What if AI Isn’t Meant to Be Understood? Toward an Ethics of Opacity: Reading AI with Walter Benjamin

“Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.”

—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

I’ve struggled with this line for years. Not because it is obscure—it isn’t, not really—but because it seems to resist precisely the kind of careful, clarifying attention one is trained to bring to philosophical statements. It’s the sort of sentence that won’t sit still under analysis, like a cat that senses a vet visit. You read it once, nod sagely, then reread it with suspicion, then again with awe, and still you’re not entirely sure whether Benjamin has told you something deeply true or merely constructed a decoy profound enough to evade interrogation. The difficulty is not that the sentence is dense. It’s that it seems to carry more than one would be wise to unpack.

That, for me, is the peculiar and enduring power of Benjamin’s writing: it does not pursue clarity in the usual sense, nor does it indulge in mystification for the sake of obscurity. Rather, it occupies a strange middle ground—somewhere between aphorism and incantation—where the sentence is built less to be decoded than to linger. His best formulations behave like philosophical contraptions with concealed hinges: open one thought, and another swings outward behind it. They are not arguments to be won or diagrams to be annotated, but strange objects of sustained attention—objects that subtly alter their contours the longer one lingers in their orbit. Benjamin writes in a way that makes "mastery"– by which I full and exhaustively transparent understanding—impossible in precisely the right way.

And here, in this particular formulation, we get a quintessential example—one that also happens to open an aperture on the meaning of his style:

Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.

Benjamin—ever the connoisseur of ambiguity—offers in this line a view of truth liable to give your average analytic philosopher a mild existential rash, an idea so indifferent to the protocols of conceptual hygiene it practically begs to be quarantined. That truth might involve secrecy—let alone demand justice to it—is precisely the sort of formulation that suggests Benjamin did not so much abandon metaphysics as tap it on the shoulder, run off with its coat, and wear it to ironic dinner parties. For most of modernity, truth has been something like a cadaver to be clinically examined—opened up, drained of its mystery, and carefully dissected into ever smaller epistemic morsels. Benjamin, in contrast, proposes that truth must be approached like a particularly recalcitrant uncle: with a certain awkward reverence, a touch of dread, and the uneasy sense that full understanding is both impossible and, frankly, unwise.

This is not to say that Benjamin fetishizes opacity or invites us into some gauzy celebration of the ineffable. On the contrary, what he offers here is an ethics of interpretation—a mode of encounter in which the object of knowledge retains its dignity by resisting the terms of domination. Exposure, in this account, is less a revelation than an act of epistemic violence, akin to dragging a poem into fluorescent lighting to see what secrets it spills under duress. The secret, in Benjamin’s phrasing, is not simply a bit of withheld information, but something with an intrinsic relation to time, form, and the one who seeks to know. To “destroy” it through exposure is not merely to reveal its content, but to annul the conditions of its meaningfulness, to collapse the distance that gave it resonance, and to mistake availability for understanding.

Benjamin’s alternative—revelation that “does justice” to the secret—requires not a forensic mentality but a literary one, or better yet, a theological one. This isn’t truth as the opposite of falsehood, but as a kind of event or arrival: something that appears without surrendering its density, something that speaks without ceasing to be strange. To do justice to a secret, after all, is not to possess it, but to respond to it in a manner proportionate to its form. Just as a work of art is not best understood by knowing how much it cost to produce, so too the truth of a thing is not exhausted by its availability to rational inspection. For Benjamin, truth is performative—it calls for an interpretive posture, a comportment that acknowledges the asymmetry between what is disclosed and what can be grasped.

One might, at this point, be tempted to accuse Benjamin of romanticism, as though he were inviting us into a Gothic epistemology of shadows and whispers. But his point is far more unsettling. What he describes is not the mystical aura of the ineffable, but the ordinary structure of interpretation itself—namely, that knowing always involves a relation between knower and known, and that this relation is never innocent. The secret is not simply what is hidden; it is what solicits response without requiring surrender. It makes a claim on us. And to do justice to that claim, one must resist both the allure of mastery and the laziness of resignation.

This is why, in Benjamin’s account, the question of truth is inseparable from ethics. It is not simply what one sees, but how one sees, and under what terms the seeing is made possible. Revelation, then, is not the unveiling of a static fact, but a situated act of responsiveness that preserves the secret’s power precisely by refusing to reduce it. It is the opposite of cynical demystification, which mistakes unmasking for understanding and treats every secret as a scandal waiting to be exposed. Benjamin instead invites us to think of secrets as sites of relation—moments in which truth shimmers into view not because we have ripped the veil aside, but because we have approached with the proper kind of attention: slow, interpretive, and unwilling to confuse access with knowledge.

In a world increasingly besotted with transparency—where data is king, and interpretive subtlety is regarded as a kind of aristocratic indulgence—it is worth remembering Benjamin’s point: that truth may ask more of us than clarity, and that doing justice to a thing may sometimes mean letting it remain strange. If we are to take revelation seriously, we might start by giving up the fantasy that every truth worth having is one we can hold in our hands like a receipt.

The danger is not in speaking of the secret, but in imagining that to speak of it is to speak it. That would be exposure in the vulgar sense—flattening revelation into information, turning the mystery into metadata. But Benjamin’s remark—that “truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it”—already alerts us to a paradox: that justice to the secret requires a kind of saying, but one that does not consume the thing in its own utterance.

In our own moment, one of the most urgent sites where this ethics of the secret demands our attention is in the growing chorus of demands for AI “transparency.” The term black box, now a cliché in AI discourse, functions less as a technical descriptor than as a moral provocation—a way of framing opacity as a kind of scandal, a sin against the Enlightenment’s demand that all things be brought to light, preferably in PowerPoint. But to name something a black box is already to accuse it, to cast its unknowability as a failure of responsibility rather than a structural condition of its operation. It rehearses the fantasy that if only we could see inside the machine—if only we could trace every weight, parameter, and activation—ethical clarity would follow, as though justice were simply a matter of enough diagnostic light.

Benjamin, I suspect, would wince at such optimism. For him, the problem is never simply that something is hidden, but how we orient ourselves toward what cannot be made fully visible. The secret, in his sense, is not a glitch in the system but a condition of meaning. And the danger lies in the belief that the right diagram can eliminate the interpretive act. When we demand transparency from AI, we often do so in the hope that meaning will arise automatically from visibility—that once the mechanism is exposed, its consequences will speak for themselves. But machines, like texts, do not disclose their ethics on contact. They must be interpreted. And interpretation, as Benjamin reminds us, is not an act of extraction but of relation. It must proceed with a kind of reverence for what resists it.

To be clear, this is not a call for mystification or a romantic indulgence in unknowability. There are, of course, forms of opacity that serve power and deserve critique. But there is also a kind of opacity that is not obstruction but excess—an opacity that marks the limits of control and demands a different mode of response. The secret of AI, if we can call it that, is not the fact that its inner workings are difficult to trace, but that its outputs emerge from an apparatus whose operations exceed the conditions of their disclosure. To do justice to this secret is not to decode it, but to engage it with a posture of interpretive responsibility—one that accepts that meaning is co-constructed in asymmetrical relation, not revealed in diagnostic printouts.

In this light, the ethical relation to AI may demand something closer to what Benjamin evokes: a practice of reading that is less about penetration than about attunement—not the soft-focus kind that mistakes resonance for harmony, but the critical kind that remains alert to friction, difference, and delay. Transparency, in this view, becomes less a goal than a metaphor whose limitations we must learn to read. And if we are to speak of black boxes at all, let us not do so in the language of broken lanterns and failed revelations. Let us speak, instead, of secrets that address us—not because they can be known, but because they cannot be ignored.