Plague Journal, ‘Beautiful’ Or ‘Ugly’
We are constantly making judgments, what we like and what we dislike. These moments are hardly thought about. Years have passed, we’ve journeyed far down our road of evaluative exploration. As a reflex we simply respond to a visual impression, a scent, a taste, or to an idea either in sophisticated, nuanced, oblique approval or with a raw disdain, as if we had touched a hot surface.
How do these evaluations arise, where do they come from?
Yesterday when I saw a image of the president in his limo 
leaving his hospital confinement, — I felt revulsion. His departure was made while undergoing treatment for the coronavirus infection so that he could do a drive by wave to supporters gathered nearby. I felt repelled.
These lines from Nietzsche offer food for thought.
19. Beautiful and ugly* — Nothing is more conditional — or, let us say, narrower— than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man’s joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. “Beautiful in itself” is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but than affirm itself alone in this manner. Its deepest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimated forms. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty — and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty — alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty…
As for judgement of what is ugly…
20. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful…
The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, “ugly.”
*Schön and hässlich is the German translation of Macbeth’s witches’ ‘fair and foul’.
— excerpt Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche Expeditions of the Untimely Man p. 89 -90
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, ‘Beautiful’ Or ‘Ugly’”
For Trump, adulation is akin to air. Without constant affirmation that his devoted disciples love him beyond reason, he cannot function, hence the never-ending rallies or the need to place his protectors from the secret service in harms way for a few huzzahs. It is not the actual air that allows Trump to breathe (so Covid is not an actual threat), but the accolades from his fans that allows him to continue to exist. He is like Gollum and the ring. If you separate Trump and his maniacal followers you can hear him mutter, “Precious” in the dark of the White House halls, or currently, the rooms of Walter Reed. This is a mentally ill and very dangerous man.
I did not know that Trump does not breathe actual air… Therefore your conclusion that covid-19 is not an actual threat to him because it is an airborne transmission. That would mean that he is not human. Humans breathe actual air. And like Gollum, he is psychologically misshapen, mutated form, marginally human….. (A parable,…and true enough)