Social Aesthetics As a Return to the Baumgartian Inferior Gnoseology.

In his Aesthetics (1750), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduces the idea of aesthetics as philosophy of art, inferior gnoseology and the art of thinking beautifully. Only the second meaning of the term survives in the first chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, and, as a consequence, inferior gnoseology has been discussed without reference to its original link with aesthetics by both analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. In this paper we would like to recuperate this baumgartian concept but with the aim to show its relevance in Social Studies. To do this, we explore the connection between the internal logic of aesthetic testimony and what Marxist theory conceives as ideology.