NON- IDENTITY THINKING
As opposed to identifying a thing with a concept, non- identity thinking “seeks to say what something is”. Remarking on the apparent contradiction, Adorno concedes that, in saying “it is”, non- identity thinking does identify; it even identifies to a greater extent than identity thinking. But non- identity thinking identifies in other ways because it does not merely classify objects by subsuming them under universal concepts (ND 149). To cite Husserl’ well- known dictum, non- identity thinking aims at the things themselves; it immerses itself in “things that are heterogeneous to it, without placing those things in prefabricated categories” (ND 13). Rather than philosophizing about concrete things, Adorno asserts, “we are to philosophize … out of these things” (ND 33). When it philosophizes out of things, non- identity thinking transcends concepts by disclosing elements of affinity between its concepts and non- conceptual objects – an affinity that makes concept formation possible in the first place. In non- identity thinking, these “elements of affinity – of the object itself to the thought of it – come to live in identity” (ND 149).
Non- identity thinking attempts to show that non- conceptuality is inalienable from the concept (ND 137). As Bernstein remarks, non- identity thinking is more fully self- aware precisely because it acknowledges that concepts are immersed in, and part of, the natural world (2001: 291). In fact, Bernstein believes that non- identity thinking marks an “axial turn” towards objects (ibid.: 233). The direction of conceptuality should be turned towards non- conceptuality because concepts are not just generated in our embodied contact with material things, but continue to evoke these things owing to their meaning in which their mediation by the non- conceptual survives (ND 12). In what follows, however, I shall argue that it is not sufficient to focus on this axial turn; non- identity thinking involves more than a turn towards the non- conceptual. (Adorno on Nature, Deborah Cook, 2011, p. 74)
