Science and Insight
Horkheimer wrote, in June 1968, that positive science was instrumental and
functional (Horkheimer 1988a:487–488). Science limited itself to the ordering
and registration of facts, which in principle were accessible to every idiot. For
Horkheimer, insight was related to the truth. The truth was neither provable
nor could it be defined. All depended on whata person was thinking, when
he or she wanted to get to the truth. While for Adorno – contrary to Hegel –
the social totality – the extremely contradictory modern exchange society –
had been the untruth, Horkheimer still agreed with Hegel, that the whole of
knowledge was the truth (Hegel 1986c:24–25; Horkheimer 1988a:487–488).
Thus, for Horkheimer, what really mattered in the process of thinking was
that its object had its right place in the totality of knowledge. According to
Horkheimer, it differentiated human beings, if they were able to think in this
sense, i.e., to have insights, or if they were merely able to order and register
facts and their functional interconnections. In Horkheimer ’s view, positive
science had no criterion, in order to differentiate between faith and supersti-
tion. For Horkheimer, insight could originate from many sources: out of tra-
dition or theology, but also out of the unconscious, and out of the structure
of the thinking of a person. Horkheimer asked himself what it meant when
he said that the what of thinking had to find its right place in the whole of
thinking. What, so Horkheimer asked himself, did he want to express, when
he said, for example, that A and B were base and mean people? Or that the
results of the positive sciences, as necessary as they may be for the life of
human beings moved nevertheless like the positivistic thinking, which was
related alone to these results, on a most miserable and pathetic level? However,
Horkheimer also asked himself how he could know that those insights were
true and not a great error. Horkheimer had to admit that there were very
smart people who had been firmly convinced to possess the right insights
and the truth: a truth for which they risked and often sacrificed their lives.
But, according to Horkheimer, today we had nevertheless to say of these peo-
ple that they had thought wrongly and that often they had fallen victim to
a conscious swindle and fraud. In the perspective of the critical theory of reli-
gion, there are probably not too many scientific statements in the sacred writ-
ings of the world religions, but there are certainly some insights in them,
without which the human species may not be able to survive: e.g., the fall of
man, the resurrection of the flesh, or the Golden Rule and a global ethos built
on it (Küng 1990).
110 • Rudolf J. Siebert