ABSTRACT
Disgust is characterized as an emotion responding to the perception of potentially noxious substances. Its function consists in protecting the organism from harm. This chapter examines a peculiar case of disgust, namely a person feeling disgust towards his own beauty. Although the person is fictional, his case allows investigating various reasons apt to explain disgust towards the beautiful. The author shows that in the case at hand several explanations fail to apply, among them the concept “disgust of satiation”, the idea of disgust rooting in envy or resentment, the concept of moral disgust, or else the idea of a simple rhetorical figure. In contrast, she argues in favor of the claims that this case of disgust (i) is a mediated feeling invoking a complex cognitive basis, and (ii) signals an offense at the subject’s personal set of values. In this particular case, the value under attack is an over-idealistic vision of love which will not admit the attractive force of physical beauty among the founding features of a relation of true love. Disgust aroused by one’s own beauty is a reaction so strong that it might incite the person to reconsider the rightness of the values they hold.
