Learning means learning what cannot be learned; practicing means practicing what cannot be practiced; discriminating means discriminating what cannot be discriminated. Understanding that rests in what it cannot understand is the finest. If you do not attain this goal, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.
—Zhuangzi
Here I am once again digging into the dirt of self. It is for me a life’s work.
The essay, as I read it in the Montaignian tradition, begins in ignorance: “If a subject is unfamiliar to me, for that very reason I essay it.” With this ars essayica implying its converse: If a subject is familiar, I do not.
Isn’t an essay simultaneously an expression and interrogation of the self? According to Virginia Woolf, “Almost all essays begin with a capital—‘I think’, ‘I feel’,” and achieve “permanent value” according to their authors’ courage to “write of themselves.”
There is a paradox inherent to the essay form. The genre of the self, the essay is bound by the limits of self-reference such that the articulating self is itself inarticulable. The subject (I) is the only subject unsayable, the only subject unessayable. Yet the elusiveness of the self is what draws the essayist ever forward on the page.
Like the self it discloses and fails to disclose, the essay is inherently imperfect and imperfectible, chronically incomplete. Indeed, its virtue is its imperfect peculiarity. Meet a consciousness in its pages, never Consciousness.
But those limits, broad as they may be, exhaust themselves. The essayist, constantly disclosing, constantly discloses thereby the limits of disclosure. Beyond the essay, silence looms; beyond the self, the very world.
Writing, I come to know myself better, never in full. Therefore, I go on essaying myself, perhaps, to be.
If I keep Woolf’s council here, I must confess that while I don’t have my autobiographical I in mind but the essayistic I that is the name of subjectivity, I nevertheless have my own unique conception of this essayistic I, one no doubt born of innate characteristics, personal history, circumstance, and whatever contingencies else.
Taking a perspective, an essay is a form of thought. Whose? I go on thinking, even without insight into the origin of thought.
Yes, the essay begins in ignorance. Doesn’t it end there, too? Essaying a subject reveals the impossibility of concluding it.
“That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche tells us. “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”
Only the unthought thought is worth thinking; only the unwritten essay worth writing.
We venture into the unknown a breath at a time, pursuing the essay to the ends of its conception before trailing off in silence.
Que sais-je? If pressed, as the essay presses: not a lot, very little, almost nothing.
Call it the Yessay, call it the Sayessay. We embrace what is, even at the limit of our powers of conception, even beyond.
Philosophy for the Greeks was a form of spiritual practice, a way of transforming the self through the discipline of critical reflection. Having long abdicated this purpose, philosophy sees itself reborn in the form of the essay.
The philosophers I love most are those from Plato to Wittgenstein who most resemble essayists: Berkeley and Hume, Emerson and Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Philosophy for the Greeks was a form of spiritual practice, a way of transforming the self through the discipline of critical reflection. Having long abdicated this purpose, philosophy sees itself reborn in the form of the essay.
The philosophers I love most are those from Plato to Wittgenstein who most resemble essayists: Berkeley and Hume, Emerson and Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Because the subject of the essay is the full expanse of the human mind, living essayistically means living at the boundaries of thought. With each discovery of new territory for thinking, simultaneously the corresponding discovery of a new thinker.
The essayist finds it possible to do philosophy in solitude, the blank page serving as the necessary other, the dialectic playing out between parts of the self. Thought thinking against itself the way Socrates thinks against his conversation partners. Partners, yes: it is a performance. The audience may be forgotten, but the audience remains.
To think out loud in the form of an essay is to perform thought as one would give a lecture consisting entirely of questions, none of them rhetorical. Who am I? What matters? How shall I live?
The questions are perennial; the answers are provisional. Each of us must write our own essays.
The essayist finds it possible to do philosophy in solitude, the blank page serving as the necessary other, the dialectic playing out between parts of the self. Thought thinking against itself the way Socrates thinks against his conversation partners. Partners, yes: it is a performance. The audience may be forgotten, but the audience remains.
To think out loud in the form of an essay is to perform thought as one would give a lecture consisting entirely of questions, none of them rhetorical. Who am I? What matters? How shall I live?
The questions are perennial; the answers are provisional. Each of us must write our own essays.
Montaigne: “I have no more created my book, than my book has created me.” Emerson (on Montaigne): “Cut these words and they would bleed.” But just as we write ourselves into being so too do we write ourselves out.
During pure concentration, writing becomes a form of prayer. The self, absorbed in its activity, loses itself in God.
Somehow, when I am least intelligible to myself is precisely when I experience myself as most truly who I am. What I am doing in such moments, I would have a hard time articulating, only that it is right right right as rain.
“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” “No imagination can conceive of Him, nor can any understanding fathom Him.” The essayist, in his own way, converges with the wisdom traditions; his path, the path of contemplation. He discovers for himself that any thought pursued to its limit dissolves into silence as thinking exhausts itself, the object of attempted thought remaining unthought.
Does the essayist believe in God? No, the essayist doesn’t believe; the essayist essays. And God is. The rest is details, and details are where the essayist thrives, the tangibles by which he sketches the intangible, saying in relief what cannot otherwise be said, saying in silence what has no sound.
“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” “No imagination can conceive of Him, nor can any understanding fathom Him.” The essayist, in his own way, converges with the wisdom traditions; his path, the path of contemplation. He discovers for himself that any thought pursued to its limit dissolves into silence as thinking exhausts itself, the object of attempted thought remaining unthought.
Does the essayist believe in God? No, the essayist doesn’t believe; the essayist essays. And God is. The rest is details, and details are where the essayist thrives, the tangibles by which he sketches the intangible, saying in relief what cannot otherwise be said, saying in silence what has no sound.
Would I be reading too much into the form if I wondered whether every essay is a devotional to God?
So often writing is discussed as a practice like other practices—yoga, meditation, running, say: in each of these, the activity brings (can bring) a particular quality of absorption that leads me beyond myself.
The only way out is through. The liberation from the self is achieved by the turn deeper into self.
Essays, David Lazar writes, “are so hopelessly, or better yet, hopefully, self-reflexive.” If thinking entails thinking about thinking and so on, n+1, before long the essayist draws a blank.
We study the self as a means of transcending it.
The only way out is through. The liberation from the self is achieved by the turn deeper into self.
Essays, David Lazar writes, “are so hopelessly, or better yet, hopefully, self-reflexive.” If thinking entails thinking about thinking and so on, n+1, before long the essayist draws a blank.
We study the self as a means of transcending it.
Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”
Torah as the interpretation of Torah, philosophy as criticism of philosophy, essay as ars essayica: in each case, the practice transforms the practitioner. The theologian, the philosopher, the essayist, each arriving at aporia finds no one arrives.
The essayist as disciple of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” He takes kenosis literally, emptying himself one thought at a time.
Neti neti leading toward the inexpressible absolute, the apophatic center around which all these words orbit.
Neti neti leading toward the inexpressible absolute, the apophatic center around which all these words orbit.
Essaying, then, as a kind of monastic practice that can be entered into an hour at a time.
Insofar as I’m in a position to say, essaying is in my nature. Beginning in doubt, I proceed toward unknowing, and in the effort align my being with being. Through my unknowing I come to know myself as the unknower, as the unknown.
That which cannot be thought needn’t be unthought.
Until then: the thought is thought; the thought is doubted; the doubt is doubted. Eventually both thought and doubt dissolve into silence without opposite, and consciousness enters the realm of the uncontrasted, the unconceived.
What sounds like confidence is only the sound of a thought thinking itself. Essays humble me. Through them—through the process of composing them—I submit myself unfailingly to the unknown, the unknowable. (It must be a poor essayist who imagines his subject could ever fit itself to his prose.)
In pursuing thought to its end, the essayist makes of himself a being toward silence. Only beyond the limit of thought do we encounter wonder and awe, in the face of which the only thing to say, if something must be said, is, as the Muslims have it, La ilaha illa Allah.
*
Scott F. Parker is the author of Teaching Without Teaching and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion, among other books. His writing has appeared in Philosophy Now, Tin House, The Believer, and other publications.
