Beatriz de Almeida Rodrigues

Over the course of five hundred years, the grotesque came to acquire a wealth of meanings, forms, and functions, spanning from naive drolleries to hideous atrocities. The variety of its historical manifestations challenges unambiguous assertions about its significance and value in modern western culture. This dissertation reconsiders the concept of the grotesque in the context of modern aesthetics, particularly the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, developing a philosophical framework to address the transformation of the concept at the turn of the nineteenth century. My analysis focuses on the period extending from 1790, the date of the first publication of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, to the 1820s, when Victor Hugo articulated the Romantic paradigm of the grotesque in his Preface to Cromwell and Hegel delivered his famous lectures on fine art at the University of Berlin. This period corresponds to a major shift in the history of the grotesque under the influence of a new, Romantic sensibility, which legitimized the grotesque as a central principle of modern artistic expression and intensified its sinister overtones. The Romantic revival of the grotesque belongs to a broader philosophical debate about the legitimacy of art in modern secular societies and the importance of aesthetic sensibility in the mediation between nature and freedom. The aim of this study is thus twofold: on the one hand, to critically examine the Romantic paradigm of the grotesque from the perspective of Kant and Hegel; on the other hand, to investigate the tension between the sensible and the supersensible in Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics through the lens of the grotesque. Broadly construed, the grotesque can be conceived as the extreme distortion of natural forms, especially the human form, in an exaggerated expression of human corporeality and animality that is deemed incongruous with rational principles. In response to the first aim of the study, I argue that, within Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, we find two strands of grotesqueness: a revelatory strand that presupposes a deliberate attempt to express or embody the supersensible, and a recreational strand that results from the carefree play with forms, often with no concern for the content or meaning of the work. From the perspective of Kant and Hegel, both strands fail to provide a truthful insight into the supersensible. Instead, they are grounded in a radical affirmation of particularity: in the revelatory grotesque, particularity assumes an objective guise, latching on to rational principles, whereas in the recreational grotesque, it tends to be recognized and valued for its own sake, disregarding objectivity. In either case, the grotesque exaggerates the chasm between our natural inclinations and our rational aspirations, suggesting the weakness and contingency of human reason. From the perspective of Kant and Hegel, the grotesque can only afford a self-contradictory and unsustainable model of reconciliation, since it undermines our awareness of ourselves as rational, self-determining agents and thus hinders the realization of human freedom in the phenomenal world. It is, therefore, plausible that Kant and Hegel were reluctant to recognize the relevance of the revelatory grotesque in European modernity, after the Enlightenment had supposedly purged reason from sensuous excesses. Insofar as the grotesque persists in modernity, it is, in their view, deprived of transcendent aspirations, restricted to the individual, and strictly opposed to reason and understanding. Following the second aim of the study, I argue that the concept of the grotesque enhances our understanding of the attempts to reconcile freedom and nature within Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics in three ways. First, the grotesque reveals the depths of nature (within and outside us) as impenetrable by rationality, challenging Kant’s principle of purposiveness of nature and Hegel’s notion of a “second nature”. While the grotesque does not necessarily invalidate these principles, it stresses their limits, serving as a helpful reminder of human finitude and the constraints it imposes on human cognition. Second, especially in the revelatory strand, the grotesque suggests that reason is constitutively enmeshed with sensuousness, dependent on external circumstances, inclinations, and feelings. In an inversion of the Hegelian Idea, the grotesque tends towards a unity of spirit and nature in which nature is dominant and generates spirit out of itself, weakening Kantian and Hegelian claims to the autonomy and universality of reason. Finally, the grotesque reveals a tension within Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics between their attempts to reconcile the sensible with the supersensible and their tendency to relegate the body to a subordinate position, de-sensualizing beauty and art. Within Romanticism, on the contrary, human finitude becomes a source of laughter, joy, and intuitive wisdom, with an implicit legitimization of sensations and emotions as integral to our grasp of the supersensible. With some ambivalence, the Romantic legitimization of the grotesque brings the body to the centre of our collective self-understanding, opening fine art to a plurality of aesthetic qualities traditionally disregarded as non-aesthetic, anti-aesthetic, or of bad taste.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant claims that ‘the English taste in gardens or the baroque taste in furniture pushes the freedom of the imagination almost to the point of the grotesque’ (KU 5:242). This paper attempts to reconstruct Kant’s views on the grotesque as a theoretical foundation for the modern conception of the grotesque as a negative aesthetic category. The first section of the paper considers and ultimately rejects the interpretation of the grotesque as a difficult kind of beauty. The second section contrasts the experience of the grotesque with similar experiences of sublimity and dreams. The third section examines the discord between faculties underlying the experience of the grotesque, defining the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness and addressing potential objections to its inclusion in Kant’s aesthetics. The fourth and final section briefly discusses the specificity of the grotesque as a subclass of ugliness.

This dissertation critically examines the writings of Max Stirner, especially his masterpiece The Ego and Its Own, as a discourse of resistance against modern forms of domination and, in particular, against the modern political State. I begin by examining Stirner's inversion of the Hegelian concept of the State, from the “actualization of freedom”to an instance of domination. The State appears, to Stirner as to Hegel, as the guardian of order and cohesion in modern societies. While both recognize the genesis of sovereign power as violent, Hegel sustains that, with the progress of civilization, force is eradicated from the public order and private interests and common interest are reconciled. Stirner, on the contrary, insists that force is the other face of right, as the hidden pillar of the norm, which only reveals itself in moments of crisis. Stirner’s focus on the extreme case, largely anticipated and devalued by Hegel as unilateral and equivocal, seems to be anchored on the conviction that conflict is ineradicable, that between my own will and the (political, social) representation of that will there is always a gap, which cannot be filled by any collective arrangement. From this follows that, if conflict is scarcely manifest in modern societies, it is not because it was truly solved, but because it is effectively masked, due to the dissymmetry of power and the internalization of authority. The “unique one” appears, in this environment of great suspicion, as the one who cannot be represented, who surpasses every representation, threatening the authority of every representative. Accordingly, the “unique one” reclaims his own power, without allowing the satisfaction of his will to be mediated by obedience to collective institutions, affirming himself instead as sovereign over himself. Stirner suggests that the self-affirmation of the “unique one” inevitably leads to confrontation with the external powers that organize his existence. Stirner, nonetheless, chooses to think this confrontation in terms of a “revolt”, of a reflexive and individual act by which the individual emerges from the situation in which he finds himself, rather than as a “revolution”, a political or social act directed towards the systemic transformation of the status quo. Even if we admit the validity of the Stirnerian critique of the legitimizing discourses of modernity, the problem remains if this critique can be sustained on the “unique one”, “a thoughtless word”, an openly self-contradictory and self-destructive name, subject or principle (?). The possibility of founding a discourse of resistance on the egoism of Max Stirner seems to depend upon the answer that we choose to give to two intimately connected questions: what remains after the destructive vortex of the “unique one” that may sustain the resistance against a state that Max Stirner deems oppressive? Can this resistance be realized in the revolt of a unique one without the recognition of another one with whom to build the conditions of freedom?

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.