The Essay as Form

TLDR

Abstract

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. essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with 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 excluding as impure anything that does not fit this antithesis: neither discontent 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 predetermined objects,2 the academic guild only has patience for philosophy that dresses itself up with the nobility of the 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