Contingently Enigmatic Pictures and the Metaphysics of British Empiricism

Throughout the canonically understood intellectual history of British empiricism are found pictures that dramatize contradictions between the analytic and historical propositions that have come to define empiricism more broadly. Whether it is confusions of Locke’s nominalism, which questioned the boundaries of humanity while at the same time upholding a form of anthropocentrism, or Hume’s critique of the imagination, which was skeptical of mental imagery yet premised on the idea that thinking is shaped by images made real, or J. S. Mill’s theorization of character, which, though empirical, led him to reject the belief that his external appearance mattered at all, some of the defining paradoxes of British empiricism have been repeatedly captured by British artists. I call the resulting pictures contingently enigmatic because the contradictions that they embody only become apparent when framed through historical contextualization, through the contingent context from which they emerged. The paper will focus on three examples of this type of picture, ranging from a 17^th-century watercolor preserved in the British library that was commissioned by Locke to the prints after the 18^th-century portraits by Allan Ramsay that were presented to Hume to the 19^th-century phrenological caricature of J. S. Mill by Leslie Ward. These examples show that British artists have been recurringly attentive to the contradictions of British empiricism over the longue durée. As historical documents, they can help us better understand the shifting contours of empiricism itself.