In realism’s embrace, one comes to know the world through time and only incompletely, buffeted by empirical historical contingencies on all sides, but also nonetheless detached and understanding oneself, in tune with the controlling author’s meaningful expression of will, to know enough to be freely acting and self-determining agents.
Skin color, for Kant, gave immediate proof that people in the present had had a similar geographical groupings in the past, and in so doing it also helped him resolve certain incoherencies in his philosophy that were presented—especially clearly as he faced his own dying—by the fact that bodies are not even like themselves over time.
Tucker brings into focus the significance of the fact that as medicine shifted away from a humoral model, skin newly came to serve to construct the opacity of our knowledge of our own body’s inner workings.
By definition, in anatomical medicine cutting open dead bodies provided the grounds for knowledge, but for the doctors and patients alike that diagnostic moment tragically came a bit too late.
This temporal incoherence, hinged on the opacity of skin, made the likeness of bodies into a problem of immediate cognition: the perplexity and reach of this logic is the subject Tucker treats in depth.