The presentation places the Sufi perspective in dialogue with Adorno’s philosophy. Sufis hold that reason and language are fundamentally inadequate for investigating the nature of reality. Building on this view, I will argue that Western philosophy, in its conventional form, cannot provide a complete understanding of the world, as it is compelled to exclude subjective experience. This remains true even in philosophical approaches (such as Heideggerian philosophy) that seek to prioritise human experience. Adorno’s philosophy can be seen as an attempt to recover the subject that Western philosophy has been striving to eliminate entirely. Drawing on concepts such as disenchantment—borrowed by Adorno from Weber—I will argue that any approach that seeks to fully understand the world by focusing solely on the object ultimately undermines its own project, due to the simple fact that the object necessarily presupposes a subject.

Simply put, failing to consider the subject in genuinely subjective terms will never lead to a complete understanding of the world. The presentation seeks to move beyond linguistic and cultural boundaries to reveal that both Adorno and the Sufi are, in the end, striving to express the same fundamental insights. In this light, Adorno’s reflections on “spiritual experience” (geistige Erfahrung) and “negative dialectics” resemble the negative theology of the Sufis.