# Identity, Difference, Ideality
**URL:** https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337
**Category:** Metaphysics & Epistemology
**Created:** [June 14, 2026, 4:03am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337 "2026-06-14T04:03:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@RussellA](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/RussellA)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:07pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/21 "2026-06-14T17:07:37Z")
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> But Rook you are referring to seems to be totally different object to Rook I am thinking about. To me, Rook is a dog owned by one of my relatives. He doesn’t move straight only.
The identity of a rook in chess derives from the name rook, as long as the name rook means a chess piece.
The identity of a dog derives from the name rook, as long as the name rook means an animal.
The identity of an object derives from its name, as long as the name means the object being referred to.
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:13pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/22 "2026-06-14T17:13:14Z")
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> The identity of a rook in chess derives from the name rook, as long as the name rook means a chess piece.
How do you know if your Rook means the chess Rook, when it is written just “Rook”? How do you know it is not Rook the dog?
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### Author:  [@RussellA](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/RussellA)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:34pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/23 "2026-06-14T17:34:22Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> Deleuze goes even further than Husserl. Drawing from Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, he asserts that identity is real but it is derived; difference is primary. Identity is an effect or product of difference. Repetition does not presuppose an identical thing that returns. What returns is the power of differing itself.
That makes sense.
The physical universe is in a state of constant change
From this constant change, the mind derives stable essences. Things such as trees, mountains and tables. In naming things, the mind creates identities that don’t exist in the physical world.
The Indirect Realist believes that objects such as trees, mountains and tables only exist in the mind as named concepts, and are illusions derived from the physical universe.
Identities as named objects only exist in the mind and are derived from differences in the physical universe. IE, difference existed in the universe prior to identity in the mind.
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### Author:  [@RussellA](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/RussellA)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:42pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/24 "2026-06-14T17:42:17Z")
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> How do you know if your Rook means the chess Rook, when it is written just “Rook”? How do you know it is not Rook the dog?
I don’t know what the single word “Rook” refers to.
Words only have meaning within the context of either the other text (“I thought you would sacrifice your rook”) or a physical situation (shouting rook!!!).
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### Author:  [@Kit](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Kit)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:42pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/25 "2026-06-14T17:42:42Z")
There’s a lot of talking of “thing-in-itself” going on here. Identity is a never-ending “tapestry” an umbrella of a multiplicity of termed “things-in-themselves.” “Will” “Heredity” “Taste” “Style” etc etc.
Viewing the gradations is where you’ll see the subtle changes that amount to a shift we eventually notice.
Change occurs when a new drive practices mastery and reconfigures the rank ordering of drives.
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### Author:  [@Kit](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Kit)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 5:53pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/26 "2026-06-14T17:53:15Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> Deleuze goes even further than Husserl. Drawing from Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, he asserts that identity is real but it is derived; difference is primary. Identity is an effect or product of difference. Repetition does not presuppose an identical thing that returns. What returns is the power of differing itself.
I digress… as Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence does detail this…
> 1. If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.
In Will to Power, Nietzsche describes all processes as something which can be interpreted as a “being.” This makes sense as the rank ordering of drives dictates the recurring factors in strength and regularity.
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### Author:  [@Joshs](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Joshs)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 6:09pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/27 "2026-06-14T18:09:36Z")
> [@Kit](#):
>
> In Will to Power, Nietzsche describes all processes as something which can be interpreted as a “being.” This makes sense as the rank ordering of drives dictates the recurring factors in strength and regularity
Whose reading of Will to Power
and Eternal Return do you prefer? I’m influenced both by Klossowski’s and Deleuze’s.
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### Author:  [@Corvus](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Corvus)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 6:34pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/28 "2026-06-14T18:34:36Z")
> [@RussellA](#):
>
> I don’t know what the single word “Rook” refers to.
>
> Words only have meaning within the context of either the other text (“I thought you would sacrifice your rook”) or a physical situation (shouting rook!!!).
Yes, that was the answer I was expecting.
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### Author:  [@Andy](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Andy)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 7:44pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/29 "2026-06-14T19:44:47Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> What would be the problem with reducing everything to difference?
I like this question. It reminds me of Radical Ontic Structural Realism (ROSR), where there are no ‘things’ but only relations – and then the question becomes “how can there be relations without relata?” And so to “how can there be differences without things that differ?”
What you’re suggesting is that difference is fundamental and that identities are derivative. The reason I like this is because it brings William James to mind, and his distinction between perception and conception. James argued that for empiricism to be complete it must encompass felt relations, putting _things_ and their _relations_ on an equal footing (I think this would be classed as _Moderate_ Ontic Structural Realism). Moreover, that we are inclined to treat our conceptual world models as the starting point at the expense of perceptual experience – a propensity that he calls “vicious intellectualism.” And any attempt to explain the world with concepts alone can never replicate the shifting interpenetrating flux that is the stream of pure experience within which the conceived world emerges.
So I’m interpreting you to be suggesting that identity is an emergent phenomenon operating at the conceptual level but not at the level of perceptual experience.
This makes sense to me because we humans (and other species but I wouldn’t like to have to hazard a guess as to how far down the phylogenetic tree this might go) have to place a lot of significance on whatever aspects of the world remain invariant over the time frames that are of significance to us.
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### Author:  [@VerticalOntology](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/VerticalOntology)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 8:01pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/30 "2026-06-14T20:01:27Z")
I think it is a problem to assume that a thing can exist by itself and that it has something like a soul or Plato’s Idea. A thing does not exist by itself, but only within a network of relations, or of potential relations. What question is pursued by the identity of an object? It is complete understanding, what Socrates was striving for. But today this question is already naive.
Existence itself has meaning only in relation to someone or something, or for someone or something. Roughly speaking, a similar understanding exists in physics. To what extent does a thing remain itself? In my view, this is simple: as long as it can remain in the same network of relations, in the same role.
The paradox of the Ship of Theseus is difficult only at first glance: it is the same ship for the sailors, and a completely different one for the wood-boring insects that have begun to eat it.
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### Author:  [@noAxioms](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/noAxioms)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 9:36pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/31 "2026-06-14T21:36:22Z")
> [@jkop](#):
>
> Emmy Noether’s first theorem (informally expressed):
>
> > If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time.
>
> For example, you can move a free particle in empty space any distance and in any direction, and the equations for motion and the physical outcomes remain the same. This continuous symmetry leads to the conservation of momentum.
I know all that, but I failed to see the connection to ‘identity, difference, ideality’, for the reasons I stated
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 11:41pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/32 "2026-06-14T23:41:27Z")
> [@bongofury](#):
>
> Call every vocalisation a “token” (or mark) of the would-be “type” (or form or idea or phonetic word) and leave a note promising to explain the type as no more than its token instances or ‘faces’? None of them the official or final one? (But some of them perhaps being especially ‘representative’ of the type by ‘exemplifying’ it. That is, by referring back to the word-name… or token instances thereof.)
Is the n- word “token” ? Yes, I think the type/token approach is great here. Given that our _entire world_ is “articulated” in terms of layers and layers of typed tokens, I’m suggesting that maybe Plato was trying to point this out. Maybe ideas are “just” types. But people have tended to read Plato in terms of postulating types that had some “substance” beyond the typed tokens. Perhaps the confusion can be attributed to a misreading of the ajar-ness or in-progress-ness of a type. New experience will arrive as “typed-tokens.” The type has an “infinity” (non-closed-ness) or “temporal depth.”
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/33 "2026-06-14T23:50:57Z")
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> In what sense identity is “ideal” and is prior to the mental and physical?
Right. Because “mental” is a category, a “type” of entity. Following some other philosophers, we might speculate that “language” is prior to the mental and physical, since these signs “mental” and “physical” depend on one another to signify.
If the physical is supposed to be “truly external” relative to the mental, then the sign “physical” is a sort of “lie” — like the mental realm’s false exit from itself. This is like Kant’s thing-in-itself, which is a sign/concept _for us._ I think we have something like the subject trying to “model it own ignorance.” As Bakhtin would put it, to be a subject is also to be between or behind that subject, as a language between self and other in dialogue.
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> In that regard, could it be named as sound-idea, instead of sound-image? Would it be the same things I am talking about? Or totally different idea I am guessing here?
Just for clarity, I understand the sound image as the “counting of” a sound ( heard by the ears **or** imagined) as the sounding of a word. Typically a cat’s meow doesn’t “manifest” as an instance of a word. But human vocalizations are heard “immediately” as chains of repeatable words. The sound is a typed-token. The vocalized word is heard _primarily_ as **the word** and not the “pure sound.”
> [@Corvus](#):
>
> But still I am not sure how identity could be prior to the mental or physical.
If you take indirect realism for granted, then the “exterior” of consciousness-as-stuff becomes “ineffable.” I’m suggesting that identity is “prior” in a logical rather than temporal sense. That all philosophy, operating with categories, swims in ideal unities or categories. But this “ideality” is not intended as mental _stuff_. Just perceiving a cat **as** a cat would count for what I mean. The world is “given” in terms of enduring self-identical objects that are nevertheless always changing.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 11:54pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/34 "2026-06-14T23:54:29Z")
> [@noAxioms](#):
>
> But being the same thing is purely a mental designation. There’s nothing beyond that, nothing physical. I did an entire topic on this. The only examples I could come up with were from fiction because it can’t work in reality.
I can understand why one would say this, but I’m not myself coming from a dualist framework. For me, experience is “immediately” world-from-POV.
> [@noAxioms](#):
>
> So with the chair, stripped of mental baggage, there is (in a naive sense) a sort of state of things in a certain volume at time X which an animal might consider to contain object ‘stick’, and then state of that ‘same volume’ (in quotes because it too is only a mental designation) does nor does not contain stick. If it does, it is up to that which makes the designation to treat it as the same stick or not.
I agree that “identity” is “subject-relevant.” But I don’t we think we can strip the chair of mental baggage by mentally stripping the chair of mental baggage. It’s like pretending to step outside of one’s own discourse within that discourse.
I’m suggesting that categories (identity, difference, ideality ) are “deeper” than most ontological positions, because they are fundamental. “Fundamental” names another category.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 14, 2026, 11:58pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/35 "2026-06-14T23:58:51Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> The same…is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference. We can only say “the same” if we think difference.”
I can find my own sense of the situation in these words. I’d add that we can only speak of difference if we think the same. The “problem” in earlier approaches to this issue was their making of identity a secure and perfectly present _substance_ — as opposed to a temporal synthesis or “gathering.”
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:02am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/36 "2026-06-15T00:02:36Z")
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> To what extent does a thing remain itself? In my view, this is simple: as long as it can remain in the same network of relations, in the same role.
I basically agree. It is simple but also illuminating. Sellars approach to meaning is like this, and it cuts through an ocean of noise and confusion.
I see “relations” as themselves identities. I can grasp the structure of Chess as a “thing,” as an intentional object.
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> The paradox of the Ship of Theseus is difficult only at first glance: it is the same ship for the sailors, and a completely different one for the wood-boring insects that have begun to eat it.
I agree here also. Though I suspect that many paradoxes were philosophical pointings. Like Zeno’s paradoxes. They are often presented as if Zeno was a fool, but it makes more sense to read him as offering koans or pointers, enticing others to notice something simple but surprisingly rich and elusive.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:05am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/37 "2026-06-15T00:05:20Z")
> [@Andy](#):
>
> So I’m interpreting you to be suggesting that identity is an emergent phenomenon operating at the conceptual level but not at the level of perceptual experience.
I think we can also find this in Ortega and Heidegger. The “flux” of pre-theoretical life is largely “circumspective.” I turn doorknobs and walk around furniture and put my foot on the brake in a way that doesn’t thematize the object as a distinct entity.
It’s interesting that “concept,” etymologically, is **together-grasping.**
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### Author:  [@Joshs](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Joshs)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:32am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/38 "2026-06-15T00:32:17Z")
> [@j\_j](#):
>
> > [@Andy](#):
> >
> > So I’m interpreting you to be suggesting that identity is an emergent phenomenon operating at the conceptual level but not at the level of perceptual experience.
>
> I think we can also find this in Ortega and Heidegger. The “flux” of pre-theoretical life is largely “circumspective.” I turn doorknobs and walk around furniture and put my foot on the brake in a way that doesn’t thematize the object as a distinct entity.
Heidegger wouldn’t treat this as a distinction between conceptual and perceptual, though.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:41am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/39 "2026-06-15T00:41:16Z")
> [@Joshs](#):
>
> Heidegger wouldn’t treat this as a distinction between conceptual and perceptual, though.
Like I said before, though, consider the dialogical context. We can’t say everything at once, make “all that deserves saying” present here and now.
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### Author:  [@j\_j](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/j_j)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2026, 12:43am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/identity-difference-ideality/1337/40 "2026-06-15T00:43:08Z")
> [@VerticalOntology](#):
>
> I think it is a problem to assume that a thing can exist by itself and that it has something like a soul or Plato’s Idea.
Just for clarity, I agree. We can read Plato as having been trying to say something more sophisticated. The object is “virtual.” It has no “substance” apart from the “difference” it gathers.
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