Indissolubly entwined, nature and history preponderate over individuals and their cognitive activity. Nature preponderates over cognition because our cognitive faculties serve primarily as instruments of adaptation to the natural world. Our concepts themselves are tied to non-conceptual reality; they emerge and develop in our embodied encounters with material objects (ND 11). By extension, nature preponderates over individuals as corporeal beings, driven by instinct and need. Now as in the past, self-preservation runs wild, and reason ends by regressing to nature (ND 289). For its part, history preponderates over cognition, not just because our concepts are intersubjectively sustained constructs with socially conditioned and sedimented histories, but because – as Adorno often put it – individuals are imprisoned in prevailing modes of thought. Finally, this chapter will show that late capitalist society preponderates because it shapes the process of individuation, ensures the material survival of individuals and defines their relation to nature as members of the labour force.

Under the monopoly conditions that characterize late capitalism, individuals stand in much the same relation to society as particulars stand to universal concepts. Adorno suggests this throughout his work when he refers to society as the “universal”. Where identity thinking summarily subsumes objects under concepts, society reifies individuals, expunging their idiosyncrasies by subsuming them under abstract exchange relations. Adorno emphasizes the isomorphism between identity thinking and exchange relations when he observes that exchange is “fundamentally akin to the principle of identification” because it serves as the “social model” for this principle.