What Do We Mean by Form? Nietzsche, Adorno, and the History of a Concept
“Das Übersehen des Individuellen und Wirklichen giebt uns den Begriff, wie es uns auch die Form giebt” (“Overlooking what is individual and actual gives us the concept, just as it gives us form”; my translation). In On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1873, §1), Nietzsche invites us to consider a difficulty concealed by our familiar use of the word form. What allows us to recognize something under a general category may depend on overlooking the differences that distinguish particular things from one another. Form and concept thus become connected through an operation of selection whose role we may fail to recognize.
We use the word form in familiar settings: to describe a poem’s arrangement, the construction of a sentence, or the shape of an argument. We often distinguish form from content, using the first term to describe how something is organized or presented and the second to refer to what is expressed. The distinction appears straightforward until we ask how independent its terms really are. Does a work possess a content before its form arranges it, or do the selection and relation of its elements help determine what that content becomes? In an argument, for instance, claims acquire force through the sequence and connections in which they appear. The distinction may therefore describe a relationship whose terms already depend on one another.
Nietzsche’s formulation also raises a broader question about concepts. Using a concept fluently does not mean that we have examined the assumptions built into it. We may rely on a familiar category without considering what its use presupposes. What allows a concept to seem self-evident, and what might we discover by investigating how it acquired its apparent clarity?
2. When History Disappears: Nietzsche on Truth and Metaphor
“Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.” In “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche examines how concepts come to seem stable descriptions of the world. His formulation directs attention to an operation that ordinary recognition tends to conceal: to identify different things under a shared designation, we must set aside some of their differences. The category makes recognition possible by treating particulars as equivalent in certain respects, even though they remain different in others.
To call different leaves leaf, for example, is to overlook their individual characteristics and retain features that allow them to be grouped together. This abstraction makes recognition and communication possible, but it can also encourage us to regard the resulting category as expressing an essential feature of things themselves. An operation of selection begins to appear as the discovery of an order that exists independently of the operation through which we identify it.
Nietzsche gives this process a temporal dimension in his well-known formulation: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (Nietzsche, 1873/1999, p. 146). The word forgotten directs attention to how the human activity involved in forming our descriptions becomes difficult to recognize. Social convention reinforces this process. Nietzsche describes truths as human constructions that, through prolonged use, come to seem “fixed, canonical, and binding” (Nietzsche, 1873/1999, p. 146). Shared practices sustain customary designations, while forgetting their formation allows them to acquire the appearance of necessity. His argument does not simply dismiss truth as falsehood; it investigates how our ways of describing the world gain authority while concealing the processes through which they developed.
This account gives us a way to approach the concept of form: distinctions that seem natural may embody a history of selection and stabilization that is no longer visible. Nietzsche’s later self-criticism brings the problem closer to philosophical practice by asking what happens when inherited concepts shape a thinker’s own attempt to express something new.
3. When Inherited Forms Become a Problem
In his 1886 “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” added to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche regrets not having allowed himself “an individual language” for his individual insights and ventures in thought. Looking back, he recognizes that he had tried to express unfamiliar valuations through Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulas. These inherited formulations provided intellectual resources, yet their established associations also shaped what he could express through them. Nietzsche even acknowledges that he had obscured his Dionysian insights through Schopenhauerian formulas (Nietzsche, 1886/1999, §6).
His dissatisfaction concerns the book’s style as well as its conceptual vocabulary. In §3, he remarks that the work “should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not spoken!” (Nietzsche, 1886/1999). The image of singing expresses a mismatch between what the book sought to articulate and the form in which its argument had developed. Nietzsche’s retrospective judgment does not establish that a different style would necessarily have resolved the problem. It does, however, make the relationship between philosophical insight and its mode of expression part of the problem itself.
This predicament leaves no straightforward route to a language entirely outside inherited traditions. Thought has to work with available resources while finding ways to redirect them. Nietzsche’s writing employs aphorisms, irony, metaphor, and shifts of perspective, among other devices that can disrupt established expectations and alter how philosophical claims are encountered. These strategies should not all be treated as deliberate solutions to the difficulties identified in 1886. They nevertheless illustrate how philosophical expression can work upon the language available to it, while conceptual innovation can emerge through new relationships among familiar terms.
Nietzsche’s self-criticism thus raises a practical question: can the way a thought is expressed contribute to its capacity to challenge established ways of thinking? Marcuse’s account of Adorno brings this problem into a social and political context.
4. Adorno: Form as Critical Practice
Why would a philosophy concerned with social criticism make itself so difficult to read? Bryan Magee raised this question with Herbert Marcuse in their conversation about the Frankfurt School, arguing that the difficulty of Adorno’s writing could place a barrier between his ideas and their readers. Marcuse partly accepted the criticism, admitting that there were things in Adorno he did not understand, but offered a justification. Ordinary language and prose, he argued, had become permeated by the established social order and its mechanisms of control (Magee, 1977–1978).
Marcuse suggested that a rupture with conformity might therefore have to appear in the means of expression themselves, “in the syntax, in the grammar, in the vocabulary.” He left open whether this strategy was acceptable and warned against the premature popularization of complex problems. His account raises a question about philosophical writing: when established conventions of expression carry assumptions that critical thought needs to examine, can departing from those conventions contribute to criticism? The answer cannot be inferred from difficulty alone; it depends on what a particular way of writing enables us to understand.
Adorno’s treatment of the relationship between concepts and their objects offers a related perspective. In Negative Dialectics, he challenges the assumption that conceptual identification can provide a complete account of what it identifies. A concept makes something intelligible by bringing it under a general determination, while potentially overlooking features that do not fit that determination. Adorno writes that “Solely constellations represent, from without, what the concept has cut away from within” (Adorno, 1973, p. 162). A constellation brings concepts into a relationship organized around the object they seek to understand. Their arrangement can illuminate aspects that an isolated determination leaves aside, allowing thought to pursue the object without assuming that one concept can exhaust it.
Adorno’s aesthetics develops a related problem through artistic form. In Aesthetic Theory, he describes art as “the sedimented history of human misery” (Adorno, 1997, p. 5), indicating how historical experience can become embedded in artistic organization. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame provides a concrete example. Its enclosed space, recurring routines, and fractured exchanges organize an experience in which communication and action persist despite their diminishing capacity to sustain shared meaning. In “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Adorno examines the play’s formal construction in relation to the historical disintegration of meaning. Its significance emerges through the organization of its elements, so its content cannot be extracted as a separate message without losing something essential to the experience it produces (Adorno, 1982).
These examples point to different dimensions of critical practice: the disruption of established modes of expression, the reorganization of conceptual relationships, and the artistic construction of experience. None becomes critical merely by departing from convention; its significance depends on what that departure makes possible.
5. Transforming Forms from Within
Nietzsche’s self-criticism and Marcuse’s interpretation of Adorno approach a common difficulty without offering the same diagnosis. Nietzsche examines the mismatch between his early intuitions and the philosophical formulas through which he tried to express them; Marcuse interprets Adorno’s difficult prose in relation to the social conditions that shape ordinary language. Their concerns differ, yet both make the means of expression part of the philosophical problem rather than treating them as neutral vehicles for ideas.
The comparison suggests that transformation can occur within the resources already available to thought. Familiar concepts can acquire new uses, established relationships can be reorganized, and different modes of expression can alter the expectations through which an argument is received. Artistic practice can likewise transform inherited materials by placing them in relationships that change their significance. These operations do not require a standpoint entirely outside language or history, and novelty alone does not establish their critical value. A new style can become manneristic, a once-productive concept can harden into a formula, and an experiment can turn into a convention.
The possibility of transformation therefore depends on continued scrutiny of its results. A formulation may disclose something obscured by familiar categories, yet its success can make it customary enough that its own assumptions become difficult to see. Critical inquiry must remain open to the possibility that what once enabled a new understanding will eventually require revision. This does not mean avoiding conclusions or treating every interpretation as equally valid. It means examining what a formulation illuminates, what it leaves aside, and whether it remains adequate to the object under consideration.
6. Learning to Ask What Form Means
The distinction between form and content remains useful, but it cannot be taken as self-explanatory. To understand a particular work or expression, we must examine how its elements are organized, which relationships this arrangement brings into focus, and how that organization helps constitute what we recognize as its content. The same inquiry applies to concepts, whose apparent clarity can conceal the history of their formation and use.
Nietzsche’s self-criticism and Adorno’s philosophical and aesthetic practice show why inherited forms deserve examination and how their transformation can become part of critical thought. Asking what form means therefore involves investigating the relations through which something becomes intelligible, as well as the possibilities and limitations those relations entail. A definition may guide this inquiry, but it cannot replace it. The question is not simply what form is, but what a particular form enables us to understand—and what might remain unrecognized as long as we take it for granted.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1966)
Adorno, T. W. (1982). Trying to understand Endgame. New German Critique, 26, 119–150.
Adorno, T. W. (1997). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.; G. Adorno & R. Tiedemann, Eds.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1970)
Magee, B. (Interviewer). (1977–1978). Herbert Marcuse [Interview]. In Men of Ideas. BBC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5yctwqSBvo
Nietzsche, F. (1999a). An attempt at self-criticism (R. Speirs, Trans.). In R. Geuss & R. Speirs (Eds.), The birth of tragedy and other writings (pp. 3–12). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1886)
Nietzsche, F. (1999b). On truth and lying in a non-moral sense (R. Speirs, Trans.). In R. Geuss & R. Speirs (Eds.), The birth of tragedy and other writings (pp. 139–153). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1873)
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