The Explanation of Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics

Abstract

There is a Latin proverb, which states: “we never really know what a thing is unless we are able to give a sufficient account of its opposite” (cited in Lorand, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(4): 399–406, 1994). This turns out to be particularly true for beauty and its opposite aesthetic concept, ugliness, in Kantian aesthetics. Since Kant’s explanation of judgments of taste is based exclusively on the notion of free harmony, constitutive of judgments of the beautiful alone, the explanation of ugliness could not begin without a prior analysis of a positive aesthetic concept, beauty. This analysis was made in the previous chapter, where I proposed an interpretation of the notion of free harmony, based on Kant’s general account of a reflective judgment and the subjective a priori principle of purposiveness. I argued that aesthetic reflective judgments or judgments of taste, just like logical reflective judgments, operate by the means of the principle of purposiveness which aims to conceptualize the manifold, that is, to find the appropriate concept. On my view, Kant’s concept of beauty has inherent cognitive ambitions. It belongs to a general plan of our power of judgment to conceptualize every aspect of experience and make it cognizable for us, that is, to organize it in a way that fits with our cognitive abilities. This analysis of the concept of beauty has also anticipated how ugliness can be included in Kantian aesthetics, which I will explain more deeply in the present chapter.