What the Concept Forgets: Nietzsche, Adorno, and the Problem of Non-Identity
We recognize different leaves as leaves because we overlook what distinguishes one from another. An oak leaf, a maple leaf, and a palm leaf differ in shape, texture, size, colour, and structure, yet the word leaf allows us to treat them as instances of a common kind. Conceptual thought makes this recognition possible by setting aside differences that would otherwise prevent us from grouping individual things together. The operation is so familiar that its selective character easily disappears from view. What happens to the differences that the concept leaves aside?
Friedrich Nietzsche addresses this question in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” by examining how words and concepts come into being. A word, he argues, does not provide a transparent expression of the thing to which it refers. Its origin already involves a series of transformations: a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image, and the image is then reproduced in a sound. At each stage, something is translated from one domain into another. The resulting word therefore does not reproduce the original experience or disclose the essence of the object. It establishes a relation that has already passed through several transformations.
A concept ceases to serve as a reminder of a unique experience when it can instead be applied to countless cases that are only more or less similar. Nietzsche describes this process as the “equation of unequal things.” The concept leaf becomes possible because individual leaves can be treated as sufficiently alike for their differences to be disregarded. What permits the concept to function across many cases is precisely what separates it from each particular case.
Nietzsche's point is not simply that concepts are false. Their usefulness is inseparable from the abstraction that makes them possible. Without general terms, thought would have no stable means of comparing different cases or recognizing them as belonging to a common kind. The problem begins when the operation of abstraction becomes invisible and the resulting identity is mistaken for something found in the things themselves.
The example of the leaf therefore exposes a tension within conceptual thought itself. The concept enables us to recognize what different things have in common, yet it does so by overlooking what makes each of them different. The concept makes recognition possible by forgetting difference.
That formulation, however, leaves an important question unanswered. What exactly does it mean for conceptual thought to “forget” the differences it has set aside? Nietzsche's answer requires us to look more closely at the passage from metaphor to concept.
2. When Metaphor Becomes Concept
Nietzsche's argument becomes more precise when we follow the sequence through which a linguistic designation acquires the appearance of conceptual truth. The initial difficulty concerns the relation between a word and the thing it names. If a word were an adequate expression of an object, different languages should presumably converge upon the same designations. Their diversity instead suggests that linguistic naming involves selections and transformations rather than a direct correspondence with things in themselves. The creator of language, Nietzsche says, grasps relations between things and human beings through “the boldest metaphors.” Language does not begin with an essence waiting to be accurately named; it begins with a transfer from one sphere into another.
This is why Nietzsche describes the movement from nerve stimulus to image, and from image to sound, as a succession of metaphors. The term is important because metaphor here does more than describe a figure of speech. It names an operation in which something is carried across a boundary between different orders. The sound is not contained in the original stimulus, nor is the image simply a visual version of it. Each translation produces a new form in a different sphere. What we eventually call language is therefore already removed from whatever occasioned it.
Concept formation adds a further transformation. A particular experience gives rise to a word, but the word becomes a concept when it can be detached from that unique occasion and applied to other cases. The concept leaf does not preserve the distinctive features of the leaf from which the designation might have arisen. It becomes usable precisely because those features no longer determine its application. This is why Nietzsche describes conceptual formation as an equation of unequal things: things that are never actually identical are treated as equivalent for a particular purpose.
The decisive step occurs when this operation is forgotten. Once the differences have been set aside, we can begin to imagine that the common identity expressed by the concept corresponds to something existing independently in nature. Nietzsche's fictitious “leaf” that serves as the original model for all individual leaves illustrates this movement from abstraction to reification. The concept produced by overlooking differences is transformed into an imagined entity that supposedly explains them. The leaf becomes the cause of the leaves, just as “honesty” can be imagined as an essential quality underlying a series of actions that we have grouped together as honest.
The genealogy is therefore more subtle than the claim that concepts are false. Nietzsche is tracing how a useful linguistic operation can acquire the appearance of access to an underlying essence. What begins as a metaphorical transfer becomes a designation; the designation is generalized across unequal cases; and what has been generalized through the omission of differences is then treated as though it existed independently of that operation. Nietzsche's target is not conceptual thought as such, but the forgetting of the operation through which conceptual identity is produced.
This also explains why his argument does not require us to replace concepts with some supposedly pure access to things themselves. Nietzsche refuses to make a dogmatic claim about what the essence of things might be. His point is instead that our conceptual distinctions cannot simply be projected back onto reality as though they had been discovered there in their finished form. A concept bears the history of its own formation, even when that history has been forgotten.
Nietzsche thus leaves us with a problem that extends beyond the origin of particular concepts. Once a thing has been identified through a general determination, what happens to the object under that identity? The question shifts from how conceptual identity is produced to what happens to the object under that identity. It is at this point that Adorno's philosophy enters the argument.
3. The Concept and the Non-Identical
Adorno takes up this problem in a different register. His concern is not primarily the genealogy of linguistic designation but the relation between conceptual determination and the object determined by it. Once an individual is subsumed under a concept, it becomes intelligible as an instance of a general category. Yet the object does not become identical with the determination through which thought has identified it.
This is the problem Adorno names Nichtidentität, or non-identity. An individual tree can be identified as a tree without being reducible to the properties that make the concept tree applicable to it. Its particular form, history, location, material condition, and countless other features do not cease to exist simply because they are irrelevant to the classification. The object exceeds the determination under which thought has brought it.
Adorno gives this problem a more general formulation in Negative Dialectics: “Objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.” The remainder should not be understood as some mysterious substance existing beyond thought and waiting to be grasped by a different faculty. It refers to what a determination does not contain because conceptualization selects certain features as relevant to the identity in question. The object is therefore not exhausted by the predicates through which thought identifies it.
This changes the problem that Nietzsche leaves us. Nietzsche asks how conceptual identity is produced through the equation of unequal things. Adorno asks what follows once that identity has been established. The issue is no longer the origin of abstraction but the temptation to treat the resulting determination as the measure of the object itself.
Non-identity therefore does not simply oppose the universal to the particular. The particular becomes intelligible through the universal, while the universal never completely captures the particular. The two belong to the same act of cognition without coinciding. Conceptual identification is consequently neither an arbitrary imposition nor a complete possession of its object.
This point also prevents non-identity from becoming a celebration of difference for its own sake. Adorno is not proposing that thought should abandon generality and return to an allegedly pure particularity. The recognition that a concept does not exhaust its object already depends upon conceptual thought. What matters is the ability to distinguish between the determination an object receives and the object itself.
Adorno thus shifts the problem from the formation of conceptual identity to the limits of conceptual identification. Nietzsche exposes the forgetting through which an abstraction can come to appear natural; Adorno shows why even a necessary determination must remain open to what it cannot contain. The concept does not become illegitimate because it leaves something out. The philosophical problem arises when its partiality is forgotten.
The question now changes accordingly. If conceptual determination is unavoidable, but no determination is exhaustive, how can thought use concepts without mistaking conceptual identity for the identity of the object?
4. Why We Cannot Abandon the Concept
The question cannot be answered by abandoning conceptual thought. To recognize an object, distinguish it from another, compare different cases, establish relations among them, or communicate a determination requires some form of generalization. Even the claim that an object exceeds its concept is itself conceptual. There is no standpoint outside conceptual mediation from which thought could simply recover the particular in an unprocessed form.
Adorno's importance here lies in what follows from accepting this constraint. His criticism does not call for fewer concepts or for a vocabulary that somehow approaches objects without mediation. It calls for a different relation to conceptual determination. A concept must identify something as something, but its adequacy for that act does not authorize thought to treat the determination as exhaustive.
This is the task of negative dialectics. Its “negative” character does not mean that philosophy should reject positive claims or remain suspended in uncertainty. It refers to a way of thinking that keeps determinate concepts exposed to what they fail to settle. Rather than moving toward a final synthesis in which the tension between concept and object disappears, thought follows the contradiction between the determination it has reached and what that determination cannot contain.
Negative dialectics therefore does not replace conceptual determination with indeterminacy. It turns the limits of determination into an ongoing task for thought. A concept can be precise, useful, and indispensable while remaining incomplete. Philosophy must resist the temptation to convert that incompleteness into a defect that could be eliminated by finding a final, more comprehensive category.
This is also why the constellation becomes relevant to Adorno's method. If no single concept can exhaust its object, thought can place concepts in configurations in which their relations disclose aspects that none could make fully visible on its own. The aim is not to assemble enough concepts to achieve completeness, but to prevent any one determination from becoming self-sufficient.
The resulting discipline is therefore more demanding than simply acknowledging that concepts have limits. Thought must determine without treating determination as possession. It must use the universal while remaining responsive to the particular, and it must allow the object to exert pressure on the categories through which it is understood.
The concept is thus not the obstacle philosophy must overcome. It is the medium within which the problem becomes visible. Once thought recognizes the necessity of conceptual determination without granting it final authority, philosophy can remain answerable to what its own categories do not settle.
5. What the Concept Forgets
Nietzsche and Adorno approach the concept from different points in the same problem. Nietzsche traces the process by which conceptual identity becomes possible: unequal things are treated as equivalent, differences are set aside, and the resulting abstraction can eventually appear to describe an identity belonging to things themselves. Adorno begins at the other end. Once an object has been identified through a concept, what prevents that determination from becoming the measure of the object itself?
The answer lies in the relation between identity and non-identity. Thought requires identities in order to identify anything at all, yet what it identifies never coincides completely with the identity through which it has become intelligible. The limitation is therefore not an accidental weakness of particular concepts. It belongs to conceptual determination as such.
This gives the two thinkers' approaches a productive sequence. Nietzsche makes us suspicious of the apparent naturalness of conceptual identities by revealing the operations through which they are produced. Adorno turns that insight into a demand internal to thought itself. Once a determination has been made, thought must remain attentive to what the determination does not settle. Nietzsche asks us to remember the forgotten act behind the concept; Adorno asks us to remain responsive to the object that exceeds the identity established by that act.
The difference matters. Nietzsche's analysis of metaphor and conceptual formation reveals why conceptual identity can acquire an appearance of natural necessity, but it does not by itself establish a philosophical practice for thinking after that appearance has been exposed. Adorno's negative dialectics provides such a practice without claiming to overcome the limits of conceptual thought. It keeps determination open rather than allowing it to become the last word.
Perhaps the task of philosophy is therefore neither to escape concepts nor to surrender to them, but to remember what conceptual thought necessarily leaves aside. Such remembrance does not restore an original access to things before language or thought. It changes how thought inhabits its own determinations, keeping them open to the object rather than allowing them to close the inquiry.
A concept allows us to recognize a tree. Philosophy begins when we remember that the tree is more than the identity through which we recognize it.
References
Adorno, T. W. (2007). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1966)
Nietzsche, F. (1979). On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense. In D. Breazeale (Ed. & Trans.), Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870s (pp. 79–91). Humanities Press. (Original work published 1873)
Comments
Post a Comment