A few thoughts on the problem of identity, positivism, objectivism, reductionism and the ethical questions they raise: When Adorno discusses the notion of non-identity, his point is precisely that one should interact with a phenomenon without assuming the judgement of absolutely knowing that phenomenon. Non-identity is another way of describing the (non-conceptual) ‘moreness’ in behind our experiences[1]. It gives expression to the experience of not being able to absolutely capture or possess a phenomenon in an abstract theory or concept. This ‘moreness’ in behind our experiences, wherein each experience we have with a particular thing is always new, unfolding, dynamic and multidimensional, resides between the experiential identity of a (multidimensional) phenomenon (i.e., our ability to discern that this tree is a birch tree) and our own (inter)subjective limitations in terms of consciously orientating toward that multidimensional phenomenon (i.e., the experiential identity of a phenomenon which we can discern but which is never absolutely identical with itself).[2] As I write in Consciousness and Revolt: An Exploration toward Reconciliation: “Let us consider the following example. There are two phenomena that have presented themselves to me, X and Y. The noting of differences between X and Y, this ability to distinguish identity itself, is inherent in experiential thought. For instance, I may distinguish a birch tree from a willow tree; the sun from the moon; a bird from a dog. In a sense, I have discerned and distinguished in the cognitive moment of my experience, a separate identity for each of the two phenomena; and accordingly, I can therefore run through discerning the unique characteristics of both distinguishable phenomena. I can also generalize from the experiential grounds of my experiences: quite practically, in the plural, those are birch trees and those are willow trees; those are birds and those are dogs. However, and this is important, experiential generalizing is only coherent if our generalizing is in a constant, normative interacting with the particular phenomenon (with the particulars of experience); and only if the general identity does not consider, for instance, all willow trees to be absolutely like all willow trees. For such ‘bad generalizing’ would inherently violate the particular phenomena of our experience. As with abstract reason, it would subsume the particularity of our experience in a bad general category, which would equate to nothing other than a conscious suppression of the very particularities of the experience that we are presently experiencing.”[3] This example might be an over-simplification of Adorno’s negative dialectics in practice, but it nevertheless contextualizes in a concrete sense how his theory of negative dialectical thought is “a philosophical attempt to conceptualize the nonconceptual without subsuming the nonconceptual under a system of concepts.”[4] While there is some similarity to Kant for example, where noumena are transcendent things that forever elude our grasp, Adorno’s argument is more in line with that of Sartre: that via conscious intentionality we must forever strive toward obtaining a general understanding of the particular (i.e., to conceptualize the non-conceptual) whilst never being able to absolutely capture it.[5] The (intersubjective) gap that separates our obtaining a general orientation with the phenomenal world and our lack of an ability to absolutely capture a particular phenomenon is not only an important epistemological point (one which both Adorno and Sartre share in common) – it is one that also carries practico-ethical implications. It are these implications that I would like to discuss throughout the remainder of this essay. For if what inspired Adorno’s critique of identity was the systematic elimination of the Jews, wherein the subject of the Jew was reduced to an object of hate in the name of a particular identity politics – this is because Adorno sensed that there was something profoundly important in the very epistemological context of the unspeakable barbarity at Auschwitz. For instance, if the Jews in Europe had been exterminated in the name of “identity” – that is, if they were identified as “the Other” and systematically categorized through their yellow stars – then the epistemological question of identity thought (likewise positivism, instrumental reason, and the historical culmination of fascism) becomes one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time.[6] It is one that I believe is an integral dimension to the fundamental philosophical problem of human history, and one which I attempted to elucidate in my latest book. If every instance of ideology possess a dimension of belief in the (false absolute and abstract) identity of a phenomenon, then Adorno was correct to suggest almost fifty years ago that the only way humanity can move on from the horrors and unspeakable atrocities of Auschwitz is to question the very status of those horror and unspeakable atrocities from a fundamental perspective. We must look to how, in the example of the Nazi persecution of the Jew or even the nationalist persecution of the immigrant, the very negation of the individual subject as a “mere object” (i.e., the negation of the Jew as a human being on behalf of “the object of the Jew as vermin”) is tantamount to a fundamental shift from the subject-subject paradigm to the subject-object parable and is directly significant of an inherently violating structure of thought that carries extended historical-ideological implications regarding the very foundations of historical society (i.e., the distorted epistemological foundations of society which made that reduction of the subject of the Jew possible). On my reading, it is this reduction of the Jew to the status of a ‘mere object’ to be dominated and the shift from the intimate subject-subject paradigm to the subject-object parable (i.e., what I described in Consciousness and Revolt as a stunting of ‘experiential coherence’ ) that ultimately forms the basis for the “coldness” that Adorno circumscribes throughout Negative Dialectics. The basic epistemic conditions that form the basis of this “coldness” can be described in how... Read more ow.ly/mie0e
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 22:58:42 +0000
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