Emily Lawson

Dying can be ugly. This fact is relevant to the growing subfield of everyday aesthetics, to the philosophy of death, and to all of us as mortal beings. Disgusting experiences in particular seem to impose a limit on the dying person’s aesthetic agency. If disgust is the fitting response to medical and body horror in everyday contexts, we might think that we can aesthetically respond to these properties only with rational disgust (cold comfort for the dying person seeking beauty in painful circumstances) or with deluded aesthetic enjoyment (false beauty). I develop a Bhattacharyyan solution to this dilemma, defending a third option. According to K. C. Bhattacharyya (KCB, 1875–1949), even acute disgust in everyday life can be rationally enjoyed as an aesthetic emotion in virtue of adopting an emotional perspective of ‘courageous love’ through a specific imaginative procedure. I argue that courageous love is a merited, positive aesthetic-emotional response to disgusting experiences on the deathbed.

This paper examines an enduring puzzle about enjoying aesthetic disgust as it arises for Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025 CE). Abhinavagupta claims that all aesthetic emotions (rasas), including the disgust (bībhatsa) rasa, are pleasurable for the sensitive appreciator. Yet he elsewhere characterizes disgust as incompatible with enjoyment of its object. Taken together, these are puzzling claims. I trace the puzzle through a number of Abhinavagupta’s works and those on which he commented in the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition. Along the way, I consider three possible but philosophically unsatisfying answers, each of which provides important pieces of the solution. Putting these pieces together with the Pratyabhijñā defense of impurity’s value and phenomenological analysis of imagination, I reconstruct an Abhinavaguptan solution according to which reflexive appreciation of expanding the limits of human imagination can explain how it is possible to enjoy experiencing aesthetic disgust and why we have reason to seek out this difficult pleasure.