厌恶并不是一种纯粹消极的情感，有了厌恶人才知道区别脏与净、美与丑、善与恶，厌恶的核心意思是否定他者的存在。厌恶可以分为身体性厌恶、物质性厌恶、情感性厌恶和符号性厌恶四种。厌恶可以与恐惧组合成恶心，与喜感组合为轻蔑，与悲感组合成悲厌，与欲望组合成傲慢或破坏欲。人类历史上的大多数道德规范都是通过培养人的厌恶感来实现的。人类首先通过定义“脏”来确定禁忌，通过禁忌建立道德，通过群体厌恶使道德体系得以稳固。共同的厌恶感的转变甚至可以移风易俗，并使社会安定团结。厌恶感始终伴随着审美活动，时时参与审美过程，而且令人厌恶的事物也可以是审美的对象。表现或唤起厌恶感，是现代艺术的一个重要目标。艺术和文学，不断尝试在厌恶管辖的领域探索，以此形成艺术革命的动力源泉。批判性的文学作品，通过唤起共同的厌恶感来实现改造社会的目的，唤起普遍厌恶感是文学家的一种使命。

Repulsion is not a pure negative emotion. With repulsion, people can tell cleanness from dirtiness, beauty from ugliness, and good from evil. Central to repulsion is the denial of the existence of the other. Repulsion can be divided into physical, material, emotional, and symbolic loathness. Repulsion may be combined with other emotions to form new feelings such as nausea, contempt, pessimism, and arrogance or destructive desire. Most moral norms in human history are constructed through cultivation of people’s repulsion or sense of disgust. In the first place, people construct taboos by defining dirtiness, establish morality through taboos, and stabilize moral systems through group aversion. Changes in ideas about repulsion can even change customs, and stabilize and unite the society. Repulsion is always accompanied by aesthetic activities and participates in aesthetic process, and repulsive things can also be aesthetic objects. It is an important goal of modern art to express or arouse repulsion. Art and literature constantly attempt to explore the field of aversion, in order to form the motive for revolutions in art. Critical literary works, through arousing a common sense of repulsion, achieve the goal of transforming the society, and as such arousing a common sense of disgust is a mission of writers.