Abstract

This article shows how Adorno and Horkheimer’s project of enlighten the enlightenment has as goal to overcome the dialectic of enlightenment and achieve an enlightenment without domination. The rationalization and disenchantment that define enlightenment have turned everything into an object that can be manipulated by human beings. In the administered world it has even come to reduce the human being itself to an object by means of his identification and deindividualization. This is the death of the human being. Enlightenment has ended up in domination, in a totalitarian system. Auschwitz has represented the culmination of this understanding of thinking as identification. To save enlightenment is to avoid this dialectic of enlightenment, to demythologize the rationalizing enlightenment. This allows an open and altruistic thinking, which is non-identifying, alien to the domain and respectful of the individual human being