“O sonho formador de Pigmaleão”: corpo e tato na estética de Herder

Abstract

Herder was deeply involved in the debates around the foundation of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline that had started in mid-eighteenth century, based on Baumgarten’s work. Since his first texts, we notice an intention to deepen the original project of a science of the senses, expanding the psychological inquire into the lower faculties into a true physiology of the senses, which should redirect all soul’s operations to their origins in the sensitive body. In his essay, Plastik [Sculpture], published in 1778, we will find the pinnacle of this debate. A text of apparently limited focus – a study on sculpture based on a theory of touch – it consolidates an important displacement of the original project of aesthetics, by incorporating Winckelmann’s passionate contemplation of sculpture. Herder rediscovers in the touching body, poetically understood, the roots of development of the human soul and of its engagement with the world through its bodily nature. In an unforeseen way, the opening to a world of symbolic shapes, in a thought inherent to sensibility, ends up bringing aesthetics to a completely different horizon, when compared to the empirical psychology in which it was conceived.