The Deprecative Comparison

Adorno's late work has often been compared to negative theology, yet there is little serious discussion of this comparison in the secondary literature.Footnote ¹ In most of the existing discussions virtually nothing is said about negative theology, as if it is obvious what it is and what the parallels with Adorno's ideas are. The truth is that negative theology is not self-evident, and neither are the parallels with Adorno at all obvious. To find out what they are would require a detailed account of both. In this article I shall make a start in this direction.

Let me begin by provisionally characterizing negative theology as a discourse about God based primarily upon denial or negation, which is sometimes known as apophatic theology. The Greek word apophasis stems from the verb , meaning to deny or negate. It contrasts with cataphasis, which means affirmation.Footnote ² Apophatic theology was a central preoccupation of the Hellenized Judeo-Christian tradition of theology, and arose from the confluence of two sets of ideas: broadly—Judaic notions of God's transcendence, and ancient Greek ontological questions about the nature of God. The ontological question in what God's essence or being consists poses peculiar difficulties when God is supposed to be wholly transcendent and therefore unknowable and ineffable. Apophatic theology is the strategy of responding to these peculiar difficulties through negation or denial, the so-called negative way.

Comparisons between Adorno and negative theology were drawn quite early on in the assessment of his work. Objections levelled by influential critics such as Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Herbert Schnädelbach and various others, at Adorno's conception of “non-identity,” or “the non-identical” then brought the comparison into the mainstream of the secondary literature on Adorno.Footnote ³ Habermas—who can be taken as representative of a significant segment of the literature—compares Adorno's thought with negative theology largely because of the role that the notion of non-identity or the non-identical plays in his late work.Footnote ⁴

Although this passage is highly compressed, the reference to “mystical experiences” and “Christian traditions” suggest that he has the comparison with apophatic theology in mind. Evidently, the comparison is meant deprecatively: That is, the claim that Adorno's late work is analogous in certain respects to apophatic theology is an objection to it. Indeed, Habermas levels four related objections to the irrationalism, mysticism, emptiness, and incoherence of Adorno's late work.

The Paradox of the Ineffable

My thesis, then, is that there is a common philosophical question animating both Adorno's later work and apophatic theology. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that the “true interest of philosophy” lies “in what is non-conceptual.” Footnote ³² Adorno does not have God in mind here, but something inaccessible to conceptual thought (the only kind of thought there is). Adorno draws the consequence from this that the task of philosophy sine qua non is to try “against Wittgenstein to say what cannot be said. The simple contradiction of this demand is the contradiction of philosophy itself; it qualifies philosophy as dialectic, before it gets entangled only in its own contradictions. The task of philosophical self-reflection consists in unraveling this paradox.”Footnote ³³ If there is a central idea in Negative Dialectics, it is this.Footnote ³⁴ And this idea is an explicit rejoinder to Wittgenstein's final proposition in the Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”Footnote ³⁵

Wittgenstein's final remark echoes, in the form of a hidden quotation, a much earlier remark about the same paradox by Augustine in On the Christian Religion:

Actually the paradox predates Augustine.Footnote ³⁷ Still, Augustine's statement of the paradox, and his suggested way of avoiding it, is perspicuous and memorable. It is this paradox, the paradox of the ineffable, to which both apophatic theology and Adorno's late work address themselves.Footnote ³⁸

It might be objected here that the paradox outlined by Augustine is not a paradox, but a sophism. David Cooper, for example, claims that, although the statement “God is ineffable” has the same grammatical form as the proposition, S is p, which makes it look as if the statement is predicating something, namely ineffability, of God, in fact the statement is not describing God or predicating ineffability of God at all. The statement—Cooper takes this to be a general point about the mystic's utterances—is therefore not about God; rather it resonates with the speaker's experience of being unable to put God into words.Footnote ³⁹ There is therefore no paradox, but rather a sentence that looks like a proposition that is not one.

My view is that there is a paradox and that Augustine and the negative theologians, when they say that God is ineffable, are saying something about God, just as they do when they say that God is mysterious. These are not just disguised statements about us and our finite and imperfect cognitive and linguistic capacities. Rather they are statements about God: God is ineffable and mysterious, because something in God, or about God, makes him this way. This is the paradox of the ineffable to which both apophatic theology and Adorno's late work address themselves. The significant parallel between Adorno and negative theology consists in this, that, faced with the paradox of the ineffable—refusing Wittgenstein's and Augustine's respective injunctions to silence—Adorno and the apophatic theologians attempt loquaciously to say what cannot be said.Footnote ⁴⁰

The One Hiding in the Darkness

Pseudo-Dionysius (or Denys) the Areopagite, a fifth-century Syrian monk, whose work became influential in the West when translated into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, is sometimes regarded as the Father of apophatic theology. His thought has origins in Neo-Platonism and in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Greek heritage can be seen in his fundamental idea, which bears the stamp of Proclus's cosmology: the triad of remaining [], procession [] and return []. God is the cause of all things, he remains one with and immanent material things, which are his effects. At the same time, insofar as these material things proceed from God he remains distinct from his effects. God, as the first cause, both is and is not identical with his effects. Like Proclus, Dionysius's thought is structured by an upward and a downward movement. On the one hand there is an upward yearning of the lower for the higher, as in most platonic and neoplatonic, and indeed Greek, thought; on the other hand, there is God's condescension and solicitude for the created world.Footnote ⁴¹ The ascent is both ontological and epistemological. There is a hierarchy of being, starting from those with mere existence, continuing through living beings, beings with sense perception and those with reason, and culminating in those beyond all reason. There is a corresponding cognitive ascent, through the objects of the will, of the sense perception, of the mind, and then of divine contemplation of objects beyond discursive reason, which Dionysius calls “divine unknowing.”Footnote ⁴²

The heritage of Hebrew Bible traditions can be seen in The Mystical Theology where, reflecting on Moses' ascent of Mount Sinai, Dionysius is struck by the fact that at the summit Moses “does not meet with God himself []” and “does not behold him [] but only the place where he is [].”Footnote ⁴³ Dionysius interprets this as a sign of the superessential difference: Namely that the essence of God surpasses and exceeds all language, all concepts, and all understanding. Objects of the eye and mind are but secondary and subordinate symbols of the transcendent God, which God's being renders as naught. Hence at the summit Moses is shrouded in “the Darkness which is above the intellect,” which conduces “not merely to brevity of speech, but even to absolute dumbness both of speech [] and thought [].”Footnote ⁴⁴ We (initiates in the Christian sacraments), in our attempt to think God's being, must plunge “into the darkness” [] like Moses on Mount Sinai, who plunges “into the Darkness of Unknowing []” where the “one beyond everything [] truly is.” Footnote ⁴⁵

It would be wrong to think of this oneness with God as an experience of the divine presence, for in this place God remains concealed, the one who is hidden in the darkness. God's presence is not perceived; his essence is not revealed. Nor is there anyone, any cognitive subject or knower to whom the divine presence could manifest itself.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the moment of ecstatic union with God, Moses leaves everything finite and created, including himself behind. In his oneness with God he belongs,

The ecstatic union—ecstatic in the sense that the knowing self is driven out by the reception of the unknown—is prepared by intellectual discipline of ascent through negation but its culmination is achieved through surrender [].Footnote ⁴⁸ This surrender or self-abnegation is strictly speaking neither an act, nor an experience (even less a personal experience since its precondition is the loss of self as agent and as patient) but rather an event: It takes place.

Cataphatic Tropes with Apophatic Intent

Dionysius does not pass over the paradox of God's ineffability in silence, neither does he attempt to resolve the paradox verbally.Footnote ⁴⁹ In fact, he does not attempt to resolve the paradox at all, but instead uses the paradox to exhibit the superessential difference, the idea that the essence of God so surpasses the mundane sphere of being that no language or thought can express it.

An important point to note here is that Dionysius does this by means of both affirmations and negations.Footnote ⁵⁰ His most straightforward device is the use of the prefix hyper-, which in Greek means “over,” “beyond” or “above,” to the names (which he also takes to be properties) of God, as in the prayer with which The Mystical Theology begins: “Trinity beyond being [] beyond divinity [], beyond good [],” which one could also translate as “superessential, superdivine and supergood Trinity.”Footnote ⁵¹ In The Divine Names he explains that the prefix hyper- is a negation, which indicates that God exceeds the meaning of the predicate to which it is attached. For example, “agathos” or “good” in []. He does the same with “essence” [], with “life” [], and interestingly also with “divine” []. At the same time the claim that God is is clearly an affirmation, since something is predicated of God, namely supergoodness, a goodness that is not like any goodness we can know.

Second, for Dionysius the superessential difference is revealed in ordinary affirmations, where vulgar and inappropriate names are attributed to God, such as “stone,” “angry,” “asleep,” and “hungover.” By contrast, Dionysius notes, less impertinent and more appropriate names conceal the superessential difference, and trick us into believing that we know something determinate about God's essence, because we mistakenly assume that he is like other beings, that his goodness can be captured by familiar senses of the term “good.”Footnote ⁵² In principle, however, Dionysius is of the view that affirmative or cataphatic language is inappropiate to God's divinity. The problem with ordinary affirmation is that it is determination, and the superessential being is not determinable. As he puts it, God “does not exist here and not there;” he does not “possess this kind of existence and not that.”Footnote ⁵³ To affirm something of God is to deny something else of him (or her, or it): For example, to say that God is light, is to imply that God is not darkness. Any determinate affirmation is thus implicitly a negation or denial. But, Dionysius argues, God is not the kind of being of whom anything can be denied. All names apply to him, everything can be said of him, and he unites all predicates, even contradictory ones, “without any confusion,” in the same way that the light from various different sources commingle into one indivisible light.Footnote ⁵⁴

This leads to Dionysius's third device for revealing the superessential difference; attributing all names (or predicates) to God, or at least all the names allowed by scripture, especially contradictory ones, simultaneously. Like vulgarity, polyonymy can be put to theological advantage. This strategy allows the superessential difference to be shown through the juxtaposition of contrary predicates: God is “darkness,” but God is also “light.” God is “speech” or the “word,” but he is also “silence,” which is the absence of words. God is “nameless” but also “the possessor of all names.”Footnote ⁵⁵The Mystical Theology is riddled with oxymorons: “The mysteries of God's word lie … in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In these three different ways Dionysius uses the inadequacy of affirmative or cataphatic theological language to provoke a crisis of meaning. As Turner puts it, “we reach the point at which the apophatic begins by means of the comprehensiveness of our affirmations, whose combined and mutually cancelling forces crack open the surface of language.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Cooper's point—that mystical statements are not genuine propositions about God—seems to miss the point. Dionysius's strategy, which harnesses paradox in order to exhibit God's ineffability, only succeeds if he is making genuine affirmative and negative judgments about God.

To the extent, then, that apophatic discourse about God makes use of cataphatic language, the terms “negative theology” and “apophatic theology” are misleading. It is not that we can somehow capture God's essence by piling up negations, whereas we cannot do so through affirmation. The so-called “negative way” is not a route to God that would be a viable alternative to the untraversable positive way. Apophaticism shows that there is no way to God, and therein consists its sole advantage over positive theology.

Style and Form in Adorno's Work

Let us now compare Dionysius's work with Adorno. Adorno's late philosophy strives “by way of the concept to transcend the concept.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Like Dionysius, Adorno pushes language to the breaking point in order to make it indicate whatever it is that exceeds it. He sets out to achieve this by exploiting the genres, the compositional form and the style of his writing: the aphorism, the philosophical fragment, the essay, the mode of composition he calls writing in constellations, and the rhetorical use of exaggeration. Let us look briefly at each of these.

Consider first Adorno's and Horkheimer's chosen style of presentation in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the philosophical fragment, as opposed to a philosophical treatise which in its very form aims at soundness and completion.Footnote ⁵⁹ For Adorno this is the virtue of the former. He makes similar claims about certain art works. In “Sacred Fragment,” for example, Adorno says of Schönberg's Moses and Aaron that when significant works of art aim for an extreme, “they are destroyed in the process and their broken outlines survive as ciphers of a supreme, unnameable truth.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The difference is that Adorno's philosophical fragments are intentionally incomplete creations, whereas Schönberg's opera was either contingently fragmentary, because unfinished, or, as Adorno claims, objectively incompletable, and therefore destined to be incomplete even though the author aimed at completion. In either case, however, the fragment, just by virtue of being a fragment, presupposes and points to an absent, unrealized whole.

Second, consider Adorno's use of hyperbole. One of Adorno's most memorable lines is: “In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations.”Footnote ⁶¹ This principle has programmatic significance for Adorno's own work, since it informs his writing practice in all his major texts. Take the following examples:

Unlike a well-formed, justified statement of fact, the exaggeration wears its own inadequacy on its sleeve. It wrings from language the admission of its falsity, and thereby, Adorno claims, “appropriates it for truth.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Third, take Adorno's notion of the constellation. Adorno's work redounds with programmatic statements to which he adheres with varying degrees of zeal: “In a philosophical text” he writes in Minima Moralia “all propositions ought to be equally close to the centre.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Adorno's strategy of thinking in constellations is faithful to this compositional principle. A constellation is a thought pattern, but one that is not fixed in advance like a method, and one that is not intended to outlast the question at issue. It is like the pattern that falls out of a rotation of the kaleidoscope, only to be replaced by another. For all that, it is a cognitive and theoretical exercise.

Placing an object of cognition in a forcefield of horizontal relations to other concepts produces a flash of illumination which forms a vertical relation to orthogonal to the conceptual plane.Footnote ⁶⁸

Finally consider the essay form, which, Adorno remarks, is not structured according to any scientific method or logical order. The essay takes the form of a series of incomplete reflections arranged around its object: “through its weakness, it testifies to the non-identity it has to express.”Footnote ⁶⁹ It is composed “as if it could break off at any point,” so there is a certain arbitrariness and contingency inherent in its form.Footnote ⁷⁰ That said, by so doing, Adorno claims, the essay “wants to heal thought of its arbitrary character, by incorporating arbitrariness reflectively into its own approach rather than disguise it as immediacy.”Footnote ⁷¹ Does Adorno think the essay gets what it wants, that it manages to overcome its own arbitrariness by admitting to it? Presumably he does, in much the same way that he claims that exaggeration, by confessing to its own falsity, can be appropriated for truth. Of course someone might worry that the mere admission to arbitrariness and incompleteness implicitly contained in its form cannot make the essay less arbitrary and incomplete and heal it in that sense. So it is hard to know in what sense the essay succeeds in “transcending the concept.” Adorno's thought seems to be that the essay, like the fragment, goes beyond the concept by resisting the illusion of completeness and foreshadowing an always unrealized and counterfactual completeness that throws its incompleteness into relief.

Of course there is much more to be said about each of these devices than I can here. But we have seen enough to draw a parallel: Like Dionysius Adorno uses self-subverting techniques of language, techniques that try to wring victories out of the defeat of discursive reason. On the one hand this allows him to manifest the limited and finite nature of conceptual thought and its inadequacy to the “non-identical” or even, as he occasionally says “the absolute”; on the other it exhibits some kind of relation to what it fails to grasp—including the ineffable, the unsayable, and the non-identical.

The Negation of the Negation or the Denial of All Beings

Dionysius constantly reminds us that when negative predicates, or negations are applied to God they imply no defect or privation, but rather excess and transcendence. God is not mind, because God is exalted above all mind; not light, because God is beyond all visible light. To say that God does not have senses and a mind like us is not to say that God lacks these, but that God possesses them in superabundance.Footnote ⁷² Thus to negate God is to exalt God, which is not the case when we attribute negative predicates to finite, created beings. This is essential to Dionysius's conception of the negative way, which is a path of transcendence through serial negation. Footnote ⁷³ God is neither “soul,” nor “mind,” nor “one,” nor “deity,” nor being, nor non-being, nor “light” nor “truth.”Footnote ⁷⁴

As Turner emphasizes, the way of negation in Dionysius contains both first order and second order negations. In the first order, as we have seen, negation and affirmation, the apophatic and the cataphatic go hand in hand, but the former is superior. Negation comes into its own in the second order precisely because it is exalting. Second order negation is sometimes termed the negation of the negation, although this phrase can be misleading. First, as Dionysius constantly reminds us, the way of negation involves the negation of both ordinary (first-order) negations and affirmations.Footnote ⁷⁵ Second, negating the negation in this context has nothing to do with double negation elimination by which ¬(¬p) becomes p. Third, it has little to do with what Hegel calls “determinate negation.” For Hegel, determinate negation is a negation of a negation leading to a positive residue or content. This process is related to what Hegel calls “sublation,” a translation of the German noun Aufhebung, stemming from the verb aufheben, which means both to cancel and to preserve. For Dionysius, by contrast, negation of the negation involves a second-order transcending negation, which supercedes all ordinary affirmations and negations by denying that any ordinary predicate applies to God, since they all fall short of divine transcendence.Footnote ⁷⁶ Dionysius's ascent via negation is (rather like Augustine's) divine in more than one sense: It is initiated by God, accompanied by God, and also directed toward him. In The Mystical Theology Dionysius describes the second order transcending negation culminating in divine unknowing as “the denial of all beings” or the “turning away from all beings.”Footnote ⁷⁷ “For this would really be to see and to know: to praise him that transcends all beings in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This phrase is more appropriate than “the negation of the negation” which suggests that only negations are negated, and to modern ears at least, has associations of Hegelian sublation.

The question arises whether the negation of negation or denial of all beings that Dionysius describes yields any positive knowledge of God. Jacques Derrida numbers among those who suspect that it does. He contends that Dionysius's apophatic theology is after all a metaphysics aimed at the “immediacy of a presence, whose success is assured.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, talk of the “immediacy of a presence” and of the metaphysics of presence is misplaced. In the penultimate place (the summit) where Dionysius says that God truly is, God is present only as “the one who is hidden,” that is, never fully present. And in the ultimate non-place, the abyss of the darkness of unknowing into which we plunge, we turn away from all thought and knowledge and surrender any self or subject that could experience or perceive or receive the presence of God. Thus God's being is and remains utterly transcendent, and is to that extent never immediately present. Better put, because of the superessential difference—that is, because of God's not having “this kind of existence and not that” even where we are immediately present to God—God is never immediately present to us.

Negativity in Adorno

Adorno in some moods conceives his negative dialectic and the various literary forms and tropes in which it is presented as determinate negations. He claims at various places that negative dialectic is in fact nothing other than determinate negation.Footnote ⁸⁰ For Hegel determinate negation yields a positive residue. Adorno, the exponent of negative dialectics is understandably worried about this. Sometimes this worry prompts him to contrast constellations with the negation of the negation: “The unifying moment survives without the negation of the negation…without delivering itself to abstraction … because there is no … progression from the concepts to a more general concept.”Footnote ⁸¹ At other times the same worry prompts him rather to cleave to the idea of the negation of the negation, while rejecting the Hegelian thesis that the negation of the negation yields a positive.Footnote ⁸² But how can Adorno welcome the determinacy of negation, whilst denying that it yields any positive residue?Footnote ⁸³

This is a version of the problem that Dionysius faces. Adorno tries to answer it. He claims that determinate negation yields no knowledge of the true (which he calls “absolute or simple positivity”) but rather yields knowledge of the false that announces itself as false (which he calls “bad positivity”).Footnote ⁸⁴ Adorno contrasts the approach of determinate negation with that of identifying thought. The latter, he claims, makes opposed terms the same—he uses the example of Hegel's logic which unifies Being and Nothing in Becoming—by dint of a certain conceptual violence [Gewalt]: “the negation of the negation is actually nothing but the of that violence … which must be corrected.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Adorno makes an equally unconvincing move in Problems of Moral Philosophy. We can reliably know what the bad is he says, for after Auschwitz, we cannot help knowing that. The “critique of the administered world” must take the form of “the concrete denunciation of the inhuman,” which we can reliably recognize even though we have no positive normative conception of humanity and no positive conception of “absolute goods” and “absolute norms.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Adorno's response is unconvincing because it restates the problem rather than answering it. Determinate negation cannot so much as reveal the falsity of the false life absent any implicit or explicit reference to a conception of the good or right life. Austere negativism implies that we are not able to descry an inverted vision of the good in extant evil, and that understanding of evil as evil cannot be based—even implicitly—on such a vision. Even Adorno realizes this, since he peels back the blanket of his austere negativism and helps himself to a notion of the positive, which he claims to be a) ineliminable from all thought, but b) also above and beyond all thought, and therefore c) ineffable.Footnote ⁸⁷

Even if Adorno does not convincingly solve his own problem and cannot develop a notion of determinate negation that is consistent with austere negativism and does not presuppose any positive knowledge, he does run into the problem that Dionysius faces. Adorno's notion of determinate negation—the notion he welcomes, not the Hegelian notion he repudiates—points in two directions at once: upwards toward a transcendence that remains conceptually out of reach and hence ineffable, and downwards toward the self-manifesting and hence effable “falsity” of all language and thought. There is an important difference here, however, for although Dionysius's thought combines the human ascent toward the divine and the divine condescension toward the human, the endpoint is the ecstatic union of the human and the divine. Adorno's thought shifts between two perspectives: from the false life, the “context of immanence” (Immanenzzusammenhang), we look upward toward a good that escapes us.Footnote ⁸⁸ We are thus drawn upward out of the “context of delusion or blindness” (Verblendungszusammenhang), toward a standpoint of transcendence from which we gaze back downward on the social world. “Knowledge has no light but that shed upon the world from redemption.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The direction the light falls is important “von der Erlösung her auf die Welt.” Having cantilevered a standpoint of transcendence in order to break out of the context of illusion from within, the aim is to look back upon the social world, for the social world is our sole concern.

Meister Eckhart's Wesensmystik

Adorno's work also bears interesting comparisons with Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth-century Dominican Monk, who was influenced by Dionysius, as well as scholasticism and who reignited the spark of apophatic mysticism in the Middle Ages. For Dionysius the ineffability of God is a reflection of the superessential difference: God is beyond being, and out of reach of all human language and thought, no matter how refined. For Eckhart, by contrast, the ineffability of God reflects the fact that God's essence is to be hidden and inscrutable. As Lossky puts it: “Indeed, to the question for why God is ineffable, Dionysius would have replied: God is ineffable, because in his ‘superessential’ nature he is transcendent not only to all that is, but also indeed to being itself. Eckhart replies: God is ineffable, because his nature is to be hidden…. And what is more … it is precisely qua Being—sub ratione esse—that God is unknowable.”Footnote ⁹¹ For Dionysius, divine ineffability is a feature of the human quest for God's essence, of the human relation to the divine, while for Eckhart it is a characteristic of the quested, God's essence itself. Eckhart does not teach that God's essence is ineffable because wholly transcendent and out of reach; God's essence is immanent, but nevertheless wholly mysterious and dark. His mysticism is what in German is called Wesensmystik—mysticism about God's essence.Footnote ⁹² “What is the final end?” asks Eckhart. “It is the hidden darkness of the eternal Godhead, which is unknown and never has been known and never shall be known. God abides there in himself.”Footnote ⁹³ I shall discuss just two of Eckhart's doctrines: his doctrines of the image, and his doctrine of detachment [Gelassen-heit or Abgeschiedenheit].

Bilderlosigkeit in Eckhart and Adorno

Eckhart uses the term image [bild/beelde] in two senses, which one can distinguish according to whether they are images that God makes of himself and reveals to humanity, or that people make in order to represent God to others.Footnote ⁹⁴

An example of the first—let us call it the ontological sense—is the second person of the trinity, Jesus Christ, son of God, whom Paul calls the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15). The ontotheological image is fully in the original, or Urbild, of which it is an image, or Abbild. Eckhart explains this to his congregation using the simile of the mirror. The mirror image is more truly in the face that looks than in the glass that reflects, for “when the mirror is taken away, I am no longer imaged in the mirror, for I am myself the image.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Eckhart holds that all human beings are images in this ontological sense: Their created being wholly depends on God, and is nothing without God.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to Eckhart's ontology, the created world has a fragile existence, wholly borrowed from God, which is why he also claims that all creatures are a “pure nothing,” one of the articles later condemned for being, though not actually heretical, nevertheless tainted with heresy.Footnote ⁹⁷ God's image is not as fully in us as it is in Jesus, but it is in us nonetheless. Eckhart teaches that the ontological image of God resides in the soul, which is the ground of the human being. This image is uncreated. It is identical with God, in the sense that it is fully in God, and that it is God (though God is not identical with it, nor is God's being fully in it). Eckhart also often speaks of the intellect as a spark [vunkelîn] or the light in the soul.Footnote ⁹⁸ This was one of the 108 sentences condemned at his Cologne trial in 1326.

Eckhart defended himself from this charge, saying that it is mistaken and false to say that “I am this image,” since I am also a creature, and to this extent not identical with the intellect or spark of the soul: “For something created is not an image, and angels and men were created in the image of God. Image and likeness in the true sense are neither made nor the work of nature.” Footnote ⁹⁹

The second sense of image in Eckhart is that of a representation of God by human beings. Representative images are something made, and they are also idolatrous, since they enclose God in creaturely determinations and disfigure his being. Citing Dionysius as a source, Eckhart teaches that we must empty ourselves of all such representative images.

As long as one seeks God in images, or any likeness, through perception, or thought one will miss God. Eckhart talks about three kinds of images: “images of all creatures, imageless images, and images above images.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This triad forms an ascending hierarchy of ways of knowing beings. The second grade is peculiarly striking.

It is hard to know exactly what Eckhart has in mind here. It may have to do the Scholastic notion of the intelligible species, the likeness by which angels know objects.Footnote ¹⁰³ Viewed against this background, Eckhart is probably saying that, like an angel, the human soul knows via intellectual forms [einem kleinen bildelîn] independently of sensory givens [âne bild].Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He also claims that knowledge of higher beings, like self-knowledge, is of a higher order than knowledge of objects, since it is not mediated by any images, and knowledge of God must occur “without images and immediately.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Be this as it may, Eckhart's epistemology and his theology are about clearing away any perceptions, memories, imaginings that cloud the intellect in order to achieve cognitive union with God. By dint of purging my soul of representational images of God, I become one with the image of God in the soul. For Eckhart, who preached this doctrine from the pulpit, this is clearly not just an epistemological but also a practical matter. “If I am to know God without means and without image, God must become practically ‘I’ and I practically God, so wholly one that when I work with Him it is not that I work and He incites me, but that I work wholly with what is mine”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Avoiding the sin of idolatry is not the only practical issue here. Eckhart is putting a whole way of looking at the world through representations into question. Eckhart's apophaticism is less a way of knowing God, than it is a way of being. It is a corrective to our current material, finite, creaturely existence. To achieve this aim he tries to shift our perspective on the material world; to get us instead, to look at God, people, and things from the standpoint of the creator, rather than to represent them from our point of view.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Imageless Images in Adorno

The critique of representation and the ideal of imagelessness [Bilderlosigkeit] are also central to Adorno's philosophy. The very notion of thinking in constellations is directed against thinking in images. Adorno rejects what he sees as the positivist view whereby atomically conceived concepts, or units built of concepts, correspond to discrete objects.

This representational view of concepts is reified, he claims, since it occludes the historical process by which reality has been shaped and concepts have been formed. Moreover, it has an ideological function, since it perpetuates the idea that concepts and the things that they pick out are antecendently individuated and fixed. Among other things, representational thinking blocks the thought that the social world might be completely otherwise, that it is shaped and can be re-shaped by human endeavor; hence it blocks the possibility of social change.

Thinking in constellations is a way of counteracting that reifying tendency by deciphering the stored up, encrypted and forgotten history in things. And the ideal at which thinking in constellations aims is one of imageless thought.

True reality can, Adorno claims, be grasped, if at all, without any representational images. This is because concepts, and, since there is no thought without concepts, discursive thought itself, are instruments of thinking, and thus incipient forms of domination and mastery of what is thought. Thus for Adorno as for Eckhart, the critique of representational thinking is not only, and not primarily, an epistemological doctrine, but a practical one. Adorno praises the infinity and sublimity of Kant's categorical imperative, precisely where it “does not repeat what occurs in social reality, but has the tendency to hold level criticism at existing society and to hold out to it another image of the possible, or an imageless image of the possible.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The idea of the imageless image is indirectly linked to critical theory's utopian aim of bringing about radical, wholesale, qualitative social change.

The critique of representational thinking goes hand in glove with Adorno's claim that philosophy has its true interest (namely the aim of individual emancipation, social transformation, and of individual and social happiness) in the non-identical, “beim Begriffslosen.”

Eckhart's Critique of Attachment

“You often ask how you ought to live. Now pay close attention. Just as I have told you about the image—that is how you ought to live.”Footnote ¹¹³ Though based on theological doctrine, Eckhart's teaching as expressed in his sermons has an ethical point. That point is the critique of attachment and of property [eigenschaft], of man's ensconcement in his material and creaturely existence. To cling to images is to be attached to material things and to creaturely existence, rather than to be receptive to God. In his eyes, these are two sides of the same coin.

Eckhart, following Augustine, defines the idea of something as “the what of a thing and the why of all its properties.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ This definition goes back to Aristotle who understands the essence of something as its function and final end. To know what something is, is to know the what, the why, or the cause of that thing. To try to know God as one knows a thing, however, is to drag him into the purposive context of daily living. “[S]ome people want to see God … as they see a cow, and to love God as they love a cow. You love a cow for her milk and her cheese and your profit.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ To love God in that way, for the sake of “outward wealth or inward consolation” is, Eckhart argues, to act for one's own profit, and “as long as you do works for the sake of heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without, you are at fault… . Indeed, if a man thinks he will get more of God by meditation, by devotion, by ecstasies or by a special infusion of grace than by the fireside or in the stable—that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak around his head and shoving him under a bench.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even acts performed for the sake of God are misdirected. One simply cannot transact with God. And to do good works in order to get closer to God is to transact with God in the expectation of a return. When we act we should instead empty ourselves of all thoughts of God. Footnote ¹¹⁷

Eckhart's animus against monastic orders, and the self-righteousness of the clergy and the priesthood takes the form of critique of what he calls “ways.” “Whoever seeks God in a special way gets the way and misses God who lies hidden in it.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Even the dispossession and asceticism characteristic of Franciscan and Dominican orders, insofar as these are entered into as ways of pleasing God, are just as empty as materialism and hedonism: Those who see God in “external things, whether in places of devotional practices, people or works, in withdrawal from the world or poverty or self-abasement … seek wrongly.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Holiness is a way of being, not a way of acting. “People should not worry about what they do, but about what they are.”Footnote ¹²⁰ A way of life that is attached to an image of God, or a thought of God is every bit as ungodly as a way of life that cleaves to material things and sensuous pleasure.

Against this, Eckhart preaches a doctrine of letting go (gelâzenheit])or detachment (Abgeschiedenheit). It is not just the idea that holiness can be transacted—the instrumentalization of divine worship—that is under attack here. Nor is it just the idea that God commands good works, and external acts, and that these sanctify the soul, ideas Eckhart was condemned for attacking.Footnote ¹²¹ In letting go of all attachments one is tuning out everything that obscures the divine word—every purpose, every intention, every reason and every image. For this reason it is wrong to see the doctrine as a deontology. Rather it is an implicit rejection of deontology, which in Eckhart's view is still too agent-centered, too action-centered, and too focused on good intentions to be truly holy. Before one can become one with God, one has to sever all attachments to creaturely life. Once one has done that, one lives as Eckhart says “without why.”

In practice this amount to a doctrine of dispossession and asceticism. God seeks to be our only possession, and “the more we are in possession of other things, the less we possess, and the less love we have for all things, the more we receive him.”Footnote ¹²³ However it is not the achievement of an inner struggle, a conquest of reason which walls us off from the world. Rather in opening oneself up to God, by freeing oneself from images and attachments, one gains a deeper appreciation, understanding and love of the world, and of all beings, as God's creations.

Adorno's Critique of False Living

What I have elsewhere called Adorno's “ethics of resistance” is the practical consequence of his negative dialectics, and its central idea, that the task of philosophy is to think the non-identical. Footnote ¹²⁴Prima facie it seems surprising that Adorno has an ethics at all. The moral of Adorno's Problems of Moral Philosophy is that under present historical conditions, namely in a false life, dominated by the pressures of production and consumption, no theory of morality, no conception of morality, and no extant ethical life is available to support or guide the right life. For a variety of complex reasons, which I cannot go into here, Adorno rejects deontological, teleological, prudential, and consequentialist ethics, sparing nothing on which to fasten his philosophy. Perhaps for this reason, some commentators maintain that Adorno, like Heidegger and Nietzsche, attempts to situate his own thought “outside ethics.” To my mind this cannot be right, however, since Adorno's philosophy has an unmistakeably moral flavour, which comes to expression, for example, in the unconditional demands it places upon us:

That said, in Adorno's eyes, such demands flow from a kind of pre-theoretical, involuntary protest at the actuality of human suffering. These pre-theoretical moral demands, he calls them “impulses”—emerge, as it were, spontaneously from our affective somatic reactions to situations. They are not in need of reasons. Indeed, they are more powerful and persuasive than any reason that could be given for them, so that the attempt to offer rational justifications for them is self-defeating, since it weakens and undermines them. Footnote ¹²⁸ However, Adorno's ethics of resistance is still an ethics in the sense that, while it will not help moral agents answer the question of what they ought to do and why, it nonetheless represents a certain way of being and way of living.

Furthermore, Adorno's ethics of resistance, like Eckhart's, is a way of “living without why.” To do this requires not adjusting oneself to or in any way compromising with the social world of universal fungibility, of ubiquitous production and consumption. And just as Eckhart's critique of attachment, as a way of being and a way of living, flows from his critique of representational thinking, as a way of thinking, so Adorno's ethics of resistance is a way of being and of living that flows from his critique of identity-thinking.

Some Salient Differences Acknowledged

It might be objected that by abstracting from the intellectual and historical context of their respective work, I have managed only to sketch some superficial similarities between Adorno and the negative theology of Dionysius and Eckhart.

I do not deny that there are important differences between them. Indeed, I began by arguing that there is no specifically religious dimension to Adorno's philosophy, by which I mean that his project makes perfect sense without involving God, which cannot be said for Eckhart's and Dionysius's. There are other major differences. For example, though Adorno advocates an ascetic aesthetic, based on the deferral of satisfaction or pleasure, he nevertheless defends a kind of ethical hedonism. To be sure it is a hedged and qualified hedonism. He claims that there is value in pleasure, albeit counterfactual pleasure, pleasure not warped by the culture industry, by the tendency of late capitalism to fabricate false needs, and not distorted by the depredations of productivism and consumerism.Footnote ¹³⁰ Similarly, Adorno's “no right living” dictum counsels against a “loveless disregard for things” as much as an overattachment to them.Footnote ¹³¹ There is no equivalent in Dionysius or in Eckhart for Adorno's hedonism and worldly materialism.

Again, Adorno's preoccupation with transcendence is motivated by a concern to break out of a nexus of immanence that has, he thinks, regressed to a nexus of delusion that blinds us to the depredations of a totally administered and universally fungible society. It is for the sake of the social world and the lives of its inhabitants that Adorno seeks to transcend the social world. This is in contrast to the apophatic theologians, Dionysius and Eckhart, who share with Neo-Platonism the erotic yearning of the lower for the higher for the sake of the higher, and seek transcendence for the sake of the divine.

Significant as they are, these differences do not render the parallels between Adorno and apophaticism superficial. As we have seen the several parallels are both striking and deep, and they flow from their respective answers to a common problem. Adorno's philosophy, like apophatic theology, answers to the paradox of the ineffable. Their respective responses are prolix; they do not pass over the paradox in silence. They both refuse the easy way out, namely of positing channel of non-discursive communication or access to whatever it is that lies beyond the bounds of thought. To this extent they share, we might say, a rejection of all positivism, where positivism is the idea that whatever it is that is outside thought—God, the good, utopia or whatever—can somehow be made immediately present, by visionary experience, or faith, or aesthetic intuition.Footnote ¹³² And yet they also emphatically reject, albeit for different reasons, the Hegelian idea that there is nothing beyond thought. Finally, both in apophaticism and in Adorno's late work we find an unstinting criticism of representational thinking with an obverse, practical side, namely the critique of attachment in Eckhart and the ethics of resistance in Adorno.

The Four Original Objections Reconsidered

Let us finally return to the question of whether the existence of these parallels with negative theology opens Adorno's late work to the four objections contained in the deprecative comparison: irrationalism, mysticism, incoherence and emptiness. The question of whether Adorno is irrationalist is complex. Adorno is, it is true, suspicious of rationality, which he conceives anthropologically as a tool for mastering external and internal nature. He construes moral demands as “impulses” not further justifiable by reason. Yet there is a clear sense in which Adorno is not an irrationalist, namely that his philosophy refuses to appeal to any non-rational or extra-rational mode of apprehending the non-identical. The aim of negative dialectics is to go beyond rationality, to go beyond conceptual thought, by means of it.

The charge of mysticism can be answered similarly. Any attempt to say what cannot be said is in one sense, though a fairly trivial one, a form of mysticism. However, Adorno is no mystic: He holds that discursive thought can be abandoned in favor of non-discursive modes of thinking: faith, feeling, visionary experience, poetry, aesthetic intuition, or mimesis. The metaphysical experience that Adorno claims to be encrypted in certain avant-garde works of art, even in works of music, stands in need of interpretation and elucidation by philosophy. Just as the apophatic theologians we have looked at do not hold out the prospect of an extra-conceptual experience of the immediacy of the divine presence, through synteresis, so in Adorno there is no direct encounter with otherness or non-identity. No vision or direct apprehension of a transformed social reality is to be won through the dialectical self-subversion of discursive reason or the experience of avant-garde art.

As for the charge of incoherence, we must concede, of course, that to attempt to say what cannot be said is pragmatically incoherent. However, Adorno is not guilty of a simple error: He exploits this incoherence as a way of manifesting the limitations of discursive thought. It is not incoherent to attempt to show what cannot be said by whatever means possible, even by means of self-subverting rhetorical utterances. Nor is it incoherent to attempt to articulate, from sideways on, the experience of being shown something that cannot be known or put into words.Footnote ¹³³

Finally, there are the objections to emptiness. Adorno's philosophy does not aim at giving us correct knowledge of the social world. That this is what philosophy aspires to is, in his eyes, part of the problem. Nor does Adorno's philosophy aim at giving us any knowledge whatsoever of what is non-identical to thought, the good life, utopia or whatever. If these really are ineffable, as he claims, then to say that we cannot think them is a platitude, for this involves no renunciation of any knowledge we could otherwise have. Thus the charge of emptiness is either trivially true, or misplaced.

Does this mean, finally, that negative dialectics is also practically empty? Scholars have often criticized Adorno for having nothing to say of any concrete political significance about what a transformed social world should be like. There is a something to this objection, although it is by no means only Adorno's problem. However, our analysis has shown that the ethics of resistance is the counterpart to his critique of representational thinking in Negative Dialectics, and the ethics of resistance is nothing less than a way of being and a way of living and no less practical for being minimal and negative.