Plessner’s “Aesthesiology of the Spirit”: Sound and the Normative Value of the Senses

Abstract

The phenomenological research initiated by Helmuth Plessner in the 1920s under the banner of an “aesthesiology of the spirit” highlights, at the same time, the role of corporality for the relation- ship of the human being with the environmental reality in which he is inserted, the meaning of the dimension of corporality, and the normative meaning of the sensory relationship with this reality. A peculiar role in Plessner’s theory plays the reference to sound and music. We intend to take up this theoretical approach and verify it in the light of some salient examples in the compositional work of Anton Webern and two contemporary Italian composers, Dario Buccino and Giovanni Damiani.