The paper proposes a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of aura, in the light of a theoretical overview that leads from the “Protocols of drug experiments” and his insights on mimesis to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and his studies on Charles Baudelaire. The main thesis is that Benjamin’s concept of aura involves a dialectics of empathy and estrangement which is deeply inscribed in the history of human perception. The characterization of the experience of beauty in nature and art as auratic consists, ultimately, in a derivation of the interpersonal relationship that constitutes the basis of the social world or, more precisely, in the transposition of an original perceptual process in the second person to the attitude that human beings manifest towards entities and events presented from the perspective of the third person.