The nocturnal sphere of history: splendor and misery of the Enlightenment

Abstract

This article updates the problem that the Frankfurt School faced regarding the analysis of the conditions that configure the technical and natural environment in industrialized societies and, with it, the real possibilities to make life on Earth at once a hell of destructiveness and desolation as the opposite. But the expectation of accessing a state of humanity and a different surrounding world cannot be possible if one remains tied to the ideology of progress. What is required is a break in the historical continuum: reject violence and speak out in favor of the dignity of the human being. The position of discourse in which this writing is inscribed is the critical theory of society, which deduces its statements about real situations from basic universal concepts, but not only in terms of their necessity in a logical sense, but also their concrete necessity. The construction of historical events is seen by critical theory as the product of an economic mechanism that already contains the possibility of protesting against that order and, with the unfolding of critical subjectivity, allowing the actions of men not to respond to a blind domain, but to result from their own decisions. To break this inertial dominance and conduct itself autonomously, humanity must expose and be aware of what happens in the nocturnal sphere of history, characterized by human destruction, hunger, human trafficking, the new slavery and self-annihilation.