A Theory Devoured by Thought 435chance to turn into positivity. His intention was to present a form of
self-reflection that could apprehend the truth in an unconventional way.
This approach would question the validation of data by reference totheir
genesis, i.e., their origins, and at the same time the illusion of an iden-
tity of thought and existence would be abandoned. ‘No object is wholly
known.’^131 This breach with the past was to open the way to a material
philosophy that constitutes the constructive goal of Negative Dialectics.^132
The core of the lengthy introduction consisted of the exposition of
a conception of philosophical experience that Adorno contrasted with
scientific knowledge. The criticism of Bergson, Husserl and especially
Heidegger in part I was the starting-point from which to develop his
own concept of truth. ‘What is true in the subject unfolds in relation to
that which it is not, but by no means in a boastful affirmation of the way
it is.’^133 The ontological need (Husserl’s ‘Let’s get back to things’) was
something Adorno took seriously in the sense that he interpreted it as
the desire for philosophical experience.
In part II, Adorno explicated the central concepts of non-identity
and non-conceptuality, as well as the idea of thinking in constellations.
In the course of his discussion of Kant’s epistemology, with its emphasis
on the primacy of the subject, he formulated a critique of idealism in
the light of specific materialist insights. His aim was to pave the way for
the thesis of the primacy of the object, a thesis he defended in a variety
of ways. As opposed to identity philosophy, with its separation of sub-
ject and object, Adorno emphasized the tension between the universal
and the particular, a tension which in Adorno’s view should not be
resolved in favour of the universal. In order to escape the reductiveness
of purely conceptual understanding, the abstract nature of classification,
he appealed to ‘the cognitive utopia’ that consisted in ‘using concepts
to open up the non-conceptual, without making it their equal.’^134 For
whatever lacks a concept he introduced the term ‘non-identity’.^135
He did not think of non-identity as a superior alternative to identificatory
thought, but as a corrective to a conceptualizing procedure. When philo-
sophy surrenders the autarky of the concept, ‘it strips the blindfold
from our eyes’.^136 It then realizes that ‘in truth the subject is never quite
the subject, and the object never quite the object.’^137
In part III Adorno tested his own principles on three models: the
philosophies of Kant and Hegel and also metaphysics. Thus hediscussed
the question of free will in relation to the idea of morality as this was
elaborated in Kant’s theory of morality. Adorno made freedomdepend-
ent upon a future world order in which ‘human beings would no longer
need to be evil. Evil, therefore, is the world’s own unfreedom.Whatever
evil is done comes from the world.’^138 As opposed to an idea of free
will based on the principium individuationis, Adorno formulated his
criticism of ‘the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’,^139 that is to say, of
the privileging of the subject that posits its individual self-preservation
as an absolute.