Humanização e desumanização: uma análise ontológica

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the dialectical relationship between humanization and dehumanization through the category of work. The path to the constitution of the human being necessarily involves the new, the ability to invent and build a social-historical future for humanity. This category is intrinsically linked to the genesis of social being, inextricably linked to the category of work. This makes it possible for a new quality of being to emerge. Social being bursts forth from merely biological, organic being. Through an ontological leap, it begins to differentiate itself from the animal kingdom proper. Work, therefore, causes a departure from natural barriers, but never their complete dissociation. In the meantime, the human being is constituted through a long journey of humanization. We will therefore deal with the nodal categories that make up work in its original sense, namely teleology and causality, as well as exteriorization and objectification, in order to reach the corollary of the humanization of the social being in the higher forms of objectification: science and art. Contradictory to humanization, human beings become entangled in a profound dehumanization, with the advent of antagonisms between social classes. Here, we will deal with specifically capitalist dehumanization, where we will perpetrate its ontological-categorical constitution in bourgeois sociability with an analysis of the commodity fetish, alienation and estrangement. Dehumanization, in turn, materializes in different ways. We will briefly investigate its forms of manifestation by analyzing racist dehumanization, as well as the relationship between dehumanization and health; dehumanization and violence; and dehumanization and nature. Using the historical-dialectical materialist method, based on social-historical ontology, we will undertake an ontological analysis of the categories of social being, in search of its being-precisely-as-it-is, in line with the contributions of Marx and Lukács. We find that capitalism promotes the structural dehumanization of the working class through wage labour.