tions. In so far as philosophy was a science, it was likewise pragmatic. Logic
and dialectic teach the correct thinking. But in Horkheimer ’s view, all that
has nothing to do with the truth. The difference, so Horkheimer explained,
between the image of the world, as it appeared, when it is seen through a
work of art, e.g., Marcel Proust’ s Remembrance of Things Pastor James Joyce’s
Ulysses, on the one hand, and the image, how the scientist sees it, on the
other, referred to the Other. This Other could not be defined. But it was never-
theless the presupposition of every effort concerning the truth.
The Miracle
Horkheimer wrote in February 1968, that it was easy to demonstrate, which
naïve error great thinkers had committed, when they wanted to make some-
body understand the miracle of all that what was happening in history
(Horkheimer 1988a:469–470). Nature was full of miracles as long as its laws
had not been discovered. History remained full of miracles as long as its laws
were not yet completely discovered. Horkheimer, Kant and Marx were good
examples: 1. Kant, the idealist, spoke of an Absolute, but at the same time
forgot that this Absolute was grasped through the same categories, for the
relativity of which he had furnished the proof. 2. Marx, the materialist, said
that everything spiritual depended on the material. At the same time, Marx
did not notice that this sentence itself fell under the same verdict. Horkheimer
did not even want to mention that Marx took the realization of the bourgeois
demands of Liberte, Egalite Fraternite literally and most seriously. Marx took
these ideals as real demands, while, according to his own theory – dialecti-
cal materialism – they were nothing else than bourgeois ideology understood
as false consciousness and masking of class and national interests. According
to Horkheimer, the miracle of all that was happening in history had usually
been understood as a process, which could in principle not be explained
through laws of nature. However, for Horkheimer, laws of nature were noth-
ing else than the resume of experiences and their abstract formulation. The
natural laws grant no insight whatsoever into the essence of things– into the
truth. What the natural laws speak about falls itself under the category of
miracle. In Horkheimer ’s view, the longing for the totally Other, the Truth,
which could not be formulated, one could explain not only idealistically, but
also materialistically: e.g., as a special case of the horrorvacui.In any case,
for Horkheimer, the longing for the totally Other remained the driving motive
for all thinking about the truth.
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