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I. Overview

The discussion explores the historicization of the concept of ugliness and its non-essentialist understanding, emphasizing the openness of aesthetics and the blurred boundaries of the category of the ugly. Aesthetics, as a core philosophical concept, has a broad definition and scope, encompassing fields such as nature, politics, and art. The issue of ugliness is complex and fraught with contradictions, making it difficult to summarize its core questions, which must instead be sought through relational and dynamic interpretations. Ugliness is not a modern invention but has always coexisted with beauty. The study of ugliness is linked to the idea of artistic autonomy, and by the 20th century, it became a cultural battleground. In an increasingly aestheticized society, the appreciation of ugliness emerged as a significant mode of expression, capable of stimulating numbed perceptions and critiquing the hypocrisy of beauty. Theodor Adorno viewed ugliness as a moment of artistic potential, a space where beauty could be discovered amid the immoral, the grotesque, and the repulsive.

II. Conceptual Clarification

This section delves into the concepts of "ugliness" and "beauty," highlighting their relativity and conditional nature—there is no absolute beauty or ugliness. Drawing on Moses Mendelssohn's perspective, it illustrates the contrast between the perfection of things and their decay into ugliness, as well as the role of ugliness in culture and enlightenment. Ugliness is described as encompassing various psychological phenomena, such as fear and horror, and is closely tied to social consensus. Friedrich Schlegel's view is cited to argue that beauty is a spiritual value rather than a direct attribute of objects. The section also examines how modernism liberated artistic practice from moral constraints and how the rise of hedonism and mass culture led to aestheticization and the blurring of boundaries between beauty and ugliness. Nietzsche's interpretation of ugliness in The Twilight of the Idols is used to illustrate humanity's hatred of decay and the profundity of art. Finally, the section distinguishes two dimensions of ugliness: the "concrete" dimension, related to the formal negation of beauty, and the "sentimental" dimension, tied to its effects, while differentiating between the manifestation of ugliness and formal ugliness. The unique position of ugliness in literature, rhetoric, aesthetics, and philosophy is emphasized, along with the need to reconceptualize ugliness as a term of aesthetic judgment.

III. Semantic Shifts in the Concept of "Ugliness"

This section explores the semantic evolution of "ugliness" and its place in cultural studies. Hegel posited that beauty and ugliness are relative rather than absolute, existing as partial aspects. Ugliness is often defined as the opposite of beauty, but in ancient Greece, the term aischros carried both aesthetic and ethical connotations. Latin developed two words—deformis and turpis—to express the two dimensions of ugliness, focusing on form and effect, respectively. Modern European languages similarly employ dual terms, such as "deformed" and "ugly" in English. The German word häßlich (ugly) derives from hatred, originally denoting active hostility before evolving into passive repulsion and detestability. By the late Middle Ages, ugliness was routinely used as the antonym of beauty. In the context of philosophical enlightenment, aesthetics emerged as an independent discipline, sharpening the distinction between beauty and ugliness along ethical, moral, and ontological lines. Ugliness was long regarded as a deficiency of the phenomenal world compared to the world of ideas, and it remained overlooked in the philosophy of art. Kant's Critique of Judgment began addressing ugliness but primarily focused on beauty and the sublime. Post-Enlightenment, with the rise of effect-based aesthetics, ugliness lost its ontological certainty, and previously rigid boundaries began to dissolve. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, art was increasingly understood as an autonomous domain separate from religion, ethics, and law, and ugliness gained significance within it. During Romanticism, ugliness became crucial in art, as Romantic poetics and aesthetics imbued the base with sublime meaning and the ordinary with a mysterious aura. Friedrich Schlegel's On the Study of Greek Poetry was the first to explicitly demand an "aesthetics of ugliness." Ugliness gradually detached from specific imagery, emerging as an abstract, self-contained system opposing beauty. The Hegelian philosopher Karl Rosenkranz, in Aesthetics of Ugliness, asserted that ugliness as an artistic subject lies outside the realm of beauty and requires separate treatment. The explicit representation of ugliness in art is paradoxical, suggesting an intermediate state—neither beautiful nor ugly—that complicates critique and evaluation. The aesthetics of ugliness manifests precisely by dismantling simplistic binary systems, freeing ugliness from moral constraints and merging it with the autonomous aesthetic program.

IV. Ugliness and Literature

This section examines the portrayal of ugliness in literature and the evolution of its aesthetic status. In ancient Greek literature, ugliness often appeared in marginal figures like Thersites in the Iliad, whose image and speech served humor and satire, contrasting with beauty. By the mid-16th century, the rise of tragic style and Mannerism marked a shift toward intense emotions and exaggerated scenes, as art began shedding moral restraints, paving the way for 19th- and 20th-century autonomous aesthetics. In late 18th-century Gothic fiction and Dark Romanticism, ugliness took on new forms, with artistic practices challenging taboos—for example, E.T.A. Hoffmann's character Cardillac in Mademoiselle de Scudéri, embodying the blurred lines between beauty and ugliness, good and evil. While 19th-century art broke conventions, judgments of ugliness still relied on established value systems. In the 20th century, the relationship between modernity and rationality became problematic, reshaping art forms. Nietzsche's "Dionysian spirit" and aesthetic phenomena emphasized the collapse of individuation and the replacement of transcendental unity with multiplicity, making ugliness a tangible new element in aesthetics. Nietzsche elevated taste as a cognitive tool transcending truth/error, good/evil, and beauty/ugliness, rendering reality a meaningless "play-space." Modern ugliness in art, unlike 19th-century works, more thoroughly dismantles value systems, erases boundaries, interweaves categories, and contaminates concepts, producing an effect akin to Freud's unheimlich—the uncanny emergence of the unfamiliar within the familiar, evoking intense stimulation and terror.

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