In her summary of the Adorno Conference at Anglia Polytechnic University, May 2001 Zoe Hepden says that Gordon Finlayson of York University, in a paper entitled ‘Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable’, dealt with the problem that Adorno’s notion of truth results in a negative theology. She says:

Finlayson examined Adorno’s claim that the social world is false. Inasmuch as it is false, there is no way of knowing what is true, or in other words, there is no way in which we can have a conception of the good. Finlayson argued that this claim contains the ‘normative basis’ for what he referred to as Adorno’s ethics of resistance. For Finlayson, like Andrew Bowie, Adorno’s claim that the truth of the social world is its untruth results in a negative theology. For Bowie this is inconsistent with Adorno’s philosophical project. However, Finlayson argued that a negative theology can be read as consistent with Adorno’s critical philosophy if it is connected to Adorno’s concern with ‘the ineffable’. Finlayson prioritised a concern with the ineffable, a sort of active ‘not-knowing’, which replaces identifying thinking with non-discursive insights, as a basis for practical strategies of resistance to the bad, even in the absence of any real conception of the good. Finlayson claimed that however inaccessible the good is, Adorno’s negative philosophy is compelled to seek modes of access to it, and that while there is no doubt that Adorno’s work contains a negative theology, when this is linked to the idea of the ineffable it does not result in irrationalism, pessimism or philosophical inconsistency.