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→Ugly
A whole series of issues arises here. First, can this third term not also be conceived of as the sublime, insofar as the ugly in its chaotic and overwhelming monstrosity that threatens to destroy the subject recalls its opposite, the indestructible fact of reason and of moral law? Which, then, is the triad: the beautiful, the ugly, and the comical (ridiculous)? Or the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime? It may appear that it depends on what kind of ugliness we are dealing with, the excessive monstrous one or the ridiculous one. However, excess can also be comical, and ''du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas''. The sublime can appear (turn into) the ridiculous, and the ridiculous can appear (turn into) the sublime, as we learned from Charlie Chaplin's late films.
Second, the notion of the ugly as the foil for the appearance of the beautiful is in its very core profoundly ambiguous. It can be read (as it is by Rosenkranz) in the traditional Hegelian way: the ugly is the subordinated moment in the game the beautiful is playing with itself, its immanent self -negation that lays the (back)ground for its full appearance; or it can be read in a much stronger literal sense, as the very (back)ground of the beautiful that precedes the beautiful and out of which the beautiful arises—the reading proposed by Theodor Adorno in his ''Aesthetic Theory: ''"If there is any causal connection at all between the beautiful and the ugly, it is from the ugly as cause to the beautiful as effect, and not the other way around. If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the ugly and not the reverse." (In a homologous way, one should turn around the standard Thomist notion of evil as a privative mode of the good: what if it is the good itself that is a privative mode of evil? What if, in order to arrive at the good, we just have to take away excess from the evil?) Adorno's point is here double. First, in general terms, concerning the very notion of art, the ugly is the archaic or primitive chaotic (Dionysian) life substance that a work of art gentrifies, elevates into the aesthetic form, but the price for this is the mortification of the life substance; the ugly is the force of life against the death imposed by the aesthetic form. Second, with a specific reference to the modern era in which the ugly became an aesthetic category, Adorno claims that art has to deal with the ugly "in order to denounce, in the Ugly, the world which created it and reproduces it in its image." The underlying premise is that art is a medium of truth, not just an escapist play of beautiful appearances; in a historical situation in which the beautiful is irreparably discredited as kitsch, it is only by presenting the ugly in its ugliness that art can keep open the utopian horizon of beauty.
Third, what if the reversal of the ugly into the comical (or the sublime) does not occur? Herman Parret describes such an option with regard to the Kantian sublime. If the overwhelming pressure of the ugly gets too strong, it becomes monstrous and can no longer be sublated/negated into the sublime. It's thus a question of an acceptable limit:
