¹ English translation by William Aggeler, used by permission of Geoffrey Aggeler.

² Many thanks to Julien Zanetta at the University of Geneva for introducing me to this disgusting poem.

³ Korsmeyer, Carolyn, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment trans. Guyer, Paul and Matthews, Eric (Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Paragraph 27, p. 141. In his introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer describes the ‘displeasure’ associated with the mathematical sublime as ‘frustration at the inability of the understanding to grasp an absolute whole.’ p. xxxi. With respect to the dynamical sublime it is displeasure at the realization of our ‘insignificance in relation to’ the ‘vast forces in nature.’ ibid.

⁵ Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ed. Boulton, J. T. (Prairie State Books, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Part 2, section 1, p. 57.

⁶ Hume, David, ‘Of Tragedy’ in John, Eileen and Lopes, Dominic eds., Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 25Google Scholar.

⁷ Carroll, Noël, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 10Google Scholar.

⁸ Sometimes Korsmeyer uses the phrase ‘paradoxes of aversion’ for all these paradoxes e.g. Savoring Disgust p. 40 and p. 72. Sometimes she confines its use to what I am calling ‘the paradox of disgust’ e.g. p. 11.

⁹ Notice that the appropriate response to all three includes varieties of fear. Burke defines the sublime as arousing fear. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, should arouse (a catharsis of) pity and fear. And, according to Carroll, ‘art-horror’ is a blend of fear and disgust. If we think of disgust as a special kind of fear – fear of contamination or fear of death and disintegration – then all the paradoxes of aversion involve fear. But, as we will see later, the mechanisms of disgust and fear are quite different.

¹⁰ This can also happen in ordinary life. See, for example, Matthew Kieran's discussion of gurning competitions in which the challenge is to ‘pull the most distorted and ugly faces possible,’ Revealing Art, (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 85Google Scholar.

¹¹ According to the main contemporary experts on disgust, Paul Rozin and his colleagues, ‘disgust is on almost every list of basic emotions that has at least four emotions in it, from Darwin onwards.’ Rozin, Paul et al. , ‘Disgust,’ in Lewis, Michael and Haviland-Jones, Jeannette eds., Handbook of Emotions 2^nd edn., 2000 (London: Guilford), p. 638Google Scholar.

¹² Ekman, Paul, ‘An Argument for Basic Emotions,’ Cognition and Emotion 6/3–4 (1992), p. 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ekman's, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2003)Google Scholar, and Prinz, Jesse, Gut Reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion (Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, especially pp. 86–97, 110–115. The basic emotion approach has its critics. In particular, James Russell and Lisa Feldman-Barrett deny the existence of basic emotions and defend a ‘dimensional’ approach, according to which all emotions have dimensions such as valence and arousal, but specific emotions are ‘configurations constructed on the fly out of more fundamental ingredients,’ Russell, James, ‘Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion,’ Psychological Review 110/1 (2003), p. 167CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Dimensional theorists tend to be impressed by the great number and variety of emotions in different cultures, whereas basic emotion theorists are more struck by the commonalities among emotions in different cultures and even among other animals. I do not have space here to adjudicate this dispute here. Suffice to say that the basic emotion approach is in my view for many reasons more plausible than its rivals.

¹³ Ekman's list of basic emotions has varied over the years, but he has consistently classified these six emotions as basic. It is probable that further basic emotions will be confirmed, especially if we consider criteria for basicness other than facial expression. Affiliation or love would be one plausible candidate.

¹⁴ Calder, Andrew et al. , ‘The Neuropsychology of Fear and Loathing,’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001), pp. 359CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁵ Another of Ekman's proposed criteria for the basic emotions is that they are emotions that we share with other primates, or some other primates, or more generally with animals lower down the phylogenetic scale. This is more controversial with respect to disgust. There is evidence that both monkeys and small children (under the age of 3–4) experience and express distaste, as in aversion to a bitter or a sour taste, but that they do not recognize the full range of elicitors or exhibit the full range of physiological symptoms of mature human disgust. In Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (MIT Press, 2011)Google Scholar Daniel Kelly argues that the reason why human disgust is peculiar to human beings is that in humans – unlike other species with only the ‘distaste’ mechanism – there is not one mechanism but two different ones which, as he puts it, have become ‘entangled’ over the course of evolution to produce modern human disgust. However, as I explain shortly, I find it more plausible that disgust probably originated as having a simple set of elicitors, shared by humans and other primates, but that in humans it evolved by expanding its elicitors, in the way characteristic of other emotions.

¹⁶ Prinz, Gut Reactions, pp. 87–88.

¹⁷ Prinz, Jesse, ‘Disgust as a Basic Emotion,’ Emotion Researcher, 16/4 (2002), pp. 7–8Google Scholar. But Prinz does not agree entirely with Ekman's list of basic emotions.

¹⁸ Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, p. 28.

¹⁹ Calder, et al. , ‘Neuropsychology of Fear and Loathing,’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001), pp. 352–363CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁰ But compare David Sander who identifies the amygdala as a general relevance detector. See Sander, David et al. , ‘The Amygdala: An Evolved System for Relevance Detection’ Reviews in the Neurosciences 14 (2003), pp. 303–316CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. But in this article disgust is not explicitly referenced.

²¹ Kelly, Yuck! p. 17.

²² Calder et al, ‘Neuropsychology of Fear and Loathing,’ p. 359.

²³ I am here defining episodes of emotion, rather than long-standing traits or dispositions. See also Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, especially chs. 1–3, where I defend a similar account.

²⁴ Lazarus himself suggests that the universal theme for disgust is: ‘Taking in or being too close to an indigestible object or idea (metaphorically speaking),’ which is not very perspicuous. See Lazarus, Richard, Emotion and Adaptation (Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 122Google Scholar.

²⁵ Paul Rozin et al, ‘Disgust,’ p. 637. In this passage they quote from Rozin, Paul and Fallon, April, ‘A Perspective on Disgust’ Psychological Review 94/1 (1987), p. 23CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁶ Rozin, et al. , ‘Operation of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50/4 (1986), pp. 703–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Plutchik, Robert, Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Toronchuk, Judith and Ellis, George, ‘Disgust: Sensory affect or primary emotional system?’ Cognition and Emotion 21/8 (2007), p. 1802CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Toronchuk and Ellis cite Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran as arguing for the ‘evolutionary origins [of disgust] in more general protection of organisms from infection’ (ibid., 1801). This hypothesis is supported by a ‘massive international survey that disgust is universally elicited by disease-salient contact stimuli such as bodily secretions, viscous substances, vermin, and sick or dirty people’ (ibid., 1801). Likewise, in his discussion of disgust Pinker, Steven comments that ‘feces, carrion, and soft, wet animal parts are home to harmful microorganisms and ought to be kept outside the body.’ How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997) p. 382Google Scholar.

²⁹ Rozin et al, ‘Disgust,’ p. 639. Toronchuk and Ellis agree. See ‘Disgust: Sensory affect or primary emotional system,’ pp. 1800–1802. Compare Kelly, Yuck! who argues that disgust and distaste are distinct but became ‘entangled’ over the course of evolution.

³⁰ Rozin et al, ‘Disgust,’ p. 642.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Kelly, Yuck! p. 44.

³³ Bloom, Paul, Descartes' Baby (London: Heinemann, 2004), p. 171Google Scholar. Korsmeyer (personal communication) points out that according to the ‘the embodied appraisal’ approach to disgust, ‘this ‘conceptual’ recognition is achieved by means of the automatic reaction of the sensual response.’ Rotting corpses are not only disgusting, but also ‘viscerally-arousing signals of death.’

³⁴ Miller, William, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 50Google Scholar. In Savoring Disgust Korsmeyer defends a similar view: fundamentally what disgusts is death, but it is death appraised not as a mighty, awesome force but as the ‘reduction – of [even] the noblest life to decaying organic matter in which all traces of individuality are obliterated’ (134).

³⁵ Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 64.

³⁶ There is some dispute about the type of appraisal that sets off the emotion process. Many theorists (e.g. Robert C. Solomon and Martha Nussbaum) think that in human beings the appraisal is ‘cognitive,’ whereas others (e.g. Jesse Prinz and myself) think it is ‘embodied’ in some sense. I do not have space to discuss this issue here, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that disgust would seem to be a poster child for the ‘embodied appraisal’ theory, given the immediate, attention-grabbing, visceral way in which it registers its objects.

³⁷ Not all objects of disgust are in fact contaminating, just as not all objects of fear are in fact dangerous. Thus although cockroaches are bearers of disease, slugs are presumably no more contaminating than ladybugs, although far more disgusting. Moreover, human disgust often expands its elicitors to other people, who are thus appraised as dirty and contaminating, as violating purity norms. William Miller studies the way that disgust marks out social hierarchies: the low tend to be equated with the dirty and disgusting; after all they do the dirty and disgusting jobs. According to Martha Nussbaum, in her study of the horrendous events in Gujurat in 2002, interpersonal disgust is a typical accompaniment of genocide. Appraising other groups of people or individuals as ‘disgusting’ is a motivator to crush or exterminate them as one would a cockroach, which, incidentally, was the term of choice for the Hutu when describing the Tutsi during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. See her Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

³⁸ Kelly, Yuck! p. 16.

³⁹ Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Ekman, Paul, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 256Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Ekman, Emotions Revealed, p. 184.

⁴¹ Daniel Kelly, Yuck! p.16. See Levenson, Robert on autonomic differences among emotions in Ekman, Paul and Davidson, Richard eds., The Nature of Emotion (Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 255–6Google Scholar.

⁴² Haidt, Jonathan, ‘The Moral Emotions,’ in J. Davidson, Richard et al. eds., Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 857Google Scholar.

⁴³ Eaton, Marcia, ‘A Strange Kind of Sadness,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41/1 (1982), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similarly, John Morreall has stressed that, like fear on a roller-coaster (for those who feel in control in such situations), fear of a monster in a horror movie can be pleasant because ‘we retain overall control of the situation’ insofar as we know it is only a fiction: we can ‘snap out of it’ if we so desire. Morreall, John, ‘Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fiction,’ Philosophy and Literature 9/1 (1985), p. 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Edward Bullough, ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,’ reprinted in Morris Weitz ed. Problems in Aesthetics, 2^nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 782–92.

⁴⁵ Dickie, George, ‘The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 1/1 (1964), pp. 56–65Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Frijda, Nico and Sundarajaran, Louise, ‘Emotion Refinement: A theory inspired by Chinese Poetics,’ Perspectives on Psychological Science 2/3 (2007), pp. 227–241CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁴⁷ The title of Korsmeyer's book is Savoring Disgust, and she suggests that we do savor the disgusting in certain foods, as when we notice the faint taste of urine in kidneys, but in her examples of this sort the disgust is always mild. As we will see later, she also argues that sometimes disgust converts into pleasure – and hence presumably can be savored. I will argue against this particular claim.

⁴⁸ This term is derived from Richard Lazarus who has identified several ‘cognitive coping strategies,’ which do not actually change anything in the relationship between a person and his or her environment but instead ‘change its meaning, and therefore the emotional reaction’ (Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, p. 112). For example, ‘if we successfully avoid thinking about a threat, the anxiety associated with it is postponed. And if we successfully deny that anything is wrong, there is no reason to experience the emotion appropriate to the particular threat or harm’ (ibid.).

⁴⁹ Of course disgust responds not just to nasty smells, feels, and so on, but also e.g. to people who are appraised as having other ‘disgusting’ qualities such as amputations or bodily disfigurements. Although such properties are clearly not contaminating, people with disfigurements are often, unfortunately, treated as though diseased and contagious.

⁵⁰ Hume, ‘Of Tragedy,’ p.27.

⁵¹ But in The Philosophy of Horror Carroll emphasizes more the satisfaction of curiosity and the fascination we experience for the monsters in the horror fiction as the sources of our pleasure, which compensates for the disgust we feel for the monsters themselves.

⁵² Following Aurel Kolnai, Korsmeyer claims that disgust ‘can be induced by the presentation of qualities alone, regardless of whether one believes in the existence of the object possessing those qualities’ (Savoring Disgust, p. 55).

⁵³ The Weighting View does not seem to have a good response to this objection, but later we will see that disgust in response to an artwork can be a means of insight, in a way that no non-disgusting artwork can provide.

⁵⁴ Miller, Susan, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale NJ: Analytic Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ See also Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ See Nichols, Shaun on etiquette books in ‘On the genealogy of norms: A case for the role of emotion in cultural evolution,’ Philosophy of Science 69 (2002), pp. 234–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Feagin, Susan, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 20/1 (1983), pp. 75–84Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Bloom, Descartes' Baby, p. 182. I suspect too that it is a lot more fun to see these movies if you are in a group all of whose members are reacting in the same way: social solidarity – we in our group are capable of enduring disgust – seems to be part of the appeal, like kids' enjoyment of fear-inducing daredevil games. (But I have no empirical proof of this.)

⁵⁹ (iv) and (ii) are clearly related. (ii) focuses on the disgusting properties of an artwork that can be outweighed by other positive properties. (iv) focuses on the emotion and emotional feelings of disgust experienced by an audience, which may be outweighed by a more positive emotion or emotional feelings. But (ii), which is a generalization of (i), is not confined to emotional properties.

⁶⁰ Damien Hirst: an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, April 4–September 9, 2012, reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Vol. 59, no. 9, May 24, 2012, by Julian Bell.

⁶¹ Similarly, Noël Carroll has emphasized how a disgusting and fearsome monster in a horror movie is nevertheless an object of intense curiosity and fascination.

⁶² It memorably escaped its moorings at an exhibition at the Paul Klee Center in Berne, Switzerland, in 2008, breaking windows and bringing down a power line!

⁶³ Iseminger, Gary, ‘How Strange a Sadness,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42/1 (1983), p. 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term ‘Co-Existentialist’ is unfortunate. What Iseminger seems to mean is that two feelings, pleasure and distress, co-exist in our reaction.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Compare Korsmeyer on pleasure: an ‘aesthetic pleasure’ should be reconstrued as ‘an intense absorption in an object that induces us to continue rather than halt an experience,’ Savoring Disgust, p. 124. See also footnote 83.

⁶⁷ Nina Strohminger et al, ‘Disgust enhances the funniness of humor,’ Manuscript under review, p. 6.

⁶⁸ This is true for disgust in real life as well as disgust responses for artworks.

⁶⁹ This is a point emphasized to me by Alex Neill.

⁷⁰ Keltner and Haidt also emphasize (like Kant) how ‘prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast.’ Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,’ Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003), p. 304. Some prefer to talk about emotion blends rather than mixed feelings of two or more emotions. I do not have space here to defend my preference for ‘mixed feelings’ over ‘blends.’ However, one problem with the idea of emotion blends is that the responses characteristic of each of the emotions in the ‘emotion blend’ may interfere with one another rather than blend. In mixed emotions, the two (or more) emotions may remain to some extent distinct.

⁷¹ Strohminger et al, ‘Disgust enhances the funniness of humor,’ p. 6.

⁷² Sometimes Strohminger seems to be saying that an appraisal of taint ‘recedes’ in the sense that it tends to vanish, but in amusing-but-disgusting artworks or real life situations, the appraisal of taint must be present alongside the appraisal of incongruity (or whatever).

⁷³ It might be questioned whether fascination is a bona fide emotion. However, it has the marks of one: it involves an appraisal of something perceived as very significant to me; it appears to have a characteristic response (attraction and fixation of attention) and expression (the gaze); and the initial appraisal can be monitored for appropriateness.

⁷⁴ Thanks to Alex Neill for this insight.

⁷⁵ Compare Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, p. 24, where she writes that reflecting on the idea that all mortals will die and disintegrate inspires ‘curiosity’ and ‘fascination.’

⁷⁶ Hume, ‘Of Tragedy,’ p. 26.

⁷⁷ Sometimes Strohminger writes as if she endorses this view, for example, when she says ‘people find disgust enjoyable in certain contexts’ as though sometimes disgust can somehow transform into pleasure. ‘Disgust enhances the funniness of humor,’ p. 1. Strohminger (personal communication) holds that ‘you can change one dimension of an emotion (e.g. valence) while still retaining the other dimensions (e.g. a sense of yuckiness, beliefs about contamination).’ I would question this assertion, at least for basic emotions.

⁷⁸ Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, p. 88.

⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 89.

⁸⁰ Schier, Flint, ‘Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment,’ in John, Eileen and Lopes, Dominic eds., Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 199Google Scholar.

⁸¹ See Ridley, Aaron, ‘Tragedy’ in Levinson, Jerrold ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 419Google Scholar. For this reason he claims that it is absurd to think that the paradox of tragedy is in any way parallel to the ‘paradox of horror.’ For the importance of ‘cognitive monitoring’ of emotions in art contexts, see my Deeper than Reason.

⁸² Of course, it is not always clear to which category a particular work belongs. Thus Andres Serrano (author of the infamous ‘Piss Christ’) has recently completed a series of giant photographs of animal shit. They have such titles as ‘Self-Portrait Shit’ and ‘Hieronymous Bosch Shit.’ Such art can lay claim to being adventurous and transgressive, like gross-out movies, but no doubt the defenders of serious ‘shit art’ would claim that it also carries some more profound meaning (‘a meditation on the corporeality of existence’ perhaps), i.e., to invite not just an emotional response of shock and/or disgust but also reflection on the meaning of these reactions and what it is about the artwork that prompts such reactions. See Donald Kuspit, ‘The Triumph of Shit’ (2008) for a vigorous attack on the pretensions of such art. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit9-11-08.asp

⁸³ Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, p. 127.

⁸⁴ Korsmeyer says that the ‘disgust remains aversive’ (130) but ‘the knowledge gained by means of it affords enjoyment’ (130). She argues that aesthetic ‘pleasure’ or enjoyment is best identified with ‘what absorbs attention in artworks’ (118), and tries in this way to link pleasure to the cognitive value of artworks. But, as Mitchell Green pointed out in his comments on Korsmeyer's book at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meetings in Seattle, April 2012, this account of enjoyment requires qualification: one can enjoy chewing gum even though it is not a very absorbing activity.

⁸⁵ Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust, p. 130.

⁸⁶ Ibid. p. 131.

⁸⁷ Ibid. p. 133.

⁸⁸ Ibid. p. 134.

⁸⁹ Ibid.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Ibid. p. 131.

⁹² Ibid. p. 139.

⁹³ Ibid. p. 132.

⁹⁴ Ibid. p. 139. In this quotation we seem to be back with the ‘pleasurable disgust’ solution to the paradox of disgust.

⁹⁵ Ibid. p. 98.

⁹⁶ Ibid. p. 101.

⁹⁷ Ibid. p. 88.

⁹⁸ See my Deeper than Reason, e.g. chs. 6 and 7.

⁹⁹ Although certain genres can be defined in part by the emotions they aim to elicit. See e.g. Carroll, Noël, ‘Film, Emotion and Genre’ in Plantinga, Carl and Smith, Greg M. eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, and my ‘Sentimentality in Life and Literature’ in Higgins, Kathleen and Sherman, David eds. Passion, Death, and Spirituality: the Philosophy of Robert C. Solomon (New York: Springer, 2012), pp. 67–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Frankenstein's monster, for example. See McGinn, Colin, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ This is a theme that runs through my Deeper than Reason.

¹⁰² As well as admiration for Baudelaire's poetic powers.

¹⁰³ Presumably, for Korsmeyer this would be an example of the ‘sublate.’

¹⁰⁴ Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, p. 64.

¹⁰⁵ Many thanks to Matthew Kieran, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Aaron Meskin, and Alex Neill for interesting and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center which partially supported this research.