Marx's aesthetic anthropological thought

WANG Jie; Hyland Waves

The overall goal of anthropology should be to unify the study of man's mental phenomena with the study of man's material existence and physiological basis, so that the study of the humanities can be based on empirical evidence, in order to refute the view that the humanities are pseudoscience. An important development direction of contemporary anthropology is to shift from the study of primitive cultures that have not been transformed by modern civilization to the study of modern society and modern civilization. The emerging sub-disciplines of anthropology, such as educational anthropology, urban anthropology, environmental anthropology, literary anthropology, and aesthetic anthropology, are all related to modern social life and the thoughts and emotions of modern people. Anthropological research in the traditional sense is still needed today, but it is even more necessary for scholars to use anthropological methods to study contemporary cultural phenomena, which will generate a lot of fresh academic topics.

While new elaborations on theoretical problems, we cannot ignore the academic basis of the discipline, especially in the field of aesthetic research. Marx's thought is closely related to aesthetics and anthropology, and this paper attempts to explain Marx's unique aesthetic anthropological thought, and whether this attempt can be recognized or not remains to be tested by the academic community.

As we all know, Marx and Engels were very excited about the publication of Morgan's "Ancient Society", which they regarded as a powerful empirical explanation of historical materialism (a philosophical theory with a very high degree of abstraction of the development of human society), before which historical materialism mainly focused on the argument of doctrine and the argument of political economy, and lacked systematic argument of empirical basis. Historical materialism bears great resemblance and intrinsic connection to Morgan's anthropological theory. Both focus on explaining the origin and development of human society from the aspects of material existence and technological progress of human life, pay attention to the material basis of human society, and believe that all cultural phenomena and social systems are based on a certain material foundation. Influenced by the Enlightenment trend of the capitalist rise, Morgan focused on explaining the development of human society from the aspect of technological progress, believing that technological progress drives the development of productive forces, which leads to changes in production relations and thus promotes the transformation of social systems. This coincides with the view of historical materialism.

Despite the above similarities, there are still great differences between Marx's historical materialism and Morgan's anthropological theory. In His Anthropological Notes, which Marx wrote in his later years, Marx had both an affirmation of Morgan and a critique of some of his ideas. This article argues that there are three differences between Marxism and anthropology:

(1) Anthropology, as an empirical science, attaches great importance to fieldwork and comparative study of empirical materials, in contrast, Marxism has a strong theoretical and speculative color. Paying attention to empirical materials has both advantages and disadvantages, fieldwork data cannot be absolutely true and objective, due to subjective and objective reasons, anthropologists may be blinded by insufficiently real fieldwork data; Moreover, when the researcher's research vision and theoretical level cannot explain the phenomenon, it is often easy to castrate and distort the empirical material, which is consciously and unconsciously done by some anthropologists. Marxism, on the other hand, has a strong speculative nature and places more emphasis on grasping academic and theoretical issues, which is very important for modern academic research.

(2) From the perspective of research ideas, cultural anthropology focuses on the comparative study of heterogeneous cultures, while Marxism focuses on the comparative study of the past and reality, ancient society and modern society, which is a difference between basic ideas. As a fundamental feature of the theory, anthropology is rooted in the positivist trend of thought, which is associated with the methodology of natural science and the process of modernization of capitalist society, so most anthropological theories affirm the process of modernization of real systems and societies. Marxism, on the other hand, criticizes reality and abandons the process of social modernization, because since its birth, Marxism has been opposed to and criticized with the ideological trends of modernization theory and positivism.

(iii) Methodologically, Marxism takes economics or political economy as the most important methodological basis, while cultural anthropology is based on cultural theory and cultural philosophy. In terms of methodology and research focus, Marxism focuses on the study of the material basis of society, economic relations, and mode of production, and extends and expounds to the superstructure and ideological fields. Cultural anthropology, on the other hand, focuses on cultural differences and the differences between different systems of culture, and traces the root of differences to the material basis. In the Western philosophical tradition, if Marx inherited the theoretical tradition of German and legal philosophy, cultural anthropology inherited the empiricist tradition of British philosophy.

Marxist aesthetics is more closely related to Marxist aesthetic anthropology, and although the latter is greatly influenced by anthropology and borrows many of its methods and materials, its tradition and foundation are still in Marxist aesthetics.

1. Marxist aesthetics or Marxist philosophy of art is an aesthetic in the anthropological sense, which many scholars have pointed out1. It is manifested in: 1) Marx believed that human imagination and emotion are human characteristics in an anthropological sense, and Marx believed that "passion and imagination are the essential existence of man" (1844 Manuscripts of Economic Philosophy), which had not been recognized before Marx. 2) In the "Notes on Anthropology", Marx emphasized the full play of human potential and ability, and there was always an "ideal man" model in Marx's mind, which is a philosophical anthropological thought.

2. In the course of its development, Marxist aesthetics has always used the materials provided by anthropology to expound and argue its theory. Not only Marx, but also his successors, such as the material used in Lafarge's discussion of the origin of art comes from anthropology, Plekhanov's "Letter without Address" quotes a lot of anthropological material, George Lukács's important aesthetic work "Aesthetic Characteristics" also quotes a lot of anthropological material, Wa Benjamin's mythological theory of Kafka and Baudelaire's interpretation is different from others, in that he borrowed the mythological and anthropological conceptual method, which is also an important reason why his theory can penetrate that era. In addition, raymond Williams, a well-known scholar known in the West as the "father of cultural studies", also made extensive use of cultural anthropology materials in his cultural studies.

3. To put it another way, many of the important ideas and theories of anthropology originated in Marxism, which was particularly evident in the 20th century. Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology, White's new theory of evolution, Marvin Harris's cultural materialism, Althusser-influenced explanatory anthropology, etc., were all profoundly influenced by Marx's doctrine, and in the West there was also the emergence of Marxist anthropology.

4. The research areas of the two are getting closer and closer. For example, an important branch of contemporary anthropology symbolizes anthropology, which has great overlap with Marxist aesthetics in terms of research objects. Symbolic anthropology believes that any culture to have universality, to transform specific objects into symbols, which is the most common action in the creation of human culture, symbolic anthropology is to study the production, role, meaning and relationship of symbols in culture, that is, to study the symbolic system of culture. Marxist aesthetics believes that if the object wants to become an aesthetic object, it must be transformed from an aesthetic object into a symbol, because it does not have symbolism, it does not have universality, and it does not have aesthetic value. It can be said that these two different disciplines have come together.

1. The difference between Marxist aesthetics and artistic anthropology is that Marxist aesthetics has stronger abstraction and more ontological colors.

2. The difference between Marxist aesthetics and other aesthetics is that it not only needs to understand the world, but also requires the transformation of the world, while understanding aesthetic phenomena, but also to transform the old aesthetic relations, create new aesthetic relations, and build a new world with an aesthetic vision, which is determined by the nature of Marxism. Anthropology, on the other hand, focuses on objective research from the perspective of a bystander.

Marx's main views on aesthetic anthropological thought have the following three aspects that deserve further attention and study, and these ideas and theories have new significance and value in the theoretical framework of modern aesthetics.

The concept of aesthetic needs is a problem that should be studied in aesthetic theory but in fact is not studied enough, in addition to Marxism, psychology has done a certain degree of research on the problem of aesthetic needs, but Marx's research is different, in my opinion, Marx's relevant ideas have anthropological significance, specifically mainly including the following four meanings:

1. The idea of the body as the material basis of aesthetic activity. This is an idea put forward by Marx in the 1844 Manuscript of the Philosophy of Economics, which Eagleton made an important exposition in aesthetic ideology. Today's anthropology strives to break through the barrier between the study of human spiritual activity and the study of material activities in human society, and this idea of Marx is a manifestation of this interdisciplinary research, which is of great significance to aesthetic research. For a long time, aesthetics is a discipline without a material basis, and in today's postmodern theory and contemporary Marxist aesthetic theory, the relationship between the body and human emotions and the relationship between the body and people's aesthetic activities have been well discussed, and these ideas are derived from Marx to varying degrees.

2. In the "1844 Manuscript of Economic Philosophy", Marx put forward the idea that the process of modernization restricts the human body or that the human body is alienated in the process of modernization. Eagleton further elaborated on this: aesthetic needs are not physical needs, but cultural needs. The strong demand for aesthetic objects is related to the alienation and restraint of the human body in the process of modernization, and theoretically it can be said that aesthetic needs are related to a certain lack of man himself. And scarcity is a social consequence, not a natural phenomenon. Therefore, it can be said that aesthetic needs are not cultivated, what needs to be cultivated is people's aesthetic ability. People living in certain social relations naturally have certain aesthetic needs, and what kind of sensory ability he has requires the corresponding aesthetic objects to meet his aesthetic needs.

3. The idea of the full realization of human potential. This is an important idea that Marx repeatedly expressed in the 1844 Manuscripts on the Philosophy of Economics and other works, that is, the idea of aesthetic anthropology. It is in line with the ideas of Enlightenment and German classical aesthetics, believing that human potential has been realized in some imaginative way in aesthetic activities. What Marx has in common with philosophers such as Enlightenment, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer is that they all believe that human potential is fully and freely realized in artistic and aesthetic activities, but the difference between Marx is that he soberly realizes that this realization is an imaginary, hallucinatory realization, not a real realization. The realization of human potential in aesthetic activities is illusory, so Marx often compares aesthetics with religion, and in Marx's writings, there are both affirmations and negations of aesthetics, and most of them are negative. Of course, just as Marx never denied the role of truly great religions in history, he also never denied the significance of great art.

4. Marx put forward the idea and theory of "the law of beauty" in the "1844 Philosophical Manuscript of Economics". Regarding the "law of beauty", Marx put forward the theory of "two scales", that is, for human objects, we must not only grasp and evaluate the scale of "things" and the scale of reality, but also use the scale of people and the internal scale to grasp and evaluate. Only when the two scales coincide and are unified, can this object conform to the law of beauty. This idea is an important part of Marx's aesthetic anthropology, Marx's understanding of the existence of man and the meaning of man requires not only the measurement of external "things" such as efficiency, money, power and other measurable external scales, but also the use of human scales, that is, in line with human nature, in line with man's highest ethics, and man's ideals to demand objects. Before Marx, Lessing had used the concept of the "law of beauty", but Lessing was mainly talking about the law of formal beauty, and Marx asked questions and thought about problems from the perspective of anthropology as a human being, that is, how to exist in accordance with human nature.

The question of the eternal charm of ancient Greek mythology was not first raised by Marx, and romantic aesthetics had raised it before that, but it had a different meaning in Marx's theoretical framework than before. Romantic aesthetics believes that human beings are normal, free and harmonious in the primitive social stage, so the creation of civilization in this era is also normal, harmonious and beautiful, which can bring the enjoyment of beauty to modern people in a state of alienation, so it has eternal charm. This view is not actually a Marxist point of view, and Marxism does not consider primitive society to be the most beautiful and perfect society. In our opinion, Marx put forward several important ideas on the eternal charm of ancient Greek mythology.

First, within Marx's theoretical framework, ancient Greek mythology is a composite text, or a text in which multiple discourses overlap, which is mentioned several times in his Anthropological Notes2. At that time, a group of anthropologists represented by Morgan deduced ancient society according to mythological genealogy, compared with Marx's analysis of ancient mythology, which was more meticulous and dialectical, and Marx believed that at least the different images and voices of patriarchal myths and matriarchal myths were superimposed in ancient Greek mythology. The excellent art of ancient Greece can convey these two voices at the same time, and the tragedy of ancient Greece is often the deepest and most intense expression of the inner conflict between these two voices.

Second, Marx's interpretation of the eternal charm of ancient Greek mythology is linked to the historical context. The uniqueness of Marx's mythological theory lies in the fact that he links the beauty of the symbolic system of myth with the specific aesthetic relationship with a certain historical stage, which is an important idea of Marx's mythological theory. Marx is not simply on the study of mythology, he believes that the meaning of myth must be combined with reality to present, the eternal charm of ancient Greek mythology has different meanings in different historical stages, it is not static, but a dynamic expression, should be in the context of specific production relations, exchange relations, aesthetic relations to grasp its charm [1]. In fact, Marx's mythological theory is closely related to his ideological theory, and it can be said that it is a form of ideological theory. The idea that beauty is linked to concrete history is also expressed in "The Eighteenth Day of the Misty Moon of Louis Bonaparte", and Marx said in a humorous tone that the aesthetic objects created during the period of bourgeois rise will also change after the bourgeoisie takes power, and its aesthetic significance will change, and it will be substantially changed.

Third, Marx also mentioned the dialectical problem of mythology, that is, the dialectical relationship between the mysticism of mythological phenomena or emotional ideologies and the reconciliation of mystery. The question of mysticism and reconciliation has always been a concern of mythology, and since the 1960s, as aesthetic ideology has become the mainstream ideology, art and aesthetic phenomena themselves have been mystified and mythologized, and the humanities have shifted to focus on the study of mythological demystification. We believe that the study of the dialectical relationship between mysticity and mysticity is actually the ancient Greek myth that Marx talked about in his Critique of Political Economy as mystical and regards mystique as eternal and supreme authority, but it is not art. Ancient Greek art used mythology as a material, or to borrow Marx's words, to treat myth as "soil", "mother's womb", and "arsenal", so that it became mysterious and presented its implicit true meaning. In His Critique of Political Economy, Marx gave himself the task of explaining and explaining the original form of ancient Greek mythology and why it has the question of demystification, that is, prompting modern people to feel its artistic value and eternal charm. 2) The mystery of modern classical art represented by Shakespeare and the problem of mystique, that is, the question of its incomparable charm and what value and role it plays. 3) We believe that there is a third point in Marx's thought, that is, modern art, which is different from the ancient Greek and classical era, uses the material of ancient mythology to combine it with the experience of modern life, and re-expresses a new problem of aesthetic value that is different from the past. This should be a more complex issue. Marxist aesthetic anthropology should make its own interpretation of these different aesthetic relations and their meanings. At present, the academic community has studied the first two problems more, and neglected the study of the third aspect. The direction that the current Marxist aesthetic anthropology should strive for is to explain the mythological return of Kafka, Joyce, and magic realism, that is, the reappearance of myths in modern form and their differences from classical myths in aesthetic charm and artistic power. The relationship between mysticism and mysticism is actually the relationship between art and ideology. Many mythological theories on the power of demystification analyze and discuss the complex and paradoxical images of myths themselves to illustrate the value and charm of their art, while Marxist mythology ultimately traces the power of demystification to the complexity and concreteness of the relationship between reality, which is its unique feature.

4. Marx put forward the important concept of aesthetic transformation in the Critique of Political Economy. When Marx was thinking about the relationship between mythology or ideology and art and aesthetic enlightenment, he believed that there was a process of transforming from myth to art, and from art to the aesthetic experience of the recipient, and then to achieve the effect of aesthetic enlightenment, and the connection link between the two transformation processes was "aesthetic transformation". "Aesthetic transformation" is both an aesthetic concept and an important concept of anthropology. Cultural anthropologist Harris also uses the concept of "transformation" when thinking about why different groups of people at different stages of social development have different artistic expressions, arguing that it contains both aesthetic traditions and realistic materials. Aesthetic transformation is the simultaneous action of these two aspects, the joint creation of the object, in the face of the same realistic material, under different aesthetic traditions will lead to different aesthetic experiences, and this aesthetic tradition in Marx's view is a certain ideology.

Marx's anthropology differs from cultural anthropology in general in that the latter focuses on the collection, collation, and objective description of materials, while all of Marx's thinking revolves around how to make human society emerge from the capitalist mode of productive forces and transcend the central question of exploitation, oppression, and the antagonism of class society. An important achievement of Marxist aesthetic anthropology is to theoretically raise the question of the relationship between aesthetic activity and historical progress, which is the difference between Marxist aesthetics and general aesthetics.

In terms of phenomena, it is not difficult for us to realize that when modern people appreciate ancient Greek mythology, primitive national culture, and primitive national art, they can always feel a certain rationality that is different from the real society with money and efficiency as the only scale; An event that is re-expressed in literary and artistic forms after a period of time will become beautiful and bring us beauty; Why is it that the more lonely it is in artistic expression, the more universal it is, and the more individual, unique, and unrepeatable, the more universal it is? These phenomena are difficult problems of aesthetic anthropology, where many theories are overwhelmed, but Marxism has the power to explain. Marx proposed an important concept in his interpretation of aesthetic activity: "the inversion of values". This is a frequently used concept in The Notes on Anthropology and the Critique of Political Economy. When discussing primitive culture and the development of exchange relations, Marx noticed that the actual value relations in a certain circle of witchcraft would produce an inversion, a series of relations that were in a rational state in daily life would be reversed in a special cultural mechanism, and in the social development after the disintegration of mythology, this was also a special phenomenon in aesthetic activities. Marx believed that this phenomenon was evidence that there was still hope for human society even in the most painful and dark societies. Art or aesthetics is a special field of human society, it preserves the most valuable and human habits, ideals, values of human society, it transcends reality by reversing certain aspects of daily life, realizes its mystique, realizes the particularity of art, protects these values, and art thus exists. It can be said that the existence of art itself is a form of expression of the irrationality of society, as Roland Barthes pointed out, it is precisely because there is a division and oppression in society that myths are needed. Art achieves its self-preservation through the inversion of values, or the defamiliarization of the technique, to convey and perpetuate the most humane things in human civilization. People have a lot of reasonable demands in real life, although they are repressed to the level of the subconscious, excluded from daily life and culture in general, but still retained in art.

The concept of "value inversion" was heavily used in the 1844 Philosophical Manuscripts of Economics, Capital, and Notes on Anthropology, and the most typical form in Marx was expressed in the exchange of commodities. After Marx, F. Jameson inherited and developed the concept of "value inversion", and he proposed the concept of "literary mode of production" in his works such as Brecht's Method, Political Unconscious, and The Seed of Time, examining Marx's relationship between the inversion of the value of aesthetic activities and historical progress. The inversion of values changes people from facing the past to facing the future. People's psychological activities are generally oriented to the past, and most art often makes people turn to the past, and real art makes us face reality, face the future, and examine reality from the standpoint of a more ideal and reasonable existence, so that we can passionately transform reality.

In the development of the humanities in the 20th century, Marx's theoretical method and anthropological method had an interactive relationship, and the two sides influenced each other, such as Lévi-Strauss's view of using women as a medium of exchange between different tribes to achieve unity with each other in his study of the kinship system was inherited from Marx. Another example is Derrida's study of writing, which has universal semiotic significance, and Derrida's research in this regard is actually a study in the anthropological sense, and he frankly admits that his research on the role of words was influenced by Marx's study of money. In addition, Lacan's psychology is also very closely related to anthropology, and his psychoanalytic theory has an interactive relationship with anthropology, and the concept of "residual pleasure" ("residual imagination") proposed in Lacan's psychology is related to Marx's theory of surplus value. The concept of "mythological elements" proposed in the myth theory of Lévi-Strauss and the concept of "ideological elements" proposed by Derrida in the book "The Ghost of Marx" are all rooted in Marx's ideological theory. We believe that Marx's study of "commodity fetishism" is of great significance to mythology and anthropology, and Marx's research on money and exchange relations also has the general significance and universality of anthropological methodology. Today's aesthetic anthropology should incorporate these methods and concepts into its own framework system.

Jameson. Marxism and Historicism[A].The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism[C].Beijing:Sanlian Bookstore, 1997.

1 (2) The anthropological notes made by Marx in his later years, also known as the "ethnological notes", refer to Marx's summary of Ma Kovalevsky's "Commune Land Tenure, the Causes, Processes and Consequences of its Disintegration" made between 1879 and 1881, the abstract of Lu Morgan's "Ancient Society", the abstract of Hen Messe's "Lecture on the History of the Ancient Legal System", the abstract of Jo Lappock's "The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive State of Mankind", etc., in The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 45, People's Publishing House, December 1985 edition.

2 (1) See S.S. Buravel's Marx and World Literature, Haucke's Despair and Confidence, etc.