This article aims at establishing links among three important concepts to the understanding of the télos of education in late capitalism: nature, human individual and society. The basic references for the analysis are ideas of authors from the Frankfurt school: Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. The article was written from the contradistinction logic, exploring the dialogue between Frankfurt thinkers and authors from different times, modern and premodern ones. The idea is to demonstrate how, since the primordium of times, domination has shaped the relation among nature, culture and individual. The text characterizes man as a natural-historical being, to affirm that to dominate nature is self-domination. At the end, the revolt of nature is discussed: not as a revolt of nature against man, as if man were not a natural being, but as a revolt of a nature that was suppressed by a society that only demands renunciation and sacrifice. It is at this point that clues which help to understand the télos of education are established: to increase the contradictions between individual and functional totality and to keep the possibilities of resistance and rebellion alive.
