native Future I – a purely instrumentally and functionally administered soci-
ety, in which the needs could be lived out without any further sublimation:
like love, art, or friendship. In alternative Future I all that could not be justified
through the functional reason, would then be considered to be meaningless:
even the question concerning the meaning and truth of life. But, according
to Horkheimer, in spite of this trend towards alternative Future I, one had to
hold in contempt the man who resigned himself to it, and who renounced,
forewent and gave up, what constituted the very humanity of man, and what
differentiated him from the chimpanzee in spite of the affinity of their genomes,
from which he separated 7 million years ago: the longing for the entirely
Other, the Truth.
Truth and Dialectic
Horkheimer considered dialectically Friedrich Nietzsche’s troubles, pains and
efforts concerning the truth, and negated him not abstractly, but concretely
and determinately (Horkheimer 1988a:535). As Horkheimer searched for the
truth, he surrendered to the power of the dialectic as radical, but still deter-
minate negation. For Horkheimer as well as for Adorno, there existed no con-
cluded or finished, but only an open, dialectic. In Horkheimer ’s view, there
also existed no dogma on the basis of which he could decide what is good
and bad. But Horkheimer knew that weapons of mass destruction, e.g., poi-
son gas, were bad for the individual as well as for humanity. However, Hork-
heimer also knew, that to this thesis there existed an anti-thesis: how do things
stand when somebody used weapons of mass destruction in order to pre-
vent somebody else from applying them? Horkheimer used another exam-
ple, in spite of the fact that dialectic does not allow for examples: Horkheimer
knew that man was a nothing in the universe. Likewise the earth was a noth-
ing in the universe: a little ball, as Arthur Schopenhauer had said, with a lit-
tle bit of mildew on it. However, so Horkheimer asked, was this I know to be
made an ultimate statement about the Absolute? Should that be the truth?
Horkheimer admitted that the statements about the nothingness of men and
earth were correct. But the statements became untrue when they claimed to
contain the Absolute. For Horkheimer, the statements of the great philoso-
phers, like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, were no dogmas which could be
allowed to claim for themselves the unconditional truth. But, so Horkheimer
asserted, even as dogmas, the statements of the great philosophers were still
by far superior to positivism, since they pointed and referred to the Absolute –
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 113