On Marcuse’s Aesthetic Utopian Thought

Herbert Marcuse,an important representative of the Frankfurt School,dealt with the exploration of aesthetic art in several books,but his study of aesthetic art was not limited to itself,but had to resort to the liberation of society.Marcuse argues that the developed industrial society controls people in all aspects,classes are assimilated,instincts are suppressed,and traditional revolutionary theories have lost their usefulness.Therefore,the emancipation of people and society is different from the violent revolution of the past,and can only be carried out at the level of people’s psychological instincts.By relying on aesthetic art to transform people’s psychological instincts,people’s repressed sensibility is stimulated,thus triggering the motivation for change and building a non-repressive society.Marcuse’s idea of awakening people’s sensuality through aesthetic art to achieve social liberation is called "aesthetic utopia" by the academic community.Marcuse’s idea of aesthetic utopia not only has implications for solving the repression of human nature and the liberation of sensibility in developed industrial societies,but also provides rich nutrients for the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics.In order to present Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought as comprehensively and clearly as possible,this paper discusses it in the following four parts:The first part mainly examines the formulation of Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought,mainly including the background of the era in which the thought arose,the opportunity of its formation and its theoretical origin.The developed industrial society controls people comprehensively in political,economic and cultural aspects,and people gradually lose their negative and critical consciousness and are reduced to one-dimensional people.Faced with the pathological phenomenon of all-round enslavement of people by technical rationality in developed industrial society,Marcuse believes that the revolutionary subject proletariat envisioned by Marx has been integrated by developed industrial society.With the search for the revolutionary subject,after the New Left radical movement proved its theoretical bankruptcy,Marcuse rethinks the path of human emancipation and emphasizes on the instinctive emancipation of people.In Marcuse’s view,people must first have the spiritual self-awareness to change society.He hopes that through aesthetic art he can achieve changes at the level of human psychological instincts,awaken people’s repressed sensibility,and ultimately achieve true social liberation.Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought was also influenced by many philosophers,and the influence of different thinkers on Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought can be seen more intuitively by tracing his thoughts.The second part deals with the definition,elements and related concepts of Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought.Aesthetic utopia,as a manifestation of utopian thought,is a theoretical conception of liberating people’s repressed sensibility and building a non-repressed society by means of the redemptive function of aesthetic art.The "new sensibility" and "aesthetic form" are the core elements of Marcuse’s aesthetic utopia,and Marcuse’s understanding of the new sensibility is also based on his understanding of sensibility,and the form as the ontology of art,and the aesthetic form gives art its own truth value.Religious utopia and ecological utopia are two other forms of utopian thought,aesthetic utopia and religious utopia are both concerned with the reality of people’s lives and undertake the mission of spiritual salvation.However,aesthetic utopia stimulates people’s suppressed inner emotions through artistic revolution,protesting and complaining against reality,while religious utopia places good wishes in heaven,expecting salvation in the afterlife.Aesthetic utopia and ecological utopia both share a concern for nature,but while ecological utopia is concerned with building an ecologically sustainable society in the midest of ecological crisis,aesthetic utopia is inherently concerned with building a non-repressed society that liberates both man and nature through the aesthetic restoration of nature.The third part specifically analyzes the construction of Marcuse’s idea of aesthetic utopia,which is the most central part of this paper.Marcuse believes that art contains the vitality to transform society,and art maintains its distance from the developed industrial society through the secondary alienation of the real world,the transformation of aesthetic forms and the excavation of critical language,showing the criticism and transcendence of the existing society.At the same time,in Marcuse’s view,the new sensuality has the property of love desire,and love desire as the essence of human being,the process of love desire liberation is also the process of people’s repressed sensuality release.At the same time,imagination as artistic thinking becomes the driving force of constructing people’s new sensuality because of its transcendence and otherness,and women’s natural sensuality makes them potential subjects of the new sensuality.When the artistic revolution removes the repression of reason and forms people’s new sensibility,human beings will enter a non-repressive society.At this time,technology is also the new technology of aestheticization,people gradually get rid of the control of the ruling class operating principle,and natural subjectivity will be restored.The fourth part is a critical reflection on Marcuse’s idea of aesthetic utopia.Marcuse gives comfort and solace to people’s hearts in the world of aesthetic art.Unlike the social liberation through violent proletarian revolution proposed by Marx and other thinkers,Marcuse provides new ideas for the liberation of society and broadens the scope of Marxist research through the excavation of the revolutionary art and the call for a new sensual man.However,Marcuse ignores the social attributes of human beings by taking love and desire as the essence of human beings,deviates from Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution by shifting the revolutionary subject,and rescues human society by virtue of an aesthetic-artistic way of thinking that is detached from concrete practice.Finally,absorbing the beneficial aspects of Marcuse’s aesthetic utopian thought to serve the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics provides guidance for the direction of China’s literary and artistic development,the production and application of science and technology,and the harmonious development of man and nature.