The Exploration Of Marcuse’s Thought Of Aestheticization Ot Technology

Herbert Marcuse,in his critical examination of modern technology,made the highly controversial point that modern technology has become a new form of ideological domination.In Marcuse’s view,the root cause of this situation lies in the fact that the development of technology profoundly affects and dominates the mental structure of the individual,making technical reason a universal and coercive principle of reality that guides the consciousness and practice of the individual.Under the domination and control of this principle of reality,modern society presents a character that lacks true critical,negative,and transcendent spiritual integration,and the ideological domination of technological rationality hinders the trend of social change,and the individual is placed in a hidden and deceptive alienated living situation.Focusing on the central task of getting rid of the alienated state of man in the repressive technological society,Marcuse comprehensively absorbed Freud’s psychoanalytic philosophy,Marx’s early "perceptual liberation" thought,and the classical aesthetic thoughts of Kant and Schiller,and put forward the concept of technological aesthetics,providing an important and practical choice path for modern people to reflect and explore out of the survival dilemma of technological society.The idea of technological aesthetics is the logical result of Marcuse’s critical theory of technical rationality,and it can be said that it is implicitly or explicitly embodied in the entire process of Marcuse’s thought,and has become the combination point of his critical theory of technology,the emancipation of love,the one-dimensionality theory and aesthetic thought.On the basis of an in-depth study of Marcuse’s text,this article aims to sort out the logical unfolding process of the idea of technological aesthetics from its formulation to its concrete construction,and to comment on this idea in the context of modernity.This paper argues that Marcuse,in the course of his study of the origins of Fascism in Germany,recognized the role of modern technology in maintaining and promoting totalitarian rule,and on the basis of an in-depth examination of the characteristics of modern technology,defined it as a social process,a mode of production,a tool of control and domination,and pointed out that the fundamental reason for this situation was that technological reason played the dominant role of ideology.In order to find the root cause of why technological rationality can become a form of ideological domination,Marcuse,through critical analysis and reference to Freud’s psychoanalytic philosophy,pointed out that the suppression of the Eros Instinct is the biological basis for the dominance of ideological domination by technical reason,thus combining the critique of technical rationality with the liberation of Eros Instinct.By merging Freud’s idea of the erotic instinct with Marx’s early definition of man’s essence as an "objective sensuous being" in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,Marcuse argued that the The suppression of the Eros Instinct is actually the suppression and denunciation of human sensibility by technical rationality,so he links the liberation of the Eros Instinct with the liberation of sensibility,and proposes to restore the right of sensibility.The classical aesthetic ideas of Kant and Schiller provided a bridge to eliminate the binary opposition between reason and sensibility,and eventually Marcuse introduced the solution of technical reason to the ideological domination of man into the field of artistic aesthetics.By emphasizing the political potential of art,Marcuse reveals that the aesthetic function expresses the remaining potential of human psychology that has not yet been controlled by technological rationality,and thus contains the revolutionary force to rebel against existing society and build a non-repressive civilization.With the help of the political potential of art,Marcuse proposed to integrate technology and art on the basis of technological progress,cultivate a new type of human being,change the direction of technological progress,and promote harmony between man and nature,so as to build a non-repressive society in which the liberation of a person,the liberation of technology,and the liberation of nature support each other and presuppose each other.This paper argues that Marcuse’s idea of technological aestheticization based on socio-historical reality provides a reference for solving the problem of technological modernity,and has increasingly important practical significance in contemporary society.The historical concept embodied in the idea of technological aesthetics not only fully embodies the spirit of dialectics,but also refutes the accusation that Marcuse’s idea has a fictitious utopian nature,and to a certain extent adheres to the positive value of utopia in maintaining the critical spirit and promoting social change.