Revista Filosófica de Coimbra (Mar 2018)
Uma estética do movimento (1870‑ 1930)
Abstract
Experimental Psychology defines a period of the autonomy of Psychology as Science and a movement of ideas that radiates from Europe to the United States in the temporal arc that can be placed between 1870 and 1930. The evidence required for a clear disciplinary independence will demand a whole field of experience, an object, instruments of measurement and laboratories defined according to criteria that are those of the Sciences of Nature. One tries to uncover the quantities of the psychic life as a system, above all the mechanisms through which the system connects to the outer world – sensations and movements. Subjects in the laboratory undergo rigorous measurements of the variables of their sensory‑motor reactions to stimuli and psychic states are investigated in their immediate conscious forms. This was a part of the philosophical Aesthetics, with its gnosiological and metaphysical themes, converted into the domain of proofs of the autonomy of the psychic system and its academic discipline. Under the strong objections of Wilhelm Wundt, the investigation of the French line of the psychiatric clinic of the Salpêtrière, or the school of Nancy, dedicated to the study of mental illnesses, like the hysteria, with the aid of hypnosis, claimed the same title of “Experimental Psychology”. Among all subjects of study, what can be considered the key, or the central problem of researchers and theorists is the relation between sensation and movement. This is a theme in which the conceptual density of the aesthetic tradition of the History of Philosophy and its concept of the unity of Man is well revealed. In the clinical context of the treatment of the hysteria with hypnosis of the Salpêtrière, the modern formation of the medium of the therapeutic relation makes its own way. One of the concepts used to conceive the therapeutic medium is suggestion. This category is embedded in the metaphysical assumptions of the anthropological continuum that psychological experimentation did not destroy, but kept. It will not only help to conceive the therapeutic pact as a purely psychological and affective relationship, but it will still serve to translate the medium of art as an irreflective and emotional medium. The arts of movement, and dance in particular, are the types chosen to evaluate, as a drama, the association between movements, gestures, sensations, and emotions in an epoch where the art medium is irreflective and doesn’t participate in the art’s message.
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