A lecture on the aporia of “dialectic of enlightenment” since Freud, Marx, and Weber

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to think the aporia in which the book "Dialectic of Enlightenment" is announced, namely the self-destruction of enlightenment and the pursuit for freedom by rationality that culminates in a regression. Our argument goes through two paths: first, we present the relationship between a kind of anthropology with Freudian bases and a reading of Marx's sociology. We conceive the notion of a psychic structure permeable to the socio-historical conditions of Western human being. That´s an essential condition for the output of the aporia closely related to a psychic anthropology linked to a historical mode of culture and society. Further, we propose a parallel between the possibility of an effective enlightenment by the mythical residue present in the technical rationality thought by Horkheimer and Adorno and the assumption of human helplessness situation in the religious worldview, a Freudian way to achieve a more "scientific" position in relation to reality. In this context, we use part of Weber’s theory as a mean to relate the enlightenment to the religion, precisely in what both have in common, that is, the defense against suffering, anxiety and helplessness. Perhaps it is through the assumption of helplessness in the religious worldview’s rationality, or the assumption of the myth in the enlightenment’s technical rationality, that would lead to the development of a "dialectical anthropology", which would result in the output of the aporia as a historical condition of the human rationality.