Emily Tilton

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.