James Sares

Nietzsche and the Labor of Thought: Fabrication of Spirit and World

Against the positivism that halts at phenomena – ‘There are only facts’ – I would say: no facts are just
what there aren’t, there are only interpretations. We cannot determine any fact ‘in itself’…‘Everything is
subjective,’ you say: but that itself is an interpretation, for the ‘subject’ is not something given but a fiction
added on, tucked behind.
-Friedrich Nietzsche 1

Abstraction as Falsification: Thought as Labor

If Nietzsche were the profaner of concepts, the profanity of the concept of the concept

lies latent at the center of his philosophy to reveal the impossibility of superseding the

fabrication of interpretation. The critique of the concept of the concept constitutes, as Adorno

writes, “Nietzsche’s liberating act” against the failure to mediate the concept with its own

formation and to understand that formation as necessarily constituting a moment of the concept

as a subjective force of intellectual labor. 2,3 To accept concepts as “gifts” or “dowries” is to be

seduced into an acquiescence bestowing upon them a “miraculous” transcendence, a

consequence of eliminating from them their historical conception and passage, such that they are

no longer products of labor and thus no longer of this world. Nietzsche reveals this divinity to be

mere myth; the uncovering of this false divination transforms the concept from a gift of

philosophy’s advancement into an inheritance of failure that characterizes the desire to free

philosophy from the contingencies of the empirical world, which can neither be subsumed under

nor exist outside of the medium of the concept.

1
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Rüdiger Bittner, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003. p.139. Henceforth Writings from the Late Notebooks will be abbreviated WLN in footnotes.
2
Adorno, Theodor. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2001. p.101.
Abbreviated henceforth as MCP in footnotes.
3
“What dawns on the philosophers last of all: they must no longer merely let themselves be given concepts, no
longer just clean and clarify them…Up to now, one generally trusted in one’s concepts as a miraculous dowry from
some sort of miracle world: but in the end they were the legacies left us by our most distant, stupidest and yet
cleverest forebears…What’s needed first is absolute skepticism towards all received concepts” (WLN pp.12-13).
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 What Nietzsche recognizes as the historical legacy of concepts, or what Adorno calls “the

relevance of the temporal to its own concept,” 4 points not only to the historical passage of the

concept but also to the historical dimension within the concept that must be put into reflection

upon itself as emerging from experience. The refusal to abstract the concept above its very

conceptuality denies its removal from its activity as intellectual labor, compelling a return to the

experience of thought laboring against its own inadequacy. As Nietzsche argues, thought

produces “a fundamental falsification of all events” emerging out of the transformation of matter

undergoing abstraction through intellectual labor; intellectual labor changes matter such that it

becomes derivative within thought and such that thought cannot capture matter without first

transforming and abstracting it within its own medium. 5 Yet for Nietzsche, matter and thought

do not constitute a static polarity but rather emerge as conditions of the activity of intellectual

labor only insofar as they are products of that labor—that is, they are conceptual fabrications like

all others. The relation, application and movement of ideas encompass thought’s matter as its

very activity, which is the basis of thought’s non-identity with its very assertion. Thought asserts

itself by encompassing what is beyond itself, which is nonetheless in itself. The very positing of

thought and matter, or similar fabrications such as subject and object, occurs through the

emergence of the concept as both the activity of thought and the congealed labor of thought, or

the matter of thought itself.

Nietzsche’s late notebooks reveal an emphasis on abstraction as the labor of falsification,

leading to his rejection of thought as pure activity separated from the experience of labor: against

Hegel, labor is not a mere moment sublimated into Spirit but rather the insuperable condition of

philosophy and the very positing of Spirit. The exercise of thinking becomes that of mediation of

fabrications and falsities produced in the activity of thought as it exposes the contradictions of

4
MCP p.101
5
WLN p.42
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attempting to posit truths separated from the contingencies of its formation and the

transformations undergone in abstraction. Thus the recognition of the relevance of the temporal

to its own concept is not only the recognition of thought’s dependence on experience and thus

the conditions outside of thought that allow for thought’s labor but also that such experience can

only be understood through the labor of thought itself. The use of the term “labor” here marks a

particular non-identical relation of activity to matter: the commodity contains the labor of the

worker and is not merely that labor but also what is beyond the labor, what the labor needed

worked upon as matter. Although intellectual labor functions such that the product of the labor of

thinking is thought itself, the return of thought to thought does not signal identity between the

product and activity of labor; rather, thought returns to itself only insofar as it has moved beyond

itself and transformed into what it is not. In this essay, I read Nietzsche’s critiques of thought as

a falsifying apparatus as signaling thought’s non-identical deployment through itself with

mediation or what Nietzsche refers to as interpretation as this labor. Thought’s insuperability

signals the need to reveal its abstraction not as purification but rather as distortion of that from

which has been abstracted through the return to itself.

Nietzsche turns thought toward itself in mediation of its own activity of falsification,

signaling the impossibility of asserting identity, unity or adequacy through the movements of

abstraction. Logic is revealed as produced through relationships between ideas abstracted from

the experience of thought encountering what is outside of itself and thus fails to supersede its

own emergence outside of its conceptuality or to become hermetic with its own conceptuality.

Whereas Hegel understands logic as thought’s sublation of itself as its own object and thus the

making infinite of thought, Nietzsche writes, “Thoughts are signs of a play and struggle of the

affects: they are always connected to their hidden roots.” 6 Further, Nietzsche disavows the idea

6
WLN p.60
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of thought without a need, writing that there is neither a thinking nor a willing “function” but

only a “willing-something” or “thinking-something” constituted only by what is outside of

itself. 7 Thus concepts are not merely conceptual as a product of pure thought but rather always

reaching to the non-conceptuality contained within yet superseding them: “all our categories of

reason have sensual origins: read off from the empirical world.” 8 Concepts are abstractions from

the abstracting and falsifying power of the senses, containing within themselves the falsifying

reference to what is beyond thought. Indeed, although Nietzsche returns to the experience of

abstraction from the empirical world to the senses and finally to thought, these steps of

derivation signal the denial to recourse to the senses as providing a philosophical foundation for

truth—as derivations, they are merely another medium of falsification. 9

The irreducibility of matter to thought appears in contradiction with Nietzsche’s

sublimation of objects to the subjective function in the fragments from his late notebooks: “The

subject alone is demonstrable: hypothesis that there are only subjects—that ‘object’ is only a

kind of effect of subject upon subject… a mode of the subject.” 10 Aside from Nietzsche’s later

denial of the subject as another mere interpretation, 11 in this quote Nietzsche does not advocate

the reduction of objects to the subject in the struggle to form identity; rather he characterizes here

the movement of thought acting upon itself in difference to itself. Nietzsche refuses the notion of

thought as self-contained or structured adequacy, as the “system of pure reason” or “the realm of

pure thought” through which essence gains form. 12 Matter, despite emerging from thought or

7
“There is no ‘willing,’ but only a willing-something: one must not uncouple the goal from the state, as the theorists
of knowledge do. ‘Willing in the way they understand it occurs just as little as ‘thinking’; is pure fiction” (WLN
p.222).
8
WLN p.159
9
“A dual falsification, by the senses and by the mind, to obtain a world of things that are, that remain, that have
equal value, etc.” (WLN p.138).
10
WLN p.161
11
WLN p.139
12
“Accordingly logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is
truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content [“objective thinking”] is the
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being a mode of the subject, has the function of entering into thought through the course of

experience; the relevance of the temporal to its own concept signals the labor of thought as

occuring through its relationship to non-conceptualities from which abstraction occurs. Thus

matter is neither fully beyond nor merely entrapped in thought but is rather both contained in and

driving outwardly thought’s activity. What cannot be contained in the concept returns to the

concept, as the conceptualization of “absence” within thought. The exercise of thinking beyond

the concept into its absence is hindered by thought’s insuperability, turning to the necessity of

tracing thought’s mediated deployment through what is beyond itself.

Nietzsche’s influence on Adorno is clear in the critique of idealism, which subsumes

matter under thought through the elimination of that from which is abstracted: “Idealism’s

πρῶτον ψεῦ δος [primary falsehood] ever since Fichte was that the movement of abstraction

allows us to get rid of that from which we abstract.” 13 Hegel for instance makes a distinction

between the “ordinary consciousness” mixing sensibility and thought and the philosophical

project involving thought itself “unmixed with anything else,” in which the matter of thought is

thought itself without reference to anything outside of it. 14 To assert this kind of identity of

thought and matter under the Subject—another fabrication according to Nietzsche—is to produce

a false unity derived from failure to mediate the mediating labor of abstraction. If the activity of

thought is its matter, this does not signal thought’s abstract unity within its own medium or the

insuperability of thought as pure substance but rather the insuperability of thought as the labor of

abstraction acting upon itself. Thought remains within itself in abstraction of what is outside of

itself, being imprisoned to itself even through its superseding movements; yet there remains for

exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit” (Hegel Science of
Logic).
13
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. New York: Routledge, 2000. p.135. Henceforth Negative Dialectics will
be abbreviated ND in footnotes.
14
G.W.F. Hegel. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Cambridge: Hackett, 1991. p.27. Henceforth abbreviated EL in
footnotes.
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Nietzsche an ability to think beyond thought through thought, which is thus another falsification

of abstraction used against the falsification of abstraction, characterizing Nietzsche’s mediated

negativity not only of matter through thought but also of thought upon itself as the very

mediation of matter through thought.

Nietzsche reveals the experience of thought’s abstracting labor as the foundational

activity of life and as necessary to live. The affirmation of life occurs through the revelation of

traditional philosophical categories as conceptual falsifications rather than as truths that bestow

an anti-mediatory staticity upon thought or an adequacy upon mediation itself as a return to

identity. In the late notebooks, Nietzsche is particularly concerned with Kant’s categories of

thought in the attempt to delineate the limitations of reason. Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s

categories underscores his divergence from the mediation of Hegel’s speculative system and thus

the refusal of both static categories and the sublation of mediation back into the purity of

thought. While Nietzsche claims a lack of interest in the conceptual distinctions between subject

and object or appearance and essence, he is interested in these fabrications as central to his

critique of knowledge as a possibility only through fabrication and negation. In what follows,

Kant’s restriction and categorization of thought is negated; yet the negative “noumena” is not to

be negated into an affirmation of the Absolute as in Hegel’s system. The critique of Absolute

Idealism does not regress into a neo-Kantian restriction of thought to a priori limits but rather

refuses Hegel’s equivocation of logic and metaphysics by revealing the mediation of and within

the concept itself. Nietzsche reveals through the tracing of the labor of abstraction the

inadequacy within any assertion of reason whose concepts portend to escape their conceptuality.

It follows that concepts must not, as Adorno later writes, “be turned into the virtue of their

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priority” but instead remain in a state of “dissatisfaction with their own conceptuality.” 15 The

return of the steps of derivation back into thought does not signify the mastery of thought but

rather the need to think beyond thought through its very medium.

Matter and Form: Non-identical Mediation

Nietzsche’s critique of traditional metaphysics is underscored in the historical prejudice

of understanding form and matter as hypostatized additives conferring thought or “form” the

status of pure and independent activity, a history tracing back to what Adorno calls the

“objective idealism” of Aristotelian metaphysics with the distinction between form (εἶ δος) and

matter (ὕ λη). Despite being a philosopher of mediation and becoming, Aristotle does not

mediate the concepts of form and matter through each other as conceptual abstractions, instead

bestowing contradictorily upon the idea (ἰ δέα), taken to be merely objective, both mediation

and being-in-itself. 16 Aristotle thus expounds an idealism in which the forms contain a higher

reality than their content but only “with regard to the objects of knowledge, but not, or not

essentially, with reference to the thinking subject.” 17 Nietzsche reveals this hypostatization of

essence into a “being-in-itself” outside of subjectivity as produced from the “activity of our

intellect” through which the subject constitutes the thing and without which the thing would not

be the thing. 18 The subject is not a mere moment of the object as an Aristotelian additive but

rather constitutive of the object itself, signaling the insuperability of thought’s abstraction as

falsification. Furthermore, the mediation of form and matter must occur from within their own

conceptuality as products of thought rather than through each other as reified dialectical poles: if
15
“Necessity compels philosophy to operate with concepts, but this necessity must itself not be turned into the virtue
of their priority—no more than, conversely, criticism of that virtue can be turned into a summary verdict against
philosophy” (ND p.11).
16
“The idea is supposed to be only immanent, only mediated, only something inhering in an existent and not
transcendent with regard to it; yet, on the other, it is made into something which has being in itself” (ND p.11).
17
MCP p.62
18
WLN p.148
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matter is a fabrication of thought, thought is a fabrication upon itself. Thus Nietzsche avoids the

sublimation of matter to the preconceived adequacy of thought by emphasizing thought as the

source of reality insofar as it is the source of fabrication and thus questioning “whether creating,

logicising, trimming, falsifying is not itself the best-guaranteed reality: in short, whether that

which ‘posits things’ is not the sole reality.” 19 His proposed equivalence of thought with reality

does not bestow upon thought a metaphysical foundation but rather reveals the inadequacy of

thought upon itself through its activity of falsification. 20

The contradictory nature of bestowing at once a mediatory function and an independence

upon the concepts of form and matter takes new form in Kantian idealism, in which thought

passes “through substantial subjective reflection,” arriving at the recognition that categories,

“such as those of form and matter are themselves abstractions produced by the mind.” 21 Kant is

the most explicit antagonist of Nietzsche’s late notebooks proceeding from his focus on

conceptuality and abstraction. As Nietzsche writes, “Kant’s mistakes—that the concept reduces

to the mathematical formula—using which, as must be emphasized again and again, nothing is

ever understood, but is distorted.” 22 In characterizing Kant’s metaphysics as mathematical

formula, Nietzsche points to the additive function between form and matter that makes the

function of the subject hermetic while naturalizing the distinction between these poles in the

attempt to eliminate the falsification of the concept. Rather than critiquing Kant for distortion

through concepts, Nietzsche critiques Kant for failing to recognize that his use of concepts

19
“Questions about what ‘things-in-themselves’ may be like, aside from our sensory receptivity and activity of our
intellect, must be parried by the question: how could we know that things exist? It was we who created ‘thingness’
in the first place. The question is whether there might not be many other ways of creating such an illusory world—
and whether this creating, logicising, trimming, falsifying is not itself the best-guaranteed reality: in short, whether
that which ‘posits things’ is not the sole reality and whether the ‘effect of the external world upon us’ is not also just
a consequence of such subjects that will” (WLN p.161).
20
All concepts are products of “inventive forces…in the service of needs…‘substance,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object’…are not
metaphysical truths” (WLN p.124).
21
MCP p.48
22
WLN p.87
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distorts from within their conceptuality and that any reduction to mathematical formula is an

enfeebled attempt to surpass conceptuality while making use of concepts. The result, Nietzsche

argues, is an internally contradictory system based around the concepts of thing-in-itself and

appearance and dependent upon the a priori. Despite the recognition of the impossibility of

arriving at knowledge without sensuous input, Kant raises form above experience, such that

although “all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of

experience.” 23 Yet it is only through conceptual hypostatization, through the restriction of

thought from its self-realization as labor, that Kant understands matter as an objective a

posteriori and form as, from within the mind, the structure of this intellectual labor, a priori.

Consequently, transcendental logic is abstracted from the sensuous a priori of space and time,

which in turn abstracts into a priori ideas and “pure reason.” 24

While Nietzsche’s critiques of Kant are neither extensive nor systematic, they reveal a

central anxiety on the mediation between and within form and matter. Although Kant attempts to

abstract away the matter that allows for form, form’s deployment remains through matter,

contained and enacted in the articulation of form: the movements of logic are possible only

through the matter that give form content, or its very conceptuality. In the Aristotelian tradition,

empirical knowledge is a “compound” in which matter, obtained through sensuous impressions,

gives merely “the occasion” for the faculty of cognition. 25 While the Aristotelian conceptions of

form and matter are objective, making their meeting between two beings-in-itself, the subjective

23
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Dover, 2003. p.1. Henceforth Critique of Pure Reason will
be abbreviated CPR in footnotes.
24
It must be emphasized that the independence of form, from which springs the negative independence of the being-
in-itself, must be critiqued through the concept of the a priori, which is preserved in the empiricist versus rationalist
debate, allowing Kant to explore its limits rather than its very conceptual possibility. Even Hume remains dedicated
to the mathematical a priori of “abstract reasoning” that, although capable of mere tautology as in mathematics,
upholds the possibility of independence of thought’s activity from experience (Hume, David. An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977. pp.111-114). Yet tautology
emerges out of experience of tautology—any view of “necessity” based upon mathematics must return to the
experience of mathematics as such.
25
CPR p.1
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function of form in Kantian idealism submits matter to form while allowing their independence

from the other. However, this independence is a positive independence of form against a

negative conception of matter submitted to the subject. In their meeting, form retains its structure

while matter transforms under form: the “pure” a priori ideas in which “no empirical element is

mixed up” fractures matter into the object of cognition and the thing-in-itself or noumena. 26 The

understanding “confesses itself unable to cognize [noumena] by means of the categories, and

hence is compelled to cogitate them merely as an unknown something.” 27 Thus the noumena is

the product of the subjective function of understanding contemplating its own limitations with

regard to sensibility; Kant argues that the categories cannot be employed to comprehend the

thing-in-itself because they “possess significance only in relation to the unity of intuitions of

space and time,” outside of which the thing-in-itself exists.28

Nietzsche critiques the Kantian delineation of reason through the mediation of concepts

within their own conceptuality in order to reveal the contradictions within this attempt to

schematize reason. He claims that through the conceptual distinction between appearance and the

thing-in-itself, Kant bestows a contradictory character upon consciousness, such that the

assertion of thought’s perspectival nature stands in contrast with its ability to assert truth through

this lack. As he writes, consciousness is for Nietzsche “on the one hand adapted to a perspectival

way of seeing…on the other, capable of grasping this perspectival seeing as perspectival, the

appearance as appearance…the knowledge that it’s only a perspectival restriction with respect to

a true reality.” 29 Nietzsche continues on to critique the idea of the “thing-in-itself” as produced

26
CPR p.2
27
CPR p.165
28
CPR p.163
29
WLN p.126
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from the “activity of our intellect” through which the subject constitutes the thing. 30 Because

matter is fractured into something at once for-another as appearance and in-itself, the in-itself

can be known only through the experience of matter for-another as the former’s negation. The in-

itself, containing in its abstract negativity the content of that which has been negated, depends in

the Kantian system on its abstraction through thought and is possible only insofar as it is for the

subject as noumena; as Kant describes, the noumena is the referent of the in-itself within

thought’s capacity to cognate it as such. That the in-itself is possible only through thought

signals the return of the in-itself to its mediation within thought, as matter for-another, the

thinking subject. As such, the limitations of thought within Kant’s system are not defined from

what is outside of thought’s scope but from within thought’s mediation of itself—a discovery

latent in the concept of noumena but not mediated through by Kant himself, who delineates the

boundaries of thought as a static and abstract negativity.

If both Hegel and Nietzsche emphasize thought as constituting the in-itself as such, Hegel

takes this as the affirmation of subjective knowledge as objective knowledge to assert the

Absolute, whereas Nietzsche emphasizes this impossibility given the irreducibility of abstraction

from which Hegel seeks to escape through the movement of abstraction itself. Hegel writes that

Kant’s error in setting static bounds to thought emerges from the distrust and fear of thought’s

ability to achieve of Absolute knowledge and thus unity of subject and object. 31 He writes of the

30
“Questions about what ‘things-in-themselves’ may be like, aside from our sensory receptivity and activity of our
intellect, must be parried by the question: how could we know that things exist? It was we who created ‘thingness’
in the first place. The question is whether there might not be many other ways of creating such an illusory world—
and whether this creating, logicising, trimming, falsifying is not itself the best-guaranteed reality: in short, whether
that which ‘posits things’ is not the sole reality and whether the ‘effect of the external world upon us’ is not also just
a consequence of such subjects that will” (WLN p.161).
31
“Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any
scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust
should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial
error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and
consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of
knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge…a
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in-itself as a moment of the abstract understanding that has yet to become concrete: for Hegel,

the in-itself must reflect into another and return to itself in order to be truly for-itself. 32 Yet what

Hegel understands as the distrust of thought is both the triumph of thought in the world, allowing

the empirical world to become definite, adequate, and knowable under the categories, and the

assertion of thought beyond itself through the conceptualization of its own inadequacy, giving

thought dominion over what is beyond itself through static conceptualization over it. The concept

of noumena is not enacted in the passage of thought but rather merely asserted as existing under

the subject. The subject and its category of “form” thus remain unmediated, their moment of

unity unthreatened by the static negativity rendered subsumable to itself.

In contrast, the effect of Nietzsche’s critique of Kant is the “abolishment” of the

distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself in the experience of thought’s abstracting

labor. 33 The structured categories that portend to restrict thought and thus assert its adequacy

encounter in Nietzsche’s philosophy the passages of thought as labor producing derivations from

its experience in the world. Nietzsche returns thought to an experience of itself as the labor of

abstraction and derivation; thought turns toward itself as a derivative of sensual immediacy,

which is in turn negated in the reflection of thought failing to express sensuality except in its

own expression. Nietzsche’s mediated negativity is thus concrete insofar as it returns thought to

itself as its object, though unlike Hegel this concreteness expresses nothing but non-identity,

revealing an anxiety against the Absolute in the wake of the dissolution of Kant’s categories

across the late notebooks. Whereas Nietzsche reveals the concepts of appearance and the in-itself

to be abstractions and falsifications within their very conceptuality, Hegel mediates form and

essence through each other such that they take on an objective quality in affirmation of the

position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth” (G.W.F. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Mind. Harper Torchbooks: New York, 1967. ¶ 74.)
32
EL p.194
33
WLN p.126
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Absolute: appearance is a moment that has form as its essence consequently passing into

actuality. 34 For Hegel, form is no longer a merely subjective structuring of thought and essence

is no longer the in-itself of the matter beyond form; rather, both categories are moments of the

Absolute through their mediation through each other and are “abolished” only insofar as they

preserved. The problem of matter and form in Kant becomes resolved in the Hegelian system

only through the transformation of matter, or that from which is abstracted, into the “essence” of

thought’s logical movements, such that it is granted objectivity only insofar as it is already first

thought, untied to anything but thought’s pure medium. Hegelian mediation reduces matter to a

logical form without, as in Nietzsche’s critique, recognition of that form’s formation from the

supersession of and return to thought.

Sense and the Empirical World: Thought Outside Itself

Nietzsche’s critiques of Hegel, though less explicit in the late notebooks than those of

Kant, reveal a struggle to mediate the static forms of thought without recourse to the speculative

moment. Hegel sublates the non-identity within thought’s assertion of itself by recognizing

abstraction as purification—that is, as allowing thought to grasp the essence of pure things and

thus become objective—rather than as labor that returns to itself in non-identity. In critique of

Kant’s system for reducing thought to a subjective form without objective content, 35 Hegel

argues that the objectivity of thought is obtained through thought’s taking of itself as its own

object, allowing thought to become infinite and capable of grasping the Absolute Idea through

the sublation of itself. 36 Although Hegel writes that thought becomes concrete from these logical

movements, the sublation of the finitude and particularity of matter to the necessity of the

34
EL p.213
35
EL p.83
36
EL p.55
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Absolute occurs out of the abstract movements of thought’s forms upon themselves. Objectivity

is granted to matter only insofar as it is a moment of thought’s development as a form in logic

and thus only insofar as thought itself is granted objectivity. Thus the non-identity of thought and

matter is the non-identity of thought with itself, which as Hegel asserts returns back to itself as

identity from the first assumption of thought’s purity. This movement appears in the description

of Nature as both objective otherness of God as the world 37 and yet also as the very reflection of

Idea; Science is the Idea’s development into Spirit through its return to itself out of its otherness

as Nature. 38 Because Nature, or what is non-identical with the Idea, returns to the Idea through

the passage to Spirit, the not-I reduces to mind such that, as Adorno writes, “…the not-I,

nevertheless is mind; and that consequently the absolute…can have nothing other than itself as

its content.” 39 Thus Hegelian mediation acquires the positive speculative quality through which

the negative moment of thought’s non-identity returns to an affirmation of the infinity and

necessity of the Absolute assumed from the first step as the mediated “becoming” grounding

such activity.

Nietzsche critiques the speculative aspect of Hegel’s philosophy as dependent upon the

transformation of God into the “becoming” under which all finitude is sublated; for Nietzsche,

Hegel’s philosophy presents the mere reformation of the concept of God in the wake of Kant

without addressing the very possibility of God or the concepts of necessity and universality,

resulting in the deployment of these concepts without critique of their conceptuality as

contingent and finite abstractions—even those of mathematics. 40 Consequently, Nietzsche’s

37
EL p.238
38
EL p.42
39
ND p.93
40
As Adorno argues, even mathematical “fact” or “necessity” is such due to interpretation and out of experience:
“The statement 3 + 4 = 7 would be false, if a factual moment, which admittedly is inseparable from the synthesis,
were not already contained in the material being judged” (MCP p.66). Even tautology roots itself in the experience
of tautology as such through which concepts come to be imagined or conceptualized in identity with the other. The a
priori is part of the experience of thought’s movements as a product of intellectual labor, revealing the possibility of
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critique of the concept refutes the progression of Hegel’s logic as taking as its first step the

presumed possibility of pure thinking as being the object of itself. Nietzsche eliminates Logic as

the science of Idea in and for itself as “pure abstraction” or “pure thought,” such that thought’s

production of objects does not result in the development of the Idea through its return into itself

out of its otherness in identity. 41 Indeed Nietzsche rejects the concept of “thinking” as an

“arbitrary fiction” insofar as it is used as an independent activity and an empty potentiality

removed from its need for objects through which to think. As he writes, “the ‘mind’, something

that thinks: maybe even ‘the mind absolute, pure, unmixed’—this conception is a derivative,

second consequence of the false self-observation that believes in ‘thinking’, and secondly a

subject-substratum is imagined in which every act of this thinking, and nothing else,

originates.” 42 That thought needs what is beyond itself signals its being bound to its own non-

identity rather than its production from the subject, which is revealed as another mere concept:

Nietzsche writes that concepts are not produced from the subject but rather that the subject is

produced as a derivative of other concepts including thought. The bestowal of any truth to the

concept through the reconciliation of subjective and objective moments is thus absurd, as the

very categories of subject and object are interpretations added for convenience or consistency.

Nietzsche signals the movement of thought upon itself as a process of falsification

through degrees and derivatives, resulting not in the identity of not-I with mind but rather the

non-identity of mind in its own deployment within itself. Nietzsche argues that it is necessary to

reveal the foundations of concepts in the sensuous experiences from which they are derived,

which in turn have their foundations in what exists outside of and acts upon subjective

perception. He explains this progression, writing that cognition begins first with images, then

the category of a priori as possible only in conceptual derivation and thus a posteriori, returning to the experience of
thought itself.
41
EL p.45
42
WLN p.222
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with words applied to images and finally to concepts, “possible only when there are words—the

collecting of many images in something nonvisible but audible.” 43 He characterizes abstraction

as a tiered process in which the root of one concept is found in a previous concept, tracing back

to experience with the empirical world. These tracings signals the use of thought to return to

what is not-thought and the subsequent realization that what is not-thought is, in the very

positing of it, contained within thought without the speculative moment. Although matter returns

to thought, both matter and thought are in themselves falsified and abstracted concepts that

cannot be made identical to the falsifying labor of thought; their inadequacy means they cannot

rest in themselves and must instead by traced to the source of their inadequacy—knowledge of

which exists only through the medium it seeks to critique. In other words, although the empirical

world returns to thought, the return does not signal the resolution of the mediation of thought and

matter, as thought remains itself unresolved by this passage back into itself. At once the

immediacy of the empirical world is mediated; yet the mediation of thought occurs through

thought’s tracing of its movements of abstraction. Thus rather than propose a resolution of the

mediation between matter and thought, Nietzsche implies recurring unfolding through their non-

identity as a form of philosophical activity: thought critiques its foundations outside of itself,

which return to itself and therefore demands a continued skepticism and discontent against it.

The tiered nature of abstraction must be recognized; yet this proposed progression of

concepts is subject itself to mediation, signaling the mediation within the mediating function.

Thus, although Nietzsche’s emphasis on the origin of thought’s content as in the senses would

imply a conferring of supremacy upon empirical experience through the senses, he rejects any

bestowal of unmediated authenticity upon the immediacy of experience. The return to the

immanent encounters with the world before their abstraction in thought is for Nietzsche

43
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage. p.275. Henceforth WTP in footnotes.
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impossible, as sensuous experience is a product of the abstraction of subjective senses from

which thought abstracts to form ideas and is thus involved in the process of fabrication. As he

writes, “Sense-perception happens without our awareness: whatever we become conscious of is a

perception that has already been processed.” 44 The senses form merely beliefs rather than

provide the foundation for truth above thinking and prove to be merely a “simplifying apparatus”

that “prove nothing about the super-sensible, not even about the animal, not even about the

typically human.” 45 These critiques fall in line with Nietzsche’s rejection of the “sensualist

prejudice” based on the idea that sensations teach “truths” about things. Therefore, despite

Adorno’s characterization of Nietzsche’s ridicule of the distinction between essence and

appearance as “concur[ing] with all of positivism,” 46 Nietzsche rejects explicitly any positivism

that would bestow truth upon the immediacy of sense and appearance without their own

mediation, arguing that faith in “scientific-positivistic form” emerges in a climate of “pessimistic

gloom, something that smells of weariness, fatalism, disappointment, and fear of new

disappointments.” 47 Nietzsche is thus critical of empiricism and positivism replacing the

transcendence of God as a new ideology of weakness. Accordingly, he does not side with

“appearance” or immediacy against the fabrication of thought but rather shows how immediacy

is already within the sphere of abstraction and thus fabrication. 48,49

44
WLN p.1
45
WLN p.6. Nietzsche continues: “The intellect and the senses are, above all, a simplifying apparatus. Yet our
erroneous, miniaturized, logicised world of causes is the one we can live in. We are ‘knowers’ to the extent that we
are able to satisfy our needs” (WLN pp.2-3).
46
ND p.169
47
GS p.288
48
In response to Nietzsche’s labeling of the metaphysician as a “backwoodsman” for adhering to the “true world” as
existing beyond appearance, Adorno writes, “No background world annoys the latest type of backwoodsman; he
happily buys what the foreground world will sell him on, in words or in silence” (ND p.170). In the attempt to
reclaim essence, Adorno writes that it must “pass into that which lies concealed beneath the façade of immediacy, of
the supposed facts, and which makes the facts what they are” (ND p.167).
49
Even when Nietzsche chooses to analyze the body before the spirit, to give body primacy in imagining a new
philosophical method, it is merely to consider “whether the inferior parts themselves cannot enter into
communication with us,” meaning the materiality of the body and affective experience that is often subsumed or
negated under the metaphysical spirit or soul (WTP p.272). Nietzsche does not seek recourse to the body as
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 To use Adorno’s terminology, Nietzsche resists both the old backwoodsmen ideology of

the “true world” and the latest backwoodsmen ideology of the immediacy of truth in the senses

by rejecting not merely Kant’s concept of the in-itself but also his concept of appearance.

Nietzsche’s philosophical project hinges on the mediation of appearance and essence, similarly

to that of thought and matter, within their very concepts rather than merely through each other.

Adorno appears so entrapped in his commitment to the transform Hegelian mediation as to fail to

see Nietzsche’s philosophy as mediatory in a divergent sense from Hegel’s made apparent in the

critique of Kant—divergent in the sense that Nietzsche refuses either category rather than finds

truth in both as moments with a speculative resolution. Perhaps most strikingly, Adorno’s

characterization of Nietzsche as positivist signals the difficulty with which to read his text as

rejecting both idealism and positivism as a similar falsity of the adequacy of the relationship of

matter and thought, such that in either case an identity, affirmation or knowability is formed

between subjective and objective poles. Nietzsche’s radical act is to reveal these poles and

everything concluded between them as falsifications, despite and even to the benefit of our need

for them. Indeed there remains the persistent need for thought in its self-critique to return to the

empirical world and the objects that give it content, even in recognition that this content is

already abstracted, distorted and thus fabricated within its own medium. The inability to assert

thought without mediation and conceptual production, without the movement of thought back

into itself as something transformed and distorted from experience, constitutes Nietzsche’s

profaning of all concepts, subject and object, appearance and in-itself, being and thinking, as

being asserted insofar as they delude and mislead in their usefulness.

unmediated appearance outside of the force of interpretation. Instead, irreducibility between materiality and
interpretation grounds itself in indistinguishability that, as nihilism reveals, is truly a potentiality for the will as it
asserts itself.
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Conclusion: Negativity as Affirmation

Across Nietzsche’s late notebooks is the emphasis that the fabrication of abstraction is

necessary to exert the will: “Truth is the kind of error without which a particular kind of living

creature could not live,” 50 while knowing goes as far as “what’s just necessary for the

preservation of life.” 51 As Nietzsche writes, life is merely the will to power, 52 a process of

becoming based on “inventing, willing, self-negating, self-overcoming.” 53 The process of self-

negating and self-overcoming, while a form of activity and creation, is activity driven by

negation and fabrication: the will to power is, at its root, the error knowledge holds about itself.

Nietzschean activity of the will to power becomes the grappling of thought with its own

falsification, such that it is possible only to live and gain strength through weakness and the

failure to know; the will to power becomes affirmation through negation of one’s own

fabrication, to mediate the insuperability of thought through the movements of thought itself.

Nietzsche’s equating of meaning with the will to power does not raise the subject to the master

of interpretation or create identity between meaning and subject but rather recognizes both terms

as borne out the incapacity to grasp what is outside of themselves yet always constructed in

reference to and out of experience. The rejection of the unconditioned includes the rejection of

the unconditioned force of interpretation itself, such that the rejection of the mythologization of

the concept against which Nietzsche first warns does not regress into faith in the unconditioned

subject driving interpretation. An account of subjective failure to identify and sublimate

interpretation under itself as a pure activity reveals the struggle to reject idealism and the

achievement of the absolute through the subject without regressing to the naïve realism of

50
WLN p.16
51
WLN p.24
52
“But what is life? Here a new, more definite version of the concept ‘life’ is needed. My formula is: life is will to
power” (WLN p.96).
53
WLN p.138
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positivism, or allowing the body, desire or affect to produce a new metaphysics in affirmation

based on the adequacy of life. 54 As Nietzsche writes, and what has become clear across this

essay, “Against the positivism that halts at phenomena – ‘There are only facts’ – I would say: no

facts are just what there aren’t, there are only interpretations. We cannot determine any fact ‘in

itself’…‘Everything is subjective,’ you say: but that itself is an interpretation, for the ‘subject’ is

not something given but a fiction added on, tucked behind.” 55

Interpretation functions through concepts that serve as “regulative fictions” 56 that bring

about constancy in the “service of needs” 57 such that “we ‘know’ just as much as may be useful

in the interests of the human herd.” 58 In emphasizing the usefulness of concepts for the herd,

Nietzsche signals concepts as useful insofar as they are restricting and false. Nietzsche describes

how the subject is neither independent of nor ontologically prior to its own negation and denial;

the herd bestows language and thus consciousness to the subject, which in giving birth to the

possibility of interpretation enervates it into the context of its emergence: “whatever becomes

54
Readings of Nietzsche that place the affirmation of life as the foundation of his philosophy and that affirm desire
as that which “lacks nothing” expound a vitalism allowing “life, strength, and will to power” to take “the place of
the old Platonic essences and the ‘Being’ of tradition.” The view that the subject controls interpretation betrays the
Nietzschean admonition that concepts are mediations that depend on, but are irreducible to, the subjective moment
of interpretation. The vitalistic readings of Nietzsche eliminate this irreducibilty, imposing a proximity between
subject and concept that manifests as the erasure of the historical and empirical subject into the objectivity, through
hypostatization, of the subjective concept of “life.” Under these readings Nietzsche’s “active nihilism” becomes
“simply a new metaphysics, which would set life, strength, and will to power in the place of the old Platonic
essences and the ‘Being’ of tradition.” These readings fail to uncover that “life is nothing but an interpretation, a
notion that is totally internal to a particular perspective and incapable of describing, in a general and ultimate way,
the essence of Being.” See: Vattimo, Gianni. “Nihilism: Reactive and Active” in Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of
Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989. p.15-
21.
55
WLN p.139.
56
“I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter,’ ‘thing,’ ‘substance,’ ‘individual,’
‘purpose,’ ‘number’: in other words, to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and
thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming” (WLN p.21).
57
“The inventive force that thought up categories was working in the service of needs—of security, of quick
comprehensibility using signs and sounds, of means of abbreviation—‘substance,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘being,’
‘becoming,’ are not metaphysical truths.—It is the powerful who made the names of things law; and among the
powerful it is the greatest artists of abstraction who created the categories” (WLN p.124).
58
“Whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd
signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities,
and generalization” (GS p.300).
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conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal;

all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to

superficialities, and generalization.” 59 The failure of supersede consciousness is the failure to

escape the medium through which to imagine the individual before society and thus the falsity of

imagining the individual before its enervation within the herd; the weakness of the herd and the

strength of the individual are always mutually dependent and enacted through the other given the

impossibility of escaping interpretation and thus the necessity of living through falsity and

weakness. The activity of the subject is thus always tied to its fabrication and the need to unravel

that fabrication—the continued assertion of thought and subjectivity despite its disappearance in

the course of critique, a production through the negativity marking active nihilism.

Active nihilism takes form in the disavowal of all concepts as fabrications: “If we give up

the concept ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ then we give up also the concept ‘substance’ – and

consequently its various modifications, e.g. ‘material,’ ‘spirit’ and other hypothetical entities,

‘the eternity and immutability of matter,’ etc.” 60 Yet the critique of the concept does not contain

thought to a mere falsity contented with itself, such that thought is drained of any critical insight

for judging all as equivalently “false:” this would turn into a static, anti-mediatory negativity

characteristic of what Nietzsche calls “passive nihilism,” 61 a “generalization of discouragement

and weakness” that reifies “the belief in unbelief.” 62 Rather, the “free spirit” that uptakes the

activity of interpretation is that which “would take leave of all faith and every wish for

certainty,” including the certainty of meaninglessness itself. 63 The mediated negativity of

thought is to think against its fabrication, such that it thinks against the mere given, including the

59
GS p.300
60
WLN p.16
61
WLN p.147
62
GS p.289
63
GS p.289
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mere given of concepts or of ideology, 64 while refusing recourse to hypostatization, including

hypostatization of its very fabrication.

As such, concepts are not false in a merely abstract sense but rather in an active,

mediated and experiential sense that enables thought and thus life itself, encompassing the

experience of the concept moving beyond itself and into relation with others, as “concepts alone

can achieve what the concept prevents…the determinable flaw in every concept makes it

necessary to cite others.” 65 This supersession drives what Adorno calls philosophy’s “ceaseless

self-renewal” between concepts and through the function of interpretation more generally. 66

Nietzsche articulates this self-renewal through the mediated negativity of thought, building his

critique of truth as to prevent recourse to the “unconditioned,” including unconditioned falsity

asserted in the concept. Through concepts, we live in a world of mediation incapable of being

sublated to a final order or truth of Being; yet Nietzsche’s view of negativity as affirmation

prevents this indeterminacy from turning philosophy to passivity or decadence. Nietzsche’s

critique of abstraction as falsification does not contain thought to a mere falsity contented with

itself, such that thought is drained of any critical insight outside of what is immediate and

apparent. Rather, the constant need of thought to think beyond itself and its immediate conditions

through its very limitations drives the ceaseless self-renewal of interpretation, the very project of

philosophy as the impossibility of its stasis.

64
Accordingly, Adorno characterizes thought’s negativity as “a revolt against being importuned to bow to every
immediate thing” (ND p.19).
65
ND p.53
66
ND p.33
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