked. This chapter reconstructs Kant’s reinterpretation: judgments of perfection become nonaesthetic evaluations that attribute goodness to an object relative to a concept of its kind, such as “Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir film.” These judgments remain important within Kant’s framework, not as substitutes for judgments of taste but as judgments that can inform and support aesthetic evaluation. By recovering this neglected role, the chapter lays the groundwork for a Kantian account of criticism that honors Kant’s rejection of aesthetic testimony and general principles of taste while making room for reasoned evaluation.

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.

This chapter draws on recent work in transnational feminist studies and critical beauty and fashion studies to examine South Asian American chick lit. It attends to how the transnationalization of Indian fashion and beauty industries produce new definitions of cosmopolitanism through economic citizenship, or the “right to work” in a global economy. The chapter focuses on Kavita Daswani’s chick lit novel Salaam, Paris (2006) and the Indian Muslim protagonist Tanaya Shah’s entry into the world of fashion modeling. It argues that Tanaya’s Muslimness contributes to the construction of fashion as a failed moral economy, in addition to operating as a racialized identity that facilitates the multicultural brand expansion of a global clothing retailer in a post-9/11 world. The chapter reads the sexual management of Tanaya's identities as a post-9/11 Muslim subject and an Indian model as allowing the fashion industry to produce convivial relations between Muslim identities, fashionability, and cosmopolitanism.

This chapter argues that throughout his prose works, Wilde demonstrates ambivalence regarding the significance of fashion in relation to flesh, and this chapter traces that ambivalence through texts including The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, and “The Birthday of the Infanta.” Treating ugliness and beauty, monstrosity and martyrdom, this chapter demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s continued fascination with beautiful flesh that is betrayed as such flesh decays, rots, and becomes loose and baggy, like an ill-fitting garment. Wilde writes against the backdrop of eugenicist discourse, which proves a foil to his aesthetic project while simultaneously animating his response to criminal charges against him for gross indecency. But Wilde also looks to an earlier precedent to work out questions of flesh and fashion, particularly that of baroque painting and sculpture by artists such as Guido Reni and Gianlorenzo Bernini in their representations of the flesh of martyrs. The world remains unsure whether Wilde was a monster or a martyr; this chapter shows that Wilde himself shared those concerns.

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.

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.