Adorno’s negative dialectics and its debt to Nietzsche: Could Nietzsche be the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics?

Abstract

The dominant view for the relation between Adorno and Nietzsche is that the latter’s influence on the former, in terms of style and content, is primarily to be found in Adorno’s book Minima Moralia. Contrary to the dominant view, this article takes seriously Adorno’s admission that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’ and investigates the extent of Nietzsche’s influence in the conception of negative dialectics. It is argued that there could be a significant as well as inconspicuous influence that runs through Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to the point where Nietzsche legitimately be proclaimed the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics. For those who consider negative dialectics to be the paramount achievement of Adorno’s thought, this claim would be equivalent to the claim that Nietzsche’s most significant contribution in Adorno’s thought is to be found in Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia.

Introduction

The dominant view for the relation between Adorno and Nietzsche is that the latter’s influence on the former, in terms of style and content, is most vivid in Adorno’s book Minima Moralia. The origin of this view can be traced back to Gillian Rose, who in her book The Melancholy Science (1978) notes that Adorno’s ‘engagement with Nietzsche is most evident’ in his essay ‘The Essay as Form’ and in his book Minima Moralia. ¹ Martin Jay’s early work Adorno (1984) repeats the claim when he refers to Minima Moralia as to ‘this most Nietzschean of Adorno’s work’. ² Since then, many commentators, in one way or another, endorse the claim. ³ The influence of Nietzsche in Adorno’s thought may be ‘most evident’ in Minima Moralia; however, is this influence also the most significant influence of Nietzsche that can be observed in Adorno’s thought? Adorno admits that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’, ⁴ and Plass, concerned as he is with Adorno’s moral philosophy and Minima Moralia, admits, on his part, that the ‘nature of this debt eludes exact philosophical retracing, for it manifests itself primarily in Adorno’s unwillingness to pursue moral philosophy in a systematic or positively prescriptive manner’. ⁵ What is more, in his Vorlesung zur Einleitung in die Erkenntnistheorie Adorno points towards his theory of knowledge rather than his moral philosophy for this elusive influence when he says that ‘there are more points of contact with the motivating experience of dialectics to be found, long after Hegel, in Nietzsche’s statement: nothing happens in reality that would strictly correspond to logic’. ⁶ That Adorno considered Nietzsche to be an ardent dialectician, at a par with Marx, is also evident by a passage from Minima Moralia:

Dialectical reason is, when set against the dominant mode of reason, unreason: only in encompassing and cancelling this mode does it become itself reasonable. Was it not bigoted and talmudic to insist, in the midst of the exchange economy, on the difference between the labour-time expended by the worker and that needed for the reproduction of his life? Did not Nietzsche put the cart before all the horses on which he rode his charges? ⁷

Strangely enough, the possibility that these statements might mean that Adorno’s own negative dialectics is indebted to some degree to Nietzsche has not been so far adequately investigated. This is the task of this article. Contrary to the dominant view which sees Minima Moralia as the main outlet of Nietzsche’s influence on Adorno, we will argue in this article that there seems to be a significant as well as inconspicuous influence that runs through Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to the point where Nietzsche could be legitimately proclaimed to be the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics. For those who consider negative dialectics to be the paramount achievement of Adorno’s thought, this claim would be equivalent to the claim that Nietzsche’s most significant contribution to Adorno’s thought is to be found in Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia.

We found some encouragement in the project of which this essay is a part, in the fact that the possible connection between Nietzsche and negative dialectics has been investigated by another researcher, Vasilis Grollios. An article of his was published in the journal Critical Sociology. ⁸ In this article, Grollios argues that there is in Nietzsche a critique of the core capitalist values of ‘growth, as accumulation of wealth, competition and hard work’ which is very close to Marx’s own, and that ‘Nietzsche, just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, establishes a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’. This project is very different from our own. Grollios argues that Nietzsche, like Adorno, is a nonidentity, negative dialectical thinker, when negative dialectics is understood in terms of the dialectic between form and content. And it may be the case that such an understanding of negative dialectics is the most adequate in bringing to the fore Marx as a negative dialectician, (as the work of Hans Georg Backhaus clearly shows), ⁹ however, it is not so effective in bringing to light the connection between Nietzsche and negative dialectics. This objective is better served, in our view, if we stick to Negative Dialectics’ original terminology. Then it becomes clear that Nietzsche does not only exhibit negative dialectical elements in his thought, as Grollios argues, but could have been the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics; what is more, it can potentially show that Nietzsche employed negative dialectics in an inconsistent manner; and finally, it can potentially highlight simultaneously the radically revolutionary as well as the reactionary elements in Nietzsche’s thought, as we will show in the case of Nietzsche idea of ‘the will to power’. And this is, we think, the most significant defect of Grollios’ approach: like most of Nietzsche literature fails to keep in the range of its vision simultaneously, let alone explain, both aspects of Nietzsche’s thought: the revolutionary and the reactionary. ¹⁰ In any case, Grollios’ article may argue that there are dialectical elements in Nietzsche’s thought, but it does not make the argument we are going to present here, that Nietzsche could have been the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics and that, in this case, it is in Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia that we should seek for the main outlet of Nietzsche’s influence in Adorno’s thought. We will make our case in two steps: first, (Sections 1 and 2) we will show that Nietzsche’s thought contains all the necessary ingredients of Adorno’s negative dialectics. In order to do this, we will provide an exposition of Adorno’s negative dialectics in the book of the same name, and an exposition of two only of Nietzsche’s many instances of dialectical, in the Adornean sense, thinking: the dialectical nature of the cornerstone of his philosophy, the idea of ‘will to power’, and his dialectical conception of truth emerging out of his critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’. In a second step (Section 3), we are going to argue that Nietzsche could be the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectic by bringing the analyses of the two previous sections together.

Adorno’s negative dialectics

As we learn from Nico Bobka and Dirk Braunstein, the book Negative Dialectics was ‘the realization of a plan that he [Adorno, NK] and Horkheimer had pursued since the late 1940s. They planned a second volume of Dialectic of Enlightenment, to continue the project of a dialectical logic’. ¹¹ This dialectic is ‘negative’ in contradistinction to the prevalent idea of dialectics which is to achieve something positive through negation (Plato), ¹² or, later, through the ‘negation of negation’ (Hegel). ¹³ One of the aims of the book, Adorno says, is ‘the unfolding’ of its ‘paradoxical title’, ¹⁴ a title which is paradoxical precisely because dialectics until his time had been associated with the production of something positive through negation. This negative, dialectical logic is also a materialist dialectic aiming to overcome the ‘fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’, that is, overcome the idea that concepts constitute objects, as part of a wider project to view history as nature and nature as history. ‘The fallacy’ is part of the growing ‘naive’ of philosophy, which ‘broke its pledge to be at one with reality’, that is, to adequately grasp, understand and explain reality, a promise broken, as we will see, because of the falsity of identity thinking, and is now ‘obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself’. ¹⁵ Negative Dialectics is Adorno’s part in this ruthless critique.

The role of contradiction in negative dialectics

What is dialectics for Adorno? Very early on, he provides us with a preliminary designation:

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. ¹⁶

The self-critique of philosophy mentioned above takes the form of the critique of Hegel and of identity thinking, the critique, that is, of the claim of the concepts to exhaust their objects. In this formulation, the word is that the objects are always more than their concepts give away, that the concepts are missing part of the objects they refer to. However, this excess/lack relation works both ways: it is also that the concept is, at the same time, more than the object it refers to, that the object does not live up to its concept: it is less. ¹⁷ The most lucid description of the untruthfulness and problematic nature of identifying is offered in Adorno’s posthumously published Lectures on Negative Dialectics:

Thus by subsuming them all under this concept, by saying that A is everything that is comprehended in this unity, I necessarily include countless characteristics that are not integrated into the individual elements contained in the concept. The concept is always less than what is subsumed in this concept. When a B is defined as A, it is always also different from and more than the A, the concept under which it is subsumed by way of a particular judgment. On the other hand, however, in a sense every concept is at the same time more than the characteristics that are subsumed under it. If, for example, I think and speak of ‘freedom’, this concept is not simply the unity of the characteristics of all the individuals who can be defined as free on the basis of a formal freedom within a given constitution. … the concept freedom contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond those specific freedoms, without our necessary realizing what this additional element amounts to. ¹⁸

However, thought and knowledge cannot exist without concepts. For Adorno, immediate and intuitive knowledge, knowledge without reason does not qualify as thought, while thought is bounded in the confines of what Adorno calls ‘conceptual totality’. ¹⁹ Conceptual totality, however, is ‘mere appearance’, the ‘façade of immediacy’ of brute facts. ²⁰ It is the knowledge of essence, appearing in the cracks, in the ‘contradiction between what things are and what they claim to be’ ²¹ that makes things what they are and gives us knowledge of them. The distinction between essence and appearance, Adorno notes, is retained in negative dialectics because otherwise we ‘side with appearance, with the total ideology which existence … become’. ²² We had to make this brief reference in the relation of essence and appearance as a step between what negative dialectics is and what it does:

Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, ²³ whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity. ²⁴

The relation between concepts and between concepts and objects is structured to accord with the rules of the mind, with logic. Now, these rules are the rules of identity thinking that demand that A cannot be A and not A simultaneously. Since the objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that as a matter of fact they are always A and not A simultaneously, concepts will always appear as contradictory from the point of view of identity thinking: ‘contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity’.

The demand of non-contradictoriness does not belong to the object of cognition but is surrogated to it by thought. Here we can find the reason why Adorno’s thought appears and is groundless, judged by the standards of traditional, identity philosophy:

… the Cartesian norm of explication [goes like this, Author]: reason for what follows … have to be found in what goes before. This norm is no longer compulsory. Measured by it, the dialectical state of facts is not explicable by a hierarchic schema of order summoned from outside. If it were, the attempt to explain would presuppose the explication that remains to be found; it would presuppose noncontradictoriness, the principle of subjective thinking, as inherent in the object which is to be thought. ²⁵

We cannot pre-decide on the foundation of our thought because this will blind us as to the nature and truth of the object of cognition. We need to become able to penetrate the object and see what it is from the inside. There is no Atlas holding the sky on his shoulders and we will do well, if we do not want to revert to mythology, to accept this level of relativity, contenting ourselves with tracing the next possible steps from the conceptual point in time and place we find ourselves to be: the contradiction we find in the object will tell us what is needed for moving beyond it, the next step, not some external criterion smuggled into the object from outside. ²⁶ The acceptance of contradiction in the objects is negative dialectics’ respect for its objects:

In a sense, dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism that outlaws it. As thinking, dialectical logic respects that which is to be thought – the object – even where the object does not heed the rules of thinking. The analysis of the object is tangential to the rules of thinking. Thought need not be content with its own legality; without abandoning it, we can think against our thought, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. ²⁷

The embrace of the contradictoriness of objects revealed with the openness of dialectical thinking is its attempt to stay truthful to its objects and, in this sense is more positivistic than positivism. In this passage, we need to pay attention to the fact that dialectical thought ‘is tangential’, meaning peripheral, ‘to the rules of thinking’; it operates ‘without abandoning’ thought’s own legality, that is, without abandoning identity thinking completely, and this is why those accusing Adorno of abandoning (traditional) reason are mistaken. This clarification is very important because it marks the point where Habermas’ understanding of negative dialectics as suffering from a ‘performative contradiction’ falters: this contradiction consists of ‘using the tools of reason to criticize reason’, ²⁸ or performing the critique of ideology by use of ‘the same tools which it has declared false’. ²⁹ This is how Habermas understands (or rather, fails to understand – a strange failure considering his personal proximity to Adorno) Adorno’s thesis that nonidentity thinking or negative dialectics amounts to the effort to ‘think against our thought’. He is unable to fathom or unwilling to accept the possibility to criticise traditional identity logic as harshly as Adorno (and Nietzsche for that matter) do and still employ it as an indispensable part of the dialectical process of argumentation. The above clarification is also important because it marks one of the fundamental differences between Adorno and Nietzsche: the word is about the status of identity thinking as of the ‘intelligible forms’ of the objects, which Nietzsche considers as ‘fictions’ indispensable for the self-preservation of the human species.

It can be said that identity thinking is capturing what is referred to as intelligible forms of objects. Adorno’s view about the intelligible forms comes, as Stone notes, from Hegel: ‘“The general assurance that … insights, cognitions are ‘merely subjective’ ceases to convince as soon as subjectivity is grasped as the object’s form,” as it is by Hegel’. ³⁰ And she also goes on to note that Adorno takes a step further than Hegel by accusing him that he ‘wrongly reduces the object to its intelligible form’ a reduction that makes him an identity thinker. ³¹ Intelligible forms are real, they are not arbitrary projections (‘fictions’) of the mind onto the objects, as Nietzsche thinks. ³² They appear so only if we abstract from the hundreds of thousands of years of the history of the formation of human perception, including the formation of our mind, through the constant exchange with nature in a social context. As Horkheimer observes:

Even the way they see and hear is inseparable from the social life-process as it has evolved over the millennia. The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception. ³³

If intelligible forms were arbitrary projections of the mind onto the objects, if objective reality was chaotic, then, as Adorno observes, ‘the domination of nature would never have succeeded’, ³⁴ the success of a science informed by logic and identity thinking in mastering nature would be inexplicable. However, this historical formation of perception and of the mind consists in training them in the ways that can more effectively manipulate the environment and other men. To the extent that they claim to exhaust all there is to know about the objects they do falsify the objects, as Nietzsche correctly notes.

Identity thinking and formal logic, as intelligible forms, are not abandoned by dialectical thinking. Horkheimer again reminds us that:

The traditional type of theory, one side of which finds expression in formal logic, is in its present form part of the production process with its division of labor. Since society must come to grips with nature in the future ages as well, this intellectual technology will not become irrelevant but on the contrary is to be developed as fully as possible. ³⁵

Intelligible forms and identity thinking form part of the inescapable metabolism with nature and cannot but be retained. They are retained for the additional reason that negative dialectics is dependent on them as its point of departure, it ‘feeds’ upon their inaccuracy and inadequacy in the exchange with nature and other men, revealing this inaccuracy and inadequacy through determinate negation and immanent critique.

Now, coming back to the passage of page 141 of Negative Dialectics (above note 27), we must stress that its main point is to alert us to the fact that negative dialectics mediates between two worlds: the world of external, objective reality and the world of internal, subjective thought, a point which becomes more explicit in the following passage:

In fact, dialectics is neither a pure method nor a reality in the naïve sense of the word. It is not a method, for the unreconciled matter – lacking precisely the identity surrogated by the thought – is contradictory and resists any attempt at unanimous interpretation. It is the matter, not the organizing drive of thought, that brings us to dialectics. Nor is dialectics a simple reality, for contradictoriness is a category of reflection, the cognitive confrontation of concept and thing. ³⁶

Contradiction, one of the central categories of negative dialectics, is the bridge between these two worlds: is a category of reflection which most accurately describes an objective reality, and is found in this reality despite the fact that reflection outlaws it. This is why ‘thinking against our thought’ is an accurate, second, definition of dialectics that Adorno provides. ³⁷ Contradiction is also the example par excellence of a dialectical concept: it partakes to both objective reality and reflection, and through it objective reality and reflection emerge as being the one a moment of the constitution of the other: they are shown to be bound in a dialectical relation.

Without identity thinking negative dialectics has no material to work on: ‘[n]egative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing against which it is conceived’. ³⁸ Identity thinking is the necessary body on the shoulders of which a second, higher order of reflection is needed to distinguish between its truth content and its ideological shell. This idea is also conveyed when Adorno states that contradiction arises only through identification: ‘[w]ithout the step that Being is the same as Nothingness, each of them would – to use one of Hegel’s favorite terms – be “indifferent” to the other; only when they are to be the same do they become contradictory’. ³⁹ What is more, the longing for identity, the longing of the concept to become identical to its object is also preserved in negative dialectics:

To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept is hubris; but the idea of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentical contains identity. ⁴⁰

The longing for identity which is preserved in negative dialectics is also its critical edge: it is this longing which deems the contradiction unacceptable and calls for its overcoming, calls for an identity that ‘is not yet’. ⁴¹

It is this same critical edge which animates negative dialectics that animates immanent critique as well. As Jarvis notes, ‘[i]mmanent critique start out from the principles of the work under discussion itself’ and ‘it uses the internal contradictions of a body of work to criticize it in its own terms’. ⁴² This means that it is the difference between what a work claims to do and what it is actually doing, the nonidentity between them, that immanent critique is aiming at. In fact, we argue that negative dialectics and immanent critique are one and the same, two different names for the same critical process. This connection is clear in the following passage where Adorno describes the operation of dialectics in the terms Jarvis uses for immanent critique:

“[t]o the fundamental ontologist, relativism is the offence of bottomless thinking. Dialectics is as strictly opposed to that as to absolutism, but it does not seek a middle ground between the two; it opposes them through the extremes themselves, convicts them of untruth by their own ideas”. ⁴³

What is more, in the course of Negative Dialectics, we have an excellent and lucid example of negative dialectics as immanent critique in practice: the critique of the bourgeois ideal of freedom: ‘[p]hilosophy’, Adorno writes, ‘had an unexpressed mandate from the bourgeoisie to find transparent grounds for freedom. But that concern is antagonistic in itself. It goes against the old oppression and promotes the new one, the one that hides in the principle of rationality itself’. ⁴⁴ In its Kantian version, this mandate turns freedom into obedience: ‘[a]ll the concepts whereby the Critique of Practical Reason proposes, in honor of freedom, to fill the chasm between the Imperative and mankind – law, constraint, respect, duty – all of these are repressive. Causality produced by freedom corrupts freedom into obedience’. ⁴⁵ This self-contradictory mandate of bourgeois philosophy regarding freedom is also the cause for the antinomy of Kant’s moral philosophy. ⁴⁶ What is argued in this passage is a case where the bourgeois claim to promote freedom is revealed to be at odds with itself and promoting obedience instead; the same with rationality: the claim of the moral law to be rational is revealed to stand on a fundamental irrationality since Kant’s Categorical Imperative is never proven by reason but is posited as given. This example, we think, illustrates vividly that negative dialectics and immanent critique are one and the same thing. This point is important because in the secondary literature, this identity goes undiscerned and causes confusion to some commentators. ⁴⁷

The role of negativity in negative dialectics

So far, we have kept our eye fixed on the concept of contradiction and tried to unfold Adorno’s negative dialectics from this point of view. Let us now turn to another fundamental concept for negative dialectics, that of negativity, and see what negative dialectics looks like from this perspective.

First of all, why is negative dialectics called negative? We already noted at the beginning of this section that negative dialectics goes against the grain of dialectics hitherto, which was to construct something positive through negation, a point that marks a radical difference between Adorno and Hegel; in fact, consideration of negativity in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is tied up and goes hand in hand with his critique of Hegel. The most general difference in disposition and direction is captured when Adorno writes that ‘[d]ialectics is critical reflection upon [the] context of immanence’, while in Hegel, ‘there was coincidence of identity and positivity’. ⁴⁸ Because, as we mentioned above, the conceptual totality appears from the point of view of nonidentity thinking to be wholly immersed in falseness and the ideology of identity, nonidentity thinking takes a critical stance against this totality (conceptual as well as actual), has to negate identity; Hegel’s operation, on the other hand, leads into the affirmation of this totality. ⁴⁹

Adorno’s observation that ‘[a] contradiction in reality is a contradiction against reality’ ⁵⁰ moves in the same direction. Contradiction arises, as we said, because of the false identification of concept and object. The detection of a contradiction in reality carries with it the implicit demand for the removal of this contradiction, of premature identification, in order to create the space for the possibility of materialisation of the longing for (true) identity. However, Adorno goes on, ‘such dialectics is no longer reconcilable with Hegel. Its motion does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead, it is suspicious of all identity’. ⁵¹

We should not be taken aback by the paradoxical position presented here: negative dialectics is “suspicious of all identity’, it negates (premature) identity, but this negation is not an end in itself. It is justified by the prospect of incorporating the nonidentical elements of the object into the concept, by the prospect of achieving true identity. However, we need to be aware of the magnitude of the task, namely, that this ‘true identity’ means no less than acquiring access to what Kant called ‘thing in itself’, which Adorno considers as ‘hubris’. So, we should be wary before we proclaim a ‘happy grasp on affirmation’ of identity. The difficulty of our presentational provocation is the difficulty of negative dialectics itself.

How are we going to get access to the nonidentical element in the object? Adorno answers this question by first clarifying how we are not going to get access to it:

The nonidentical is not to be obtained directly, as something positive on its part, nor is it obtainable by a negation of the negative. This negation is not an affirmation itself, as it is to Hegel. … To equate negation of negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form. What thus wins out in the inmost core of dialectics is the antidialectical principle: that traditional logic which, more arithmetico, takes minus times minus for plus. ⁵²

So, we see that Adorno directly confronts and rejects Hegel’s negation of negation as ‘the quintessence of identification’, noting that ‘[t]he structure of [Hegel’s] system would unquestionably fall without the principle that to negate negation is positive’. ⁵³ The answer he offers to our question is that negative’s ‘only positive side would be criticism, definite negation; it would not be a circumventing result with a happy grasp on affirmation’. ⁵⁴ It is through criticism, the famous or infamous ‘determinate negation’, that access to the nonidentical or to ‘the otherness’, is acquired.

Here we reach a crucial, as well as controversial, point in Adorno’s thought. If it is true that, according to his thought, negative dialectics cannot but start its operation from the conceptual totality and this totality is structured according to identity thinking, and therefore is false, then, indeed, it seems that negation of identity is the only way to break through the façade of ideology. In this perspective, determinate negation denies the identity between the concept and its object by bringing to the surface the disparity, the contradiction between them: that is, by bringing to the surface how the concept fails to incorporate the nonconceptual remainder of the object and/or how the object fails to live up to the concept’s expectations, to materialise the possibilities of the concept. Both, concept and object, are defined in this process through the recognition of the contradiction that animates them since ‘the factors that define reality as antagonistic are the same factors as those which constrain mind, i.e. the concept, and force it into its intrinsic contradictions’. ⁵⁵ The ‘truth content’ of philosophical categories is the social experiences, the human practice, locked within them, ⁵⁶ and deciphering this content defines both them and the society in which they are born or used. As Adorno notes, ‘[t]he only way to pass philosophically into social categories is to decipher the truth content of philosophical categories’. ⁵⁷ Hence, the adjective ‘determinate’ that characterises this kind of negation.

The mode of philosophising which emerges out of this universe is one which is confined and exhausted in determinate negation in two senses: as a ruthless critique of ‘what is’ and unreconcilable opposition to the status quo, as well as a refusal to clearly point to a way out, to point to an alternative way to organise social life. This is why Adorno has been severely criticised for his acute pessimism, for his unwillingness to offer the slightest trace of affirmation of anything. ⁵⁸ Here, it is not the place to expand and suggest a way that this criticism could be addressed on negative dialectical grounds; we have done so elsewhere. ¹⁴⁶ However, it is time to turn to Nietzsche’s critique of dialectics and of identity.

Nietzsche’s critique of dialectics and of identity, and two dialectical instances: I) ‘will to power’ II) the critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’

Having presented, in very broad strokes, Adorno’s nonidentity thesis, we see that it goes hand in hand with his critique of Hegel’s dialectic and of identity thinking. We now turn to Nietzsche’s respective critique, which although, in the first instance, seems to make him an unlikely candidate as originator of any dialectics, can, after the exposition of Adorno’s negative dialectics, appear under a new light.

However, before we move on, some methodological clarifications are needed to justify our reading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s corpus is traditionally divided in three periods but the inclusion of particular works in each of them can differ slightly: in Keith Ansell-Pearson’s periodisation, the early period comprises his first published book The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the collection of four essays published under the title Untimely Meditations (1874); the middle period includes Human all too Human (1878), Daybreak (1881) and The Gay Science (1882); his magnum opus (according to himself) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) serves as a bridge between his middle and mature period, as Ansell-Pearson says; the mature period comprises of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a new edition of The Gay Science with a new, fifth part (1887), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche contra Wagner and Ecce Homo, all written in 1888, the final year of his active life before his collapse in 1889, from which he never recovered. ⁵⁹ We concentrated on his middle and late period leaving out of consideration Daybreak and all his 1888 production except Anti-Christ. We also studied the somewhat questionable collection from his Nachlass, edited and published posthumously by his sister Elizabeth Foster-Nietzsche under the title The Will to Power. This last book, being unpublished by Nietzsche himself and being compiled from his notebooks and edited according to his sister’s nationalistic and racist inclinations it has also been assigned by some like Reginald Hollingdale a lesser value in relation to Nietzsche’s published work. However, it was available in Adorno’s time, Adorno must have read it and, in any case, the status of the book does not erase the fact that Nietzsche had made the thoughts in it and Adorno was aware of them, which is the two important factors for our argument. ⁶⁰ Now, like every philosopher, Nietzsche’s positions developed: for instance, the idea of eternal return first appears in The Gay Science, aphorism 341, while the idea of will to power first appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s section entitled ‘Of self-Overcoming’, ⁶¹ and Domenico Losurdo’s book Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel is quite extraordinary in documenting many of the changes that Nietzsche’s views underwent on various issues throughout his intellectual life. ⁶² However, what is remarkable is the consistency of Nietzsche’s epistemological interest in producing or detecting the origin of things from their opposites, that is, the dialectical quality of his thought. Throughout the middle and mature period of his work and from Human, all too Human’s programmatic declaration that ‘In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite…’ ⁶³ to Beyond Good and Evil’s position that truth originates in error ⁶⁴ and On the Genealogy of Morals production of morality from its opposites, the ‘noble’ ‘pathos of distance’ or ‘slave’s’ ‘ressentiment’, ⁶⁵ the dialectical attitude is a constant in his writings. In any case, the objective of this article is not to establish Nietzsche as a dialectical thinker, but only to show that Adorno could have found in Nietzsche’s thought the necessary ingredients for his negative dialectics, to read Nietzsche with Adorno’s eyes, as it were, an argument that is independent of the question of whether Nietzsche held consistently or not a dialectical position throughout his intellectual life.

With these considerations out of the way, we can now pick up the thread of Nietzsche’s critique of dialectics and of identity.

Nietzsche refers to dialectics in a derogative manner on more than a few occasions. In On the Genealogy of Morals, ⁶⁶ and in The Will to Power, he argues that one of the consequences of the ‘tremendous blunders’ associated with consciousness is for him that ‘one approaches reality, “real being” through dialectic’. ⁶⁷ However, we can distinguish between at least three kinds of dialectics: Hegel’s, Marx’s and Adorno’s negative dialectics. Nietzsche, of course, must have in mind Hegelian dialectics ⁶⁸ which he understands as aiming at a reconciliation between opposite terms and as on a par with theology:

Nihilism as psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a totality, a systematisation, indeed any organisation in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration (– if the soul be that of logician, complete consistency and real dialectic are quite sufficient to reconcile it to everything) … At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value. ⁶⁹

The description in this passage is so construed as to fit both the Christian doctrine and Hegel’s thought, both aiming at a reconciliation of man with the world, and both being of ‘reactive’ origin and having nihilistic consequences. Nietzsche’s critique of Hegelian dialectics belies Kaufmann’s reading of Nietzsche as a Hegelian dialectician, when dialectics is reduced to not thinking ‘in black and white’, ⁷⁰ as a commitment to question all presuppositions, and as reconciliation between opposites. ⁷¹

To be sure, however, Nietzsche does not understand dialectics as nonidentity thinking either, as is evident from a passage from The Anti-Christ where Jesus is thought as both, an exponent of nonidentity and as lacking dialectical thinking at the same time:

One could, with some freedom of expression, call Jesus a ‘free spirit’ – he cares nothing for what is fixed: the word killeth, everything fixed killeth. The concept, the experience ‘life’ in the only form he knows it is opposed, to any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. … Denial is precisely what is totally impossible to him. – Dialectics are likewise lacking… ⁷²

The expression ‘the word killeth, everything fixed killeth’ is an adequate illustration of the fluidity of nonidentity thinking as we came to know it with Adorno. However, Nietzsche, lacking precisely a theory of nonidentity thinking/negative dialectics like Adorno’s, goes on to brand Jesus as lacking any dialectics, which for Nietzsche is associated with a reactive denial of life.

Nietzsche’s nonidentity thesis can be reconstructed from the fragments scattered in his work. The first step is taken in Human, all too Human and consists in questioning the belief in identical things and the equalisation of quantities on which our knowledge of the world is based, which Nietzsche thinks is false. ⁷³ In Beyond Good and Evil, he becomes more specific and questions the accuracy of the correspondence between the concepts we form and the objects that these concepts refer to: ‘just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree’. ⁷⁴ This is the meaning of his thesis that truth originates in error ⁷⁵ and had been put forward already in The Gay Science: ‘[t]he dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merely similar – an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal – is what first created any basis for logic’. ⁷⁶ In his notes of The Will to Power, we find a head-on attack on Aristotelean logic:

We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability. If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. … Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as it presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirm it. … Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things – that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time” – quite coarse and false.) The conceptual contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it – in fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. ⁷⁷

All the above elements comprise the rational side of Nietzsche’s critique of identity that, as we will see, is appropriated by Adorno.

Nietzsche’s theory of will to power and its ‘dialectical twist’

However, Nietzsche’s critique of identity goes a step further, where Adorno is reluctant to follow. It takes the form of the irrationalistic critique of the rationalistic subject centred around the theory of the will to power, which, nevertheless, we will argue, contains a ‘dialectical twist’. Nietzsche, with his concept of will to power and his understanding of human psyche is, like Hume, part of the irrationalist and materialist strand of the Enlightenment, to the extent that he locates human ‘soul’ in the body or, better, as the body, and reverses the relative importance of consciousness and ego, on the one side, and the unconscious, the locus of the ‘powerful commander’ behind the thoughts and feelings, on the other side. ⁷⁸

Who or what is this ‘powerful commander’ behind the thoughts and feelings? Nietzsche’s response is: the will to power:

…the will to power is the primitive form of affect, that all other affects are only developments of it; that it is notably enlightening to posit power in place of individual “happiness” (after which every living thing is supposed to be striving): “there is a striving for power, for an increase of power”. ⁷⁹

So, will to power, like Freud’s libido, is for Nietzsche the general energising power of the human psyche, ⁸⁰ the difference being that while libido has no particular object and can be invested to anything, will to power has a single object, namely, the striving for the increase of power.

Will to power is meant to be applicable to the whole of organic nature as a general exegesis of life itself: ‘In order to understand what “life” is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply as well to trees and plants as to animals. …For what do trees in the jungle fight each other? For ‘happiness’? – For power!’; ⁸¹ it is also, unfortunately for those who would promote a more benign interpretation of Nietzsche, like Deleuze, who understands ‘power’ as a verb and will to power as ‘will to empower’, ⁸² a striving for power in all its forms (political, intellectual, psychological etc). This is how we understand Nietzsche’s constant references to ‘strong’ people, the increase of ‘strength’ and the ‘healthy’ people. We choose this interpretation because replacing ‘striving for power’ with ‘striving to empower’ in Nietzsche’s texts most of the time does not make good sense. Regarding the link between power in the conventional sense and intellectual power Nietzsche is very explicit in The Will to Power notes ⁸³ and in Beyond Good and Evil. ⁸⁴

Drives, because of their origin in will to power, have a ‘lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm’. ⁸⁵ This has, as a result, the unconscious life of the psyche to look like a battleground of war of all against all ⁸⁶ of which consciousness is only scantly aware or hopelessly ‘torn back and forth’:

Irresponsibility and innocence. Man’s complete lack of responsibility, for his behavior and for his nature, is the bitterest drop which the man of knowledge must swallow, if he had been in the habit of seeing responsibility and duty as humanity’s claim to nobility. …[actions are, Author] chemical processes, and the clash of elements, the agony of the sick man who yearns for recovery, these have no more earned merit than do those inner struggles and crises in which a man is torn back and forth by various motives until he finally decides for the most powerful – as is said (in truth until the most powerful motive decides about us). ⁸⁷

That ‘the body is only a social structure composed of many souls’ ⁸⁸ inflicts a decisive blow to the Cartesian supposition of the immediate certainty of the ‘I’, a supposition which Nietzsche considers as common sense. ⁸⁹

However, the situation of the warring clusters of drives that alternate in domination are the source of the multiple perspectives of the world inside the same person and are also, for Nietzsche, the source of the ‘diseased’ condition of man in relation to the animals. ⁹⁰ Viewing the multiplicity of souls as a problem ⁹¹ for the species, even if it brings with it some advantages to some members of the species in relation to other members, Nietzsche seeks a solution by the supposition of the unity of self as a goal, as Nehamas insightfully puts it. ⁹² Gemes, who is inspired by Nehamas, agrees on this point. ⁹³ Nehamas, however, ends up with a too ‘modern’, too rationalistic conception of Nietzsche’s views: Nietzsche’s view, even of the unified self under the domination of one cluster of drives only, is, in our view, neither that ‘desire follows thought’ nor that ‘the distinction between choice and constraint’ disappears. ⁹⁴ In our understanding, dominated drives never stop fighting for the power of domination and the contradictions in the psyche are never resolved entirely as new contradictions are constantly generated for Nietzsche. Gemes observes that: ‘[t]he dogma of a pre-given unified self generates certain complacency and that is the core of Nietzsche’s objection. Assuming a world of ready-made beings it allows for the suppression of the problem of becoming’. ⁹⁵ However, if we suppose that the unity of self is somehow achieved once and for all, the problem of becoming is suppressed again, only on a different level.

Gemes is sensitive to the problems of Nehamas’ views and takes a different approach by recognising the irrationally based unity of the self. ⁹⁶ Consciousness and conscious effort on the part of the subject has a role to play in the creation of this unity, which is, however, limited to that of the ‘catalyst’ in the unconscious raging battle. ⁹⁷ We are here before the problem of the relation between subject and object, where subject is the conscious efforts and object is the unconscious drives, the will to power. In Gemes’ view, it seems that the unconscious drives have priority and circumscribe the limits of the potentialities of a human being, a human being, however, who is not a passive and helpless object in the hands of their drives, but has a degree of influence in the articulation of their libidinal constitution. ⁹⁸

Now, that becoming is never arrested for Nietzsche is quite plain by the following words uttered by Zarathustra:

How does this happen? I asked myself. What persuades the living to obey and command and to still practice obedience while commanding? Hear my words, you wisest ones! Check seriously to see whether I crept into the very heart of life and into the roots of its heart! Wherever I found the living, there I found the will to power; and even in the will of the serving I found the will to be master. …Along secret passages the weaker sneaks into the fortress and straight to the heart of the more powerful – and there it steals power. And this secret life itself spoke to me: “Behold”, it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. To be sure, you call it will to beget or drive to a purpose, to something higher, more distant, more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret…Whatever I may create and however I may love it – soon I must oppose it and my love, thus my will wants it. …Truly, I say to you: good and evil that would be everlasting – there is no such thing! They must overcome themselves out of themselves again and again. …And whoever must be a creator in good and evil – truly, he must first be an annihilator and break values. ⁹⁹

So, Nietzsche plunges into the depths of life to find will to power and at the bottom of will to power finds self-overcoming as the essence of will to power. This means that becoming is a constant process, that we, as much as the overman, as the vehicles of will to power, are engaged in a constant and open-ended process of self-overcoming, we are and are not ourselves at any given moment. This is nonidentity, dialectical thinking in the Adornean sense, and makes will to power a dialectical concept. Self-overcoming is of an inherently dialectical nature since it implies that we are involved in a constant process of departure from our own selves, we are and are not ourselves simultaneously at any given moment. ¹⁰⁰ We can already see the affinity between Nietzsche’s will to power as self-overcoming and Adorno’s negative dialectics.

However, we should not overlook that the will to power is regrettably, as we said, considered by Nietzsche as will for power in all its forms. First, we have repeated assertions that seeking power is an incontrovertible fact of all life. Thus, in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation …’; ¹⁰¹ thus, in The Will to Power: ‘Life, as the form of being most familiar to us, is specifically a will to the accumulation of force; all the processes of life depend on this: nothing wants to preserve itself, everything is to be added and accumulated’; ¹⁰² and again: ‘There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power – assuming that life is the will to power’; ¹⁰³ thus, in the Anti-Christ: ‘I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking there is decline’. ¹⁰⁴ In all these cases, the meaning of will to power is best understood as strive for power in the conventional sense, which seems, ‘in the first instance’, to be the meaning of the controversial term. And we say ‘in the first instance’ because, as we saw in the passage from Zarathustra quoted above, ¹⁰⁵ Nietzsche introduces underneath this meaning a meaning ‘in the second instance’, a meaning with a dialectical twist, which is pointed at by interpretations like Deleuze’s (who understands it as ‘desire to empower’), Kaufmann’s (who understands will to power as the classical antiquity’s term ‘dynamis’ or ‘potentia’) ¹⁴⁷ and even more so by Ansell-Pearson’s who understands it as combining the interpretations of Deleuze and Kaufmann. Ansell-Pearson argues that the noun ‘macht’ in Wille zur Macht derives from the verb ‘mögen’ – meaning want, desire – and the adjective ‘möglich’ – meaning potential. It does not mean strength ‘but an “accomplishment” of the will overcoming or overcoming itself’. ¹⁰⁶ However, we think it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that there is a primary, as it were, meaning of ‘macht’ as strength or lust for power in Nietzsche, which Hollingdale’s ¹⁰⁷ and, unfortunately, the Nazis’ interpretation captures. ¹⁰⁸ In all the above-mentioned passages replacing ‘seeking of power’ with ‘desire to empower’ (Deleuze), or ‘potential’ (Kaufmann, Ansell-Pearson), or accomplishment (Ansell-Pearson) does not make good sense. It is telling that Nietzsche is going so far as to propose the construction of a quantitative scale of force, force to which ‘will to power’ is always attached according to Deleuze, ¹⁰⁹ against which all values can be measured and according to which can be given an order of rank. ¹¹⁰ Therefore, when Deleuze, Kaufmann, and more so, Ansell-Pearson argue that will to power means ‘will to empower’, ‘potentia’ or ‘an “accomplishment” of the will overcoming or overcoming itself’ they are capturing the deeper layer in the meaning of will to power, its meaning ‘in the second instance’. Our contention is that it would be a mistake to restrict the meaning of will to power to this deeper level and not to recognise that ‘in the first instance’ it means lust for power, and that self-overcoming is inserted as a dialectical twist underneath this primary meaning.

Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’: Nietzsche’s dialectical view of truth

The second instance of Nietzsche’s dialectical way of thinking we would like to draw attention to is revealed on the occasion of his critique of the ‘ascetic ideal’, the culmination of his critique of religion, and regards his conception of truth. Nietzsche identifies as the ‘kernel’ of the ascetic ideal atheism and its ‘will to truth’: the relentless quest for truth, nourished by the Christian faith itself, takes the form of atheism, as its latest embodiment, eventually turning against itself, against the belief in God. ¹¹¹ However, for Nietzsche, this is not the deepest layer of the issue. The ‘suicidal nihilism’ that follows, and leads the drive of the quest for truth to its furthest consequences (that is, the prohibition of ‘the lie involved in the belief in God’), reveals an even deeper layer in human psychology from which humans were protected with the belief in God, namely, the lack of meaning in life, the inability to affirm the positive value of life. The inability to affirm life Nietzsche calls the lack ‘of will for man and earth’. It is the pointless, the ‘in vain’ of human existence and more precisely the unintelligible suffering, or social distress that breeds nihilism. ¹¹²

But this is not the end of the issue. Clark argues that Nehamas sees in Nietzsche’s refusal to acknowledge science as the counter-ideal to the ascetic one (because science ‘still has faith in truth’), an argument against dogmatism: the belief in truth is ascetic because it does not overcome the dogmatism on which the ascetic ideal depends. Clark dismisses the claim by saying that it is the self-denial which is characteristic of the ascetic ideal and not dogmatism. ¹¹³ Clark’s own interpretation seems to be that when Nietzsche says ‘faith in truth’ he means ‘faith in the overriding value of truth’, that is, that truth is unquestionably considered as more important than anything else. ¹¹⁴ We think that although Nietzsche undoubtedly holds the view Clark is arguing for, his critique of the ascetic ideal aims to uncover the deepest layer in human psychology that sustains the faith in truth, which is not dogmatism as such, which refers to the cognitive level of human psyche, but the conscious or unconscious ¹¹⁵ need dogmatism is satisfying. Which need is this?

Talking about the ‘philosophers and scholars’ of his time, who are repudiating God’s existence while, at the same time, insisting in the quest for ‘truth’ Nietzsche observes: ‘They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth’. ¹¹⁶ A couple of pages later, he cites a passage from the fifth book of his Gay Science: ‘…It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science - and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith’. ¹¹⁷

What do these passages tell us? They tell us that ‘free spirits’, that is, the persons or philosophers most highly regarded by Nietzsche, who, himself, was a free spirit in his own eyes, ¹¹⁸ cannot have faith in truth. They also tell us that the identification of God with truth, that is, truth’s divine nature, is millennia old, and, what is more, they tell us that the anti-metaphysical critique, Nietzsche’s own included, is ignited by such a faith. What sense are we going to make of these, apparently, contradictory statements, which deny free spirits their identity because of their faith in truth, only to affirm that faith as the legitimate motive behind free spirits’ anti-metaphysical critique?

We think that an interpretive way out of this contradiction is afforded through the observation that what is actually denied by Nietzsche is not the faith in the existence of truth as such, but rather, that such a faith is a guarantee or can give us any certainty for truth’s actual existence: ‘We, too, do not deny that faith “makes blessed”: that is precisely why we deny that faith proves anything’. ¹¹⁹ On the other hand, what is affirmed in the faith in the existence of truth is exactly the need of certainty, the longing to make sure or to prove the certainty of our truths, this is to say, to reach the absolute truth. Towards this direction points a passage from Human, all too Human, where Nietzsche is talking regretfully about the diminution of the longing for certainty. ¹²⁰ The longing for certainty must be preserved because it sustains the alertness against unwarranted convictions. The larger weight, however, of Nietzsche’s argument is towards the side of the danger of transforming this longing itself into certainty. A passage from Nietzsche’s Gay Science is decisive in this respect because it allows a further elaboration in the above affirmation of the ‘faith in truth’ on the part of ‘free spirits’:

Yet what is good-heartedness, refinement, and genius to me, [is, NK] when the human being who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments, and when the demand for certainty is not to him the inmost craving and the deepest need - that which distinguishes the higher from the lower men… Not to question, not to tremble with the craving and the joy of questioning…that is what I feel to be contemptible… ¹²¹

With this passage, Nietzsche introduces a condition in the aforementioned longing for certainty and truth: it is indeed the motive behind the faith in, and the search for truth, but it should not be ‘the inmost craving’, in the sense that the need for certainty should not blind us to the fact that such certainty is today impossible. In other words, the intensity of the need should not lead us to transform our longing itself into certainty that we possess absolute truth. In this direction points also one passage from the Gay Science where Nietzsche warns that the case is that ‘The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm (while on account of the ardor of this demand one is easier and more negligent about the demonstration of this certainty)…’. ¹²² The need for certainty can lead to dogmatism, but the longing for certainty must be preserved because it keeps us closer to whatever truth is possible for us to discover (or create, in Nietzsche’s perspective). It then emerges that an attitude which ‘take[s] leave of all faith and every wish for certainty’ and is ‘practiced in maintaining [itself, NK] on insubstantial ropes and possibilities’ is the touchstone of the ‘free spirits par excellence’. ¹²³ It is, we think, apparent that this interpretation of Nietzsche’s view on truth is an outright dialectical position in the Adornean sense, but we will show it in more detail in the next section.

In this section, we showed that Nietzsche’s thought includes a rationalistic critique of identity. We also showed two occasions (out of many) that Nietzsche employs negative dialectics: his theory of the will to power, infused as it is with the idea of self-overcoming, according to which we are and are not ourselves at any given moment, and his conception of truth, according to which we must drop the illusion that we possess certain truths but retain the longing for certainty. Therefore, we think it has been adequately shown that Nietzsche’s thought contains all the ingredients of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Now, we are going to argue that Nietzsche could be the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics.

Adorno’s appropriation of Nietzsche in negative dialectics

We will base our argument on textual rather than biographical evidence. We will highlight the affinity of Nietzsche’s ideas with the basic tenets of negative dialectics as they were blueprinted in the two previous sections.

In both instances, the idea is entertained that the equalisation of qualities is false. The world comprises of qualitatively unique objects and the scientific method of abstraction in order to bring forth the similarities that the objects do possess neglects this uniqueness, it forgets it, as soon as it convinces itself that has now a firm grasp of the whole of the objects thanks to these abstractions: the difference between two human beings, two human beings of the same nationality, sex, religion, social class etc, is erased as soon as these human beings are identified as human beings of the same nationality, sex, religion, social class etc, and this identification is assumed to exhaust the objects.

In Nietzsche, the idea is first presented in Human all too Human: ‘From the period of low organisms, man has inherited the belief that there are identical things (only experience which has been educated by the highest science contradicts this tenet). From the beginning, the first belief of all organic being may be that the whole rest of the world is one and unmoved’. ¹²⁴ This idea has its exact equivalent in Adorno’s critique of abstract labour which appears in both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics: ‘Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature’; ¹²⁵ and ‘Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is – an exchange of things that are equal and yet unequal – our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too, for all our skepticism of the rancor involved in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal that tolerates no qualitative difference’. ¹²⁶ The bourgeois economic theory and practice which considers two products comparable and exchangeable by reducing them to the common denominator of abstract labour and, ultimately, to money, is making identical two objects that are distinctly different: the labour of, say, the baker and that of, say, the carpenter. However, these two kinds of labour, in actual fact, are not comparable, there are no ‘identical things’, as Nietzsche notes. Of course, one can here object that this idea is a Marxian more than a Nietzschean idea, and that, therefore, in this instance, Adorno’s nonidentity thesis is shown to originate in the former rather than in the latter. We do not want to deny that Marx might have been an additional influence in the inception of Adorno’s negative dialectics. However, the language used by Adorno carries a closer resemblance to that of Nietzsche rather than to that of Marx: Marx does not generalise the problem of abstract labour as a problem of equalisation of qualities that is applicable in all sorts of situations and applies to a way of thinking, in the matter of course way that Nietzsche and Adorno do. If we stick to the original terminology of the book Negative Dialectics, we can and have to look towards Nietzsche for the decisive influence in its inception. If we are to look towards Marx, we have to introduce the problematic of form and content to make the connection, as Grollios and others have done very successfully. But such a problematic is not at all obvious in Negative Dialectics: it has and can be argued for, while the Adorno-Nietzsche connection does not need such mediation. We will also remind the reader that, as we mentioned earlier, Adorno considers both Marx and Nietzsche as ardent dialecticians and his own admission is that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’ (emphasis added). If the case was that the inspiration of negative dialectics was coming from Marx rather than from Nietzsche why would Adorno single out Nietzsche in this fashion? Why not Marx instead? The possible objection that there might be some biographical reference here, that Adorno refers to the inspiration he obtained from Nietzsche’s life for his own, does not hold true because Adorno refers to Nietzsche the philosopher in comparison to Hegel (again, why not in comparison to Marx?) and not Nietzsche the man. If the example of abstract labour is chosen here, which perhaps complicates the issue of the origin of Adorno’s negative dialectics, is because the coincidence of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s position highlight’s the importance and helps us to better evaluate why Adorno singles out Nietzsche in that fashion: the importance of the acknowledgement of the father of negative dialectics of his greatest ‘by far’ debt to Nietzsche, more than Hegel and Marx, both being generally recognised as dialecticians, gives this acknowledgment extra significance that should not be taken lightly.

Similarly to the idea of the equalisation of qualities, Nietzsche’s idea that the concepts do not correspond exactly to the objects they refer to has also its exact equivalent in Adorno. Nietzsche says: ‘just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree’; ¹²⁷ this has its exact equivalent in the initial definition of negative dialectics provided by Adorno: ‘The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, … It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived’. ¹²⁸ In both cases, the argument is that the concept (the concept of a tree in Nietzsche’s example, any concept in Adorno’s passage) does not exhaust the thing conceived: the concept is less than the object. It is the individuality of the object that is missed out, that differential element that would allow us to distinguish one, say, orange tree from any other orange tree. ¹²⁹ It is in the writings of Nietzsche rather than Marx’s or Hegel’s that the closest approximation of the language of Adorno’s nonidentity thesis can be observed.

The decisive passage, worth repeating, however, comes from The Will to Power where Nietzsche mounts a direct assault on Aristotelian logic:

We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability. If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. … Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as it presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirm it. … Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things – that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time” – quite coarse and false.) The conceptual contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it – in fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. ¹³⁰

Here all the essential elements of Adorno’s negative dialectics are in display: a) the non-objective nature of the inability ‘to affirm and to deny one and the same thing’, which, in Adorno’s terms, is another way to say that the law of non-contradictoriness is a subjective requirement of reflection and not an objective property of the objects. Nietzsche too captures the subjective nature of the law of non-contradictoriness but he is missing out its objective side, the fact that the law captures indeed part of the essence of objects. As we argued in our interpretation of Adorno’s thought, contradiction mediates between two worlds: the world of our mind, subjective and internal, and the external, objective world. Identity thinking for Adorno expresses the intelligible forms that the objects do possess, while in Nietzsche, identity thinking is plain fiction, subjective through and through, a fact that makes Nietzsche victim of what Adorno calls the ‘fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’, of the view, that is, as already mentioned, that the concepts constitute objects. However, as we also argued above, if it were plain fiction, its ability to dominate over nature, an ability Nietzsche expressly recognises when he says that these fictions are indispensable for the self-preservation of the species of humans, would be inexplicable. b) Nietzsche, like Adorno, is aware that the law of non-contradiction, Aristotle’s logic, is fundamental for all science and mathematics. Its critique, that is, the fact that there is ‘no self-identical “A”’, as Nietzsche says, that A is always ‘A’ and ‘not A’ simultaneously, as our interpretation of Adorno’s nonidentity thesis has it is identical with Adorno’s. It even coincides with Adorno’s critique of positivism, with the insight that the conceptual totality is ‘mere appearance’, the ‘façade of immediacy’ of brute facts, as Adorno says. Nietzsche also criticises identity thinking as ‘mere appearance’ and as the ‘sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things’, positivism’s ‘brute facts’. As Adorno writes in a passage worth repeating too:

Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity. ¹³¹

We have to keep in mind, however, the difference between the two philosophers observed above, That, for Adorno, unlike Nietzsche, identity thinking captures the intelligible forms that the objects do possess. c) The doubt as to whether the concepts of identity thinking we form are able to comprehend the things they refer to, which in Adorno’s perspective is denied because it is the particularity of the objects, excluded from the concepts of identity thinking, their essence, which gives us knowledge of them, an essence which can be accessed only through determinate negation. So, we see that Nietzsche’s critique of Aristotelian logic in the above passage comprises in most of its essential parts Adorno’s negative dialectics: the nucleus of Adorno’s negative dialectics not only can be found in Nietzsche’s thought, but the correspondence with Adorno’s nonidentity thesis is too close for Nietzsche not to be its originator.

And this is not all. The realisation that concepts and our truths are actually so many falsities does not lead either Nietzsche or Adorno to give up on them: ‘…to renounce false judgments would be to renounce life, would be to deny life’ Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, ¹³² and in The Will to Power he acknowledges the impossibility of doing away with the notion of the subject, no matter how false he considers it to be: ‘… our belief in “ego” as a substance … our thinking itself involves this belief … to let it go means: being no longer able to think’. ¹³³ Adorno, unlike Deleuze, follows Nietzsche down this path, accepting that it is impossible to avoid the falsification of reality by the mind; however, not only does he differ from Nietzsche in that he does not think that concepts are fictions of our imagination having no bearing in reality but they are rather capturing the intelligible forms that the objects do possess, but he also enriches the argument claiming that it is possible to think against the rules of the mind, to ‘think against our thought’: ¹³⁴ Adorno not only appropriates Nietzsche’s nonidentity thesis but also develops it into a new and full-blown epistemological theory not to be found in either Nietzsche or in Hegel and Marx.

Further, we saw Nietzsche entertaining a very significant idea for his thought, and for the thought of Adorno, namely, the idea that the longing to acquire certainty in our truths, although dangerously close to dogmatism, has to be preserved; ¹³⁵ in Adorno, we saw that it is the longing for identity that has to be preserved, but this disparity between Nietzsche and Adorno is only because the former is interested in the unconscious need dogmatism is satisfying, while the latter is building the theory of dialectical reason and moves in the region of consciousness. Likewise, faith should and should not be the energising force of free spirits; the search for truth should and should not be of overriding value. These instances of nonidentity, dialectical thinking on the part of Nietzsche are too close to Adorno’s thought to be disregarded or be considered fortuitous.

Nietzsche used negative dialectics extensively throughout his work. In Human, all too Human he describes the task of the philosophy of his day as an attempt to explain ‘how can something arise from its opposite’:

In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite – for example, reason from unreason, sensation from the lifeless, logic from the illogical, disinterested observation from covetous desire, altruism from egoism, truth from error? Until now, metaphysical philosophy has overcome this difficulty by denying the origin of the one from the other … ¹³⁶

This is a programmatic statement for philosophy, recorded in the middle period of Nietzsche’s thought, which is not abandoned in his mature period, but, on the contrary, is brought to fruition most impressively in his book of that period On the Genealogy of Morals. In the first of the three essays of this book, his basic conclusion is that the concept ‘good’ does not originate in the utility of unegoistic actions of men but in the egoistic ‘pathos of distance’ of the noble men in particular. ¹³⁷ What is more, the tremendous revaluation of values, which took place with the decline of the power of the nobles, through the mediation of the Jewish priest, has its origin in ressentiment. Therefore, the concept ‘good’ either in its archetypal form or in its more recent, Biblical form does not originate in unegoistic good-heartedness but in its opposites: either in the egoistic pathos of distance or in the spirit of revenge (ressentiment). ¹³⁸ In the second essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche arrives at the conclusion that morality has been acquired through cruelty upon oneself and others: ‘how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all “good things”!’; ¹³⁹ that guilt is repressed freedom turned inwards ¹⁴⁰ and that the Christian ideals that supposedly preserve life actually slander it. ¹⁴¹ In the third essay, the basic conclusion is that atheism, far from being the opposite of the ascetic ideal, is actually its very kernel. ¹⁴² In The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to take two other examples, we have many more instances of putting into action this programmatically dialectical viewpoint but there is no room to refer to them here. In the examples that we did mention is already clear that the opposing terms are not independent of each other but the one is considered a moment of the constitution of the other, are intrinsically intertwined in a dialectical relation with each other, and could possibly justify Adorno’s view of Nietzsche as an ardent dialectician, noted in the introduction and elsewhere in our article. However, a much more comprehensive discussion of Nietzsche’s thought is needed before we proclaim him as proper dialectical thinker and in order to pin point the exact nature of his dialectics; all we try to do here is to show that Adorno could have found in Nietzsche’s thought the basic ingredients he needed to develop his negative dialectics.

Finally, we think that Adorno could find in Nietzsche the confirmation or inspiration he needed to distinguish his negative dialectics from Hegel’s own. For Adorno, Hegel’s dialectics aims at syntheses but Adorno notes that this is not of the essence of dialectics: ‘The task of dialectical cognition is not, as its adversaries like to charge, to construe contradictions from above and to progress by resolving them – although Hegel’s logic, now and then, proceeds in this fashion’. ¹⁴³ Adorno’s own solution is to keep the contradictions in suspension, without resolution. The negativity of his thought is in line with Nietzsche’s demand, as we saw earlier, for the thought of free spirits to ‘take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty’ and be ‘practiced in maintaining [itself, NK] on insubstantial ropes and possibilities’. ¹⁴⁴ Nietzsche’s thought marks the limits of Hegel’s influence in Adorno’s negative dialectics.

Therefore, we think that Nietzsche could be the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics in Adorno’s book with the same name. There is, we think, no other way to make sense of Adorno’s admission that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche, NK] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’.

Conclusion

The possibility of Nietzsche’s influence in the inception of Adorno’s negative dialectics is largely overlooked in the literature. Various thinkers like Peter Dews, Gillian Rose, and Karin Bauer came close to the recognition of this influence but either stopped short of doing so (Dews) or dropped the issue without investigating it any further (Rose, Bauer). Therefore, Adorno’s admissions about the importance of Nietzsche’s influence in his thought is to this day misleadingly explained by Nietzsche’s influence in Minima Moralia or remains something of a mystery. Vincent Pecora, who also comes very close to the recognition of Nietzsche’s influence in the inception of Adorno’s negative dialectics, gives the explanation that Nietzsche is not a dialectical thinker but is ‘dialectically understood’ by Adorno. ¹⁴⁵ On the contrary, we showed that all the essential elements for Adorno’s negative dialectics are present in Nietzsche’s thought – a thought which is full of dialectical instances of which we explored just two examples – and therefore, Nietzsche could legitimately be proclaimed the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics. For those who consider negative dialectics to be the paramount achievement of Adorno’s thought, this claim would be equivalent to the claim that Nietzsche’s most significant contribution to Adorno’s thought is to be found in Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia. The decisive argument would come through biographical evidence or through a much more comprehensive analysis of the work of the two philosophers than the one possible here. The textual evidence we provided in this article can only aspire in showing the possibility and, perhaps, the probability of this contribution.