No More Learning

? The Essay as Form*
by T. W. Adorno
"Destined, to see the illuminated, not the light. "
Goethe, Pandora
That in Germany the essay is decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a convincing tradition; that its strenuous requirements have only rarely been met: all this has been often remarked upon and censured. "The essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from aprimitive, undifferentiated unitywith science, ethics, and art. "' But neither discontent with this situation, nor discontent with the mentality that reacts to the situation by fencing up art as a preserve for the irrational, identifying knowledge with organized science and ex- cludingas impure anything that does not fit this antithesis: neither dis- content has changed anything in the customary national prejudice. The bestowal of the garland "writer" still suffices to exclude from academia the person one is praising. Despite the weighty perspicacity that Simmel and the young Lukics, Kassner and Benjamin entrusted to the essay, to the speculative investigation of specific, culturally pre- determined objects,' the academic guild only has ptience for phi- losophy that dresses itself up with the nobility oft e universal, the everlasting, and today - when possible - with the primal; the cultural artifact is of interest only to the degree that it serves to exemplify
* Adorno's "Der Essay als Form" was written between 1954 and 1958 and first pub- lished as the lead essay of Nota zur Literatur I in 1958. It is now contained in Adorno, Gesammelte Schnzen, 1 1 (~;ankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1974). The essay is published here in English with the permission of SuhrkampVerlag.
1. George Lukiics, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT, 1974), p. 13.
2. Ibid. ,p. 10. "Theessayisalwaysconcernedwithsomethingalreadyformed,orat best, with something that has been; it is part of its essence that it does not draw some- thing new out of an empty vacuum, but only gives a new order to such things as once lived. And because he only newly orders them, not forming something new out of the formless, he is bound to them; he must alwaysspeakg'thetruth" about them, find, that is, the expression for their essence. "
? 1 5 2 The Essay a s Form
universal categories, or at the very least allows them to shine through - however little the particular is thereby illuminated. The stubborn- ness with which this stereotypical thought survives would be as puz- zling as its emotional rootedness if it were not fed by motives that are stronger than the painful recollection of how much cultivation is miss- ing from a culture that historically scarcely recognizes the homme de lettres. In Germany the essay provokes resistance because it is reminiscent of the intellectual freedom that, from the time of an unsuccessful and lukewarm Enlightenment, since Leibniz's day, all the way to the pres- ent has never really emerged, not even under the conditions of formal freedom; the German Enlightenment was always ready to proclaim, as its essential concern, subordination under whatever higher courts. The essay, however, does not permit its domain to be prescribed. Instead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done. The essay mirrors what is loved and hated instead of presenting the intel- lect, on the model of a boundless work ethic, as creatio ex nihilo. Luck and play are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itselfcomplete - not where nothing is left to say. Therefore it is classed among the oddities. Its concepts are neither deduced from any firstprinciplenordotheycomefullcircleandarriveatafinalprinciple. Its interpretations are not philologically hardened and sober, rather - according to the predictable verdict of that vigilant calculating reason that hires itself out to stupidity as a guard against intelligence - it overinterprets. Due to a fear of negativityper se, the subject's effort to break through what masks itself as objectivity is branded as idleness. Everything is supposedly much simpler. The person who interprets instead of unquestioningly accepting and categorizing is slapped with the charge of intellectualizing as if with a yellow star; his misled and decadent intelligence is said to subtilize and project meaning where there is nothing to interpret. Technician or dreamer, those are the alternatives. Once one lets oneself be terrorized by the prohibition of going beyond the intended meaning of a certain text, one becomes the dupe of the false intentionality that men and things harbor of them- selves. Understanding then amounts to nothing more than unwrap- ping what the author wanted to say, or, if need by, tracking down the individual psychological reactions that the phenomenon indicates. Butjust as it is scarcely possible to figure out what someone at a certain time and place felt and thought, such insights could not hope to gain anything essential. The author's impulses are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp. The objective abundance of signifi-
? cations encapsulated within each spiritual phenomenon, if it is to reveal itself, requires from the person receiving them precisely that spontaneity of subjective fantasy that is chastised in the name of objec- tive discipline. Nothing can be interpreted out of aworkwithout at the same time being interpreted into it. The criteria of this process are the compatibility of the interpretation with the text and with itself and its power to release the object's expression in the unity of its elements. The essay thereby acquires an aesthetic autonomy that is easily criti- cized as simply borrowed from art, though it distinguishes itself from art through its conceptual character and its claim to truth free from aesthetic semblance. Lukscs failed to recognize this when he called the essay an art form in a letter to Leo Popper that serves as the introduc- tion to Soul and Form. 3 Neither is the positivist maxim superior to Lukscs' thesis, namely the maxim which maintains that what is written about art may claim nothing of art's mode of presentation, nothing, that is, of its autonomy of form. 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 ofform and content: for it is scarcely possible to speakofthe aesthetic unaesthetically, 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 modelled 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. In its allergy to forms, as pure accidents, the scien- tific mind approaches the stupidly dogmatic mind. Positivism's ir- responsibly bungled language fancies itself to be responsibly objective and adaquate to the matter at hand; the reflection on the spiritual becomes the privilege of the spiritless.
None of these offspring of resentment are simply untruth. If the essay disdains to begin by deriving cultural products from something underlying them, it embroils itself only more intently in the culture industry and it falls for the conspicuousness, successand prestige ofprod- ucts designed for the market place. Fictional biographies and all the related commercial writing are no mere degeneration but the perma-
3. LukPcs, "On the Nature and Form of the Essay," in Soul and Form, pp. 1-18.
? 154 The Essayas Form
nent temptation of a form whose suspicion toward false profundity is no defense against its own turning into skillful superficiality. The essay's capitulation is already evident in Sainte-Beuve,from whom the genre of the modern essay really stems. Such works - alongwith prod- ucts like the biographical sketches of Herbert E ~ l e n b e r gt,h~e German model for a flood of cultural trash-literature, all the way to the films about Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Holy Bible - have pro- moted the neutralizing transformation of cultural artifacts into com- modities, a transformation which, in recent cultural history, has ir- resistably seized up all that which in the eastern bloc is shamelessly called "the cultural heritage. " This process is perhaps most striking in the instance of Stefan Zweig, who in his youth wrote several discerning essays, and who finally, in his book on Balzac, stooped so low as to de- scribe the psychology of the creative artist. Such writing does not criticize basic abstract concepts, mindless dates, worn-out clich6s, but implicitly and thereby with the greater complicity, it presupposes them. The detritus of an hermeneutic psychology is fused with com- mon categories drawn from the Weltanschauung of the cultural philis- tines, categories like those of personality and the irrational. Such essays mistake themselves for that kind of feuilleton journalism with which mistake themselves for that kind of feuilleton journalism with which the enemies of form confuse the form of the essay. Torn itself becomes unfree and sets itself to work in the service of the socially performed needs of its customers. The moment of irresponsibility, in itself an aspect of every truth that does not exhaust itself in respon- sibility toward the status quo, will account for itselfwhen faced with the needs of the established consciousness; bad essays are no less con- formist than bad dissertations. Responsibility, however, respects not only authorities and committees but the object itself.
The bad essay chats about people instead of opening up the mat- ter at hand; in this the essay form is somewhat complicitous. The separation of knowledge from art is irreversible. Only the naivetC of the literary entrepreneur takes no notice of this separation; he thinks of himself as at least an organizational genius, and simply chews up good art-works into bad ones. With the objectification of the world in the course of progressing demythologization, science and art have separated from each other. A consciousness in which perception and concept, image and sign would be one is not, if it ever existed, to be re- created with a wave of the wand; its restitution would be a return to chaos. Only as the completion of the mediating process would such a
4. [Herbert Eulenberg (1876-1949),author of Schattenbilder (Silhouettes), a collec- tion of biograptlical miniatures of notables published in 1910. Translator's foot- note. ]
? consciousness be thinkable, as a utopia just as that on which idealist philosophers since Kant had bestowed the name of creative intuition, and which failed them whenever actual knowledge appealed to it. When philosophy supposes that by borrowing from art it can do away with objectifying thought and its history - with what is usually termed the antithesis of subject and object - and indeed expects that being itselfwould speak out of a poetic montage of Parmenides andJungnic- kel,5it only approximates a washed-out pseudo-culture. With peasant cunninglegitimated as primordiality, it refuses to honor the obligation of conceptual thought to which it has subscribed as soon as it has employed concepts in statements andjudgments. At the same time its aesthetic element remains a second-hand thinned-out cultural rem- iniscence of Holderlin or Expressionism, o r possibly of art nouveau,simply because no thought can entrust itself to language as boundlessly and blindly as the idea of a primal utterance deceptively suggests. Out of the violence that image and concept do to one another in such writings springs the jargon of authenticity in which words tremble as though possessed, while remaining secretive about that which possesses them. The ambitious transcendence of language beyond its meaning results in a meaninglessness that can easily be seized upon by a positivism to which one thinks oneself superior; and yet, one falls victim to pos- itivism precisely through that meaninglessness that positivism criti- cizes and which one shares with it. The playing chips of both are the same. Under the spell of such developments, language, where in the sciences it still dares to stir, approximates pseudo-art; and only that scientist proves, negatively, his fidelity to the aesthetic who in general resists language and instead of degrading the word to a mere paraphrase of his calculations prefers the charts that uninhibitedly admit the reification of consciousness and so produces a sort of form for reification without resorting to any apologetic borrowing from art. Of course art was always so interwoven with the dominant tendency of the Enlightenment that it has, since antiquity, incorporated scientific discoveries in its technique. Yet quantity becomes quality. When tech- nique is made absolute in the art-work; when construction becomes total, eliminating what motivates it and what resists it, expression; when art claims to be science and makes scientific criteria its standard, it sanctions a crude preartistic manipulation of raw material as devoid of meaning as all the talk about "Being" (Seyn) in philosophical seminars. It allies itselfwith that reification against which it is the func- tion of functionless art, even today, to raise its own however mute and
5. [Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel (b. 1881 in Vienna), painter and handicraft artist well known for his animal woodcuts. This and the following passage refer to Heidegger. Translator's note. ]
? 156 The Essay as Form
objectified protest.
But although art and science have separated from each other in his-
tory, their opposition is not to be hypostatized. The disgust for anach- ronistic eclecticism does not sanctify a culture organized according to departmental specialization. In all of their necessity these divisions simply attest institutionally to the renunciation of the whole truth. The ideals of purity and cleanliness bear the marks of a repressive order; these ideals are shared by the bustle of authentic philosophy aiming at eternal values, a sealed and flawlessly organized science, and by a con- ceptless, intuitive art. Spirit must pass a competency test to assure that it will not overstep the offical culture or cross its officially sanctioned borders. The presupposition is that all knowledge can potentially be converted into science. Theories of knowledge that distinguish pre- scientific from scientific consciousness have therefore grasped this dis- tinction as one of degree only. The fact that this convertibility has remained a mere assertion and that living consciousness has never really been transformed into scientific consciousness, points to the precariousness of the transition itself, to a qualitative difference. The simplestreflection onthelifeofconsciousnesswouldrevealjust how little acts of knowledge, which are notjust arbitrary premonitions, can be completely caught by the net of science. The work of Marcel Proust, no more lacking than Bergson's in scientific-positivistic elements, is a single effort to express necessary and compelling perceptions about men and their social relations which science can simply not match, while at the same time the claim of these perceptions to objectivity would be neither lessened nor left up to vague plausibility. The mea- sure of such objectivity is not the verification ofasserted theses through repeated testing, but individual experience, unified in hope and dis- illusion. Experience, reminiscing, gives depth to its observations by confirming or refuting them. But their individually grasped unity, in which the whole surely appears, could not be divided up and re- organized under the separatedpersonaeand apparatuses of psychology and sociology. Under the pressure of the scientific spirit and of'an ever- present desire latent in every artist, Proust attempted, by means of a scientificallymodelled technique,asortofexperimentation, tosaveor reproduce a form of knowledge that was still considered valid in the days of bourgeois individualism when the individual consciousness still trusted itself and was not yet worried about organizational cen- sure: the knowledge of an experienced man, that extinct homme de lettres, whom Proust once again conjures up as the highest form of the dilet- tante. No one would have thought to dismiss as unimportant, acciden- tal or irrational the observations of an experienced man because they are only his own and as such do not lend themselves readily to scientific
? generalization. Those ofhis discoveries which slip through the meshes of science certainly elude science itself. Science, as cultural science (Geis- teswissenschaj? ), negates what it promises to culture: to open up its artifacts from within. The young writer who wants to learn at college what an art-work is, what linguistic form, aesthetic quality, even aes- thetic technique are, will only haphazardly learn anything at all about the matter; at best he will pick up information ready culled from whatever modish philosophy and more or less arbitrarily slapped on to the content of works currently under discussion. If he turns, how- ever, to philosophical aesthetics he is beleagured with highly abstract propositions that have neither a connection with the works he wants to understand, nor with the content after which he is groping. The divi- sion of labor within the kosmos noetikos (intelligible world) into art and science is not, however, altogether responsible for this situation; the internal boundaries between art and science will not be obviated by good will or over-arching planning. Rather, the spirit irretrievably modeled on the pattern of the control of nature and material produc- tion forgoes both recollection of any surpassed phase that would promise any other future and any transcendence vis-2-vis the frozen relations of production; this cripples the technical intelligence's own specialized procedure precisely with regard to its specific objects.
With regard to scientificprocedure and itsphilosophic groundingas method, the essay, in accordance with its idea, draws the fullest conse- quences from the critique of the system. Even the empiricist doctrines that grant priority to open, unanticipated experience over firm, con- ceptual ordering remain systematic to the extent that they investigate what they hold to be the more or less constant pre-conditions of knowledge and develop them in as continuous a context as possible. Since the time of Bacon, who was himselfan essayist, empiricism - no less than rationalism - has been "method. " Doubt about the uncon- ditional priority of method was raised, in the actual process of thought, almost exclusively by the essay. It doesjustice to the consciousness of non-identity, without needing to say so, radically un-radical in refrain- ing from any reduction to a principle, in accentuating the fragmentary, the partial rather then the total. "Perhaps the great Sieur d e Montaigne felt something like this when he gave his writings the wonderfully elegant and apt title of Essays. The simple modesty of this word is an arrogant courtesy. 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 face of life - and even emphasizes it with ironic modes-
? 158 TheEssayasFonn
ty. "6Theessay does not obey the rules ofthegameof organized science and theory that, following Spinoza's principle, the order of things is identical with that of ideas. Since the airtight order of concepts is not identical with existence, the essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It revolts above all against the doctrine - deeply rooted since Plato - that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy; against that ancient injustice toward the tran- sitory, by which it is once more anathematized, conceptually. The essay shys away from the violence of dogma, from the notion that the result of abstraction, the temporally invariable concept indifferent to the individual phenomenon grasped by it, deserves ontological digni- ty. The delusion that theordoidearum (orderof ideas) should be theordo rerum (order of things) is based on the insinuation that the mediated is unmediated. Just as little as a simple fact can be thought without a con- cept, because to think it always already means to conceptualize it, it is equally impossible to think the purest conceptwithout reference to the factual. Even the creations of phantasy that are supposedly indepen- dent of space and time, point toward individual existence - however far they may be removed from it. Therefore the essay is not intimidated by the depraved profundity which claims that truth and history are incompatible. If truth has in fact a temporal core, then the full histori- cal content becomes an integral moment in truth; the a posteriori be- comes concretely the apriori, as only generally stipulated by Fichte and his followers. The relation to experience - and from it the essay takes as much substance as does traditional theory from its categories - is a relation to all of history; merely individual experience, in which con- sciousness begins with what is nearest to it, is itself mediated by the all- encompassing experience of historical humanity; the claim that social- historical contents are nevertheless supposed to be only indirectly important compared with the immediate life of the individual is a sim- ple self-delusion of an individualistic society and ideology. The de- preciation of the historically produced, as an object of theory, is therefore corrected by the essay. There is no salvaging the distinction of a first philosophy from a mere philosophy of culture that assumes the former and builds on it, a distinction with which the taboo on the essay is rationalized theoretically. The intellectual process which can- onizes a distinction between the temporal and the timeless is losing its authority. Higher levels of abstraction invest thought neither with a greater sanctity nor with metaphysical content; rather, the metaphysi- cal content evaporates with the progress of abstraction, for which the
6. Lukics, p. 9.
? essay attempts to make reparation. 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 ofthe essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. Its weakness testifies to the non-identity that it has to express, as well as to that excess of intention over its object, and thereby it points to that utopia which is blocked out by the classifica- tion of the world into the eternal and the transitory. In the emphatic essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth.
The essay simultaneously suspends the traditional concept of meth- od. Thought acquires its depth from penetrating deeply into a matter, not from referring it back to something else. In this the essay becomes polemical by treating what is normally held to be derived, without however pursuing its ultimate derivation. The essay freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen object. It does not insist stubbornly on a realm transcending all mediations - and they are the historical ones in which the whole of society is sedimented - rather the essay seeks truth contents as being historical in themselves. It does not concern itself with any supposed primeval condition in order to contravene society's false sociality, which, just because it tolerates nothing not stamped by it, ultimately tolerates nothing in- dicative of it own omnipresence and necessarily cites, as its ideological complement, that nature which its own praxis eliminates. The essay silently abandons the illusion that thought can break out of thesis into
physis, out of culture into nature. Spellbound by what is fixed and admittedly deduced, by artifacts, the essay honors nature by confirm- ing that it no longer exists for human beings. The essay's Alexan- drianism replies to the fact that by their very existence the lilac and the nightingale, wherever the universal net allows them to survive, only want to delude us that life still lives. The essay abandons the main road to the origins, the road leading to the most derivative, to being, the ideology that simply doubles that which already exists; at the same time the essay does not allow the idea of immediacy, postulated by the very concept of mediation, to disappear entirely. All levels of the mediated are immediate to the essay, before its reflection begins.
As the essay denies any primeval givens, so it refuses any definition of its concepts. Philosophy has completed the fullest critique of defini- tion from the most diverse perspectives, including those of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. But science has never adopted this critique. While the movement beginning with Kant, a movement against the scholastic residues in modern thought, replaces verbal definition with an understanding of concepts as part of the process in which they are
? 160 The Essay as Form
temporally embodied, the individual sciences insist stubbornly on the pre-critical job of definition - and do so for the sake of the undis- turbed security of their operation. In this regard the neopositivists, who identify philosophy with scientific method, agree with Scholas- ticism. The essay, in contrast, takes the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure, and introduces concepts directly, "immediately," as it receives them. They gain their precision only through their relation to one another. In this, however, the essay gets some support from the concepts themselves. For it is a mere superstition of a science ex- clusively concerned with the appropriation of raw materials to believe that concepts are in themselves undetermined, that they are first deter- mined by their definition. Science requires the image of the concept as atabula rasa, in order to secure its claim to domination; the claim to be the sole power at the head of the table. Actually, all concepts are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand. The essay begins with such meanings and, itself being essen- tially language, it forces these meanings on farther; it wants to help language, in its relation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectively in the way that they are already unconsciously named in language. That effort is already envisaged by the procedure of meaning-analysis in phenomenology; only there the relation of concepts to language is fetishized. The essay remains as skeptical of this as it is of definition. Without apology the essay draws on itself the reproach that it does not know beyond a doubtjust what is to be understood as the real content of concepts. For the essay perceives that the longing for strict defini- tions has long offered, through fixating manipulations of the mean- ings of concepts, to eliminate the irritating and dangerous elements of things that live within concepts. Yet the essay can neither do without general concepts - even language that does not fetishize the concept cannot do without concepts - nor does it treat them arbitrarily. It thereforetakesthematterofpresentationmoreseriouslythandothose procedures that separate out method from material and are indifferent to the way they represent their objectified contents. Thehow of expres- sion should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacrifices, without, however, betraying the intended matter to the arbitrariness of previously decreed significations. In this Benjamin was an unequaled master. Such precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less, but more than the process of defining, the essay urges the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argu- ment interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts de- pends on the density of this texture. Actually, the thinker does not
? think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual ex- perience, without simplifying it. While even traditional thought draws its impulses from such experience, such thought by its form eliminates the remembrance of these impulses. The essay, on the other hand, takes them as its model, without simply imitating them as reflected form; it mediates them through its own conceptual organization; it proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically.
The way in which the essay appropriates concepts is most easily comparable to the behavior of a man who is obliged, in a foreign coun- try, to speak that country's language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dic- tionary. If he has looked at the same word thirty times, in constantly changing contexts, he has a clearer grasp of it than he would if he looked up all the word's meanings; meanings that are generally too narrow, considering they change depending on the context, and too vague in view of the nuances that the context establishes in every individual case. Just as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death. It is not so much that the essay ignores indis- putable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light from ater- minus ad quem hidden to the essay itself, and not from an obvious ter- minus a quo. In this the very method of the essay expresses the utopian intention.
In this the essay becomes polemical by treating what is normally held to be derived, without however pursuing its ultimate derivation. The essay freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen object. It does not insist stubbornly on a realm transcending all mediations - and they are the historical ones in which the whole of society is sedimented - rather the essay seeks truth contents as being historical in themselves. It does not concern itself with any supposed primeval condition in order to contravene society's false sociality, which, just because it tolerates nothing not stamped by it, ultimately tolerates nothing in- dicative of it own omnipresence and necessarily cites, as its ideological complement, that nature which its own praxis eliminates. The essay silently abandons the illusion that thought can break out of thesis into
physis, out of culture into nature. Spellbound by what is fixed and admittedly deduced, by artifacts, the essay honors nature by confirm- ing that it no longer exists for human beings. The essay's Alexan- drianism replies to the fact that by their very existence the lilac and the nightingale, wherever the universal net allows them to survive, only want to delude us that life still lives. The essay abandons the main road to the origins, the road leading to the most derivative, to being, the ideology that simply doubles that which already exists; at the same time the essay does not allow the idea of immediacy, postulated by the very concept of mediation, to disappear entirely. All levels of the mediated are immediate to the essay, before its reflection begins.
As the essay denies any primeval givens, so it refuses any definition of its concepts. Philosophy has completed the fullest critique of defini- tion from the most diverse perspectives, including those of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. But science has never adopted this critique. While the movement beginning with Kant, a movement against the scholastic residues in modern thought, replaces verbal definition with an understanding of concepts as part of the process in which they are
? 160 The Essay as Form
temporally embodied, the individual sciences insist stubbornly on the pre-critical job of definition - and do so for the sake of the undis- turbed security of their operation. In this regard the neopositivists, who identify philosophy with scientific method, agree with Scholas- ticism. The essay, in contrast, takes the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure, and introduces concepts directly, "immediately," as it receives them. They gain their precision only through their relation to one another. In this, however, the essay gets some support from the concepts themselves. For it is a mere superstition of a science ex- clusively concerned with the appropriation of raw materials to believe that concepts are in themselves undetermined, that they are first deter- mined by their definition. Science requires the image of the concept as atabula rasa, in order to secure its claim to domination; the claim to be the sole power at the head of the table. Actually, all concepts are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand. The essay begins with such meanings and, itself being essen- tially language, it forces these meanings on farther; it wants to help language, in its relation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectively in the way that they are already unconsciously named in language. That effort is already envisaged by the procedure of meaning-analysis in phenomenology; only there the relation of concepts to language is fetishized. The essay remains as skeptical of this as it is of definition. Without apology the essay draws on itself the reproach that it does not know beyond a doubtjust what is to be understood as the real content of concepts. For the essay perceives that the longing for strict defini- tions has long offered, through fixating manipulations of the mean- ings of concepts, to eliminate the irritating and dangerous elements of things that live within concepts. Yet the essay can neither do without general concepts - even language that does not fetishize the concept cannot do without concepts - nor does it treat them arbitrarily. It thereforetakesthematterofpresentationmoreseriouslythandothose procedures that separate out method from material and are indifferent to the way they represent their objectified contents. Thehow of expres- sion should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacrifices, without, however, betraying the intended matter to the arbitrariness of previously decreed significations. In this Benjamin was an unequaled master. Such precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less, but more than the process of defining, the essay urges the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argu- ment interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts de- pends on the density of this texture. Actually, the thinker does not
? think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual ex- perience, without simplifying it. While even traditional thought draws its impulses from such experience, such thought by its form eliminates the remembrance of these impulses. The essay, on the other hand, takes them as its model, without simply imitating them as reflected form; it mediates them through its own conceptual organization; it proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically.
The way in which the essay appropriates concepts is most easily comparable to the behavior of a man who is obliged, in a foreign coun- try, to speak that country's language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dic- tionary. If he has looked at the same word thirty times, in constantly changing contexts, he has a clearer grasp of it than he would if he looked up all the word's meanings; meanings that are generally too narrow, considering they change depending on the context, and too vague in view of the nuances that the context establishes in every individual case. Just as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death. It is not so much that the essay ignores indis- putable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light from ater- minus ad quem hidden to the essay itself, and not from an obvious ter- minus a quo. In this the very method of the essay expresses the utopian intention. All of its concepts are presentable in such a way that they support one another, that each one articulates itself according to the configuration that it forms with the others. In the essay discreet1 separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaftbl? ' - ing, no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration. It is a force field,just as under the essay's glance every intellectual artifact must transform itself into a force field.
The essay gently defies the ideals of clara et distinctaperceptio and of absolute certainty. On the whole it could be interpreted as a protest againt the four rules that Descartes' Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning of modern Western science and its theory. The second of these rules, the decomposition of the object into "as many parts as possible and as might be necessary for its adequate ~olution,"fo~r- mulates that analysis of elements under whose sign traditional theory
7. Ren6 Descartes, A DiscourseOn Method, trans. John Veitch (NewYork: E. P. Dut- ton, 1951), p. 15.
TW. Adomo 161
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equates a conceptual order with the structure of being. But the object of the essay, the artifact, refuses any analysis of its elements and can only be constructed from its specific idea; it is not accidental that Kant treated art-works and organisms analogously, although at the same time he insisted, against all romantic obscurantism, on distinguishing them. Thewhole is to be hypostatized into afirst principlejust as little as is the product of analysis, the elements. In opposition to both, the essay is informed by the idea of that interaction which in fact tolerates the question of elements as little as that of the elementary. Neither are the specific elements to be developed purely out of the whole, nor vice versa. Theartifactisamonad,yetitisnot;itselements,assuchofacon- ceptual kind, point beyond the specific object in which they gather themselves. But the essay does not 'follow these elements to that point where they legitimize themselves, on the far side of the specific object; otherwise it would turn into a bad kind of infinity. Rather, the essav comes so close to the here and now of the object, up to the point where that object, instead of being simply an object, dissociates itself into those elements in which it has its life.
The third Cartesian rule, "to conduct my thoughts in such an order that, by commencing with the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, step by step, to the knowledge of the more ~ o m p l e x , "is~sharply contravened by the form of the essay in that it begins with the most complex, not the most simple, which is in every instance the habitual. The essay as form will be a good guide for the person who is beginning to study philosophy, and before whose eyes the idea of philosophy somehow stands. He will hardly begin by read- ing the easiest writers, whose common sensegwill skim the surface where depth is called for; he will rather go for the allegedly difficult writers, who shed light on what is simple and illuminate it as a "stance of the mind toward objectivity. " The naivetC of the student, to whom the difficult and formidable seems good enough, is wiser than the adult pedantry that admonishes thought with a threatening finger to understand the simple before risking that complexity which alone entices it. Such a postponement of knowledge only prevents knowl- edge. In opposition to the clich6 of the "understandable," the notion of truth as a network of causes and effects, the essay insists that a matter be considered, from the verv first, in its whole complexity; it counter-
acts that hardened primitiveness that always allies itself with reason's current form. Whereas science treats the difficulties and complexities of an antagonistic and monadologically split reality according to the
8. Ibid.
9. [In English. ]
? expectation of this societyby reducing them to simplifyingmodels and then belatedly differentiates them with fabricated material, the essay shakes off the illusion of a simple, basically logical world that so perfectly suits the defense of the status quo. Its differentiation is no supplement, but its medium. Established thought readily ascribes that differentiation to the mere psychology of the author and then thinks that it has adequately dealt with it. The pompous scientificobjections to over-sophistication actually do not aim at the impertinently unreli- able method but at the irritating aspects of the object which the essay reveals.
The fourth Cartesian rule that one "should in every case institute such exhaustive enumerations and such general surveys" that one "is sure of leaving nothing out" - this ultimate principle of systematic thought - reappears unchanged in Kant's polemic against Aristotle's "rhapsodic" thought. This rule corresponds to the particular objec- tion to the essay that, in the words of the schoolmaster, it is not exhaus- tive, while it is clear that every object, and above all a cultural object, encloses endlessly many aspects, the choice among which can only be determined by the intention of the knower. The "general survey'' would only be possible if it were determined in advance that the object in question can be fully grasped by the concepts which treat it; that nothing is left over that could not be anticipated by these concepts. Following that assumption, the rule requiring the exhaustive enumer- ation ofthe individual elements claims that the object can be presented in an airtight deductive system:a supposition of aphilosophy of identi- ty. As a practical technique of thought, as for example in its insistence on definition, the Cartesian rule has outlived the rationalistic theorem on which it was founded: a comprehensive general view and a con- tinuity of presentation is urged even upon empirically open scientific procedure. In this fashion the intellectual conscience that should, in Descartes' philosophy, keep watch over the necessity of knowledge is transformedintothearbitrarinessofa"frameofreference. "" Inorder to satisfya methodological need and to support the plausibility of the whole,itbecomesanaxiomaticdoctrinethatisbeingsetupasthegate- way to thought while no longer being able to demonstrate its own validity or proof. Or, in the German version, it becomes a "project" (Entwurf)that, with the pathos-laden claim of reaching into being, sim- ply suppresses its subjective conditions. The insistence on the continuity of thought's process tends to prejudice the inner co- herence of the object, its own harmony. A continuous presentation would contradict material that is full of antogonisms as long as it did
10. [In English. ]
? 164 The Essay as Form
not simultaneously define continuity as discontinuity. Unconsciously and far from theory, the need arises in the essay as form to annul the theoretically outmoded claims of totality and continuity, and to do so in the concrete procedure of the intellect. If the essay struggles aes- thetically against that narrow-minded method that will leave nothing out, it is obeying an epistemological motive. The romantic conception of the fragment as an artifact that is not complete in itself but openly striding into infinity by way of self-reflection, advocates this anti- idealist motive even in the midst of idealism. Even in its manner of delivery the essay refuses to behave as though it had deduced its object and had exhausted the topic. Self-relativization 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 fragmentsjust as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over. The unanimity of the logical order deceives us about the antagonistic nature of that on which it wasjauntily imposed. Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its concern is always a conflict
brought to a standstill. While the essay adjusts concepts to one another by virtue of their function in the parallelogram of the forces of the materials, it shrinks back from the over-arching concept under which particular concepts should be subordinated; what the over-arching concept merely pretends to accomplish, the essay's method recog- nizes as insoluble while nevertheless attempting to accomplish it. The word "essay" - in which thought's utopia of hitting the bull's eye unites with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional nature - indicates something, like most historically surviving ter-
minologies, about the form, the importance of which is magnified by the fact that it results not programmatically but as a characteristic of the form's groping intention. The essaymust let the totality light up in one of its chosen or haphazard features but without asserting that the whole is present. It corrects the isolated and accidental aspects of its insights by allowing them to multiply, confirm, and restrict themselves - whether in the essay's proper progress or in its mosaic-like relation to other essays; and it does so not by abstracting characteristic features
from its insights. "Thus the essay distinguishes itself from a scientific treatise. He writes essayisticallywho 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. "" Thediscontentwiththisprocedure,thefeelingthatitcould
11. Max Bense, "Cber den Essay und seine Prosa," Aferkur 1:3 (1947), 418.
? all go on indefinitely, has its truth and untruth. Its truth, because in fact the essay comes to no final conclusions and makes explicit its inability to do so by parodying its own apriori; it is then saddled with the guilt that is actually incurred by those forms that erase every trace of arbi- trariness. Yet that discontent with the essay is at the same time untrue because, as a constellation, the essay is not arbitrary in the way that it seems to a philosophical subjectivism which translates the exigencies of the object into those of its conceptual organization. The essay is determined by the unity of its object, together with that of theory and experience which have migrated into the object. The essay's openness is not vaguely one of feeling and mood, but obtains its contour from its content. It resists the idea of the master-work that reflects the idea of creation and totality. Its form follows the critical thought that man is no creator, that nothing human is creation. The essay, always directed towards artifacts, does not present itself as a creation; nor does it long for something all-embracing, the totality of which would resemble creation. Its totality, the unity of a form thoroughly constructed in itself, is that of non-totality; one that even as form does not assert the. thesis of the identity of thought and thing, the thesis which in its own content the essay rejects. Freedom from the pressure of identity occa- sionally provides the essay (and this is lacking in official thought) with an aspect of ineffaceability, of inextinguishable color. In Simmel cer- tain foreign words - cachet, attitude - betray this intention, without it being treated theoretically as such.
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like. It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic;residues of the systematic in the essay such as the infiltration of literary studies with ready-made, wide-spread philosophical commonplaces, by which these studies try to make themselves respectable, are of no morevalue than psychologi- cal banalities. On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation. The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art; otherwise, on account of the concepts which appear in it and which import not only their meaning but also their theoretical aspects, the essay is necessarilyrelated to theory. To be sure, the essay relates itselfto theory as cautiously as to the concept. It neither deduces itself rigidly from theory - the cardinal fault of all LukAcs' later essayis- tic work - nor is it a down-payment on future syntheses. Disaster threatens intellectual experience the more strenuously it ossifies into theory and acts as if it held the philosopher's stone in hand. And yet,
T. W. Adorno 165
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intellectual experience itself strives by its own nature toward such objectification. This antinomy is mirrored by the essay. Just as it absorbs concepts and experiences, so it absorbs theories. However, its relation to them is not that o f a standpoint. If this lackofa standpoint is no longer naive and dependent on the prominence of its objects; if the essay rather uses the relationship to its objects as aweapon against the spell of beginnings, it parodically practices the otherwise only feeble polemic of thought against mere standpoint philosophy. The essay swallowsupthetheoriesthatarecloseby;itstendencyisalwaystoward the liquidation of opinion, even that from which it takes its own impulse. The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence; specifically, it constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artifacts, and it confronts that which such artifacts are with their con- cept; it is the critique of ideology. "The essay is the form of the critical category of our mind. For whoever criticizes must necessarily experi- ment; he must create conditions under which an object is newly seen, and he must do so in a fashion different from that of a creative author. Above all the fragility of the object must be probed, tested; this is pre- cisely the meaning of the small variation that an object undergoes in thehandsofitscritic. "" Iftheessayisaccusedoflackingastandpoint and of tending toward relativism because it recognizes no standpoint lying outside of itself, then the accusation implicitly contains the con- ception of truth as something "ready-made," a hierarchy of concepts, an image of truth that Hegel destroyed in his dislike of standpoints: in this the essay touches its polar opposite, the philosophy of absolute knowledge. The essay would like to cure thought of its arbitrariness by taking arbitrariness reflectively into its own procedure instead ofmask- ing it as spontaneity.
Hegelian philosophy, to be sure, remained trapped in the inconsis- tency that it criticized the abstract, over-arching concept, the mere "result," in the name of an internally discontinuous process, while at the same time, in the idealist tradition, speaking about dialectical method. Therefore the essay is more dialectical than the dialectic as it articulates itself. TheessaytakesHegelian logicatitsword:neithermay the truth of the totality be played off immediately against individual judgments, nor may truth be reduced to individualjudgments; rather, the claim of the particular to truth is taken literally to the point where there is evidence of its untruth. The risked, anticipatory, and incom- pletely redeemed aspect of every essayistic detail draws in other details as negation; the untruth in which the essay knowingly entangles itself is the element of its truth. Untruth certainly also resides in the essay's
? basic form, in its relation to what is culturally preformed and derived as though it were something in-itself. But the more energetically the essay suspends the concept of some first principle, the more it refuses to spin culture out of nature, the more fundamentally it recognizes the unremittingly natural essence of culture itself. Up to the present day, a blind natural interconnectedness, myth, perpetuates itself in culture. It is precisely this upon which the essay reflects: its proper theme is the interrelation of nature and culture. It is not by coincidence that, rather than "reducing" the artifact, the essay immerses itself in cultural phenomena as in a second nature, a second immediacy, in order through persistence to remove the illusion of immediacy. The essay deceives itself as little as the philosophy of origins about the difference between culture and that which underlies it. Yet for the essay, culture is not some epiphenomenon superimposed on being that must be elim- inated, but rather what lies underneath is itself artificial (thesei), false society. Thus, for the essay, origins have no priority over the super- structure. The essay owes its freedom in its choice of objects, its sovereigntyvis-2-visall prioritiesI3offact or theory to the circumstance that for it all objects are equally near the center, to the principle that casts a spell over everything. The essay refuses to glorify concern for the primal as something more primal than concern for the mediated, because to the essay primacy itself is an object of reflection, something negative. It corresponds to a situation in which the primal, as a stand- point of the mind within the falsely socialized world, becomes a lie. It covers a wide territory from the enshrinement as primal words of his- torical concepts extracted from historical languages, to academic in- struction in "creative writing;"I4 from craft-shop primitiveness to re- corders and finger-painting:'' in every instance the pedagogical neces- sity sets itself up as a metaphysical virtue. Thought is not exempt from Baudelaire's rebellion of poetry against nature as a social reservation. Even the paradises of thought are only artificial, and in them the essay indulges. Since, according to Hegel's dictum, there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not mediated, thought may only hold true to the idea of immediacy by way of the mediated, but it becomes the prey of the mediated the instant it grasps directly for the unmediated. Cun- ningly, the essay settles itself into texts, as though they were simply there and had authority; without the illusion of the primal, it gets under its feet a ground, however dubious, comparable to earlier theological exegesis of holy writings. The essay's impulse, however, is
13. [In English. ]
14. [In English. ]
15. [In English. ]
? I68 The Essay as Form
the exact opposite of the theological; it is critical: through confronta- tion of texts with their own emphatic concept, with the truth that each text intends even in spite of itself, to shatter the claim of culture and move it to remember its untruth - the untruth of that ideological facade which reveals culture's bondage to nature. Under the glance of the essay second nature becomes conscious of itself as first nature.
If the truth of the essay gains its momentum by way ofits untruth, its truth is not to be sought in mere opposition to what is ignoble and pro- scribed in it, but in these very things: in its mobility, its lack of that soliditywhich science demands, transferring it, as it were, from property- relationships to the intellect. Those who believe they must defend the intellect against the charge of a lack of solidity are the enemies of intellect: intellect itself, once emancipated, is mobile. As soon as it wants more than simply the administrative repetition and manipu- lated presentation of what already exists, it is somehow exposed; truth abandoned by play would be nothing more than tautology. Thus his- torically the essay is related to rhetoric, which the scientific mentality, since Descartes and Bacon, has alwayswanted to do awaywith; that is, until, appropriately in the age of science, rhetoric decayed and became a science suigeneris, the science of communication. Of course rhetoric has always been a form of thought which accommodated itself to com- municative language. It directed itself to the unmediated: the substitute-satisfaction of its audience. Yet the essay preserves in the very autonomy of its presentation, through which it distinguishes itself from the scientific mode of communication, traces of the communica- tive with which science dispenses. The pleasures which rhetoric wants to provide to its audience are sublimated in the essay into the idea of the pleasure of freedom vis-A-vis the object, freedom that gives the object more of itself than if it were mercilessly incorporated into the order of ideas. The scientific consciousness, which is directed against any anthropomorphic idea whatsoever, was always closely bound up with the reality principle and similarly hostile to happiness. While hap- piness is supposedly the goal of all domination over nature, it always appears to the reality principle as regression to mere nature. This can be seen even in the highest philosophies, including Kant's and Hegel's. Reason, in whoseabsolute idea these philosophies have their pathos, is denounced by them as something both pert and disrespectful as soon as it challenges the established system of values. Against this inclina- tion theessayrescues asophisticelement. Thehostilitytohappinessof official critical thought can be felt particularly in Kant's transcendental dialectic: it wants to eternalize the boundary between understanding
and speculation, and, according to its characteristic metaphor, to pre- vent any "roaming around in intelligible worlds. " While self-critical
? reason should, according to Kant, keep both feet planted on the ground, indeed should ground itself, it follows its innermost principle and seals itself off against anything new as well as against curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought, that is also upbraided by existential ontology. What in the content of his thought Kant projects as the goal of reason, utopia, the production of humanity, is disbarred by the form of his thought, the theory of knowledge; it forbids reason to go beyond the realm of experience, which, caught in the machinery of mere material and unchangeable categories, is reduced to that which always was. But the object of the essay is the new as something genu- inely new, as something not translatable back into the staleness of already existing forms. By reflecting the object without doing violence to it, the essay silently laments the fact that truth has betrayed happi- ness and thus itself; this lament incites the rage against the essay. In the essay the persuasive aspect of communication, analogously to the functional transformation of many traits in autonomous music, is alienated from its original goal and converted into the pure articula- tion of presentation in itself; it becomes a compelling construction that does not want to copy the object, but to reconstruct it out of its concep- tual membra disjecta. But the objectionable transitions in rhetoric, in which association, ambiguity of words, neglect of logical synthesis all make it easy for the auditor, yoking him to the speaker's will: all these are fused ik the essay with its truth-content. Its transitions disavow rigid deduction in the interest of establishing internal cross-connections, something for which discursive logic has no use.