Sensibilidade para uma sociedade administrada: moral e religião em Max Horkheimer.

Abstract

This work investigates the key issue of the increase of importance of religion inside Horkheimer’s philosophy starting from the pessimistic perspective of the impossibility of a practical plan for social change and the path of spread of the technical reason with the free individual's decline. Religion, solidarity, compassion, they are concepts that progressively take a prominence place in the late philosophy of Horkheimer. This was interpreted sometimes as resignation or annulment of his philosophy. Against this, we want to present in this work that those aspects seemingly new in the author's philosophy they are coherent with the "first" phase of his thought. In the completely intellectual path of Horkheimer underlies a moral aspect. In a text published in 1933, entitled Materialism and Moral, Horkheimer identifies that the moral has a tendency to the individual's happiness. Thus, there is two inherent unfolding to the morals. The first is the compassion, when the individual notices that his happiness implicates in the happiness of the other; second, the politics, which seeks the construction of a society in in which happiness is a natural consequence of the individuals' united actions. Therefore, this work investigates two moments of inflection of the philosophy of Horkheimer. The first meant in the failure of the moral project in the 1930s that proposed the urge of a society in order to accomplishment of a social happiness. After noticing the impotence of the contemporary reason, Horkheimer builds the critic to the instrumental reason. He notices the impossibility of accomplishment of a rational society then, because this was attempted historically and it resulted in the almost the disappearance of autonomous individual. From then on we explored the second inflection when the critic of the reason gives place to a religious longing for a less unjust and bad reality. Therefore, we retook the concept of religion, formulated in the decade of 1930, and how it develops in his late philosophy. Thus, we consider that the religion in the author's late philosophy is a relocation of the morals in his compassionate sense as the only form of overcoming administered society.