Notes on the critical-interpretive essay

crh4@uiuc.edu

What is an essay?

1. An essay is not a research paper in which you collect the thoughts of others on a topic, but a process of thinking through a question for yourself. Thus, good essays have the spark of genuine inquiry, of someone trying to understand better something they care about.
   
2. Critical essays share the results of the inquiry (so far) in an affirmative voice. In other words, they are structured as a defense of a particular answer to their central question. This "thesis" should be clearly stated at the outset of the paper and should then implicitly, if not explicitly, organize all that follows.
   
3. If an essay is a searching train of thought, and a critical essay is an extended argument, a critical-interpretive essay is an argument in which what counts as evidence is (mainly) readings of key passages of texts that illuminate the question at hand.
   

What are the ingredients of a good critical-interpretive essay?

1. What gives an essay its critical force is how well it constructs its central question and thesis which should be:
   
   1. Focused. A well-focused central question is neither too broad nor too narrow, so that the length of the essay is appropriate to the case being made. It is acceptable, however, to mention how one's thesis forms part of a broader argument which goes beyond the scope of the essay. It is also acceptable to have a multi-part thesis, each part of which takes a portion of the essay to establish.
      
   2. Interesting. A good essay avoids stale formulations of the question and clichéd pros and cons in the thesis. It offers a personal conception of the problem, promising a fresh appreciation of the issues at hand.
      
   3. Motivated. The question should be introduced and/or stated in such a way that its importance is clear. The motivation is what answers the challenge: "but, what hangs on this question?"
      
   4. Controversial. A well-formed central question admits of at least two plausible, conflicting answers. If the thesis is a truism, the essay has nowhere to go. Indeed, essays tend to be engaging to the degree that they push against conventional wisdom, taking the less popular or seemingly less plausible side of an issue. Establishing the controversy is what answers the challenge: "but, who would disagree with this?"
      
   5. In practice, all of these features will be interconnected.
      
      1. For example, vague theses such as "All children deserve to learn!" will tend to be uninteresting and uncontroversial.
         
      2. Conversely, focusing the question and establishing the controversy immediately begins to communicate its interest and importance as in the following example:
         
         1. "Some argue that liberal learning is nothing better than the legacy of the straight, white, male leisure class arrogantly prescribing its peculiar brand of Hellenism as the sole path to truth and goodness. Defenders of liberal learning reply that what truly constitutes racism and classism is the contention that there are certain groups of people that would not, or could not, benefit from, and therefore do not deserve, the chance to understand themselves and their world in the special way afforded by conversation with the great works of the human mind and imagination."
            
2. What gives an essay its interpretive richness is how well the author carries on a dialogue with the text(s) in question.
   
   1. Dialogue requires a balance between two extremes.
      
      1. At one extreme, dialogue fails when one judges the views of another before taking the time to fully understand them.
         
         1. In interpretation, listening carefully to the other means quoting and working with quotes.
            
         2. It means seeking out the strongest version of each argument under consideration, not looking for weak points to exploit.
            
      2. At the other extreme, dialogue fails when we completely withhold criticism, accepting the other's ideas wholesale, as if they could not stand up to scrutiny.
         
         1. Note that at both extremes we find a similar failure of respect. Whether one cuts the other off, or backs away and lets the other talk in a vacuum, one fails to give the claims of the other their due.
            
         2. In interpretive dialogue, you must not let either your voice or the voice of the author drop out.
            
   2. Another way to put this is that a successful dialogue with a text involves a balance between trust and doubt, a stance that is at once open-minded and critical.
      
      1. An essay that blindly trusts its sources is not compelling.
         
         1. Never accept a claim simply on authority and don't ask your reader to. The point in citing a text is never merely to say that someone said this or that, but rather to show what that author was able to show and how this advances your inquiry.
            
         2. We cannot understand what a text establishes unless we test its claims in some way. Is the text asking the right questions? How well does it answer them? How does it compare to rival positions? Are there gaps in the argument? How might we restate its central claims more clearly and fully than it itself does?
            
      2. On the other hand, this critical spirit must be combined with a certain generosity towards the text, a presumption that the text has something important to say to us.
         
         1. Doubt without trust produces only exercises in self-confirmation, in which you act as if you could determine the rightness of each claim according to criteria you already have.
            
         2. Any text worth writing about offers not only individual claims, but a chain of reasoning justifying those claims and a whole sensibility animating those claims.
            
         3. One of the rewards of interpretation is precisely to learn new criteria by which to judge ourselves and our world.
            
         4. If you do not respect a particular text, write about another one. Condescension is anathema to good criticism.
            

Critical-interpretive essays are found across the humanities. What distinguishes those in philosophy?

1. Philosophical essays often concern questions specific to philosophy (e.g., Are secondary qualities such as color objective or subjective?) but most work in philosophy deals with questions shared by many disciplines (e.g., What is culture?), if not by every human being (e.g., Why are we here?). As a general rule:
   
   1. Philosophers gravitate toward the most basic form of a question (e.g., "What is freedom?" versus "What are the tropes of freedom in Whitman's Leaves of Grass?").
      
   2. Philosophers typically deal with non-empirical questions, or the non-empirical part of questions, focusing especially on normative issues.
      
2. Philosophical essays tend to work with texts in the philosophical canon, but again this is not always the case (e.g., philosophy of literature, philosophy of social science, etc.)
   
3. Though there are many different ways of doing philosophy and much overlap between philosophical essays and those in other disciplines, we can identify certain typical features of philosophical writing:
   
   1. A propensity to foreground reasoning and scrutinize arguments, whether that of the essay itself or those of the texts the essay interprets.
      
   2. An effort to make assumptions explicit, to be careful in the definition of terms, and to consider counter-arguments to positions advanced.