Alterity in Aesthetics: Reflections on Ugliness

Charles FEITOSA

Abstract
Ugliness in aesthetics may sound paradoxical at
first. But historically ugliness and aesthetics have been
bound together in several ways. From Etymology we
learn that the German word Hsslichkeit is
connected to Hass [Hate]. The Portuguese term
feira comes from Latin foeditas, which means
dirt and shame. The French word laideur comes from
Latin verb laedere: to hurt. Why do we feel
ashamed in front the ugly? What are we afraid of? What
is it in ugliness that we hate so much and that hurts us
so much? I will suggest that the connection between
ugliness and alterity is the reason why ugliness is so
unbearable.

Introduction

Recently, there has been intensive discussion in Brazil about the

television stations strategies to increase their audience levels. In
many live-programs we can see an unscrupulous spectacle of
ugliness, the grotesque and the bizarre (from deformed people to all
kinds of nature aberrations). The audience, from its side, takes this all
in with joy and pleasure. What are the grounds of this fascination
with ugliness? What is the role of the grotesque in the mass-media?
What happens to us when we are confronted with the ugly that
attracts and repels us at the same time? Reflecting on ugliness in the
aesthetics can help us answer these questions.

Ugliness in aesthetics may sound paradoxical at first, however,

ugliness and aesthetics have historically been bound together. First, I
would like to examine the traditional aesthetics of ugliness which
deals with ugliness as the opposite of beauty, i.e., as something to be
improved, negated or excluded.

I. The Ugly as the Other of the Beautiful

What is so ugly in ugliness? Ugliness has different grades. It can

provoke laughter, fear or repugnance. The word "ugly" in English

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means "repulsive or offensive; objectionable". From etymology we
learn that the German word Hsslichkeit is connected to Hass
[hate]. The Portuguese term feira comes from Latin foeditas,
which means dirt and shame. The French word laideur comes from
the Latin verb laedere [to hurt]. Why do we feel ashamed in front of
the ugly? What are we afraid of? What is it, in ugliness, that we hate
and that hurts us so much?

The Japanese word for ugly is minikui and it means "hard to see".
In this sense, ugliness seems to be a kind of violence against
perception; a violence against the senses. But ugliness attacks only
the superior senses, like sight and hearing. A strange sound hurts our
ears. A deformed face offends our eyes. On the other hand, there are
many things that offend our sense of taste, smell or touch, but we do
not call them ugly. The smell of a body in decomposition is repulsive,
but not ugly. Just as with beauty, it seems that ugliness manifests
itself only for the so called more spiritual or rational senses. Given
the historical connection between the rational senses and the intellect,
might we say that the violence of ugliness is directed, perhaps,
against our faculty to think?

We usually understand ugliness as the absence of beauty. If beauty is

associated with harmony and perfection, ugliness is associated with
disharmony, asymmetry and imperfection. If beauty shows the
splendor of order and balance, ugliness brings the stigma of
imbalance, excess and chaos. If beauty is on the true and good side,
ugliness is on the side of the false and bad. These kinds of
dichotomies suppose a general moral suspicion against ugliness. The
most frequent accusation suggests that ugliness is the immediate
reflection of behavior deviations. In the Ilias, Homer describes the
figure of Thersites as the ugliest Greek warrior: "squint-eyed, cripple,
bald-headed, humpback" (Ilias; II, 217-219). This repulsive
appearance is the sensible expression of his blasphemies against
goodness, and it testifies to the lack of nobility in his character.

If the Greek culture was marked by the ideal of kalos-kagathos,

that is, a correspondence between goodness and beauty, one could
say that there would be such thing as a non-explicit ideal of kakos-
kaischros. With this neologism, which juxtaposes kakos [bad] and
aischros [ugly], I intend to show the necessary connection between
ugliness and iniquity. On several occasions, Plato criticized Homer
for not showing properly the gods' and heroes' beauty. For example,
in many passages he affirms there is a relationship between the lack
of grace, rhythm or harmony and the bad conduct or bad speeches
(See Politeia; III, 401a; Gorgias; 470e).

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There are other texts where Plato suggests that ugliness is not only a
sign of morals, but also of ontological imperfection. In Hippias Maior
(289a) he says that human beings are ugly when compared to gods,
but the most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to the human
being. The ugliness is used here as an indicator for the respective
modalities of being. Furthermore the human ugliness was for Plato an
index for the loss of rationality. When someone is under intense
affect, like ecstasy or rage, hate or happiness, the persons face is
deformed. In a certain sense, ugliness is associated with the image of
foreigners or barbarians, that is, everyone or everything which does not
comply with the rules of the polis.

If Plato accepted and worked with the Greek ideal of kalokagathia

(and its contrary, kakoskaschronia), he nevertheless did it in a very
strange way. How can one explain the fact that Socrates, the main
character of his dialogues, was famous for his unattractive body?
How could the ugly Socrates be the best man to guide his disciples to
the perception of the virtues? Nietzsche said the ugliness of Socrates
had a repulsive effect to the Greeks1. For Plato, conversely, this
contradiction between spiritual beauty and corporal ugliness made
Socrates the perfect incarnation of Platos own philosophy. Socrates'
ugliness worked very well as symbol for his detachment from the
realm of appearance. Socrates' ugliness calls the legitimacy or reality
of the sensible world, the world of mere appearance into question.

This brief reference to Socrates suggests something more significant

than the moral judgment against on ugliness. One of the reasons why
art, since Plato, has been seen as inferior when compared to
philosophy is the strict connection between beauty and the realm of
sensibility. I will demonstrate that the connection between ugliness
and sensibility is even more originary and contagious than the
connection between the ugly and the (morally) bad, and that this is
precisely why ugliness is so unbearable.

1 See F. Nietzsche: G tzen-Dmmerung [Crepuscle of the Idols]; p.68, in: Kritische

Studienausgabe, edited by G. Colli und M. Montinari, V. 6, Berlin: 1988.

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II. Ugliness as Wild Sensibility

The first aspect I want to consider is the relationship between

ugliness and the transitory or ephemeral. Time leaves marks on the
surface of things and bodies. It seems that ugliness comes as an
unavoidable process of becoming older, of losing the force of the
muscles, falling by their own weight. This ugliness penetrates us and
shows in a violent way our own finitude. Ugliness hurts us so deeply
because it touches our essential wound; it wildly shows us our
mortality. The decomposing corpse is repulsive because it reminds us
of our future without mercy. We oppose ugliness as we oppose death;
in opposing ugliness we are fighting against our own mortality2.

Another interesting aspect of this issue is the supposed relationship

between ugliness and sensibility as sensuous erotic sensibility. Again
in Plato we can see that the sexual intercourse is at the same time the
most pleasant and most repulsive act we can do. So ugly that people
used to hide themselves to have sex (See Hippias Maior; 299a). From
the biblical myth of the paradise expulsion, to the Brazilians
reference to the sex organs as the shame-parts, we see a long and
common tradition of viewing sex as ugly. In the act of sex we lose
our human face; we become like animals or monsters. Freud was
concerned about these ambivalences: on one hand, the concept of
beauty is connected with the sexual excitation, on the other he was
surprised about the sentiment of aversion that was provoked by the
sight of the sexual organs3. George Battaile interpreted these
phenomena in a positive way in L'Erotism (1957): "La beaute
importe au premier chef en ce que la laideur ne peut etre souillee, et
que l'essence de l'erotisme est la souillure 4. The essence of the
erotism is the macula! Besides, Freud suggests that only the erected
penis can be considered beautiful. This connection between the
female organ and the ugliness is very strange, as if the passivity and
limitation of the feminine could be exteriorized as ugliness, while the
male principle of perfection could be translated into the beauty of the
phallus.

It is dangerous, however, to reduce the essence of the feminine to the

female genitalia. If ugliness has something in common with the
feminine, it is only the fact that both of them were ignored, excluded

2. Western culture has the tendency to use beauty for defending us from death. (For
example, in Brazil people used to make-up the face of their dead relatives for the burial
ceremony.) It is not a coincidence that the German word for beauty, Schnheit, has its
origin in verb schonen, which means "to protect, to care".
3. See S. Freud: Sexual Leben, p.66, q. 2, in: Studienausgabe, V. 5, Frankfurt a.M.: 1972.
4. G. Bataille: L'Erotisme, p.161, Paris: 1995.

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or repressed by our phallus- and kallo-centrical culture. The ugliness
and the feminine resist explanation, and this inexplicability is
interpreted as a menace to rationality. A deeper analysis of the
traditional way to think of ugliness, as the opposite of the beauty,
could perhaps show us that our bad will comes perhaps from our
general inability to understand the alterity as such, whether it be in
the barbarian or the stranger, the irrational, the feminine, or the
sensible. Hegel affirms in his Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik that the
will to beauty comes from a kind of narcissistic pleasure the Spirit
takes in itself, or in other words, the human desire to see itself
reflected in the nature or in the art5. If Hegel is right about this
inherent narcissism, then I would like to affirm that the Unbehagen
of ugliness has its origin in the confrontation with difference,
strangeness, alterity.

Traditional aesthetics expects art to help us control everything in the

world that may threaten us. But what could a different kind of
aesthetics of ugliness be? Could an inversion of the rules of the
game be the best way to counteract the exclusion of ugliness from
our cultural values? In other words, would it be possible to let the
ugly work for the beauty (and for the goodness)?

III. The Ugly Working for Beauty

As long as ugliness could contribute to spiritual edification it was

allowed to be represented and presented by art. For example, the
monsters and daemons at the walls of the medieval churches have
helped us remember evil's constant menace to the world. Sometimes
ugliness has the task of emphasizing the absolute value of beauty
itself. The contrast between the ugly Judas Ischarioth and the
beautiful Christ is supposed to prove the superiority of goodness over
the evil6. Other traditional forms of the aesthetical appropriation of
ugliness take place in comedy. For example, in the Poetics, Aristotle
defines the laughable as the mild ugly, that means, an ugliness which
doesn't hurt (See Poetics, 1445a).

Besides the Christian and the comical appropriation of ugliness, there

are some other explicit attempts to let the ugly work for the beautiful.
One could mention Victor Hugo's famous foreword for his book
Cromwell (1827). In this historical drama the author announces his

5. See G.W.F. Hegel: Asthetik; I, p.14, edited by F. Bassenge, Berlin: 1976.

6. Although Jesus has been described in the bible as a man without beauty (see Jesaia
53:2), his representations are dominated by the need to connect divine powers with sensible
perfection.

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love for the grotesque and for the ugly. After Victor Hugo, the true
harmony is realized by the idea of totality. The artist is only free if he
can recognize that the shadow comes side by side with the light, the
good with the evil, grotesque with the sublime, the ugly with the
beautiful. Ugliness becomes more than an aesthetical category, it
becomes a cosmic one. Baudelaire was also fascinated by ugliness. In
his famous poem Une Charogne [a carrier] he describes the image of
a cadaver in decomposition, being consumed by worms and flies. In
reality, Baudelaire wanted to change the ugliness of the world into
art. Despite his apology of the ugly, he doesn't give up on the ideal of
classical beauty: his verses are always correct, following all the rules
and harmony criteria of the traditional metric (For example: "Les
mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride, /D'ou sortaient de noirs
bataillons /De larves, qui coulaient comme un epais liquide /Le long
de ces vivants haillons).

In the nineteenth century, it was not only the artists that seemed to
discover the aesthetic potential of ugliness, but also the philosophers.
Karl Rosenkranzs sthetik des Hsslichen, published in 1853,
argues that a dialectical aesthetics must handle the opposite of beauty
too. He then presents a detailed analysis of the figures of the ugly in
nature, the human body, art and culture. He concludes that ugliness is
not the simple opposite of beauty but a moment of the process of
beauty in becoming itself. Ugliness is an important stage, even if it
has to be aufgehoben. Even in these all too brief references to Hugo,
Baudelaire and Rosenkranz (one could also cite Edgar Allan Poe,
Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde) we begin to see that an attempt to
rehabilitate ugliness is associated with modernity. It has all happened
as if the people have lost their sensibility for the classical idea of
beauty, as if they have lost their ability to be surprised and seduced.
Hegel has interpreted this inability of the spirit of his time to become
satisfied with beauty as a sign of the end of art--"die Kunst ist...ein
Vergangenes" [art is something, that has passed], he provocatively
said in his lessons for sthetik (p.22). If Hegel is correct that art in
some profound way has passed, do we then need to find new ways to
produce and consume beauty? Instead of considering ugliness as the
other of beauty, modern aesthetics can look to the ugly as an other
form of the beautiful itself. The new beautiful (that includes the ugly)
is able to impress eyes and ears anesthetized by the tradition.

The price to pay for the integration of ugliness in aesthetics is its

debilitation. The ugly loses its poison. It becomes domesticated,
buried alive under the totalizing idea of beauty. The most difficult
challenge is to examine whether it is possible not only to invert the
terms of tradition, but to twist free [herausdrehen] of its schema. Is it

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possible to experience ugliness as such, and not only as the other
(which means the imperfection) of beauty? That is, is it possible to
think ugliness without reference to the distinctions between good and
bad, true and false, perfection and imperfection, spiritual and
sensuous? Could one think ugliness in registers other than those of
epistemology, metaphysics, and ethicsand perhaps even aesthetics?

IV. Beyond the Ugly and the Beautiful

We should be suspicious of our need for beauty and our aversion to

ugliness. Couldn't it be that our will to beauty has its origin in an
unreflected will to stability and order?

Is our aversion to ugliness a symptom of our fear of death and our

inability to deal with the transitoriness and finitude of existence? An
altered aesthetics should accept the ugly as such, letting it be what it
is, without including or excluding it. An altered aesthetics should be
able to point out the ugliness of reality, not in Adorno's sense of
denouncing the ugliness of social injustice, but in the sense of
bringing to light the ugliness of existence and the absolute
impossibility for ugliness to be forgotten or legitimized. Pointing out
the ugliness of reality shouldn't be an attempt to overcome it, but to
expose it. Dealing with ugliness, we can learn to deal with the other
and recognize in ourselves the presence of Otherness. It seems to me
that some pictures of Edward Munch and Francis Bacon, and some
books like Sartre's La Nause and A Paixo segundo G.H. by the
brazilian author Clarice Lispector are contemporary examples of a
kind of altered aesthetics7. Those artworks cause a certain inebriety,
which moves us to a dimension beyond the ugly and the beautiful.

We live in a time when no normative form of aesthetics is possible

anymore. Ugliness and beauty have lost their paradigmatic functions.
We should take this loss of values ambiguously, celebrating it and
resisting it at the same time. At one hand it seems that no kind of
aesthetic authoritarianism is possible anymore8. But the fall of

7. The plot of A Paixo segundo G.H. tells the story of a middle to high-class woman
living a regular life. Suddenly things start changing when a cockroach comes out in her
luxurious flat and she unexpectedly eats the repulsive insect. This strange event provokes
the start of a slow metamorphosis process in her life. On the one hand, the departure of a
beautiful and secure but also a superficial and moralistic world. On the other hand, a hard
learning of a new freedom through a deep jump into the realm of ugliness and horror. An
English translation is available by Ronald de Souza entitled The Passion According to
G.H, Univ. of Minnesota: 1989.
8. It is important to note that National Socialism was extreme form of normative aesthetics
in the twentieth century. Hitler's project was an attempt to make the world more beautiful,
which means to eliminate its impurities. In this context we must understand the Nazi

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aesthetic values can also be regarded as a sign of poverty. Our time
suffers no more from an insensibility towards the beautiful, than from
a certain insensibility towards the ugly. In an epoch of the technical
reproduction of culture, we lack more and more the ability for
dissatisfaction. The will for satisfaction is so strong that even
ugliness can become a source of pleasure and fascination. We have
fun without end and limits. The overexploitation of ugliness, the
grotesque and all kinds of bizarreness by the mass media can lead to
its banalization. Perhaps an "ecological" movement for the
preservation of ugliness would be necessary, if only to create a focus
of resistance against the anesthetic look which dominates our time.

phenomenon not as a political aberration, but instead as the logical consequence of

traditional aesthetics in western culture, which dogmatically aligns the good, the true and
the beautiful. Thinking differently, if ugliness belongs essentially to the world, then its
purification cannot be realized, except through its destruction.