Referring to the fundamental works dedicated to fetishism and aesthetics (A. Baumgarten, K. Marx, W. Benjamin, G. Schulze etc.), the author reveals the characteristic aesthetic nature of fetishism. <...> Summarizing the various positions, the author also puts forward and substantiates the hypothesis about the aesthetic protonature of fetishism. <...> After hearing the word “fetishism”, a researcher of the world of religious culture associates it with a defi nition that can be found in almost any book or training manual on religious studies. <...> And there will not be a fundamental difference in the possible variation of the defi nition, as its basic semantic content is surprisingly limited with a traditional repeatability of a once found easy clichй. <...> It is to be recalled that, the German philosopher put forward the idea that capitalist wealth was inevitably expressed in the form of commodity. <...> This creates a mystical attitude of man to Iuriy V. Sobolev. <...> The appearance of the defi nition of “fetishism of commodities” is associated with a fairly good knowledge of the studied problem fi eld, and the defi nition of fetishism proposed by Marx, in our opinion, is one of the most accurate and concise: “Fetishism is very far from being able to raise man above his sensuous desires – on the contrary, it is a “religion of sensuous lusts” (the article of Marx in a German newspaper of 1842). <...> The German philosopher’s defi nition of fetishism as “the religion of sensuous lusts” highlights another facet of this phenomenon that is an aesthetic facet. <...> In the XVIII century A. Baumgarten, who was a follower of Wolf, made an attempt (a successful attempt, which did not get enough attention and development) to create a scientifi c program that could allow aesthetics to dissociate itself from art claims and to become an independent, fullfl edged division of philosophical knowledge. <...> Baumgarten gave a name for the discipline – «Aesthetica», offering to understand it as “the science of sensuous knowledge» [Baumgarten, 1883: 452]. “Sensuous” (“Sensually perceived signs of the sensuous”) in this case should be understood not so much in a sensationalist way (as a feeling), but in a sensuous-emotional way (as phantasm) (A. Losev insists on the translation of «aestetica» exactly as “emotions”). <...> In particular, Kant, a classic of German philosophy, wrote the following on the key issue of aesthetics <...>