ABSTRACT
The chapter presents a reading of Marx’s early writings as a critique of what Marx terms ‘intuitional materialism,’ a turn of phrase that has been missed in translation, but which suggests a close link to Kant’s cognitive faculties of sensibility and understanding. As will be argued, Marx advocates a view of sensibility as active—not, as Kant suggests, inherently passive. In so doing, it is possible to claim that Marx offers an implicit critique of all contemporary views that continue to instate a distinction between the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ faculties, encompassing Wilfrid Sellars’ attack on what he calls “the myth of the given.” Marx claims that limiting cognitive mediation to abstraction of particulars into concepts by understanding is a symptom of alienation under capitalism; liberation from alienation consists in the freeing of sensible activity to discern empirical objects in all their unique particularity. For Marx, sensibility as activity is thus importantly aesthetic, and intimately bound up with his view that the (social) object of intuition given in sensibility is collectively made, and hence can be unmade.
