The Importance of the Sense of Touch in Heder’s Early Philosophy

This essay aims to explore the focal importance of the sense of touch in the  young  Johann Gottfried Herder’s Philosophy. In line with this purpose, some ontological and epistemological aspects of his early philosophy are examined. However, the true incentive of this inquiry is the role that sense of touch plays in Herder’s Aesthetics, the discipline which has a fundamental and indispensable interrelation with all fields of his thought. This text attempts to outline Herder’s stance regarding embodiment and sense of touch especially in relation to Ontology and Aesthetics of German rationalist tradition and also to Immanuel Kant’s pre-critical philosophy. It will be explained that the sense of touch, as Herder contends, is the most fundamental part of human perception, which grasps the being of the soul and the being of the world in terms of one single force, i.e. the force of representation; And aesthetic experience, as Herder assumes, consists in the very experience of detecting this unity between the soul and the world, namely the experience of perceiving perfection.