Thought, Language, and Reality: Kant and Adorno on the Limits of Knowledge
When we call a particular animal a dog, we identify it by bringing what we perceive under a general concept. This enables us to recognize similarities among different animals, distinguish them from other kinds of living beings, and communicate what we know about them. Concepts make experience intelligible by allowing us to organize what we encounter according to shared characteristics.
Yet the concept dog does not tell us everything about the specific animal before us. Its history, behaviour, physical condition, and responses to its surroundings may require further observation and more precise descriptions. The general concept allows us to identify the animal, while understanding its particular characteristics calls for a more differentiated account. How these two aspects of knowledge are related raises a philosophical problem: how do concepts enable us to know objects, and what are the limits of the understanding they provide?
Immanuel Kant investigates the conditions that make objective knowledge possible, examining how our cognitive capacities contribute to the constitution of experience and how concepts allow us to think what is given through the senses. Theodor W. Adorno approaches the problem from a different direction. While Kant focuses on the subject's contribution to making objects intelligible, Adorno asks how thought can acknowledge what objects are beyond the determinations through which we identify them. His emphasis on the priority of the object challenges the assumption that the subject's role in constituting experience gives it the authority to determine its objects completely. Their disagreement thus concerns not only the limits of conceptual knowledge but also the relation between consciousness and a reality that resists being reduced to the conditions under which we understand it, recalling the longstanding philosophical dispute between idealism and materialism.
This problem also raises a question about language. Concepts can be expressed in words, and the meanings associated with those words affect how we describe and communicate our experience. Does language simply convey knowledge that thought has already acquired, or does it participate in the formation and development of what we can think? Examining Kant and Adorno will allow us to explore this question while distinguishing their respective approaches to knowledge.
2. Kant: What Makes Objective Knowledge Possible?
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason investigates the conditions under which human beings can acquire objective knowledge. Cognition requires the cooperation of two distinct capacities: sensibility, through which objects are given to us, and understanding, through which they are thought by means of concepts. As Kant famously writes, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (1781/1787, A51/B75). Each capacity performs a function that the other cannot fulfil on its own.
In Kant’s technical vocabulary, an intuition is an immediate representation through which an object is given, rather than a hunch or an inexplicable feeling. A concept, by contrast, enables us to think objects through general determinations. Kant’s distinction concerns two complementary functions of cognition, not two kinds of words or expressions.
He further distinguishes between empirical concepts, acquired through experience, and pure concepts of the understanding, which he calls categories. Here, pure is a technical term: the categories do not derive from experience. The term does not mean morally good, ethically superior, or free from some undesirable influence. Substance, causality, and unity are examples of pure concepts, whereas dog and tree are empirical concepts whose content is acquired through experience.
This distinction concerns the origin of concepts and their role in cognition. Although the categories do not originate in experience, their application to objects of possible experience requires a relation to sensible intuition. Kant is therefore concerned with more than how we learn to classify things; he seeks to explain what makes objective judgments about them possible.
Consider causality. We can observe that one event follows another, but temporal succession alone does not establish that the first event caused the second. The category of causality enables us to think a succession as governed by a rule, making possible an objective judgment about the relation between events rather than merely registering the order in which we perceive them.
Kant addresses the application of pure concepts to sensible appearances in his account of transcendental schematism. Because a category such as substance is too abstract to correspond directly to a particular sensible representation, its application requires a schema: a rule that mediates between the pure concept and sensible intuition through determinations of time. The schema of substance, for example, concerns the permanence of the real in time (Kant, 1781/1787, A144/B183).
Schematism thus clarifies the difference between the origin of a concept and its application in knowledge. A category can be independent of experience in its origin while requiring sensible conditions to apply to objects of experience. Kant’s account explains how conceptual and sensible elements cooperate in objective cognition, but it does not give language a comparable role in this explanation. Whether linguistic expression remains external to this account, or whether Kant’s wider writings suggest a more complex relationship, is the issue to be examined next.
3. Where Is Language in Kant?
Language does not occupy a central place in the architecture of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant examines the functions of intuition and understanding, the origin and application of the categories, and the limits of theoretical knowledge, but he does not develop a systematic theory of language comparable in scope to his account of cognition. This difference in emphasis raises the question of whether language simply expresses thoughts already formed or also participates in the development of human understanding.
Michael N. Forster addresses this issue in “Kant’s Philosophy of Language?” (2012). He argues that Kant’s position changes over the course of his intellectual development. According to Forster, the period of the three Critiques is characterized by a relatively dualistic account of the relation between thought and language, whereas writings from around 1790 onward show a movement towards recognizing a more essential dependence of thought and concepts on language. Forster attributes this development partly to Kant’s changing response to ideas associated with Hamann and Herder.
Forster’s interpretation provides a useful framework for examining Kant’s texts, although it remains an interpretive thesis rather than an uncontested account of his development. The relative absence of language from the central argument of the first Critique does not establish that Kant regarded linguistic questions as philosophically unimportant. Nor does his later consideration of language necessarily mean that he fully integrated linguistic mediation into his transcendental philosophy.
Other writings complicate any simple picture of Kant as treating language exclusively as an external instrument. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), he discusses aesthetic ideas, symbolic presentation, and the communicability of judgments of taste. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) considers language within a broader account of human capacities and practices. These discussions provide material for investigating the relation between cognition and expression, even though they do not, by themselves, constitute a unified theory of linguistic mediation.
The scholarly debate has developed through several important collections. The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought, edited by Frank Schalow and Richard Velkley (2014), examines language in relation to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, practical philosophy, aesthetics, and intellectual legacy. Schalow’s chapter on the language of time in transcendental schematism explores a possible intersection between linguistic concerns and Kant’s account of cognition. More recently, Kant on Language, edited by Luigi Filieri and Konstantin Pollok (2025), has extended this inquiry through studies of the linguistic implications of Kant’s thought and their historical and philosophical consequences.
These studies invite us to distinguish between the role Kant explicitly assigns to language and the role that later interpreters find implicit in his account of cognition. The first question can be addressed through his texts; the second requires a more interpretive argument about the assumptions and implications of his philosophy.
Kant's writings leave open the question of how language relates to the conditions of cognition he identifies. Adorno approaches the broader problem of knowledge from a different starting point, asking whether the concepts through which thought makes objects intelligible can do justice to what those objects are. His critique of conceptual identification provides the basis for examining both the limits of knowledge and the role language can play in addressing them.
4. Adorno: The Object Exceeds the Concept
Adorno’s criticism begins with the necessity of conceptual identification while questioning the assumption that identifying something amounts to fully understanding it. Concepts allow us to recognize objects and establish relations among them, but the determinations through which we classify something cannot be assumed to exhaust what that object is. Adorno calls attention to the nonidentity between concept and object: the discrepancy between an object and the conceptual determination through which thought identifies it (Adorno, 1973).
This criticism is closely connected to what Adorno calls the priority of the object. Although objects become intelligible through thought, their reality cannot be reduced to the determinations through which the subject understands them. Adorno’s materialism challenges the idealist tendency to grant constitutive priority to consciousness, emphasizing instead that the subject depends on an objective reality that it does not wholly determine (Adorno, 1973, pp. 183–197). The priority of the object therefore qualifies the subject’s role in cognition without implying that objects can be known independently of conceptual mediation.
The consequences of this discrepancy extend beyond epistemology into social life. People can be classified according to their occupations, economic positions, or institutional roles. Such categories make certain aspects of social life intelligible, yet they can also obscure differences among individuals and conceal the historical conditions that have shaped their positions. Adorno connects this tendency to a social order in which the principle of exchange makes qualitatively different things commensurable. Treating distinct objects as equivalent can thus reproduce, at the level of thought, a form of abstraction that also operates in social relations.
Nonidentity does not designate a mysterious reality forever inaccessible to thought, nor does it imply that concepts are incapable of conveying truth. Adorno’s concern is that thought mistakes the success of identification for the achievement of complete knowledge. The particular object may disclose contradictions or features that the concepts applied to it fail to accommodate. Recognizing these limitations requires thought to reconsider its own determinations rather than claim access to the object outside all conceptual mediation.
Negative dialectics develops this criticism by examining contradictions within established ways of understanding something. When a concept fails to account adequately for its object, philosophical inquiry can expose the discrepancy and identify the limits of the original account. Adorno retains the resources of rational argument while challenging the assumption that conceptual unity guarantees complete knowledge. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes, he does not reject the necessity of identification or claim direct access to the nonidentical; the critique of identification must proceed from within conceptual thought.
The constellation offers one method for pursuing this task. Instead of subordinating an object to a single dominant definition, thought brings several concepts into relation around the particular subject matter. Their configuration can disclose historical and social dimensions that an isolated determination might leave obscure. The aim is not to replace one exhaustive definition with a collection of definitions, but to allow relations among concepts to illuminate aspects of the object that no single determination adequately expresses.
This concern with how concepts are arranged leads to a further question about philosophical expression. If the relations among concepts help make an object more intelligible, the way philosophical thought is expressed becomes part of its critical work. This brings us to Adorno’s account of language.
5. Adorno: Language Between Identification and Expression
Adorno’s Theses on the Language of the Philosopher, drafted in the early 1930s and published posthumously, addresses the relation between linguistic form, philosophical content, and historical experience. He rejects approaches that treat words as arbitrary instruments for representing an independently given world, but also criticizes philosophical vocabularies that seek an abstract, privileged relation to Being while neglecting the concrete historical relations in which words acquire meaning. Against both positions, he insists that language and its subject matter cannot be cleanly separated. As he writes, “history and truth meet in the word” (Adorno, 2007, pp. 35–36).
The claim concerns more than the changing meanings of individual words. Language bears the traces of the practices, conflicts, and experiences through which its meanings have developed. Its historical character affects what philosophical expression can disclose: established usages may restrict how a subject is understood, while the histories sedimented in words can also reveal tensions that those usages conceal.
Philip Hogh’s Communication and Expression: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language (2017) reconstructs these ideas as a coherent philosophical position. Hogh examines the historical character of language, the theory of the name, the nature of meaning, and communication, relating these topics to Adorno’s epistemology, social theory, and aesthetics. His study demonstrates how reflections scattered across different works can be understood as a substantial contribution to the philosophy of language, even though Adorno never consolidated them into a single treatise.
A central feature of this account is the tension between the communicative and expressive dimensions of language. Communication makes it possible to share meanings, describe objects, formulate judgments, and participate in common practices. Yet familiar linguistic conventions can encourage thought to reproduce established classifications. When the meanings of words become fixed within conventional ways of understanding, features of experience that do not fit those patterns may become difficult to articulate.
Expression opens a further dimension of linguistic meaning. Adorno associates it with the mimetic capacities of language, through which the particular character of an experience can become perceptible in the way something is presented, rather than solely through the information conveyed. Mimesis does not mean that words simply imitate objects or reproduce sensations. It refers to a responsiveness to particular qualities that cannot be fully accounted for by abstract classification or conventional communication alone. Language’s expressive possibilities can therefore disclose aspects of experience that established conceptual usage tends to leave in the background (Adorno, 2007; Hogh, 2017).
Communication and expression are not independent forms of language between which we must choose. Adorno seeks to understand their tension and interdependence. He does not propose abandoning rational argument in favour of personal expression, nor does he treat poetic language as providing unmediated access to reality. Philosophical thought must work through concepts, while its presentation can make the relations and tensions among them more responsive to the subject matter.
This is why Adorno assigns importance to the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. In Negative Dialectics, he writes that “in dialectics … the rhetorical element is on the side of content” (Adorno, 1973, p. 41). Presentation is therefore more than an ornamental addition to an argument whose meaning is already complete. The arrangement of concepts and the movement of philosophical prose can participate in articulating the subject matter, allowing relations or tensions to become apparent that a succession of isolated propositions might fail to convey.
The constellation illustrates how this concern with presentation enters philosophical method. Its force depends on how concepts are arranged around an object, and on whether their relations make aspects of the subject matter visible that ordinary classifications obscure. The linguistic form of philosophy can thus participate in its critique of established meanings without claiming to overcome conceptual mediation altogether.
Adorno’s philosophy of language belongs to his broader account of knowledge rather than constituting an autonomous theory of linguistic structures. Language matters because its historical meanings, communicative conventions, and expressive possibilities shape how thought relates to its object. This perspective provides a basis for comparing Adorno with Kant while keeping their different philosophical priorities in view.
6. From Kant to Adorno and Beyond
Kant and Adorno approach the relation between thought and its object through different but related problems. Kant investigates the conditions under which concepts can be applied to sensible objects and make objective experience possible. Adorno retains the problem of mediation while examining how conceptual determination can become reductive when thought treats its identifications as exhaustive. His criticism asks how knowledge can remain attentive to what its own concepts leave unresolved.
Their accounts of language reflect this difference in emphasis. Kant does not give language the systematic role assigned to intuition, understanding, and the categories, although his later writings and the scholarship devoted to them complicate the view that he treats it merely as an external instrument. Adorno gives language a more explicit philosophical significance because its historical and social character forms part of his examination of knowledge. Its conventional uses may reinforce established identifications, while its expressive possibilities can help articulate features of experience that those identifications fail to accommodate.
Adorno’s debt to Kant is therefore best understood as the inheritance and transformation of a problem, rather than as a straightforward correction of Kant’s alleged neglect of language. Kant explains the conditions under which objective knowledge is possible; Adorno also investigates the historical and conceptual limitations that affect how objects become intelligible. His position does not simply add a theory of language to Kant’s critical philosophy. It connects linguistic expression to a broader critique of rationality, society, and the tendency to mistake conceptual identification for complete knowledge.
Other twentieth-century approaches take the question in different directions. Saussure examines how linguistic value emerges through differential relations within a system of signs. Derrida questions inherited philosophical oppositions by examining the operations of signification, while Barthes investigates the cultural processes through which signs acquire social meanings. Foucault explores the historical conditions under which discourses organize knowledge and determine what can be said or treated as true. These thinkers do not constitute a single tradition, and their differences will require separate consideration.
Their work nevertheless opens a further question: to what extent does language mediate our understanding of a reality that exceeds it, and to what extent do linguistic systems and discursive practices shape what can become intelligible to us in the first place? Kant and Adorno provide distinct starting points for this inquiry. Their differences prepare the way for a subsequent examination of the linguistic turn and poststructuralism, where the relation between language, thought, and reality becomes an increasingly explicit object of philosophical investigation.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1966)
Adorno, T. W. (2007). Theses on the language of the philosopher. In D. Burke, C. J. Campbell, K. Kiloh, M. Palamarek, & J. Short (Eds.), Adorno and the need in thinking: New critical essays (pp. 35–40). University of Toronto Press.
Filieri, L., & Pollok, K. (Eds.). (2025). Kant on language. Cambridge University Press.
Forster, M. N. (2012). Kant’s philosophy of language? Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 74(3), 485–511.
Hogh, P. (2017). Communication and expression: Adorno’s philosophy of language (A. Hofstätter, Trans.). Rowman & Littlefield International.
Kant, I. (1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original works published 1781 and 1787)
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer, Ed.; P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790)
Kant, I. (2006). Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (R. B. Louden, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1798)
Schalow, F. (2014). The language of time in Kant’s transcendental schematism. In F. Schalow & R. Velkley (Eds.), The linguistic dimension of Kant’s thought: Historical and critical essays (pp. 53–69). Northwestern University Press.
Schalow, F., & Velkley, R. (Eds.). (2014). The linguistic dimension of Kant’s thought: Historical and critical essays. Northwestern University Press.
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