Abstract
This article explores the distinctive artistic form of caricature and the philosophical treatment it receives in the work of Karl Rosenkranz (1805–1879), who gives it a central role in the context of his remarkable book The Aesthetics of Ugliness (Die Ästhetik des Hässlichen). Rosenkranz’ legacy on this score is not much discussed (certainly in Anglo-American philosophical circles), but its importance for the development of post-eighteenth-century aesthetics—in particular, for an aesthetics that stretches beyond the conventional concerns with the beautiful and the sublime—can hardly be overstated. After a presentation of Rosenkranz’ project on the aesthetics of ugliness, this article examines his take on caricature and its relation to philosophy (as well as philosophy’s relation to caricature), and then takes up some pressing contemporary questions that arise for caricature’s use of stereotypes.
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Notes
- 1.
Die Ästhetik des Hässlichen has recently been translated in full into English (Rosenkranz 2015). More broadly, the status of the ugly in aesthetics has provoked a number of reflections (Eco 2011; Adorno 1997; Goodman 1976; and Bayley 2013, among many others) which it would be interesting, if space allowed, to compare with Rosenkranz’ views.
- 2.
An account of his experiences as a young student during this heady time in Berlin can be found in his memoir (Rosenkranz 1878).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Just to take an example in the first category: the mean includes the petty, the feeble and the low; the low the ordinary, the accidental and the crude; and the crude the obscene, the brutal and the frivolous.
- 6.
Thus, in contrast to Kant’s opposition of these terms, Rosenkranz takes the sublime to be “one extreme” of the manifestation of beauty, “through which it turns into the infinite”; the pleasant is the other extreme, where beauty’s manifestation is finite. “Absolute beauty” (Rosenkranz’ term) is “just as much sublime as pleasant,” and hence brings together both dignity and grace.
- 7.
“Our age has become political. The aesthetic interest has retreated behind the great impulse which the state has received since the July revolution and still more since that of February. Our aesthetic culture is now so moderate that we are scarcely able to regulate facts of daily life aesthetically. In Hegel’s time it was otherwise. Although the greatest political catastrophes were then taking place, interest in the productions of art and in aesthetic theories was very general and vital” (Rosenkranz 1874, 91).
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Allen Speight, C. (2018). Caricature, Philosophy and the “Aesthetics of the Ugly”: Some Questions for Rosenkranz. In: Moland, L. (eds) All Too Human. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91331-5_5
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