A desumanização pela razão instrumental na obra de André Carneiro

Abstract

The 18th and 19th Centuries were marked by Industrial Revolutions. In a short period of time, humanity underwent several socio-political transformations as a result of scientific discoveries and inventions. The enthusiasm brought by the idea of modernity linked to industrial development, but this enthusiasm is soon obliterated by the numerous conflicts and barbarism that would mark the 20th Century as the "Age of lost illusions", in the words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm (2002). The philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer ask themselves: "Why, instead of entering into a truly human state, is humanity sinking into a new species of barbarism?" (2006, p. 11) The answer was given in their work Dialectic of enlightenment published in 1944. It links such consequences to the increasingly totalitarian predominance of an instrumental reason, operationalized in every social process. Thus relations in the midst of capitalist society have acquired a reified character, relations between things, while concealing their fundamental essence: relationship between men (LUKÁCS, 2003). This study aims to analyze how the criticism of the idea of progress linked to scientific technical development in the André Granja Carneiro's works Diário da nave perdida (1963) and O homem que adivinhava (1977), and how such progress combined with technicist pragmatism came to suppress emotionality, sensitivity, affectivity and other sensitive forms of human behavior, thus culminating in the process of dehumanization. In this perspective, the philosophers Adorno (2006), Horkheimer (2006, 2015), Lukács (2003) Guy Debord (1997) and the studies of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 2008, 2011, 2014) on liquid modernity will be used. With the critical panorama adopted, we raise the historical-philosophical question of the invasion of instrumental rationality in different spheres of life, affecting the most diverse human experiences, such as social and affective relations. This question also arises in the literary treatment of the André Granja Carneiro's science fiction, reflecting on the implications of instrumental rationality, when it comes to command the relationships, the choices, the yearnings and the way of being of the individuals in the society. Literature in this way legitimates itself as an artistic product fomenting philosophical questions, bearer of reflective content on reality.