A Better Human Life and Society
According to Horkheimer, the critical theorists wanted the Other: that meant
also a life and a society, which were other and different from the horror of
the present, i.e., 1967 (Horkheimer 1988a:369–370). This relationship to the
Other was supposed to be concretely superseded in each of the critical the-
orists’ reactions toward the extant antagonistic civil society. This was to hap-
pen also if the Other could not be expressed positively, but if it appeared
only in the critique of that which was the case in present society and history.
To the contrary, the positivists saw, without naiveté, in the Other nothing
more than mere utopia, and in what was the case the unchangeable neces-
sity. However, so Horkheimer criticized the positivistic attitude, precisely this
reality-conforming recognition of the status quo prevented every change
toward alternative Future III – a better society and a better human life. For
Horkheimer, particularly the being-oriented-ness of positivism was the mor-
tal enemy of the truth. This positivistic being-oriented-ness, mediated so many
details, which were correct, that behind them the truth disappeared.
The Relative and the Other
In 1967, Horkheimer stated that all his feelings, considerations, impressions
and experiences were obviously conditioned through his sense-organs, in
Kantian terms, through his ability of apperception, and through the society,
and through the closer environment, the family, the neighborhood, in which
he had grown up. For Horkheimer, it was therefore senseless to dispute that
all his statements were relative. However, so Horkheimer argued in Hegelian
terms, when there was something relative, then there had also to exist the
Other which was not relative, the Transcendent (Hegel 1986n; Horkheimer
1988a:370–371; Siebert 1987). Horkheimer had to admit that this conclusion
underlay the same objections as all his other statements. This was so also
because the method of Horkheimer ’s thinking had only relative validity.
Horkheimer remembered that even Kant had broken through his own pro-
hibition against excursions into the notion of the thing-in-itself: God, Freedom
and Immortality (Horkheimer 1988a:370–371; Kielmansegg 2004:10). Recently,
the possibility that the Vatican may cancel limbo for unbaptized children, a
non-dogmatic medieval afterlife tradition, was another lesson that, while faith
in God may not change, the things people believe about Him most certainly
do (Fisher 2005). For Horkheimer, there existed something in space and time,
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 107