Going Back To Sensibility:Reconsidering The Aesthetic Dimension Of Marx's Philosophy

In recent years,the study of Marxist aesthetics has become a hot spot,but in fact,as some scholars have pointed out,Marxist philosophy inherently contains the aesthet-ic dimension.Based on the history of thought and the mode of text interpretation,the thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the essence of Marxist philosophy through the further study of this issue.The core clue of the thesis is Marx's concept of sensibil-ity.When discussing Marx's philosophical revolution in the past,the academic circles mostly focused on the epistemological or ontological significance of sensibility(pract-ice),but did not fully explore its aesthetic meaning.Since Baumgarten defined aesthetics as "the science of perceptual knowledge",aesthetics has been regarded as a kind of knowledge that seeks truth in the perceptual mechanism of the subject,thus forming a supplement to enlightenment rationality.Therefore,aesthetics has become a fundamental pespective that cannot be ignored in philosophical exploration of sensibility.On the whole,Marx did not accept the tradition of modern aesthetics.On the contrary,in his construction of historical materialism,he carried out a new sensibility construction road which embodied in political economy criticism and revolutionary politics by returning to the original concept of aesthetics(sensibility),thus promoting human liberation to the height of aesthetic revolution.This is Marx's aesthetics which is considered as the internal dimension of Marx's philosophy.In this sense,deepening the study of the aesthetic dimension of Marx's philosophy is a subject of profound significance.The thesis is divided into three parts.The first part analyses the epistemological trend of modern aesthetics from the perspective of the history of thought and points out that it was comprehensively reflected by Kant.By asserting that perceptual knowledge is different from scientific knowledge,Kant returned to the original meaning of aesthetics,that is,the concept of sensibility,which undoubtedly laid an important foundation for aesthetics.However,in the process of exploring the subjective necessity of aesthetic judgment,Kant oftentakes an ambiguous attitude with the traditional aesthetics.This also means that the universal transmissibility of beauty in Kant will ultimately appeal to the perceptional law of aesthetic subject,that is,the principle of pure form which excludes sensible qualities.In this way,the aesthetic form became a priori given thing to cover the complex relation between aesthetic and social reality.Marx inherited Kant's viewpoint that aesthetic is different from science and it can't provide any knowledge.The same as Kant,Marx backed to the key of the aesthetics,namely the concept of sensibility.With the reduction of perceptual concept from epistemology to the sensible concept as an ontological category,historical materialism provided a new horizon for Marx to transcend the formal aesthetics.The attention of historical materialism to realistic individuals and their sensible activities contains aesthetic dimensions.Marx broke the narrow understanding of perceptual problems in traditional aesthetics by internalizing sensibility in social production practice through political economy criticism.Furthermore,from the perspective of historical materialism,the concept of the sensibility in different dimensions of aesthetics,economy and politics are analyzed to reconstruct the object of Marx's aesthetics.Different from the object of traditional aesthetics,Marx did not grasp sensibility as a supplement to an aesthetic ideology outside the real social world,but regarded it as an overall existentialist structure dialectically unified in the process of nature and society,thus transforming the aesthetic from the consciousness of contemplation to the problem of the sensibility liberation with practice as the principle.This means that in order to achieve aesthetics of the human existence,we must change the capitalist mode of production and eliminate the division between public and private,as a result we can use the common social feeling instead of the innate common sense(Kant).The second part reveals the construction path of Marx's aesthetics.First,Marx analyzed sensibility as the fusion of objective material and self-consciousness in the temporality of physicalization through the research of Epicurus' atomism in his Dissertation,thus presenting man as an infinite and open existence.In the Paris Manuscripts,Marx criticized national economics from the perspective of sensory alienation,showing the aesthetic ontological turn to reconstruct the sensibility world through political economy criticism for the first time.In addition,in the Holy Family,XMarx has not only indicated the traditional aesthetics in the social reality of powerless through the analysis of the play "the Secret of the Paris",and realized to break away from the bourgeois aesthetic ideology must base on the premise of a rift with their material conditions,which constitute the creation of the aesthetic power of historical materialism.In the mature period of historical materialism,on the one hand,Marx revealed that spiritual production in any era has its specific social material basis,so as to explain the sensibility activities in social history with the correlation between division of labor and social production,and grasp the sociality of its material and spiritual achievements.On the other hand,only when the division of labor is eliminated in the future,can we surmount the great obstacle of private ownership to individuals and sociality and truly realize the comprehensive production of the unity of aesthetic form and social content.Finally,in the critique of political economy,Marx revealed the sensibility radicalism of capital operation by separating out the "surplus" in the theory of surplus value.In the process of the reconstruction of the sensibility world,the surplus existence shows a tendency towards the "sublime" of higher existence,which makes them eager to complete a kind of restoration to themselves and society.The sublimity of Marxism is to transform the surplus existence into communism by reconstructing the new sensible distribution system.In this sense,communism is the ultimate existence of human aestheticism.The third part further reveals the political and social dimensions of Marx's aesthetics.In the political dimension,as the starting point of his political theory,the proletarian position is the realistic attitude adopted by Marx to analyze social and historical issues,which provides rich social content for the proletarian revolution and the world outlook change.The reexamination of the concept of sensibility shows that the proletarian position is a position of unity between the perspective of the observer and the perspective of the actor,which is guided by historical science towards a world-changing aesthetic politics.In the social dimension,Marx's aesthetics believes that with the continuous enhancement of human's ability to master natural processes,the society that "regards labor time as the measure of wealth" can be abolished in a future stage of joint possession of scientific and social production.Then,there is an inherent unity between the creative individual action of satisfying the self and thesocially constructive activities.Further,with the external relations of exchange value as intermediary is transformed into direct the social relations,the society will no longer be an abstract collective power that secludes people.The sublation of "abstract rule" completed the return of man to socialization,and the social relations were reorganized from the cooperative mode that both realized common planning and supported the development of each person's free personality.