A Study On Marx’s Thought Of "Life World"

“Life determines consciousness” is a programmatic summary of Marx’s philosophical revolution,which requires us to abandon the transcendental existence of consciousness in the living world and reveal the origin of consciousness from the process of people’s actual life.Marx’s thought of life world permeates the whole process of the development of his philosophy.From the reservation about self-consciousness in his doctoral thesis to the sublation of self-consciousness in the German-French yearbook period;From the abstract intuition of ready-made things to the grasp of the historical generation process of human nature in the perceptual world,Marx turned to the real life world,inspired by the problem of material interests,and grasped the essence of the real life world through his understanding of the perceptual activities of real individuals.Taking the life world as the starting point is the key point of the "practical turn" from pure self-consciousness to perceptual object activity initiated by Marx’s philosophical revolution.In Marx’s view,"the world" is not an independent existence outside of human beings,but is engaged,constructed,and imbued with meaning and value by human beings.The significance of the external world to human beings lies in that it becomes something within the scope of human life process with the expansion of human’s practical activities.It is true that the world of life is not based on the abstract material and nature of materialism,nor is it based on the abstract subject and self-spirit of idealism.It is the process of human practice itself,and the result of the performance of the perceptual activities of realistic individuals,constantly changing in the course of history.While Hegel’s object world mystifies the absolute idea by reintroducing the essence of reality into it,Marx,guided by the perceptual principle,finally broke through the internality of consciousness with perceptual activities and regards reality as the "process of people’s real life" before rationality and logic in the life world.Therefore,"life determines consciousness" is by no means a simple reversal of the western traditional metaphysics,but a reflection on the ontological foundation of consciousness itself,making the life world that has always been covered by the object world,re-examined.This object world constructed by pure reason through the intellectual nature of consciousness,as the result of the externalization of consciousness itself,contains all the abstractness of Hegel’s philosophy in the ontological determinations of consciousness itself.The subjectivity of consciousness establishes the object world within itself,and the whole significance of its dialectical movement is to reveal the self-development process of absolute spirit as actuality.However,Marx revealed the perceptual essence of consciousness in the life world.As the language of real life,perceptual consciousness is the conceptual expression of people’s practical activities and changes with the change of people’s life process."Life" is not a derivative of consciousness,nor is history the development of consciousness itself.That is to say,it is not consciousness or perception that determine people’s lives,but the actual process of life that determines people’s consciousness.Indeed,Marx’s life world thought breaks through the internality of consciousness,penetrates the substantive content of social reality,and realizes the generation of historical materialism.