ABSTRACT
The modern study of beauty and ugliness, and their echoes morality and immorality, begins well before the benchmark publication of Alexander Baumgarten's Aesthetika to which Mendelssohn's earliest essays responded. When Moses Mendelssohn turned his attention explicitly to aesthetics, he was already deeply immersed in the study of classical literature, metaphysics, British empiricism, French rationalism, and German perfectionism. In reconstructing Mendelssohn's theory of mixed sentiments thus far, the aesthetic experiences witness the depiction of cruelty and ugliness and the attraction of executions. Kant argues that in contrast to Judaism Christianity, the religion of pure reason, achieves a morality that transcends earthly desire because it projects the potential of individuals to know and achieve objective virtue by their own designs. Mendelssohn took ugliness as a type of case study within the perfectionist aesthetic of the ontological independence of the art work, whereas Kant, operating from a wholly other foundation in the Third Critique, is obviously ill at ease with it.
