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=Ugly=
The notion of the ugly as an aesthetic category was first systematically deployed by Karl Rosenkranz—editor and scholar of G. W. F. Hegel, author of his first "official" biography, although himself a reluctant Hegelian—in his ''Ästhetik des Häßlichen ''(Aesthetics of the Ugly, 1853).(1 ) Rosenkranz's starting point is the historical process of the gradual abandonment of the unity of true, good, and beautiful; not only can something ugly be true and good but ugliness can also be an immanent aesthetic notion; in other words, an object can be ugly ''and ''an aesthetic object, an object of art. Rosenkranz remains within the long tradition from Homer onwards that associates physical ugliness with moral monstrosity; for him, ugly is ''das Negativschöne ''(the negatively beautiful): "The pure image of the beautiful arises all the more shining against the dark background/foil of the ugly." Rosenkranz distinguishes here between a healthy and a pathological mode of enjoying the ugly in a work of art; in order to be aesthetically enjoyable and, as such, edifying and permissible, ugliness has to remain as a foil of the beautiful. Ugliness for the sake of itself is a pathological enjoyment of art.
Ugliness is, as such, immanent to beauty, a moment of the latter's self development. Like every concept, beauty contains its opposite within itself, and Rosenkranz provides a systematic Hegelian deployment of all the modalities of the ugly, from formless chaos to the perverted distortions of the beautiful. The basic matrix of his conceptualization of the ugly is the triad of the beautiful, the ugly, and the comical, where the ugly serves as the middle, the intermediate moment, between the beautiful and the comical: "A caricature pushes something particular over its proper measure and creates thereby a disproportion which, insofar as it recalls its ideal counterpart, becomes comical."
