THE ESSAY AS FORM

“Destined, to see the illuminated, not the light”

-Goethe, Pandora

The Essay

• Essay- (n) a short literary composition on a particular theme or subject, usually in prose and generally analytic, speculative, or interpretative. (defined by dictionary.com)

• The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'.

• The first essayist is considered the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) writings were the first works in English to title themselves as essays.

Theodor Adorno

• German, 1903-1969.• Considered a sociologist,

philosopher, and musician. • A member of the Frankfurt

School, which is credited as the founder of cultural and critical theory.

• He greatly influenced intellectuals of the postwar era in Germany, and his style of thought is a precursor of the Postmodern influence.

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• Adorno immediately starts out by claiming the essay is a hybrid of styles, and “does not permit its domain to be prescribed.” Therefore, “It is classed among the oddities.” (152)

• The essay’s goal is not to oblige to “universal categories,” or to cater to positivists* tendencies. The essay does not find a beginning or an end to its argument.

*Positivism is a philosophy that states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. This knowledge is seen as objective and as concrete Truth. Furthermore, what comes with positivism is the reduction and demarcation of areas of study, such as the separation of art and science as Adorno mentions in the beginning.

“Its concepts are neither deduced from any first principle nor do they come full circle and arrive at a final principle.” (152)

“The positivist tendency to set up every possible examinable object in rigid opposition to the knowing subject remains- in this as in every other instance- caught up with the rigid separation of form and content: for it is scarcely possible to speak of the aesthetic anesthetically, stripped of any similarity with its object, without becoming narrow-minded and a priori losing touch with the aesthetic object. According to a positivist procedure the content, once rigidly modeled on the protocol sentence, should be indifferent to its presentation. Presentation should be conventional, not demanded by the matter itself. Every impulse of expression- as far as the instinct of scientific purism is concerned- endangers an objectivity that is said to spring forth after the subtraction of the subject; such expression would thus endanger the authenticity of the material, which is said to prove itself all the better the less it relies on form, even though the measure of form is precisely its ability to render content purely and without addition.” (153)

“The essayist dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes lead him to believe that he has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than explanations of the poems of others, or at best of his own ideas. But he ironically adapts himself to this smallness- the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in the face of life- and even emphasizes it with ironic modesty. The essay does not obey the rules of the game of organized science and theory that…the order of things is identical with that of ideas.” (158)

• Therefore, essays “seek truth content as being historical in themselves.”

“The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness of totality and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.” (159)

• Adorno is going against the positivist tendency of the belief in a linear progression of thought that will in time penetrate and master objective reality; he sees the essay as the antithesis of this mode of thought. Adorno believes that eternal truth is an illusionary goal, and claims that knowledge and human created concepts are much more complex and can never fully explain existence like positivist’s model claims to.

• “The essay silently abandons the illusion that thought can break out of thesis into physis, out of culture into nature.” (159)

“In the essay, concepts do not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture.” (160)

• According to Adorno, there is no one mode of thought that can grasp one reality. He claims that both thought and reality are fragmentary, and should be treated as such in the essay. The essays concern is to jeopardize any theory that claims to have found the ultimate answer.

• “Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its concern is always a conflict brought to a standstill.” (164)

“Even in its manner of delivery the essays refuses to behave as though it had deduced its object and had exhausted the topic. Self-realization is immanent in its form; it must be constructed in such a way that it could always, and at any point, break off. It thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over.” (164)

“Thus the essays distinguishes itself from scientific treatise. He writes essayistically who writes while experimenting, who turns his object this way and that, who questions it, feels it, tests it, thoroughly reflects on it, attacks it from different angles, and in his mind’s eye collects what he sees, and puts into words what the object allows to be seen under the conditions established in the course of writing.” (164) -Max Bense

In conclusion…

• “The relevance of the essay is that of anachronism.

• “Therefore, the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible.” (172)