In his Lectures on Fine Art (1835), Hegel emphasizes the grotesque character of Indian art. Grotesqueness results, in his view, from a contradiction between meaning and shape due to the incongruous combination of spiritual and material elements. Since Hegel's history of art is teeming with examples of inadequacy between meaning and shape, this paper aims to distinguish the grotesque from other types of artistic dissonance and to problematize Hegel's ascriptions of grotesqueness to ancient Indian art. In the first part of (...) the paper, I characterize the grotesque by the unnatural distortion of natural shapes with the purpose of achieving a direct sensuous manifestation of an indeterminate and impersonal divinity, Brahman. Such an attempt is, in Hegel's view, self-contradictory and self-defeating, leading to an exaggeration of the conflict between nature and spirit instead of the intended reconciliation between the two parts. In the second part of the paper, I compare Hegel's account of Indian art to the ‘monstrous myths’ of early modern Europe. Unlike his predecessors, Hegel legitimizes the grotesque representations of Hindu gods as endowed with profound meaning and the result of a universal human need, yet he describes them as ultimately irrational and repulsive based on a prejudiced view of the Indian people(s). In this sense, Hegel's assessment of Indian art functions as a reflection of modern European culture, its fascination and horror in the face of what Enlightenment could not entirely purge, rather than as a truthful and objective account of Indian art and culture. By questioning Hegel's characterization of Hindu iconography and mythology, this paper contributes to underexplored areas of Hegelian aesthetics, namely Hegel's account of symbolic art, especially Indian art, as well as his views on negative aesthetic experiences and values. (shrink)

Disgust, the emotion of rotting carcasses and slimy animalitos, finds itself at the center of several critical questions about human culture and cognition. This article summarizes recent developments, identify active points of debate, and provide an account of where the field is heading next.

Grand unified theories of messy topics like emotion tend to fail at capturing all the important dimensions of their subject. Why is this? I take on this question while responding to commentaries.

The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our (...) philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly. (shrink)

A position has been advanced by a number of philosophers, notably by Burnham and Skilleås, that certain knowledge is required to aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. They further argue that pleasure is not an integral part of aesthetically appreciating wine. Their position implies that a novice cannot aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. This paper draws on research into tasting and psychology to rebut these claims. I argue that there is strong evidence from both the average consumer and from wine experts (...) that they are unable to separate enjoyment from aesthetic evaluation; secondly, I argue that wine knowledge may actually preclude tasting of the wine as it exists in the glass due to perceptual bias. I conclude by arguing that it is unclear how exactly knowledge of things like terroir is supposed to affect the taste, as well as question what role conforming to a certain style plays in aesthetic success, as arguments that require knowledge for appreciation typically emphasize knowledge of styles of wine. (shrink)

The ideology of ‘purity’, normalcy and hierarchy through food and its relations is a postcolonial, feminist, queer issue. In an increasingly intolerant Hindutva political climate in India, a politics of enforced vegetarianism-based-purity as a mark of authenticity and ideal national identity intersects with liberalisation of the economy and globalisation of tastes to produce complex hierarchies of taste and ideas of culinary belonging. Given that literary and other cultural products can play an influential role in issues of social change, my paper (...) critically investigates how queer contemporary anglophone Indian fiction reworks dominant attitudes towards abjection through consumption, queering the approach to disgust as a stable marker of unbelonging in the contexts of postcoloniality and the transnational. Specifically, I examine approaches to abjection through food and discuss transgression through food as a postcolonial re-reading of disgust-based politics and aesthetics in two novels: The Boyfriend (2003) by author and gay-activist R. Raj Rao, and A Life Apart (2010) by writer-reviewer Neel Mukherjee—both of whom are part of an emerging group of authors writing in English and explicitly dealing with male same-sex desire in the subcontinent and the diaspora. Using a transnational and intersectional queer feminist lens on disgust and queering through food, I discuss how by challenging the hidden codes of a disgust-based gastro-politics and aesthetics in culture, The Boyfriend and A Life Apart reveal new spaces of sovereignty and self-expression in the everyday. In the process, I show how they provide fresh positions of resistance and subjectivity that complicate narrow ideas of belonging—national, diasporic and bodily—the production of which becomes crucial in the context of carving out a transnational queer (gastro) aesthetics and politics. (shrink)

Disgust is an emotion that is visceral, reactive, and uncomfortable. It is also purposively aroused by art in ways that contribute substantially to the meaning of a work. In such cases “aesthetic disgust” is a component of understanding and appreciation. Disgust comes in many varieties, including the humorous, the horrid, and the tragic. The responses it elicits can be strong or subtle, but few are actually pleasant. Therefore aesthetic disgust raises an ancient question: how is it that emotions aroused in (...) practical life become the focus of pleasure or enjoyment when they are aroused by art? This paper reviews a number of accounts of aesthetic satisfaction in disgust, arguing that the most profound uses convey an immediate and visceral grasp of physical vulnerability and mortality. (shrink)

Introduction for Special Issue on Disgust.

Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The (...) first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

This essay examines the public debate about the agricultural biotechnologies known as genetically modified organisms, as that debate is being carried out in its most dichotomizing forms in the United States. It attempts to reveal the power of sharply dichotomous thinking, as well as its limits. The essay draws on the work of Michel Serres, who uses the concept of the parasite to reconstruct or reframe fundamental dichotomies in western philosophy; it attempts a similar reframing of the public debates about (...) GMOs. The purpose of such a reframing is to create possibilities for dialogue among participants that will move beyond the polarization that characterizes much of the current debate in the U.S. (shrink)

El concepto de negatividad recorre el pensamiento dialéctico de Adorno en su intención de rebatir u oponerse a lo establecido, de rescatar del sometimiento y el olvido a las víctimas de cualquier voluntad de dominio. Este deseo de recuperación se asocia aquí al restablecimientode las emociones negativas en la reflexión estética anglosajona actual, en especial el asco, que despreciado en la tradición estética moderna en nombre del placer, permite advertir una voluntad de dominio similar a la denunciada por Adorno y (...) un enfoque dialéctico análogo al suyo también, en la reciente pretensión de devolverle a este afecto su dignidad. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende aproximar dos realidades aparentemente contrapuestas como son la experiencia romántica de lo sublime y la emergente estética de lo cotidiano. Pero quiere hacerlo desde un enfoque distinto del de Thomas Leddy, que basado en el carácter extraordinario de los objetos y procesos normales de la vida, acaba haciendo de lo irrelevante diario, algo grande y atemorizante. Para nosotros, la experiencia sublime de lo cotidiano exige tomar la cotidianeidad como pura cotidianeidad, según aparece en Yuriko Saito. Esto lleva (...) a fijarse en aspectos distintos de los establecidos por la estética moderna para lo sublime, como el sentimiento de asombro y la pequeñez, con los que se traza aquí un recorrido histórico alternativo para esta experiencia a través de pensadores como Burke, Schopenhauer, Ortega y Gasset y Carolyn Korsmeyer. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

ABSTRACTCan a Naturalist Definition of art replace the historical and institutional positions argued for by philosophical aesthetics? This article considers Denis Dutton’s work in evolutionary psychology and his cluster Naturalist Definition of art. I begin with an analysis of the validity of what Dutton takes to be the most important criterion: Imaginative Experience. I propose a criticism of Dutton’s set of criteria coupled with a re-evaluation of what may be implied when referring to a naturalist basis for the arts. Specifically, (...) I argue that philosophical aesthetics, which has been criticized by Dutton as a form of cultural relativism, is instead able to address features of our interaction with the arts that have adaptive and evolutionary value. (shrink)

Obesity has been pointed out as one of the main current health risks leading to calls for a so-called “war on obesity”. As we show in this paper, activities that attempt to counter obesity by persuading people to adjust a specific behavior often employ a pedagogy of regret and disgust. Nowadays, however, public healthcare campaigns that aim to tackle obesity have often replaced or augmented the explicit negative depictions of obesity and/or excessive food intake with the positive promotion of healthy (...) food items. In this paper, we draw on a phenomenological perspective on disgust to highlight that food-related disgust is connected to the character and behavior of a perceived individual even in the context of promoting healthy food items. We argue that the focus on “making the healthy food choice the easy choice” might be an important step towards the de-stigmatization of people that are affected by obesity. However, so we suggest, this focus threatens to bring back an image of individuals affected by obesity as disgusting “through the backdoor”. It does so not by portraying bodies with overweight as disgusting, but instead by implying that lifestyle choices, character and habits of people that are affected by obesity are markers of a lack of control. We argue that the close relationship between disgust and the perception of self-control in the context of obesity should be taken into consideration in the context of assessing the implications of new health promotion strategies to minimize the risk of stigmatizing people. (shrink)

Carolyn Korsmeyer has offered some compelling arguments for the role of disgust in aesthetic appreciation. In the course of this project, she considers and holds up for justifiable criticism the account of emotional conversion proposed by David Hume in “Of Tragedy”. I will consider variant interpretations of Humean conversion and pinpoint a proposal that may afford an explanation of the ways in which aesthetic absorption can depend on and be intensified by the emotion of disgust.

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.