Imaginative Rationality

From the perspective of aesthetics, metaphor is a unique way for Marx to get involved in literary and artistic issues, and it is also an important way for later scholars to explore the composition and evolution of Marx’s aesthetic thoughts. Represented by the complex relations among the three metaphorical systems of visual metaphor, organic metaphor and “base-superstructure” metaphor, Marx’s aesthetic thought not only shows the opening and transformation from the specific literary perspective to the social historical perspective, but also shows the overlapping supplement of dialectics and historical materialism in the social historical perspective. The history of Marx’s aesthetic thoughts interpretation shows that single metaphor has the cognitive limitations of both show and hide things’ features, and only from the view of full text, adhering to the “base-superstructure” metaphor as the leading factor while performing mixed interpretations of various metaphors, then can we achieve the accurate and complete understanding of Marx’s aesthetic thoughts.