Mocombe sets out to name and codify a philosophical system he finds already embedded in Vodou practice, calling it Haitian or Vilokan idealism. On his reading the cosmos is a single material universe made by Bondye out of itself, doubled into a profane world and a mirrored sacred one where the lwa exist as real concepts, ideals and skills reached through dreams, divination, trance, reason or ordinary experience.

He treats this as a form of transcendental idealism close to Kant's but departing from it at two points: the noumenal realm is knowable rather than sealed off, and the categories of understanding are supplemented by dream and trance states. Out of it he derives a hermeneutic phenomenology, a materialism, an antidialectics in which each person contends against everyone else's interpretation, and an ethic of reciprocal justice.

Later chapters follow these commitments through the revolution, the lakou and Haitian aesthetics, and argue that Haiti's metaphysics has outrun its sciences.