The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "The pre-establishes disharmony" (La disarmonia prestabilita) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics (Palermo, October 26-27, 1984) in occasion of the Italian edition of Aesthetics of Ugliness of Karl Rosenkranz.

Remo Bodei, The Logic of Ugliness
This paper - which presupposes the recent italian edition of Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness - sketches out a morphology of the notion of ugliness and puts forward the hypothesis of the conclusion of a long cycle in its history. The category of "ugliness" is subdivided into five conceptual families, characterized by its increasing weight in the domain of aesthetics: it ceases being a threat to the symbolic order and becomes, finally, more important than the "beauty", as representative of all the forms and contents of the social repression. At the present time, however, any dialectics based upon the integration of the ugliness into the beauty results impracticable, because of the new logic which gives a different shape to the aesthetic categories.

Vittorio Stella, Aesthetics of the Beauty and aesthetics of the Ugly
After a brief historical account of the problem of the ugly and foul in art, with special reference to Hegel's and Rosenkranz's thought, the author points out how the problem was posed in its basic terms in German Romantic philosophy. This, at least, if one wants to use dialectically some conceptual modes of the real. To talk of the ugly in terms of artistic expression would imply an evident contradiction, whereas to deny the presence of what is improperly defined as ugly in the content would severely reduce the possibilities for art to represent all that is human. Such the mistake made by those poets of the Avant-guard which have followed the most radical artistic tendencies of the Romantic period.

Giuseppe Panella, A parallax view: Between the Sublime and the Horror
From PseudoLonginus's On the Sublime to Kant's Critique of Judgment there is an historical connection bound to the nature itself of the problems in question. The go between from these two different considerations about the Sublime is given by Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke was the first to disjoint the relationship between Beautiful and Sublime, otherwise than Pseudo Longinus, in fact, he considers the Sublime close to a sort of «delightful horror», the only chance to connect fear and pleasure, beauty and aesthetical terror. On this anthropological structure, he builds up his general theory of human appreciation of Beauty. The Sublime is, all in all, a parallax view from which he can derive the philosophical and political implications of his aesthetical theory.

Sergio Givone, Pre-establishes disharmony and postulatory Atheism
"Preestablishes disharmony" is a paradoxical and provocative concept that emphasizes a dominant trend of the contemporary thought. This results quite clearly in the comparison of this concept with another, that is already in use in the philosophical lexicon of the twentieth Century: I mean the concept of "postulatory Atheism". As the "postulatory Atheism", the "pre-established disharmony" refers to the liberated world from the metaphysical presuppositions and develops a radical humanistic perspective. In this paper the Author discusses and shows the limits of this point of view.

Rino Genovese, What is Art?
The indeterminacy of taste judgements cannot be eliminated. On the contrary it is multiplied by the art itself, especially by the contemporary art. "Intersubjectivization" and "reflexivity" are in fact two moments of the artistical praxis by means of which indeterminacy is increased. By intersubjectivization we mean the theorical discussions that continuously affect artists and critics, and by reflexivity the tendency of art to characterize itself as meta-art. This paper uses Luhmann's theory on binary schemes of the communication in order to formulate a theory of art, which accounts for the indeterminacy of taste judgments and the continuous disputes which art seems to consist in. The pair beautiful/ugly, as well as the opposition I like/I don't like, is not sufficient to analyse the artistical sphere. They can be applied in face to everything and have a low degree of intesubjective generalization and reflexivity. This paper intends to define the art by means of a double pair of oppositions: "beautiful/ugly" and "thought/unthought".

Guido Almansi, The Danger of Beauty
According to Rosenkranz, «beauty is an absolute, ugliness is a relative». Nowadays the concept of absolute is undergoing a process of canceration, and the only plausible reality is a tension between what is beautiful and what is ugly. Twentieth century has thrived on the ugliness emerging from the fracture between the notion of art and the notion of beauty. Yet we can already make out the first signs of a crisis. It is not a crisis of values, but rather of unvalues. The concept of crisis itself is entering a crisis, a critical phase. The great contemporary saga of transgressiveness is becoming a norm of transgression, with a consequence abatement of the moral imperative to violate all norms. The Surrealists and the historical Avant-garde were in a position to break up everything; we are left now with mere fragments, which we are almost tempted to put back together, rather than going on pounding them in always smaller particles, reducing the universe of discourse into dust. Aren't we a bit tired of the Aesthetik des Häßlichen? But the Avant-garde, with its exaltation of ugliness, is protected by its own enemies. Even when we are most sorely tempted to reject the aesthetics of ugliness, it is enough to think what would have happened if the aesthetics of beauty had prevailed in the twentieth century for us to run back, like a prodigal son, to the Avant-garde church. The writings of the bellettrists, the exhibitions of the pompier painters (like the one recently dedicated to Bouguereau in Paris), convince us that, all being told, the perversions of ugliness must be preferred to the supreme horror of academic beauty. Today, the aesthetics of ugliness owes its vitality rather to the shortcomings of its opponents than to its own merits.

Gillo Dorfles, Planned or accidental Disharmony?
Starting from the concept of "preference" and preferential choice (as already considered by O. H. von Wright in his book The Logic of Preference, (1963) the Author underlines the importance of Asymmetry and of Disharmony in present day aesthetics, and formulates the opinion that the striving towards disritmic, dissonant, dissymetric conditions (already present in many artistic achievements of the far-western civilization, influenced by Zen philosophy) may also become - and has already become - active in the artistic creation of our own civilization.