The Neutralization of Ugliness and the Birth of Art: Revisiting the Neglected Aesthetic Chapter of Adorno’s Critique of the Aufklärung

II.1 Against Unity

Myth is first characterized by its refusal to subscribe to unity, which the authors conceive, in the Kantian and Hegelian manner, as the rational action of placing the manifold under a single determination or concept. The very action of reason is the ability to reduce everything exterior to the subject into a unique concept, precisely that of nature. Opposing this situation, the mythical world presents nature as being populated by ‘spirits and demons’ (DE, p. 4). Horkheimer and Adorno call this representation of nature ‘animism’ and write that, in such a context, the spirit – that is, the human mind – is subjugated to nature. It is precisely in this regard that ‘[t]he disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism’ (ibid., p. 2). This entire project rests on the rational conviction that ‘[t]here shall be neither mystery nor any desire to reveal mystery’ (ibid.). Stripped of all mystery, which is precisely the goal of the disenchantment of the world, nature is now reducible to a concept of the understanding and, as such, entirely at the disposal of rational thought, which, with the help of mathematics, will supply it with a new meaning. Instead of hosting a variety of entities to be feared, nature now refers to raw material to be mastered by knowing its rules: ‘Technology is the essence of this knowledge’ (ibid.). From an entire world gifted with an inner, luxuriant life in mythical thought, nature is now, for the enlightenment, a mere means for the ultimate end that is the betterment of the human condition. To be sure, rational rules for mastering nature, the system of which is technology, serve less to show the path out of the mythical spell than to prevent a return to myth.

For Karl Rosenkranz, a follower of Hegel who was the first philosopher to devote a treatise to the aesthetic treatment of ugliness, the concept of beauty captures this idea. Relying heavily on Hegel’s theory, Rosenkranz argues that unity is the very condition of beauty as ‘[t]he beautiful […] demands unity of form and content in determined relations’.¹⁰ However, as a proponent of the idealist tradition, what Rosenkranz calls unity is more accurately described as the preeminence of reason over matter, the superiority of the form that gives shape to the content by melding with it.¹¹ Beauty as unity in Rosenkranz, thus, refers, as in Hegel, to the act of subsuming natural diversity under a rational law, preventing the whole from falling under the three domains of ugliness he identifies: formlessness, incorrectness, and disfiguration or deformation. Now, the absence of form, that is, of a rational rule by which unity can be achieved, reminds the spirit of its existence under the mythical rule, when it was subjected, in the language of Dialectic of Enlightenment, to the terror of the mana. In this regard, and as far as the project of enlightenment is concerned, the demand for beauty and the codification of its concept are means to prevent subjectivity from returning to a pre-rational state that is only identified as such in the wake of the disenchantment of the world. Consequently, myth, nature, and ugliness are as rational as their positive counterparts, precisely as their negative reflections. In this regard, Adorno is not mistaken when he writes that the aesthetic category of ugliness stands as ‘a canon of prohibitions’.¹² In particular, ‘[w]hat appears ugly is in the first place what is historically older, what art rejected on its path toward autonomy, and what is therefore mediated in itself’.¹³ And what Adorno calls the autonomy of art, which in this case applies to its relationship with nature rather than with society, is its accession to rationality, which marks both the ‘Rise and Decline of the Individual’, to borrow the title of the fourth chapter of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason.¹⁴

Reconstructing the relationship between myth and ugliness in Adorno’s aesthetic theory clarifies Rosenkranz’s critique of the latter concept. Consequently, one can better understand the role that the concept of unity plays in his Aesthetics of Ugliness: it serves to exclude everything – whether an attitude, an object, or a concept – that cannot be reduced to it. When, for example, resisting traditional aesthetic and artistic conventions, Victor Hugo writes in the preface to Cromwell that ‘[t]here is only one type of beauty; there are myriad types of ugliness’,¹⁵ he underlines the fact that the task (whether conscious or not) of ugliness is to resist the diktat of unity that beauty imposes on it. As such, he directly opposes the common agreement that ‘Art ought to improve on Nature’.¹⁶ Hugo’s response to this situation combines two arguments. The first is the remark that ‘[t]he distinction between beauty and ugliness in art doesn’t correspond exactly to that in nature’,¹⁷ and is therefore largely artificial. The second argument recalls what Adorno later labelled ‘the polysemy of the ugly [Die Vieldeutigkeit des Häßlichen]’,¹⁸ which is reminiscent of the polysemy of nature in the mythical world. Ugliness is the enlightened subject’s fear of such polysemy transformed into an aesthetic category. This is how, as Petteri Enroth has perceptively noted, artistic ugliness and archaic – and therefore mythical – ugliness come together as one in Adorno.¹⁹

II.2 Objectivity and Autonomy

The second characteristic of myth closely follows the first and relates to the nature and means of the resistance myth opposes rationality in the enlightened world. This characteristic lies in the following: the main reason why myth resists the enlightenment is that it opposes its own world to that of Aufklärung. As an aesthetic category reminiscent of the mythical condition of the self, ugliness participates in this affront by bringing to light a world that is governed by its own rules, which usually go against the rules of rationality, such as harmony, unity, good taste, proportion, and so on. For instance, constructed around ugliness as a leitmotif, most of Francisco Goya’s oeuvre gives a vivid and commanding example of a powerful intelligence that creates a world parallel to what is required by artistic conventions and in which reason becomes, if not absent, at least a superfluous element. Goya’s paintings, which no longer rely on the authority of a normative concept such as that of the beautiful, can thoroughly explore and present the metaphysical depth of the ugliness of the human body, opening venues that lead, for example, to a reflection about human existence and finitude.²⁰ In such a perspective, ugliness is no longer presented as a negation of beauty. Rather, it appears as presence, precisely the presence of an inescapable force that can corrupt – and indeed corrupts – even the most beautiful and accomplished creature – namely, the human being. Compared to the world created by the beautiful, the world put forward by ugliness is closer to reality, which it expresses without trying to ennoble it. In this regard, Truth, instead of standing in solidarity with Beauty as claimed by Plato, is rather on the side of artistic ugliness. The ultimate point of tension, then, is this: beauty and ugliness, as artistic representatives of Aufklärung and myth, both claim to express truth and reality, that is, to reveal the world. In this regard, ‘myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products’, because, like reason, ‘[m]yth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins – but therefore also to narrate, record, explain’ (DE, p. 5). This tendency of myth translates into ugliness in the form of organized chaos, a polymorphous system by which ugliness struggles to free itself from external rules.

Now, if ugliness in art creates a world sheltered from rational aesthetic laws, this attitude must undergo a three-step process in the rationalized world. First, it must be connected to the mythical attitude presented earlier. Second, it must be interpreted as an act of regression into the archaic, precisely as an attempt to obstruct the disenchantment of the world by promoting, through art, the return of the repressed.²¹ Finally, owing to this connection with myth, ugliness must be vigorously opposed to prevent such a return to the pre-rational state of the mind. Thus, we return to the idea of fear and horror inherent in the concept of artistic ugliness.²² Adorno is well aware of this perception of ugliness when he writes that ‘[a]rchaic ugliness, the cannibalistically threatening cult masks and grimaces, was the substantive imitation of fear, which it disseminated around itself in expiation’.²³ From this moment on, the conflictual relationship between enlightenment and myth transposes to the battle against the ugly in traditional European aesthetics.

It is possible to identify a Nietzschean framework behind Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the relationship between myth and nature, as The Birth of Tragedy anticipates their perspective.²⁴ This book, constructed around the intimate relationship between myth and aesthetic discourse, claims the omnipresence of the former in the latter, hence the centrality of the figures of Apollo and Dionysus for Nietzsche’s argument. Nietzsche compares these two deities with two impulses or drives: serenity (die Heiterkeit) for Apollo and intoxication (der Rausch) for Dionysus. He argues that through intoxication humanity draws closer to nature and tends to become one with it. Contrary to what one might think, this is not a submission that would mark a decadence and a degradation of humanity; it is quite the opposite, for it is in the worship of Apollo that the true mark of decadence is to be found. By uniting with nature through the figure of Dionysus, the art of the young Greeks is an expression of strength and life, which, interestingly, Nietzsche calls ‘myth’. The artistic recourse to Dionysus allows art to break out of the patterns determined in advance by rationality and enlightened thought, and reach the true depth of the world, its darkest and truest expression, hence Nietzsche’s praise of madness. Myth – that is, life – is expressed through power and the debauchery of energy, two traits that the Greeks gradually came to reject as they grew older, abandoning the expression of power in favour of the ontological serenity conferred by the Apollonian veil of beauty. Apollo, indeed, imposes measure and order in the place of intoxication, draws lines of rigid demarcation between the elements of the world, and, at the same time, demands that each of them remain in its assigned place. Nietzsche mocks this aesthetic rationalism and its herald, Socrates. With this doctrine, the figure of Dionysus and the cultic and artistic expressions that attested to his presence and influence in Greek culture are grouped under the category of ugliness and marked with the seal of exclusion. Such an endeavour is another way of freeing the world from myth by making the rational forces of ‘aesthetic Socratism’,²⁵ that ‘lethal principle’²⁶ of Greek tragedy, shine upon it. But, as Nietzsche notices, art resists Socrates. In music, dissonance serves as a stronghold for the myth by providing Dionysus with a last refuge in an entirely rationalized world. Now, dissonance is the irruption of ugliness in the ocean of beauty, which is exactly why music has the power ‘to give birth to myth’,²⁷ or, more precisely, to revive it beyond and against the Apollonian appearance.

It is this notion of reviving a parallel world endowed with objectivity and autonomy that is sacrilegious to the enlightenment, especially in the context of a disenchanted world. As one of the vehicles of the enlightenment, aesthetics will take on the task of neutralizing ugliness.

III.1 Exposition

The Sirens represent the myth in that they are beings attached to nature, fatally linked to a natural element. This is surely why they wait for the travellers at a fixed point that they can neither leave nor flee, as evidenced by their inability to pursue Odysseus’s boat. Then comes their ‘song’, which ‘sings’²⁸ of the past, that is, of death, because it promises knowledge – especially knowledge beyond history – to anyone who listens to it. By attaching himself to the mast of his boat, Odysseus enjoys the past by holding himself firmly in the present with a view to the future. Even today, when looking politically at people it deems ‘primitive’, the Western mind generally does nothing more than behave like Odysseus. It incessantly reminds them to turn their backs on the past, especially on the barbarity they had to suffer at the hands of their always old-new-allies-executioners, and to transfer it to themselves. But in this exhortation to build a so-called ‘common’ future rather than to look to the past (which is no less common…), two attitudes are concealed, as already in Odysseus: cunning and contempt. It is no coincidence that Homer defines Odysseus by his πολύμητις and that Horkheimer and Adorno identify Odysseus as the very archetype of the bourgeois, that is, of the modern European man. To be sure, historical and practical questions arise from this comparison that mainly have to do with the concern regarding anachronism.²⁹ But the reader must keep in mind that what is targeted here is not historical or practical exactitude, as this assimilation is a metaphor or an allegory.³⁰

Cunning takes place when one speaks in the place of the one who should speak, replacing them in the crucial moment that decides on the authority and the historical initiative by which the relationship of domination is established or destroyed. It is then necessary to be silent once this moment has passed and to make people think that it is the word of the other that establishes the regime of order, even though, by asserting itself, it denies this very possibility, just as through the mouth of Polyphemus the crime of Odysseus is masked by the name of no one.³¹ Contempt appears later, when, now sheltered from the anger of the giant whose eye it has gouged out, impersonal reason finally confesses its crime and abandons – at least, it believes it does – its victim and mischief to the past, from which it will protect itself three songs later. Even today, when the West recognizes its wrongs against savages, barbarians, and people who have never been humans or who have not yet finished learning to be humans, it is under the cover of history, or precisely of the past, in the same way that Odysseus, the fugitive, confesses his crime to his victim with a feeling that is on the verge of jubilation: without ‘repentance or apology’. Besides, why should anyone apologize for having gouged out the eye of a monster – and, additionally, a cannibal – on a nameless land, amid a people who have neither science nor history and who receive this name of ‘people’ only because of the magnanimity of the one who sees and thus judges them? In Odysseus’s gesture of escaping and giving Polyphemus the finger lies the quintessence of Western arrogance towards the ‘primitives’, which is a central attitude illustrating its bourgeois character.³²

Odysseus’s attitude reveals the rational principle of the λόγος: cunning and contempt are always to the advantage of the one who speaks. And this is where myth is unsafe, because it reshapes – or threatens to reshape – the power dynamics with the enlightenment by reminding the latter of the past, of its own past. The result can only be death – that is to say, the opening to the possibility of transparency to oneself³³ – because enlightenment – in this case, Odysseus – is forced to recognize, even under the hideous camouflage of mockery, that its deployment requires evil.³⁴ In the face of myth, enlightenment cannot hide – the Sirens call Odysseus by his name – and it can neither lie nor lie to itself – the Sirens are omniscient. In this respect, the ‘melodious’ aspect of their ‘song’ is only a matter of appearance, because deep down it conveys an agonizing and unbearable fright. Nevertheless, even in the face of this terror, Odysseus is still lucid enough to be cunning and lie one last time, because he asks his companions to untie him even though he has taken the trouble to carefully plug their ears with wax: this is the ultimate mockery of Western reason against the mythical beings that are the primitive Sirens.

III.2 Aesthetic Translation

The neutralization of the Sirens is equivalent to the neutralization of the mythical content of art when the latter is attached to nature. This neutralization is, at best, the neutralization of natural beauty,³⁵ which Homer couples with the exaltation of spiritual beauty. In the latter, the subject no longer succumbs to the anguish caused by mana but enjoys the ontological security that comes from knowing that they are now expressing themselves in a world totally created by them: entirely pacified; enlightened. Hence, a clear opposition between music and poetry.

Indeed, the ‘song’ of the Sirens is a natural production of natural beings, whose content is mythical terror; it still possesses in itself the fear of the terrifying natural powers that establish an ontological distance between the one who sings and the one who listens. In Homer, Odysseus listens to the Sirens as one listens, in the modern world, to an opera or a symphony – namely, until there is nothing left to listen to. In such a context, the spectator’s silence, or precisely their rationalized silence in the face of the modern myth, becomes the only form of meaning production still possible, apart from applause and expressions of satisfaction that have themselves been demystified and standardized. At the opera, the ‘bravo!’ that the crowd shouts to the prima donna or the tenor after the main aria of the piece plays such a role. This is precisely where the subjective evocative power of music exhausts itself, supplanted by poetry, as evidenced by Homer’s story, since in music there still remains an unmentionable and inexhaustible mythical background that poses itself as a fatal obstacle to the expression of subjectivity. The latter is suppressed by the return to oneself that poetry imposes on music.

In poetry, the subject emerges as the self-referential centre of the narrative they tell, a privilege obtained by taming natural powers. But to tell the story of the self is to revive the myth in an existence that was not its own in the first place, so that it appears now freed from the fear and dread produced by the original encounter with nature. As a poet, Homer is a privileged representative of the dialectic of the Aufklärung, because, ‘as the Homeric spirit takes over and “organizes” the myths, it comes into contradiction with them’ (DE, p. 35), from where epic and myth appear as distinct strategies. Similarly, it is as a poet that Odysseus ‘revives’ the Sirens, whose ‘music’ he had previously silenced. In this perspective, Horkheimer and Adorno are quite right to write that ‘[m]easures like those taken on Odysseus’s ship in [the] face of the Sirens are a prescient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment’ (ibid., p. 27). European aesthetics has taken similar measures in the face of the ugly. In both attempts, the purpose is the same: guarding the self against the return to the past. Fortunately, enlightened aesthetics tries in vain to minimize the mythical scope of artistic practice by muzzling ugliness and all the concepts and emotions that remind enlightenment of its origins. Considered in this positive way as the eviction of its other, the promise of happiness of rational art can only ever be broken, not because of the mythical content of art but because of its constant rationalization, the unfolding of which takes place according to a repressed dissatisfaction with the very nature of enlightenment that ugliness constantly reminds it of, thus opening its remaining eye on what it purposively refuses to see. And this is exactly what artistic ugliness is about, as shown earlier.

From the Odyssey onwards, aesthetic rationalization serves to silence the myth, because the ‘song’ of the Sirens only really becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation once Odysseus survives it, that is to say, empties it of its power of attraction and death. This power is very often a return to nature, to the forms through which it expresses itself and imposes itself on consciousness. Pablo Picasso is a canonical example of this, as his interest in the so-called ‘primitive’ arts corresponds to a considerable increase in ugliness in his production.³⁶ For this same reason, impressionist paintings may have appeared particularly ugly to those who had to experience them in the mid-nineteenth century, because consciousness recognized in them, particularly well expressed, the traces of its pre-rational existence, through a shift in established rules and a rediscovered freedom regarding the subjects of painting and their pictorial treatment. If ugliness is fought on all sides, it is mainly for the reason that it revives an era that, in principle – that is to say, according to the postulates of the Aufklärung – is now behind the self, to be located in its past. In many respects, aesthetics appears as the philosophical attempt to secure this ‘progress’.

IV.1 The Concept of Neutralization

Unlike Surti Singh, who interprets the situation of ugliness, especially in modern art, as one of rejection,³⁷ I contend that Horkheimer and Adorno present a different scenario whereby ugliness (that is, myth) undergoes a rational sublimation. This rational sublimation is the process by which the power of myth is subdued by the subject’s μῆτις, thereby obliterating the original mythical terror, which is the fear of self-annihilation. As argued by Horkheimer and Adorno, art emerges as a direct consequence of this situation.

Because it is an enlightened practice, art comes into existence only when, similar to the Sirens’ song, natural forces are deprived of their power to the benefit of the subject’s enjoyment. ‘Pleasure’ (DE, p. 25) is the name Horkheimer and Adorno give to this new relation between the subject and nature. The authors further explain that, from an aesthetic perspective, the difference between Odysseus and his comrades in the face of the Sirens lies in the fact that the latter ‘know only of the danger of the song, not of its beauty’ (ibid., p. 27), whereas the former knows of its beauty because he has come to ignore – that is, he does not longer fear – its power and danger. In other words, the Sirens’ song becomes beautiful (that is, pleasurable) only insofar as it has ‘been deprived of power as art [zur Kunst entmächtigt]’ (ibid., p. 25). Hence, Horkheimer and Adorno’s conclusion:

The bonds by which [Odysseus] has irrevocably fettered himself to praxis at the same time keep the Sirens at a distance from praxis: their lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art [ihre Lockung wird zum bloßen Gegenstand der Kontemplation neutralisiert, zur Kunst]. (Ibid., p. 27)

IV.2 Aesthetics and the Neutralization of Ugliness

Coupled with the notion that myth and nature can be linked to ugliness in the enlightened world, the idea that art arises from the neutralization of nature provides fresh perspectives for interpreting the arguments traditionally used in the aesthetic discourse against ugliness.³⁸ These arguments and the attitude they promote against ugliness read as strong evidence of the enlightened origins of aesthetics.

Ontologically, the ugly is conceived as a non-being, that is, deprived of existence, or at least as having an existence that is not autonomous from that of beauty. It follows, therefore, that ugliness is the negative result of the decadence of beauty, produced by corrosion, whose ontological marker is movement. The philosophical foundations of this ontological denigration of ugliness can be traced back to Parmenides and Plato. Both thinkers conceptualize movement as a source of corruption and locate the demand for truth beyond movement (Parmenides), in the realm of ideas (Plato), conceived as single and indivisible realities that are also stable and permanent. It is with good reason that Murielle Gagnebin identifies time as the ontological mark of ugliness, because it is under the action of the latter that bodies (especially the female body, which is a thousand-year-old symbol of beauty) fall into aesthetic decadence. It is arguably with this depreciating background in mind that Rosenkranz develops his ontological apology for beauty, writing, for example, that ‘[b]eauty makes us forget the time, because as something eternal and self-sufficient it transports us to eternity too and fills us with bliss’.³⁹

The religious and moral argument rests on the same basis as the previous one, with the difference that the latter is formed while the struggle between enlightenment and myth is still in its infancy. In the religious and moral world, enlightenment has already established itself as a principle, and disobedience to this principle is now interpreted as evil and therefore, aesthetically, as ugly. In the essay that closes Dialectic of Enlightenment (‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment’), before the ‘Notes and Sketches’, Adorno and Horkheimer engage in an analysis of religion from the perspective of their approach to enlightenment. They maintain that (Jewish) religion is the rational result of the unification of nature. The Jewish God, unique, has replaced the crowd of natural demons while keeping the same principle of domination that he now applies to creation, precisely because he created it. Religion is therefore a rational production whose purpose is to counteract the myth, and as a rational production, it lends itself to the reproach of totalitarianism that Adorno and Horkheimer address to enlightenment. Indeed, this ‘“I am who I am” (which is the name by which the Jewish God reveals himself to Abraham) tolerates nothing beside itself, surpasses in its inescapable power the blinder and therefore more ambiguous judgment of anonymous fate’ (DE, p. 145). Thus, religious laws, when read through the lenses of the dialectic of enlightenment, have no other purpose than to set the framework for human obedience, and thus to delay the wrath of God, for ‘[t]he God of Judaism demands what he is owed and settles accounts with the defaulter’ (ibid.). In art and aesthetics, too, it is the same dialectic and the same oppression that are at work: disobedience to the Law struck with anathema or death becomes the affront made to the ‘laws of aesthetics’,⁴⁰ an affront stamped with the seal of ugliness. On earth as in heaven, therefore, the divine, totalitarian judgement is exercised: to exclude what is not the self or does not tend to turn into the self. To draw closer to God, and thus to enlightenment, it is necessary to separate from sin. This injunction aesthetically translates into the requirement to separate from the ugly. In this second sense, the critical attitude towards ugliness in traditional European aesthetics once again participates in the dialectic of enlightenment, that is to say, in the idea of humanity’s steady march towards progress.

Clearly, the rational argument bears the traces of enlightenment as a demand for rationality, order, and magnitude. But this aspect is especially visible when aesthetics begins to attack passions cast as errors of reason. Rationality, in this context, views passions as situations where reason becomes the object of an object, thereby reminding the self of the mythical state in which it existed before the awakening of the individual.⁴¹ We can therefore see that, in reality, the rational argument has always been the one at work in the traditional critique of ugliness, except that it has taken on different formulations according to the various periods of European philosophy. Be that as it may, the rational meaning of the fight against ugliness is revealed: it is the necessity to contribute to a more enlightened world, that is to say, less far from the truth of reason. This truth is, foremost, that of its existence: only reason exists, and it alone must be found in existence. As existence is also aesthetic, the dialectic of aesthetic enlightenment commands the dissolution of ugliness. This truth is then religious and moral: only reason must decide the meaning of life through the double idea of God and the Good. Now, aesthetics is part of the meaning of life, so this commandment must also apply to life itself. It is a question of fighting firmly against disobedience to enlightenment, that is to say, against evil and the ugliness that it creates.