Abstract

FERREIRA, João Vicente Hadich  and  BUENO, Sinésio Ferraz. Instrumental rationality, fascism and education in contemporarity. Conjectura: filos. e Educ. [online]. 2020, vol.25, edossie.4. ISSN 2178-4612.  https://doi.org/10.18226/21784612.v25.dossie.4.

This essay has asan initial base the established conflict from nature’s mechanistic view in modern science, counterposed to the previous methaphysical finalism. Following that perspective, interestsus it’s deployment al on gwith the origin of what Adorno and Horkheimer called instrumental reason and the commitments that seems to be underlying in the foundations of the contemporary educational process. Based more on economic and scientific pragmatism than on the perception of education as a humanizing and emancipating process, we find a world increasingly technologically advanced, interconnected and allegedly virtually socialized, but paradoxically, experiencing setbacks in the field of political and social achievement. From the Scientific Revolution in Modernity and its mechanistic bases, the world interpreted from the perspective of subjective reason – known as instrumental, as Horkheimer (2015) clarifiesus – be comes mechanically understood, disregarding it’s purpose or the finalism of the things. The control of nature, of what frightened us, and of the man in his condition of rationality, taken by the civilizing and enlightening process, have become, over the years, a non-emancipatory but instrumentalizing rationality of our own existence. A condition that allowed the emergence of fascism and that continues to feed and manifest the signs of barbarism that still looms on the horizon, as Adorno warned us in Education after Auschwitz (1995). Understood as a projective phenomenon by the philosopher, based on a narcissistic pathology, the fascist discourse has in its foundations the concept of “strange and familiar”, in which the other is the different that reminds the aggressor of his own ills, those with which he does not handleand that mirrors him self. Catalyzedby the hate speech repeatedly disseminated by the leader, the fascist in-group finds the great enemies in the out-group. To implementh is project, his ideology is what is at stake. On the contrary, perhaps to think Education as an element of rupture and denudation of the contradictions that are hidden in a society based on the modern mechanism and regulated by an instrumental rationality that objectifies consciousnesses and manifests, in it’s daily use, the administration of what exists and not its emancipatory possibilities.

Keywords : Fascism; Education; Emacipation.

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