“Anthropology from an Aesthetic Point of View” presents a major reassessment of Kantian anthropology, correcting a tendency, common in Kant scholarship and in broader debates about race, to view Enlightenment race theory solely through the lens of moral or political philosophy. Keeping the practical stakes firmly in the frame, I shift our understanding of Kant’s anthropology away from a moral register and toward an aesthetic one, arguing that the Critique of Judgment predicates the perfection of racialized bodies on their conformity to an ideal form or “shape [Gestalt].” These ideal forms, I contend, then serve as the crux of Kant’s mature race theory and the post-Kantian anthropologies examined in the next chapter.

The chapter explores the connection between the emergence of Nature as an independent entity and the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture shaped democratic practices. Nature became a political resource in democratic society, providing concepts like “necessity” and “constraint.” Modern scholarly discourses often invoke Nature as a limit and source of legitimation for political claims. It further examines how the imaginary of Nature as an autonomous entity influenced the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture created space for human agency and democratic practices. It also discusses how Nature became a source of authority, necessity, and constraint in modern political discourses. Lastly, the chapter compares Western cosmology with non-Western ones and analyzes the impact of cosmological shifts on politics.

In this chapter, Ezrahi argues that the massive discrediting of claims of objectivity has deeply weakened the social authority of professional communities and institutions – governments, scientists, and economists – which have heavily resorted to professionalism in order to seemingly depoliticize decisions and empower their legitimacy. The dual role of objectivity norms and objectification strategies in depoliticizing decisions while concealing value-political choices is scrutinized. The delicate balance between overpoliticization and over-objectification is examined, emphasizing the challenges faced by governments in navigating transparency and political functionality. The chapter traces the interconnected erosion of the transcendental concept of Nature, democratic culture, and the rule of law. The loss of objectivity in law, exemplified by challenges to the Israeli Supreme Court, underscores the broader decline in civic solidarity. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the cultural and epistemological crises facing modern democracy, raising critical questions about resources available for shaping new imaginaries of self-governance and justice, drawing on historical cosmological transformations.

Contemporary democracies are experiencing decay due to economic crises, inequality, and the emergence of harsh capitalism, leading to democratic fragmentation and the rise of undemocratic liberalism and illiberal democracy. Ezrahi attributes this crisis to a shift in political epistemology from a dualistic cosmology of modernity to a postmodern monism, which blurs the boundaries between Nature/Culture. This book traces this shift from the monistic religious cosmology of the Middle Ages, based on a hierarchical “Chain of Being” with God at the top, to the secular, anti-hierarchical dualistic cosmology of the modern West. This shift created a dichotomy between Nature/Culture, world and humanity, providing space for human agency and forming the basis for democracy. Ezrahi argues that the dissolution of this dualistic cosmology has led to the breakdown of beliefs and perceptions that supported Western civic individualism, including perceptions of cause and effect in politics, public facts, expert competence, objectivity, and the visibility of political power.

This chapter explores the impact of science and technology’s objectifying gaze on society, Culture, and politics throughout history. It discusses how this gaze has turned the world into an object and humans into observers, diminishing moral, psychological, and political aspects. The chapter analyzes the duality of objectification, which renders man-made objects external despite embodying human values and actions. It examines the Industrial Revolution as a pivotal historical context where technology was seen as a mark of progress and an embodiment of objective Nature. Eventually, the human choices and interests behind technology were exposed, leading to the reconsideration of technologies from ethical, economic, political, and aesthetic viewpoints. The chapter also points to the ambivalence surrounding technology, including both fear and admiration, and how the disillusionment with technology has impacted the democratic epistemological framework. Additionally, it discusses the influence of philosophers-scientists like Descartes and Newton on modern dualistic cosmology, highlighting how science and technology have shaped various socio-political fields such as law, medicine, economics, and political science.

This chapter probes the ontological foundations of territorial sovereignty by tracing its normative logic to two diverging conceptions of sovereign authority in Roman law: dominium and imperium. While the dominium-based perspective ties the legitimacy of territorial sovereignty to prototypical forms of precivil private property association, from an imperium-based viewpoint, territorial sovereignty entails only sovereign jurisdiction over persons within a given spatial domain. Tracing these viewpoints through their early modern uptake by Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, the chapter points to a key normative disjunction – namely, whether territorial sovereignty is legitimated by the facticity of precivil object acquisition or by associational bonds between human beings unconstrained by claim rights over given segments of land, water, and air. The analysis highlights that contemporary questions on the limits of sovereign authority – including on the “right to exclude” and on the legitimacy of the extraterritorial exercise of sovereign power – stem from a normative disjunction in the very idea of territorial sovereignty. The chapter argues that the moral-ethical dilemma of inclusion in a bordered world is profoundly imbricated with the ecological-ontological question of how we imagine our collective selves to be coconstituted with the land, water, and air around us.

In contrast to anthropocentric readings of the Georgics, chapter 3 argues that Vergil is interested in farming as a way of considering the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. The chapter contextualizes Vergil’s ecological thinking – highlighting influences from ancient philosophy, ethnography, Hesiod, and Roman agricultural treatises – and differentiates this reading from interpretations that shoehorn the relations of humans and nonhumans into a nature–culture binary. The chapter examines how the poem discloses agriculture as a practice of managing ecological relations. The second half of the chapter then queries the status of the human within its ecologies. While much of the poem denies human exceptionality, it does recognize ways in which humans stand out from the rest of the world, above all in their unparalleled ability to transform their environments – epitomized by the world-altering activities of Rome and Caesar. Ultimately, the chapter connects the peculiar status of the human to the didactic aims of the poem. By relaying and explaining the signa of the world, the Georgics offers the fantasy of an expertise that can better embed humans in their environments.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

This chapter argues that Hegel’s aim in his philosophy of nature is not to compete with natural science but to show that there is reason in nature – reason that science cannot see but that works through the causal processes discovered by science. It considers first the transition from Hegel’s logic to his philosophy of nature and argues that the latter continues the project of the former, starting with reason, or the “absolute idea”, as nature, as sheer externality. It then argues that Hegel derives nature’s categories logically – a priori – from the idea-as-externality, and subsequently matches them with empirical phenomena (rather than constructing categories to fit the latter). It provides an abridged account of Hegel’s physics in order to show how the categories of physical (as opposed to mechanical or organic) nature are derived from one another and how they are embodied in physical phenomena, such as sound, heat, and magnetism. It then concludes by arguing that, contrary to appearances, Hegel’s conception of light complements, and is not simply at odds with, that presented by quantum physics.

Serving as an introduction to the collection, this chapter underscores the significance of Hegel’s philosophy of nature within his comprehensive philosophical system and its relevance to contemporary philosophical engagement with empirical sciences. It explores the reception history of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, discussing several efforts to revitalize it over the last century and highlighting significant instances of its positive reception despite prevailing skepticism. Tracing the theoretical roots of Hegel’s philosophical interest in the natural world, from post-Kantian thought and the Romantic science movement, the chapter highlights Hegel’s engagement with figures such as Goethe and Schiller, which shaped his organicist views of nature. It examines Hegel’s evolving approach to nature, tracing the emergence of his own natural philosophy and its subsequent refinement in the Dissertatio, the Jena System Drafts, the Phenomenology, and the Encyclopaedia, all of which constitute the important stages of its development. Through successive revisions in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel incorporated advancements in scientific understanding, emphasizing the interplay between empirical observation and philosophical inquiry. In its final section, this chapter outlines the objectives and structure of the volume, emphasizing the revitalization of Hegel’s philosophy of nature beyond its historical context. It argues that Hegel’s approach provides insights into the intricate interplay between humanity and nature, recognizing its depth beyond mere physical needs. Therefore, reassessing his concepts from a modern perspective could generate new viewpoints on the relationship between nature and human culture.

Imperial gardens in ancient Rome and China were as much a physical arrangement of place as they were discursive realms, evoking imagination and invective alike. Starting from semantic observations on ancient Latin and Chinese terminologies, Wentian Fu explores the divergent contexts and concepts of imperial gardens in each culture. The first section traces the respective origins: while inextricably intertwined with ideas of visibility, citizenship, and republican traditions in Rome, the chapter argues for a conspicuous absence of those vectors in China prior to Western Han traditions. The analysis of odes from the Book of Songs reveals, on the contrary, close connections with the power-invested charge of palatial structures. In the second section, the author showcases how Roman aristocratic gardens evolved over time from aristocratic domains into imperial properties, dynamically growing in size and scope. The gardens in Nero’s Golden House, which are given exemplary consideration, both resembled and reversed the order of human spheres and nature. In doing so, they paralleled Shanglin Park and the Jianzhang Palace outside of Chang’an: the chapter explains how those sites were critical to the emperor’s pursuit of immortality. In the concluding section, Fu fully capitalizes on his findings, immersing the argument in the ambiguities of imperial gardens both as seductive spaces of transgression, indulgence, and debauchery, and as role model instantiations of good governance.

Riffing on the narcissism of male grooming, Devin Garofalo discusses the Romantic impulse to “manscape” – that is, to “read… a culturally specific conception of the human into the landscape such that it is invisibilized as the world’s structuring principle.” This culturally specific conception of the human, she clarifies, building on the pathbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter, is that of man as a bourgeois colonialist, a tamer, and a conqueror. He is Hannibal and Napoleon and the Wordsworthian poet all in one. The Romantic nature poem that is the hallmark of early nineteenth–century poetry, then, recruits the ecological imagination as it consolidates and eradicates all threats to whiteness.

One of the primary ways we encounter animals is as a food source. The dominant system of animal agriculture is “factory farming,” which is designed to produce the greatest amount of meat at the lowest possible cost. Factory farming is grossly inefficient from an ecological point of view, imposes enormous suffering on animals, and damages both humans and the environment. “Conscientious omnivores” reject factory farming but defend painlessly killing animals for food. Some defend hunting because they think it promotes other important values as well. These arguments are rejected by vegetarians and vegans, but they remind us that concerns about animals exist against the background of other values, including those that relate to the broader value of nature.

The words ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have different senses and referents. The idea of the environment is keyed to what surrounds us, and we can speak of natural and built environments as well as others. This book is concerned with ethical questions about the environment. Many of these concern problems that occur at different scales and cause harms of various types. Environmental problems can be viewed from technological, economic, religious, and aesthetic perspectives, among others. No single perspective provides the sole correct or exhaustive way of viewing environmental problems. There is an ethical dimension to most environmental problems and that is the focus of this book.

Since the early nineteenth century, critics have noted John Clare’s unusually attentive eye for animals. From his earliest published pieces to the final poems transcribed from manuscripts in Northampton Asylum, Clare’s poetry is packed with animal life. This piece closely reads two sonnets from the middle of his career to investigate the breadth and complexity of his engagement with multiple non-human modes of being. It then turns to a representative range of other examples from his work and touches briefly upon critical analogies drawn between the poet and the non-human creatures about which he writes. The piece focuses repeatedly on the variety in Clare’s representations of animals and the consequent difficulty of drawing singular critical conclusions from them. In the process, it explores tensions in Clare’s poetry between themes of interconnection and alienation, freedom and confinement, profusion and scarcity, resilience and fragility, and exposure and agency.

This chapter discusses psychic contemplation as our participation in the contemplation of the World Soul, who creates the sensible world and time. As a result, we see the world as becoming alive and we transcend time by finding in ourselves the peace and rest of Nature, the lower power of the World Soul. The main faculty in ourselves which participates in Nature is imagination (and memory), although Nature herself doesn’t entertain perception, imagination, or memory. When we ascend to this level, we begin to live in the present, mindfully awake to our sensible experience, but also having a sense that we are something different from it. Sensible experience no longer deceives us because we see the sensible world in and through its archetypes, which are the logoi in Nature. Like a geometer who sees the intelligible structure of the square in squared sensible shapes, we intuitively see the essence of things (“what it is”) revealed to us through their qualities (“what it is like”).