Dialectics. Toward the end of this extraordinary book, which embraces the
main accomplishment of his whole philosophical life work, Adorno speaks
about the great Anselm of Canterbury’s specifically Christian ontological
proof for the existence of God: that God is the highest Notion or Idea, which
a greater one can not be conceived, and which therefore must contain being
or existence, since otherwise a greater one could be thought of: ergo God
exists (Anselm 1962; Adorno 1973:402–405). According to Adorno, Hegel had
tried, in opposition to Kant, to determinately negate, i.e., not only to criti-
cize, but also to resurrect dialectically, and thus to preserve, and to elevate,
and to fulfill Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God (Anselm
1962; Hegel 1986n). In Adorno’s view, Hegel failed in his attempt to restore
the ontological proof (Adorno 2003:402–405). Adorno, rather, sides with the
monk Gaunilon and with Kant against Anselm of Canterbury and Hegel: he
denies the identity of the Notion, or the Idea, and being, and stresses their
non-identity, and thus negates Anselm’s proof once more, but still not merely
abstractly, but rather determinately and concretely (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986n).
In Adorno’s perspective, in Hegel’s consistent resolution of non-identity into
pure identity, the notion becomes the guarantor of the non-conceptual.
According to Adorno, Transcendence, captured by the immanence of the
human spirit, was supposedly at the same time turned into the totality of the
human spirit and thus abolished altogether. Here Feuerbach’s projection
theory is of course presupposed.
Radical Objectivity
Adorno was truly and honestly convinced, that his negative dialectic with
its emphasize on non-identity preserved and protected better the radical objec-
tivity of the Absolute, or the totally Other, than Hegel’s positive dialectic with
its emphasize on identity and its consequent pantheistic tendencies, which
of course Hegel had always denied (Hegel 1986a:347; Adorno 2003:402–405).
Adorno observed that, after Hegel, the more Transcendence crumbled under
the pressure of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment move-
ments, both in the world and in the human mind, the more arcane it would
become, thus concentrating in an outermost point above all mediations. In
this sense, so Adorno argued, the anti-historical Barthian theology of down-
right Otherness has its historical index. For Adorno, the question of theol-
ogy and metaphysics was sharpened into the question of whether this utter
tenuousness, abstractness, and indefiniteness of the Absolute was the last,
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