4 - The Thing of the Essay

Summary

The essay is bound to ‘speak “the truth”’ about things, György Lukács declares. Expanding on this claim in his own essay on the essay, Theodor W. Adorno contrasts the essay’s truth with scientific or positivistic truth, which, he argues, relies on purging the ‘irritating and dangerous elements of things that live within concepts’. Clarity and simplicity – the Cartesian hallmarks of sound philosophical thought and writing – did not disappear as philosophical virtues with the waning of logical positivism. On the contrary, they appear so naturally aligned with truth (telling ‘the plain truth’) that one feels rather sheepish about suggesting otherwise. Yet there is reason to question, as Adorno does and Friedrich Schlegel and Søren Kierkegaard did before him, whether truth is properly at home in the clear and simple – especially when these terms are used to endorse or exclude specific ways of writing. Henry David Thoreau famously complains of the ‘ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither man nor toadstools grow so.’ The American poet John Hollander asks of philosophical writing ‘more compelling models of what our moral – and even what our epistemologically and metaphysically wondrous – life is like’. Precision may be correct, without touching on the true.

How can an essay’s truth be understood? When Adorno writes of the ‘dangerous elements of things’, he points to the refusal of objects to be resolved into a system or definition, their refusal to conform neatly to our thinking of them. The recalcitrance of a thing or a phenomenon, a thereness that stubbornly asserts itself, is a feature to which the essay bears witness in its mode of presentation. I would like to suggest in what follows a reading of the essay’s attitude toward things as a commitment to both receptivity and renewal. Essayistic writing attempts to meet and to hold the stubborn complexity of things; in lingering with things as they are found, the essayist is able to draw out of them compelling models of world and self, demonstrating the philosophical value of such writing. Understanding the essay as an experiment in dwelling with things gives body to Lukács’s claim that the essay speaks the truth and perhaps helps to motivate the contemporary relevance of the form.