Adorno-The-Essay-As-Form

160 The Essay as Formtemporally embodied, the individual sciences insist stubbornly on thepre-critical job of definition - and do so for the sake of the undisturbedsecurity of their operation. In this regard the neopositivists,who identify philosophy with scientific method, agree with Scholasticism.The essay, in contrast, takes the anti-systematic impulse into itsown procedure, and introduces concepts directly, "immediately," as itreceives them. They gain their precision only through their relation toone another. In this, however, the essay gets some support from theconcepts themselves. For it is a mere superstition of a science exclusivelyconcerned with the appropriation of raw materials to believethat concepts are in themselves undetermined, that they are first determinedby their definition. Science requires the image of the concept asatabula rasa, in order to secure its claim to domination; the claim to bethe sole power at the head of the table. Actually, all concepts arealready implicitly concretized through the language in which theystand. The essay begins with such meanings and, itself being essentiallylanguage, it forces these meanings on farther; it wants to helplanguage, in its relation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectivelyin the way that they are already unconsciously named in language. Thateffort is already envisaged by the procedure of meaning-analysis inphenomenology; only there the relation of concepts to language isfetishized. The essay remains as skeptical of this as it is of definition.Without apology the essay draws on itself the reproach that it does notknow beyond a doubtjust what is to be understood as the real contentof concepts. For the essay perceives that the longing for strict definitionshas long offered, through fixating manipulations of the meaningsof concepts, to eliminate the irritating and dangerous elements ofthings that live within concepts. Yet the essay can neither do withoutgeneral concepts - even language that does not fetishize the conceptcannot do without concepts - nor does it treat them arbitrarily. Ittherefore takes the matter of presentation more seriously than do thoseprocedures that separate out method from material and are indifferentto the way they represent their objectified contents. The how of expressionshould rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacrifices,without, however, betraying the intended matter to the arbitrariness ofpreviously decreed significations. In this Benjamin was an unequaledmaster. Such precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less,but more than the process of defining, the essay urges the reciprocalinteraction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. Inthe essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thoughtdoes not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argumentinterweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts dependson the density of this texture. Actually, the thinker does not