Essay on formation and adaptation in Adorno

Abstract

This article evaluates the issue of formation and adaptation in the context of the bourgeois society, as seen under the lights of Theodor W. Adorno’s thinking, (1903-1969), especially in following the texts: Education and Emancipation (1995); Semiculture Theory (1996) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), aiming at exposing the inherent forceful conditions of the capitalist system that validates the exit of man from the tutelage of divine authority, without, however, bestowing upon him effective autonomy, in the Kantian sense, to self-govern. Such a society chooses scientific knowledge, enhanced by technical-instrumental rationality, as the only valid form of knowledge that will forge a type of subjectivity whose thinking that support it is reified. Education is linked to the interests of the capitalist system to train operators of scientific knowledge to produce goods, without considering the critical reflections that it will provoke on life marked by exploitation and inequalities in this dominating society.