The first layer: Nietzsche's legacy — The attack from below
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What Adorno takes from Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s philosophical innovation was the genealogical method: tracing claims to validity back to their conditions of origin. Not: “Is this concept true?” but: “How did this concept arise? What interests stand behind it? Who benefits from this truth?” The principle is: origin before validity. The question of a thought’s provenance is more revealing than the question of its logical justification.[1]
The legitimate intuition behind this method, as Volume I has shown, is insight into the non-rational conditions of rationality. Thinking does not happen in a vacuum. It is embedded in interests, needs, structures of power. The question “Who benefits from this truth?” is philosophically legitimate and necessary. The systematic limit lies in absolutizing it: if everything is merely interpretation, then this also holds for the genealogical method itself. Radical perspectivism leads into a performative self-contradiction — the thesis that there is no truth itself claims to be true.[2]
Adorno takes both from Nietzsche — the legitimate insight and the self-contradiction — and transforms them into his own vocabulary. Genealogy becomes “ideology critique.” Concepts like “reason,” “enlightenment,” “progress,” “freedom” are interrogated as to their social conditions of origin. The Dialectic of Enlightenment[3] is, in its methodological core, a genealogy of reason: it does not ask whether enlightenment is true, but which relations of power it has produced and which forms of domination it enables. The method is Nietzsche’s method, even if the vocabulary is colored Marxist.
This adoption shows most clearly in Minima Moralia — not only in content but in form. The aphoristic form, which refuses systematic development and instead strings together flash-like insights, is directly in Nietzsche’s line of succession. Nietzsche had chosen this form because he distrusted systematic thinking; Adorno chooses it for the same reason, even if he names that reason differently. Where Nietzsche exposed “system” as an expression of the will to power, Adorno exposes it as an expression of the “context of delusion” (Verblendungszusammenhang). The structure of the argument is the same: systematic thinking is suspect because it is domination-shaped.
What follows from this: The prohibition of positive determination
The consequence of the Nietzschean layer in Adorno’s thought is a general distrust of positive determinations. Every statement of the form “X is Y” is suspected of ideology, because it might serve interests, might conceal domination, might legitimize the status quo. Ideology critique becomes total: it is not this or that statement that is ideological — the affirmative judgment as such stands under suspicion.
Adorno did not always maintain this distrust consistently; his material-rich analyses of the culture industry, the authoritarian character, and the sociology of music certainly contain positive determinations that convey concrete knowledge about concrete mechanisms. But on the level of philosophical principles — and this is the level on which Negative Dialectics operates — the rule holds: every positive determination is exposed to the suspicion of being affirmative, and being affirmative means confirming the existing order.
This move reproduces the performative self-contradiction that Volume I diagnosed in Nietzsche. The Dialectic of Enlightenment claims to enlighten, in an enlightened manner, about the impossibility of enlightenment. Negative Dialectics claims to demonstrate, dialectically, the impossibility of dialectics. In both cases, the method diagnosed as having failed is used to diagnose the failure. This is not a logical error that Adorno overlooked — he knows the problem and tries to catch it with the figure of “determinate negation.” But the question is whether this figure solves the problem or merely renames it. We shall return to this.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). The fundamental question — “Under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil?” — formulates the genealogical program. On the analysis of the genealogical principle, see Nietzsche: Genealogy and the Critique of Power (Aspect II: Historicity). ↩︎
On the systematic discussion of the performative self-contradiction in Nietzsche, see Nietzsche: Genealogy and the Critique of Power (Aspect II: Historicity) and Nietzsche: Genealogy and Will to Power (Aspect I: The Irrational). The formulation “There are no facts, only interpretations” comes from the notebooks (summer 1886 – fall 1887). ↩︎
Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947. The manuscript had already been duplicated in 1944 under the title Philosophische Fragmente. The new edition, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969, became the standard edition. ↩︎