the totally Other, the Truth – of which the positivists have not the slightest
inkling.
Longing for Light
In January 1970, Horkheimer reflected on his own biography (Horkheimer
1988a:536). At the time, Horkheimer had already lost his beloved wife Maidon
and his great friend Adorno and had himself been diagnosed with prostate
cancer and heart disease. Horkheimer had to confess, that in his biography
the motive of longing was present already in his earliest youth (Horkheimer
1988d; 1988a:536). It was first the longing for light, for love and friendship,
for a meaning of life. According to Horkheimer, in the course of years this
first longing concretized itself further. It became the longing for alternative
Future III – a good society as the presupposition for the realization of a mean-
ingful life of all people. Later on followed the insight that the socialistic soci-
eties of Eastern Europe, which under Stalin had sometimes even degenerated
into red fascism, could not achieve this goal of alternative Future III – the
reconciled society, but rather moved toward alternative Future I – the entirely
administered world. That led Horkheimer to the confession to liberalism in
Western Europe and America, which in its socially modified form still allowed
for an intellectual, mental and spiritual life. But in the face of the permanent
crisis of liberalism, neoconservativism and neoliberalism and of the bad
infinity of antagonistic civil society, Horkheimer ’s longing became, finally,
one for the totally Other, as opposed to the horror and terror of nature and
history, for the Truth: which final longing nevertheless preserved, elevated
and fulfilled in itself its earlier, less concrete forms, in which it had after all
been present already from the poetical and religious beginning of the criti-
cal theory of society: longing as transcending from inside into this life and
beyond (Horkheimer 1988d; 1987b; Habermas 1991; Ott 2001).
114 • Rudolf J. Siebert