“The Only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but
that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere
technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the
world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted
as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives
without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this
alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the
situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because
consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image
of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it
presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from
the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge
must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also
marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it
seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for
the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so
calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it
must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of
redemption itself hardly matters.”
~Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia