IDENTITY UNDER SUSPICION: FORGETTING HEGEL’S DISCOURSE

Abstract

The current situation in philosophy testifies to the dominance of such a semantic field, which is covered by the concepts of distinction, difference, and a certain distrust, even skeptical suspicion of the idea of identity. The procedure of distinction is recognized as determining the very possibility of thinking, moreover, such an important subject of philosophical thought as being, which explicitly or implicitly determines the specificity of philosophical discourse from antiquity to the present day, was subject to grasping through the distinction of identical and different, one and numerical/plural, which constituted the further understanding of essence and existence, phenomenon and concept. Therefore, the task is set – by Heidegger’s principle of Kehre based on Hegel’s philosophy to reveal the a priori problematicity of identity, its unstable equilibrium of a mediated relationship with itself, as a result of which mediation, connection, synthesis become available, which do not allow us to see identity as emptiness, indistinguishable monotony. To theoretically correctly and adequately reveal the essence of the concept of “identity”, it must be considered at the categorical level itself, without borrowing the vision of everyday consciousness, since here one does not rise to the level of the concept itself, being content with ordinary representations. At the everyday, empirical, or rather, empiricist level, one does not have to talk about “understanding” in the proper sense of the word. The category of identity is a category of the sphere of essence itself. Every “something” is identical to itself, coincides with itself – and at the same time this “something” is not identical to itself, different from itself: but this does not mean that here this “something” is identical to itself, and there and then – different from itself, from its previous state, – we will certainly fall into the trap of Zeno’s aporias. To avoid them, one must think purely dialectically: every “something” at every moment is identical and different from itself. And further, since it is precisely about the essence, and not simply about the “something” given in observation, the identity of identity and difference means that each “something” in its essence is greater than itself, since in the composition of a certain integrity it contains both the integrity itself and other “somethings”. The relationship to others is necessarily included in the essence of each “something”; therefore, in its essence, each “something” is the identity of the different and the difference of the identity.