Towards History Itself: On the Production of Marx’s Concept of Perceptual Consciousness

Abstract

Towards history itself is the basic spirit of Marx’s philosophy of history. The process of Marx’s restoration of human history is both a process of continual sublation and transcendence of traditional philosophy and a process of continual return to the realistic sensual life. The work of historical restoration that Marx accomplished created the core of its philosophy of history, perceptual consciousness. Perceptual consciousness is not simply equivalent to the relevant concepts of Feuerbach’s philosophy, but always corresponds to human perceptual activity and forms an organic unity with it. It overcomes the grasp of human conceptualisation and absoluteness and has a certain phenomenological character with a strong orientation towards history itself. Marx’s spiritual effort to restore history has roughly gone through the following three steps:Firstly, the reduction from self-consciousness to perceptual object. Secondly, the reduction from perceptual object to perceptual practice. Thirdly, the comprehensive development of perceptual consciousness. Through the generation of the concept of perceptual consciousness, Marx blazed a trail of reality to a state of historical clarity and completed the clarification of the original meaning of history.