When Concepts Fall Short: Adorno, Saussure, and the Limits of Definition
When reading philosophy, we often encounter words whose meanings seem perfectly familiar. We know what freedom, reason, nature, or will means in ordinary conversation, and this familiarity can make a philosophical text appear more accessible than it actually is. Yet recognising a word does not necessarily mean understanding the concept an author develops through it. A familiar term may acquire a more specialised significance or perform a role that cannot be grasped from its everyday use alone. The difficulty is easy to overlook because the word itself gives us the impression that we already know what is being discussed.
Consider the word will. In everyday language, it generally refers to a person's capacity to want something, make a decision, or act deliberately. Schopenhauer's Wille, however, occupies a much broader place in his philosophy. It does not designate simply an individual's psychological faculty or the conscious intention behind an action. It names the inner essence of reality and plays a central role in the relationship between will and representation that structures his account of the world. Someone familiar with the ordinary meaning of will may therefore recognise the term throughout Schopenhauer's work while still missing the philosophical function it performs there.
Understanding a philosophical term consequently requires more than familiarity with its ordinary meaning. We need to ask how it has been used in philosophical discussions and what particular role it performs within an author's thought. These questions raise a difficulty for anyone approaching a philosophical text: how can we determine what a term means when its significance depends on the context in which it is used? This is the starting point for Adorno's lectures on philosophical terminology.
2. Adorno: Why Philosophical Problems Are Also Problems of Language
In 1962 and 1963, Theodor W. Adorno delivered a two-semester lecture course entitled Philosophische Terminologie, subsequently published in two volumes. Its purpose was to introduce students to philosophy by examining the language through which philosophical thinking takes shape. The lectures are therefore not intended as a dictionary or a catalogue of established definitions. Adorno explains his point of departure in a concise formulation: “Language is essential to philosophy; philosophical problems are largely problems of its language” (Adorno, 1973b, p. 7; my translation). The claim matters because philosophical language cannot be treated as a neutral instrument that merely conveys ideas already formed elsewhere. The terms and distinctions through which philosophers think are themselves implicated in the questions they investigate. Studying philosophical terminology is therefore part of examining how philosophical problems are formulated and developed.
This approach becomes clearer in Adorno's treatment of opposing positions such as idealism and realism, or rationalism and empiricism. These terms are often presented as labels identifying separate schools of thought, as though each could be understood by consulting a definition and listing its characteristic doctrines. Adorno is interested instead in the history of problems embedded in philosophical terminology, or Problemgeschichte. A philosophical position acquires its significance through the controversy in which it participates and the problem to which it responds. Idealism, for instance, cannot be understood simply by listing its claims about the subject or the conditions of knowledge; we must also consider the account of reality against which those claims are developed. Realism, in turn, takes on a particular significance through its response to such claims. Each position therefore carries traces of the questions and assumptions of the position it opposes. Their histories are intertwined through arguments, responses, and unresolved tensions.
The consequence for philosophical interpretation is that a definition, however accurate, can provide only a starting point. To understand a term, we must reconstruct the problem to which it responds and the debate within which its use becomes intelligible. Adorno thus makes the examination of terminology part of the work of philosophical thinking itself. But this raises a further question: how do the elements of a philosophical discussion acquire their significance in relation to one another? Saussure's account of linguistic value offers a particularly illuminating way of approaching this problem.
3. Saussure: Why a Concept Cannot Be Understood in Isolation
Ferdinand de Saussure's account of language provides a useful model for understanding the relational character of meaning. One of his best-known formulations is that “it is the point of view that creates the object” (Saussure, 1983, p. 8). In the context of his linguistic investigations, this remark draws attention to the way an object of study is delimited through the perspective from which it is examined: the questions guiding an investigation help determine which features become relevant and how its object is constituted as an object of knowledge. Saussure's approach leads him to examine language as a system of signs whose elements acquire their values through their relations with one another. A sign cannot be fully understood by considering it as an isolated label attached to an independently given thing.
The distinction between the English sheep and the French mouton helps illustrate this point. Both words can refer to the same animal, but their values within their respective languages are not identical. English distinguishes sheep, the animal, from mutton, its meat when considered as food, whereas French uses mouton for both. Each word therefore occupies a position within a distinct network of linguistic distinctions. Its value depends partly on the alternatives available in that language and on the boundaries separating it from other terms. A simple correspondence between a word and the thing it names tells us too little; we must also consider the distinctions that make the word meaningful within its linguistic system. Meaning, in this account, is differential (Saussure, 1983).
The relations that determine a sign's value are not limited to terms appearing together in a sentence. Saussure also discusses associative relations, which connect a term with others that are absent from the immediate utterance. His example enseignement (teaching) can evoke enseigner (to teach), renseignement (information), armement (armament), changement (change), and other words linked through their form or meaning. Such connections contribute to the value of a term even when the associated words are not spoken. A comparable question can be asked of philosophical concepts: which other concepts and distinctions help determine the role a particular term performs within an argument? The analogy must, however, remain carefully bounded. A language is a social system shared by its speakers, whereas a philosophical work develops a particular conceptual configuration. A philosophical system is not literally a langue, and its concepts do not function in precisely the same way as linguistic signs. Saussure nevertheless helps us recognise why interpreting a concept requires attention to the relations surrounding it, including those that remain implicit. We can now extend this insight to a further problem: what happens when a term enters a different philosophical configuration?
4. When a Concept Moves: Philosophical Systems and Conceptual Transfer
If the significance of a concept depends on its relations to other concepts, what happens when it enters a different philosophical system? Philosophical texts frequently inherit terms from earlier thinkers, and a word may retain its familiar form while acquiring a different function as the questions it addresses and the conceptual framework in which it operates change. Tracing the history of a term can therefore help us understand its philosophical use, but verbal continuity alone cannot establish that the same concept is at work.
The relation between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche offers an instructive example. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Wille names the underlying reality that manifests itself in the world of representation. It is central to his account of the relationship between appearance and the thing in itself, and its significance cannot be reduced to the ordinary meaning of willing or choosing. Nietzsche engages with a philosophical problem in which Schopenhauer is an important predecessor, and his own use of the language of will bears the marks of that engagement. Yet Nietzsche's treatment of the will, particularly in his later reflections on the will to power, must be understood through the questions and distinctions that organise his own philosophy. His engagement with Schopenhauer involves a transformation of the inherited problem, including a challenge to Schopenhauer's pessimistic account of the will to life. Nietzsche's position cannot simply be inferred from Schopenhauer's, even where the vocabulary and intellectual background overlap.
When a term enters another philosophical configuration, its inherited associations may be partly assimilated, may create tensions with the receiving framework, or may contribute to a reorganisation of its conceptual relations. These possibilities describe different ways in which conceptual transfer can take place. The interpreter must therefore examine what a term does within the argument in which it appears, while remaining attentive to the intellectual history it brings with it. The identity of a philosophical term does not guarantee the identity of the concept it expresses. This problem of transfer, however, is distinct from another question: what happens when the object a concept seeks to understand, or the conditions under which we know it, undergoes change?
5. When the Object Changes: Adorno, Non-Identity, and Conceptual Adequacy
Adorno's account of non-identity in Negative Dialectics provides a basis for considering the limits of conceptual adequacy. Concepts are indispensable to thought because they allow us to identify and determine objects, yet those objects are never fully exhausted by their conceptual determinations. Adorno expresses this point in a well-known passage: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” (Adorno, 1973a, p. 5). The remainder indicates what resists complete identification with the conceptual account. This does not make concepts useless or knowledge impossible. It means that identifying an object through a concept should not be confused with comprehending everything that the object is.
This general limitation does not mean that every concept must be continually revised. A concept may remain adequate for a particular purpose over an extended period, even though it cannot capture every aspect of its object. The question of revision arises when developments in the object, in the practices through which it is encountered, or in the conditions of knowledge reveal specific inadequacies in its established determinations. Here Adorno's idea of the Vorrang des Objekts, the primacy of the object, becomes relevant. Thought must remain attentive to what its object discloses, including features that challenge the categories through which it has been understood. The object does not supply a new definition ready-made; rather, it confronts thought with difficulties that its existing conceptual resources may be unable to resolve. Non-identity thus describes a general limit of conceptual identification, while the need for revision emerges under particular historical and epistemic conditions.
Derrida's examination of writing in Of Grammatology illustrates how such difficulties can also expose the assumptions underlying an established conceptual distinction. He observes that the term writing is increasingly being used to describe practices extending far beyond conventional written notation, including cinematography, choreography, and pictorial, musical, and sculptural forms. His most consequential examples, however, come from science and technology. He points to the contemporary biologist's use of "writing" and "program" in describing processes of information within the living cell, and to the field opened up by cybernetics, which he characterises as a field of writing. These developments challenge the assumption that writing is essentially a graphic representation of speech. If processes of information and organisation can be described in terms of writing without depending on spoken language, the traditional definition of writing as a secondary means of recording speech becomes difficult to sustain. Derrida's argument, however, goes beyond extending the meaning of an established term. The expanded use of writing allows him to question the hierarchy between speech and writing itself, and to examine the metaphysical assumptions that have granted speech conceptual priority. Even the vocabulary of cybernetics, despite its potential to unsettle inherited distinctions between the human and the machine, remains subject to this examination: its own concepts of writing, trace, and program must also be interrogated in relation to their metaphysical inheritance.
Derrida's analysis therefore brings into view a further dimension of conceptual adequacy. The difficulty may lie not only in the inability of an established concept to account for developments in its object, but also in the assumptions and distinctions that have shaped the concept itself. In either case, the fact that concepts are historically situated and never exhaustive is a reason for critical attention, not an automatic demand for replacement. Revision becomes warranted when we can identify what an established account fails to explain, which assumptions have contributed to that limitation, and why the failure matters for understanding the object. The task of thought is to determine whether its conceptual resources can still do justice to what they seek to comprehend, or whether their established determinations need to be reconsidered.
6. Thinking with Concepts: A Constellation Rather Than a Dictionary
Adorno's idea of the constellation offers a way to bring these considerations together. To understand a philosophical concept, we need to examine its particular use, its relations to other concepts, the historical problems in which it participates, and the function it performs within an author's thought. We must also consider the object it seeks to comprehend and those aspects that its established determinations leave unresolved. A constellation gathers these different perspectives around an object so that their relations can make its complexity more visible. It is neither an enlarged dictionary entry nor an indiscriminate accumulation of information; its purpose is to resist the reduction of an object to a single conceptual determination.
For readers approaching a philosophical text, this approach can be translated into four practical questions:
- What does this term mean in ordinary language, and how does its philosophical use differ?
- Which concepts and problems determine its function within the author's thought?
- How does its meaning change when it enters a different philosophical configuration?
- What developments in the object, or in our knowledge of it, might require us to reconsider its established meaning?
The last question is especially important because it encourages readers to recognise when a concept's existing determinations have become inadequate, rather than assuming that revision is always necessary or that inherited definitions remain valid indefinitely. Reading philosophy in this way means learning to reconstruct concepts in their historical and theoretical contexts, while examining how well they continue to account for the objects they seek to understand. A concept remains philosophically adequate insofar as it continues to illuminate its object while remaining open to what its existing determinations cannot yet explain.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973a). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press.
Adorno, T. W. (1973b). Philosophische Terminologie: Zur Einleitung (Vol. 1; R. zur Lippe, Ed.). Suhrkamp.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, Trans. & Ed.). Modern Library.
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.; C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds., with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger). Duckworth.
Schopenhauer, A. (2018). The world as will and representation (J. Norman, A. Welchman, & C. Janaway, Trans.; Vols. 1–2). Cambridge University Press.
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