Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition

by Karl Rosenkranz, Andrei Pop (Translator), Mechtild Widrich (Translator)

In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty.

Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art, Essays

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1853

About the author

Karl Rosenkranz was a German philosopher. He followed Kant and Herbart as professor of philosophy in Königsberg, Germany. A lifelong defender of the philosophy of Hegel, he participated briefly in the post-1848 reform government in Berlin.

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Urîtul ţine de negativul lumii şi este, aşadar, inevitabil şi omniprezent. El se defineşte, bineînţeles, prin trăsături opuse frumosului.

Ca lipsă de formă, în primul rînd, el are ca însuşiri: amorfia, asimetria, disarmonia. Urîtul desemnează, în al doilea rînd, incorectitudinea. În al treilea rînd, urîtul se referă la desfigurare [deformare]. De hidos ţin absurdul, scîrbosul şi răul. La rîndul său, răul poate fi: fărădelegea, fantomaticul şi diabolicul. Rosenkranz e un raţionalist [hegelian], iar estetica sa o reacţie la romantism ca program estetic şi curent artistic. Rosenkranz nu bănuia, în 1853, căile pe care se va angaja arta modernă.

Într-un fel, făcînd descripţia şi analiza urîtului, Karl Rosenkranz a produs o descriere a artei moderne şi a trăirilor provocate de o astfel de artă.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout the history of aesthetic thought, there are many examples of treatises on beauty. But, as far as I know, Karl Rosenkranz's nineteenth-century work *Aesthetics of Ugliness* is the first serious study of the non-beautiful. Sublimity had already been a working concept for over a hundred years in Rosenkranz's time, and he was clearly very familiar with the Romantic and Gothic aesthetic movements. But Rosenkranz convincingly argues--with a plethora of examples--that ugliness is more varied than simply being the negation of beauty (though he believes it is that as well).

Though originally meant for a broader audience, the fact that it is a translation from a century and half German, and Rosenkranz was deeply Hegelian, makes this work often overly abstract and difficult to understand. Nevertheless, his many examples help to flesh out his ideas. And though much of what he says is rooted within a Hegelian framework, there are various insights that equally and freely translate over into other perspectives in useful ways.

I found this book a much deeper discussion of ugliness than Umberto Eco's *On Ugliness* (which is where I first found out about Rosenkranz), though not as broad. I would recommend to all non-specialists (like myself) to read that work first. The introduction and various annotations in this critical edition of Rosenkranz, by the translators Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, were incredibly helpful and clarifying in many places.

[Francesco Iorianni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nach langer Zeit hab ich diese kolossale Abhandlung über den Begriff des Hässlichen und dessen ästhetischen Wert auch beendet. Rosenkranz glänzt mit seinem Wissen über die Kunst - und Literaturgeschichte seiner Zeit und bringt gekonnt Beispiele ein, um seine Theorien und Thesen zu untermauern. Er schrieb eine erste vollständig dem Begriff des Hässlichen dedizierte Schrift und unterschied dabei unter vielen Begrifflichkeiten, die der Sphäre des Hässlichen zugeordnet werden können (das Grauenvolle, das Deformierte, das Diabolische usw.). Nichtsdestotrotz muss darauf aufmerksam gemacht werden, dass Rosenkranz mit Diskursen des 19. Jahrhunderts argumentiert. Viele seiner Aussagen sind nicht gut gealtert und ließen mich etwas verstutzt... Themen bezüglich fremder Völker oder androgyner Menschen werden hier diskriminierend behandelt.
Die kritische Lektüre des Buches war dennoch sehr hilfreich, um ständig fokussiert zu bleiben und die höchst Komplexen Gedankengänge nachzuvollziehen.
Das Hässliche wird besonders in den literarischen Strömungen um 1900 ein Massenthema und Rosenkranz hat diesen Trend voreilig erkannt und eine detaillierte Studie dazu verfasst.

[Ed. Tablas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Libro ensayo con base filosófica y estética, que nos muestra las diversas acepciones de lo feo y sus diferentes aplicaciones al medio actual.
Hay muchas palabras que cotidianamente se emplea en nuestro círculo y que las asociamos con la idea principal, pero no sabemos las diferencias entre todas.