The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch, and Aesthetic Experience

In this essay I want to address a question I have had for some time: Why is it that Alexander Gottfried Baumgarten, the founder and inventor of the modern philosophical discipline of aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century, makes reference to the “ground of the soul,” the “fundus animae,” calling our attention to a basic concept that, as he points out, “many people, even philosophers, ignore nowadays”? Baumgarten writes this in his Metaphysics, the Metaphysica of 1751.¹ The very context of the thought, however, is his elaboration of the modern meaning of “aesthetics” as a theory of “sensible cognition.” “Aesthetica,” Baumgarten states in a famous sentence of his Aesthetica, “est scientia cognitionis sensitivae.”—“Aesthetics [ . . . ] is the science of sensible cognition.”² Thus, aesthetics is not primarily a realm of knowledge concerned with normative questions of beauty but—and this will be true for Herder as well—with questions of cognition, experience, and sensation; in short, with the “aisthesis” of things and what used to be called “lower gnoseology.”

Thus, my question is: How does the notion of the “ground of the soul,” something that in fact is a trope of mystical discourse,³ play a role in this new science? How is it that such an eminent notion from the vocabulary of medieval and early modern theology and mysticism returns in the context of one of the most modern questions and quests, namely the understanding of aesthetic experience and sensation? And why is it that Johann Gottfried Herder, who along with Immanuel Kant was arguably one of the “crucial protagonists of the transformation of aesthetics after Baumgarten,”⁴ returns to this same figure of thought as well, emphasizing a common element in his and Baumgarten’s project and giving even more prominence to the very idea of a “ground of the soul”?⁵

In short, we could say, at this point in the eighteenth century—and quite surprisingly—a mystical trope enters the stage again, seemingly from a different corner, namely the new discourse about aesthetics, and thus challenges us to ask what the use of this figure of thought implies.⁶ As I will show here, the references to the “ground of the soul” in Baumgarten and Herder are not only of historical interest insofar as they evoke traditions of German mystical thought in the eighteenth century and in the midst of rational debate, testifying, as it is often phrased in all-too general terms, to a “Pietist” element in the thought of these two thinkers. Beyond that, and more importantly, an inquiry into the use of the notion of a “ground of the soul” will help us understand the seemingly entirely secular concepts of aesthetic experience in Baumgarten and Herder and its indebtedness to a mystical image of the soul as a realm of possibility. And it will help to understand, as well, one of the most significant turns in Herder’s thought about aesthetic experience, namely his attempt to privilege the sense of touch in the constitution of aesthetic experience.

As is well known, Herder considers the sense of touch to be the highest of all our senses. This has often been understood in terms of a rehabilitation of touch in a historical context that predominantly and quite conventionally puts vision at the top of a hierarchy of the senses. While Herder indeed rehabilitates the sense of touch, he actually does more than that. He turns touch not only into a specific sense that is the foundation of all sensation, but into something that figures as the very sphere of possibility for the deployment of all effects of sensation and aesthetic experience in the soul. In aesthetic experience, one might summarize Herder’s position, all sensation turns into touch—and touch encompasses virtually all sensation. Or, to put it differently, touch is the aspect of sensation and of the life of the soul that constitutes the realm of possibility—in other words, the possibility to become everything in sensation, to take shape in sensation, and to experience what I am calling the plasticity of the soul...