Religion and the exhaustion of the Enlightenment: Philosophy of Religion study based on the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Abstract

Studies of religion in Renaissance and Enlightenment modernity were always under the conditions of the emancipatory promises of secular knowledge, technology experimental and critical traditions, aiming at social emancipation from the old ways of thinking and society. However, the disasters of the great wars and the problems arising from political and economic forms of technical and bureaucratic characteristics favored painful ailments and even bloody in the twentieth century. Religion has always been treated in the size of traditional societies, of which modernity struggled to get free. This article deals with a study written by Adorno and Horkheimer, which is critical to the ideological and germinal aspects of modernity. Between reading and analysis of the Frankfurt School thinkers, this article focuses on further implications to religious studies in which the Frankfurt School thinkers weave an archetypal genealogy and sociopsicanalítica of modernity, aiming, above all, at the possibilities of social emancipation.