Introduction: Philosophy and the Essay

Theoretical debates on the essay have been largely dominated by attempts to understand the essay in its relation to literature and literary criticism. Studies on the essay have centered on its different facets: its forms, its styles, what it can capture, what it can reveal about authorship. This chapter approaches the debate by looking at the interface between the essay and philosophy. Alongside the literary genealogy of the essay and essayists, the history of the essay indicates that philosophical activity has long been associated with this form, right from the beginnings of Western philosophy. Indeed, in an important study on essayism, Claire de Obaldia refers to Plato’s dialogues, Seneca’s epistles and Augustine’s confessions as having a role in the history of the essay. Discussions about the relation between philosophy and the essay have been largely influenced by the work of Theodor W. Adorno and György Lukács. These analyses have considered the status of the essay as an art form, regarding the genre of the essay as a challenge to the conception of philosophy as the construction of theoretical systems. More recent work, such as Erin Plunkett’s, sought to expand the epistemological question of the relation between philosophy and the essay by considering how the essayistic, as a style of writing, is present in a diversity of writers that includes Michel de Montaigne as an essayist alongside modern philosophers such as David Hume, Søren Kierkegaard, figures in German romanticism such as the Schlegel brothers and, into the twentieth century, Stanley Cavell.

This chapter approaches the relationship between philosophy and the essay from a different but complementary angle: namely, self-transformation. It reads the relation between philosophy and the essay in light of their mutual concern with self-transformation, whereby both philosophy and the essayistic can amount to practices of the self – askesis – which can have an ethical and political dimension. To explore this shared aspect of the essay and philosophy, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault.

A discussion of the essay – often associated with a form of writing reliant on notions of a transparent subjectivity and radically honest confession – in relation to Foucault’s work might seem paradoxical.