Abstract：Descartes constructed a rational psychology based on the rational intuition of “I think”. Kant’s way of transforming rational psychology is to use innate categories to define the boundaries of “I think”. Hegel uses his huge spiritual kingdom to unify the subject and object worlds and thus constructed rational psychology into a system of knowledge. In Hegel’s system, he achieved the unity of form and content, and the unity of concept and experience. Marx’s change in modern epistemology is to unify the process of knowing the world with transforming the world, and to explain the source of knowledge on the basis of transforming the world. On the basis of his full affirmation of Feuerbach, Marx examines sensibility-objectivity by placing it in the context of a certain social existence and the productive life of society. The result of this perceptual-objective activity is industry, and its most fundamental symbol is the machine system. The machine system is the product of mankind’s knowing of the world and its transformation. On this basis, Marx founded the psychology of sensibility.Marx suggested that the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are “the exposure to the senses of human psychology”. This psychology is to be understood as the reality of man’s essential powers; and the reality of man’s essential powers is embodied in the history of industry. The process of man’s essential unfolding is also embodied in industrial history. If history is “nothing but the creation of man through human labor, nothing but the emergence of nature for man”, then the sensibility-objective activity of man is the whole content of history, and history becomes the whole process of the objectification of man’s essential power into sensuous being. Thus Marx unites psychology of sensibility with the history of sensibility, industry with the reality of man’s essential power, and industrial history with the material production of sensible man and its conditions.Marx’s psychology of sensibility provides an epistemological perspective for understanding Chinese modernization. Modernization is the comprehensive and holistic realization of man’s perceptual-objective activities; modernization is the self-awakening of man’s essential power; modernization is the qualitative change of the subject’s ability to transform the object. In the sense of industrial history, machine industry is the essential symbol of modernization and the start of modernization. It creates the conditions for the modernization of the world. Chinese modernization is a qualitative change in the reality of man’s essential power based on its own perceptual historical conditions. It implies a process of qualitative change in the machine system, a process which is the unity of the change of the productive forces and the change of the relations of production. Therefore, the epistemological significance of Chinese modernization lies in the fact that it is a qualitative change in man’s ability to transform the world.
2025, Vol. 55 
