The Frankfurt School's Critique Of Ideology And Its Ontological Horizon

Frankfurt School, the primary school of Western Marxism in the 20^th century, is one of the most influential schools of thought in contemporary philosophy. The social critical theory founded by Frankfurt School still plays an important role for criticizing modernity till now.Primarily regarded as ideology criticism, the social critical theory clears the ideology veil away so as to explore the possibility of the rise of new sensuous awareness through criticizing the ideological nature of the late capitalist social life. The social critical theory is not a simply return to young Hegelism which is a rational criticism based upon self-awareness, but a kind of criticism to reveal life world itself in terms of practical criticism.Marx discovered the dialectic of capital sublation through plutonomy criticism to disclose the secret, history and its process of private property, while Frankfurt School disclosed the precondition and its limit of contemporary culture consciousness through criticism of developed capitalism society to discuss the possibility of the rise of new sensuous awareness. As a result, the ideology criticism of Frankfurt School is the embodiment of Marx's spirit of criticism at the present age, meanwhile it inherits the basic philosophy theme of 20^th century, ie. alienation of ideology itself. Frankfurt School was enlightened to probe into the sensuous awareness of proletariat in the light of the ideological theory of those Western Marxist founders. Above three aspects constitute the theoretic context of the ideology criticism of Frankfurt School.The ideology criticism of Frankfurt School includes the disclosure of ideological nature of positivism, enlightenment spirit, science and technology and the mass culture. On the one hand, each aspect is separate which has its own unique content; on the other hand, each interrelates which is one of the manifestation of self-alienation of modern man. The last section of the dissertation discusses how to probe into the root of self-alienation of modern man and look after the way to overcome self-alienation. The root of self-alienation comes from three aspects, ie, the suppression of identity from nonidentity, the suppression of instinct and sensuousness from reason, the veil of communicative action from labour. The paper dissertates the sublation of self-alienation of modern man and probe into the sensuous awareness from negative dialectics, instinct liberation and interactive rationality. Compared with the new ontology horizon of Marx's philosophy revolution, it also explores the ontology horizon of three ways of alienation sublation to illustrate gain and loss of the ideology criticism of Frankfurt School and illumination and significance for us.