BEAUTY OF LABOUR

Marcuse’s espousal of the relative autonomy of aesthetic form in his late works has been interpreted as evidence of the transcendental detachment of his aesthetic theory from social praxis. Conversely, positive appraisals attribute value to Marcuse’s purported utopianism, grounded in his occasional borrowings from Kant’s formalist aesthetics. This paper reconstructs the evolution of Marcuse’s early period aesthetic theory, aiming to elaborate his praxis-oriented perspective on art and society that surpasses Kant’s transcendental exposition, a framework implied in both critical and positive appraisals. By discussing Marcuse’s approach to the “art–life problem” in his first work, The German Artist-Novel, I establish a backdrop against which to assess Marcuse’s aesthetic writings. In this early work, Marcuse employed a neo-Kantian methodology to demonstrate how the art form of the artist-novel genre reflects the problematic character of modern life. While surpassing Kant’s reduction of aesthetics to reflective judgment by considering artworks as having exemplary validity in explaining social reality, this neo-Kantian method is still transcendental and, for this reason, inherently lacks a systematic theory of the production process in modern society. I will show that Marcuse’s engagement with Hegel in Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity marks a departure from transcendental inquiry into art forms and lays the groundwork for his “aesthetic ontology,” which integrates the ontology of labour. This shift from neo-Kantianism is evident in Marcuse’s interpretation of Hegel, particularly in how Hegel recasts Kant’s theory of imagination in terms of the historicity of the “original synthetic unity of thought and being.” As I demonstrate, Marcuse situates different aspects of this ontological unity – “semblance,” “appearance,” and “beautiful shining-forth” – within the human productive activity in the material context of life. The article further demonstrates how Marcuse’s later works on culture incorporate the framework of Hegel’s Ontology into a Marxian historical critique of bourgeois art, revealing the beautiful “shining-forth” as a non-alienated labour of a “free people.” This interpretation offers a renewed perspective on aesthetic ontology, contesting the mischaracterisation of Marcuse’s aesthetic theory as formalistic, subjectivist, and overly utopian.