On the Aesthetics of the Ugly in Karl Rosenkranz and Christian Hermann Weisse

Abstract

This article studies some issues in a main transformation in the history of aesthetic thought, namely the rise of a systematic theory of ugliness. After some references to the aesthetical conceptions of ugliness in G. E. Lessing and F. Schlegel, it is studied the dialectical conception of Ch. H. Weisse’s System der Ästhetik (1830), an author of the Hegelian school. The ugliness is understood as the non-sublimated exhibition of the contradictions pertaining to the finite. This conception paves the way to K. Rosenkranz’s Ästhetik des Häßlichen, the only and surely the first complete, independent and systematic aesthetics of ugliness. The study of its main thesis and of some examples referred to by Rosenkranz, shows that although still obeying to classical patterns, his aesthetics opened the way to the aesthetical autonomy of ugliness and the substitution of beauty by other aesthetic values. It participates thus of a more general movement of transformation of reason that started at the end of the 18^th Century.