Essay as Method From Lukacs's and Adorno's views

Focusing on Lukacs’s and Adorno’s ideas, this paper aims to clarify how the philosophical attitude of critical theory relates to the essay genre as a method. It firstly elaborates on essay as an emergent genre of modern philosophy, indicating that philosophy is extremely interwoven with its form of presentation. Accordingly, form, language, and stylistic features are irreducible to chimerical or ornamental appearances; it includes various methodological and epistemological implications. The genre first appeared closely linked to the emergence of modern observing self, became critically self-conscious in the 20th century, increasingly engaged with the question of methodology. In doing so, interpreting Lukacs’s essay “On the Nature and Form of Essay”, indicates essay is a proper form of expression for lived experience and it is inherently an ironic form. For Lukacs, irony has the same relation to essay as doubting has to science. Afterward, by reading Adorno’s “Essay as Form”, this paper shows how he employs essay as a methodological tool to realize the negative dialectics thesis. Adorno formulates essay against the four rules that Descartes’s Discourse on Method sets up, contends that it proceeds methodically unmethodically. This method makes it a force field in which concepts come together in an open, dynamic network. So essay is a privileged form of philosophizing, allowing for the resistance to identifying, totalizing tendencies in a philosophical system. Therefore, both Lukacs’ and Adorno’s descriptions of essay are largely informed by their broader philosophical outlooks. Combining its epistemological and aesthetic aspects, they have also extended beyond the modern science-art dichotomy.