The Conceptual Implication of Beauty/Uglinessin the East and the West

Joosik Min

The parallel words of ‘mi(beauty)’ and ‘chu(ugliness)’ are frequently used in our daily life and in technical terms. We need to investigate when these words began to be used and what were the meaning at that time. The words ‘mihak(aesthetics)’ and ‘misul(fine art)’ were modern translated words which did not exist before the Japanese Meiji era. The method of academic study needs new innovation and perspective in the rapid change of human society and environment. We should investigate the process which has formulated the genre concepts concerning learning and art in the modern westernizing period. This task is a very complicated thing, but it was overlooked for a while. It is worth to notice the ideological or cultural meaning of the concept of beauty which has played a role in the process of modernization. The beauty as an abstract idea did not exist in Korea and Japan until confronting westernization. And the inclusive value system covering truth, goodness, and beauty also did not exist. It was borrowed from neo-Kantian philosophy. Though the meaning of beauty used in present times in Korean society includes the traditional aesthetic concept to a certain degree, it basically expresses the Western concept of beauty. In * Professor of Yeungnam University this sense, it is significant for us to discuss ‘mi(beauty)’ and ‘chu(ugliness)’ in aesthetics. But such discussion is not effective to understand fully how the aesthetic value was acknowledged in Eastern cultures. Accordingly, this paper aims to notice the concepts of ‘a(雅, elegance)’ and ‘sok(俗, vulgarity)’ which were managed with gravity in the East, instead of the western translated words, beauty and ugliness. As a result, we could know the relational aspect of aesthetic value concepts in the East and the West and the difference of their role in the development of aesthetic consciousness. Some distinctive traits are indicated as following. Beauty and ugliness in the West were the concepts focused on the formative phase of aesthetic value. The two are oppositionary and show contrastive relation. But a or elegance and sok or vulgarity were the concepts focused on the human inner consciousness. The two strive to maintain a convertible relation or an associated relation.

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* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

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