REFLECTION ON THE NOTION OF INDIVIDUALITY IN MAX HORKHEIMER

Abstract

This essay seeks to reflect on the emptied culture, which underlies the concept of contemporary individuality, analyzing it in the historical movement that makes it social adjustment or instrumental training for the maintenance of the developed industrial society. The analysis is based on the chapter "Rise and decline of the individual", from Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason. In it, the Western civilizing process is thought by the Frankfurtian as a way to expose the limits of rationality that architected the project of enlightenment and gave rise to the civilizing crisis of the twentieth century. His analysis is based on the Critical Theory project, developed by the Institute for Social Research, through which the thinker elaborates his critique of Western culture. Therefore, this text approaches the concept of individual to register the cultural path of constitution of the enlightened identity of the self, by the enlightenment rationality, as well as the contradiction registered in the bourgeois rationality itself which subsidizes the positive idea of progress and executes the technical-scientific plan which brutalizes and dehumanizes the society. Therefore, Horkheimer's critique is not limited to the political facts that shook the planet, but to the amplitude of the civilizing process that regulated human actions in the world.