Vasanth

The Essay as Form paraphrasing and notes (There are 15 paragraphs in this essay, and the letters refer to the sentences in each paragraph.)

¶1: (terms: [|homme de lettres], [|creatio ex nihilo], [|positivism]) (phrases: o:"[|philologically] hardened and sober") a-b: The form of the essay, in Germany, has not been developed fully, like poetry has. c: People are discontent for two reasons: with the current form of the essay, and with the placing of the essay into the field of art and not in the field of 'organized science'. d: A writer is not considered to be academic. e: Simmel, Lukács, Kassner, and Benjamin had used the essay to write about cultural things. But the academic world was not interested in culture, it was more interested in things that were more 'universal'. They saw culture as an example, a consequence, as proof, of the 'universal categories'. f-h: Why did people think this way? Germany 'historically scarcely recognizes' the intellectual ('[|homme de lettres]'). Intellectual freedom had never really emerged in Germany because there was always a stress on subordination. The essay embodies this freedom and that's why there is a resistance to it. i-j: The essay does not achieve something scientific, does not create something artistic, but refers to something that has already been done. The intellect of the essay is seen as "unoriginal", and not something created out of nothing ([|creatio ex nihilo]). k-n: The essay can discuss anything for as much as it wants; and does not have to cover the very beginning something, the 'first principle', nor a conclusion, a 'final principle'. o-q: Essays overinterpret, and their subjects are presented in an objective and simple way, lest they idle. r: Also, if a person reading the essay interprets something from it, instead of accepting it as is, the person is frowned upon as seeing too much into it, as being an intellectual. s: "Technician or dreamer, those are the alternatives." (Accept the essay like reading a manual, or read into it and between the lines, where there might not be anything). t: When a person is aware and afraid of overinterpreting, they get to second-guessing themselves. u-w: To understand the essay is to understand what the author wanted to say, how the author felt at the time, etc...but this is not possible, and it won't really advance understanding, because the author was supposed to write objectively, and in doing so had to not consider his personal feelings. x: In order to understand subjective things like 'spiritual phenomenon' through an essay, the reader has to be subjective, has to interpret. y-z: "Nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it." (If the reader finds something subjective, then the writer wrote it a little subjectively, and in this way can convey an object's expression.) aa: When the essay is looked at in this way, it resembles art because it has 'aesthetic autonomy'. (The essay can be on any topic?) But it is different from art in two ways: 'conceptual character' (words on a page?) and 'its claim to truth free from aesthetic semblance' (it can be objective?). ab: Lukács called the essay an art form, and this was his failure to recognize it for what it was. ac: The positivist view of the essay was also not right: that when an essay is written about art, it has to objective and cannot have the free form of art. ad: This positivist view gets caught up in separating form and content -- this separation makes the essay narrow-minded and loses touch with the object, if the object is art. ae-af: A positivist view: the content of something can and should be presented conventionally, and this presentation does not affect the content at all. ag: According to 'scientific purisim': expression endangers objectivity and the authenticity of the material; the less the material relies on form, the better. But form's role is to present content purely and without adding to it (so this is an important enough role to be relied upon). ah: By avoiding forms and presenting things in a conventional way, positivism is too dogmatic, and is stuck with presenting and thinking about spiritual things in a non-spiritual way.

¶2: a-f: Paragraph 1 mentions some things which are resentment: resentment of the essay and how it is a hybrid, between something scientific and artistic. If the essay is not about cultural things already established in the past, then that’s even worse, because anything new to come out of an essay is too tempting to be something for the market place – it’s conspicuous, successfulness, and prestige. Things like fictional biographies, commercial writing, all of it superficial. Someone named Sainte-Beuve has a genre of the modern essay. Herbert Eulenberg is mentioned and Adorno labels ‘cultural trash-literature’, and also includes films about artists like Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Holy Bible, along with this group. He sees this as a ‘transformation of cultural artifacts into commodities’. **I see it as educational.** Stefan Zweig is brought to the blamelight, and Adorno considers it the lowest of the low for Zweig to write about Balzac’s ‘psychology of the creative artist’. g: Adorno criticizes ‘cultural trash-literature’ as not criticizing what it writes about. Criticizing things in writings such as ‘basic abstract concepts, mindless dates, worn-out clichés. These things are not criticized, but are **presupposed, whatever this means**. h-: i-l: These type of essays are not really essays, but **feuilleton journalism**, form is confused with the form of the essay. The needs of the customers is what drives the writing. This irresponsible writing will eventually be “found out” and be accounted for through the consciousness of society. To write responsibly, foremost, is to respect the object (the subject, the cultural object) of the essay.
 * ‘The detritus of an hermeneutic psychology’** is mixed with **Weltaunschauung of cultural philistines**, and they talk about crap like personality and the irrational (new age type stuff).

Para 3: a-f: A bad essay does not get to the point. Adorno holds that the knowledge are separate, and cannot not be mixed. He criticizes writers who try to organize and categorize and try to mix science and art: **perception and concept, image and sign**. The term Kant coined **‘creative intuition’**, cannot be appealed by knowledge. g-j: Instead of objectifying thought and its history, if you replace that with borrowing from art, then that philosophy is a **‘washed-out pseudo-culture’**. Such culture is blamed as being too shallow, valuing **‘peasant cunning’**, or common sense**,** and its aesthetics are criticized as being **‘second-hand thinned-out cultural reminiscence of Hölderlin or Expressionism, or possibly of //art nouveau//’**, because complex though cannot be trusted as opposed to the sureness of common sense, ‘primal utterance’. This philosophy results in writing that is vague and meaningless, words that are incapable of expressing more complex ideas. k-m: This “getting ahead of oneself” in writing results in meaninglessness, leads to positivism, and a tendency to inflate oneself with superiority, just on how the words express oneself, without giving credit to art at all. n-q: Adorno admits that art can use discoveries from science. But this makes ‘quantity become quality’, when technique is given so much focus that the expression is forgotten. He compares this “technique over artistic expression” to the similar statement of functionless art and how it makes a statement about objectivity, but thinks it’s ‘mute’.

Para 4 a-i: Modern times have separated art from science, and there are many departments of specialization in science. People are looking for the theory of everything, for absolutes, and this same philosophy is taking art and trying to compartmentalize it, or try to understand in scientifically. Adorno argues that not everything can be broken down by science. j-q: Marcel Proust tried to show the things that science cannot bring to light. Individual experiences, reminiscings. He tried to show this by trying to reproduce the knowledge of an intellectual, a //homme de lettres.// Whatever the intellectual can conclude, if science cannot conclude it, then it would prove that there would be something that science cannot “get at”. r-s: Another example Adorno gives is of the student who reads books, rather than getting hands-on experience. The books have their own philosophy attached to them, and are therefore like a second-hand source of information. t-u: This failure of knowledge to try to understand what it cannot is not the fault of separating art and science, but it is because we are trying to control nature and view things as fixed and certain.

Para 5 a-: