ND Part II / Outset from the Concept (Part 1)
Beginning with the concept as we must, we see
relics of static thought and of a static cognitive ideal in the midst of dynamized consciousness. The immanent claim of the concept is its order-creating invariance as opposed to the change in what it analyzes. The form of the concept rejects this latter, is therein “wrong”.
There is just something “wrong” with concepts as such, the mismatch built in to conceptuality, between dynamic reality and conceptuality’s invariant order. He cannot say “wrong” without scare-quotes because he means something like constitutively inadequate, not wrong in the usual sense that some judgements are wrong and some are right.
This is why dialectics is so important:
In dialectics thought raises the objection against the archaisms of its conceptuality.
Dialectics amounts, according to its subjective side, to a thinking wherein the form of thought no longer turns its objects into immutable things which stay the same; that they would be so, is refuted by experience.
He illustrates the non-identity in identity with an everyday example, familiar to many:
an older one, looking back to when it once began to consciously exist to some extent, clearly recalls its distant past. It produces a unity, however irreally childhood may slip away from it. In that irreality however the I which one remembers, which one once was and potentially is once again, becomes at the same time an other, an alien, to be detachedly observed.
An older one = an older individual consciousness.
Such ambivalence of identity and non-identity is preserved all the way into the logical problematic of identity. The expert jargon had the ready-made formula of the identity in the non-identity ready for this. It would need to be contrasted first with the non-identity in identity.
The “expert jargon” is the specialist terminology of the philosophers, particularly Hegel and the German idealists. For Hegel, identity-in-non-identity is something like a “ready-made formula”—differences and opposites are to be comprehended as moments in a higher (or deeper) identity, achieved in the synthesis of sublation.
Adorno flips it around, to find the non-identity in identity. But…
Such a mere formal inversion meanwhile allows room for the subreption, that dialectics would be in spite of everything prima philosophia, as “prima dialectica”. The turn to the non-identical is borne out in its execution; if it remained a declaration, it would revoke itself.
He immediately distrusts his own inversion and says, effectively, be careful not to turn this into another ready-made formula. Non-identity is not another first principle, but is to be found in philosophical practice.