I. The Funnel of the Dialectic
There is a great deal on the dialectic, whether that be the Socratic or the Hegelian. So much that the push-and-pull of thesis and antithesis feels like a deeply, exclusively Western invention.
Are there some Eastern Traditions on the Dialectic? It is so deeply ingrained in the West.
At first glance, looking through a Confucian lens, the answer seems to be no. The Eastern teacher-student relationship feels entirely different from the conversational equals we see in a Socratic dialogue. Even if Socrates usually held the upper hand, there was a volley. In the Confucian model, there is no catch and return. There is no active challenge.
But stopping there would be a lazy, orientalist framing of the East. Digging deeper, we find that the universality of the dialectic actually gets stronger. There are examples in Buddhist thought. Whether it be Tibetan monastic debate, or Nagarjuna’s philosophical carving of the Middle Way, the dialectic is clearly there.
Why is the dynamic so universal? Why two?
There cannot be any words without a writer. That eliminates zero. With only a single viewpoint, a monologue, the universe becomes solipsistic. Therefore, two is the necessary minimum for any real intellectual friction.
But what if there are more than two? For any larger number of viewpoints, we can preserve the dynamic by pairing them into two distinct groups, reducing the noise back down to a binary. Granted, not every web of ideas can be immediately reduced to a bipartite graph. We might have to reduce it in stages. But eventually, if we keep distilling, we arrive back at that core collision of two opposing forces.
How, then, does this apply to something as mundane as writing an essay? Should an essay be considered a single phrase within this intellectual discourse?
Perhaps, but that doesn’t give much guidance on how to write an essay. Telling someone they are writing a “single phrase in the intellectual discourse” is like telling a bricklayer they are building a cathedral; it’s inspiring, but it doesn’t tell them how to mix the mortar.
If an essay is just a stubborn defense of a pre-determined thesis, it’s nothing more than a monologue. It reverts back to that rigid teacher-student dynamic. But if we try to construct the essay as an internal dialectic, suddenly we have a roadmap.
The writer posits a thought (the thesis). Then they actively hunt down and introduce the best possible objection to their own thought (the antithesis). Finally, they have to wrestle those two competing ideas into a new position (the synthesis). Taking inspiration from Hegelian theory, this process destroys the contradiction between the two ideas, but preserves the underlying truth of both.
When approached this way, through the funnel of the dialectic, the essay becomes a microcosm of the universe.
II. To Attempt to Write
It helps to remember the origins of the form. When Michel de Montaigne coined the term, he derived it from the French essayer—to try, or to attempt. An essay was never meant to be a definitive decree delivered from a mountaintop. Rather, it is the record of a mind trying to figure something out.
An essay of course can be many things. It has practical utilities that are best discussed in context. The sort of essay we are discussing is not one defined by external usefulness, that would require input of the context and in many ways is far closer to a monologue or even an artifact of pure accident where the writer is an accessory.
(As proof of “accident” and “accessory,” I will offer the suggestion that a tightly defined context is enough for such an essay to be produced by an AI stochastically)
Instead, the desire here is to clarify one’s own internal landscape. This aligns with Montaigne’s ethos: the value lies in showing your work.
If an essay is genuinely an attempt to figure things out, we arrive at a paradox regarding the audience. Standardizing our language to make an essay palatable for a general readership might actually destroy the very friction the writer needs to reach a breakthrough. Instead of leaning on sanitized, standard arguments, the essayist must make explicit the deeply idiosyncratic nature of their own thinking. To an outside observer, this deeply personal lexicon might make the essay more difficult to follow.
Yet, if there is value in the extra work the reader must put in, it is because these idiosyncrasies carry vital, hidden information. They shed light on an architecture that lives entirely above the specific argument being made.
Consider the connections a writer draws to construct their metaphors. There is no logical necessity in comparing a philosophical concept to a biological ecosystem or a financial market. To apply formal logic to a metaphor would be a massive over-fitting of the truth. But if a writer consistently identifies abstract concepts through the lens of economics, or physics, or theology, we begin to understand the grand narratives in which they find the most purchase. The idiosyncratic metaphor is the fingerprint of the mind.
What other forces constrain us? What forms the antithesis to the unformed thesis of raw thought?
The act of writing itself changes the nature of the thought. As it is placed onto the page, thought becomes concrete, losing its fluid, boundless nature. Therefore, the physical constraints of the medium become an active participant in the dialectic. Are you writing with a pen, a keyboard, or utilizing voice dictation? How fast can the words flow? Can you backtrack and edit while still in the throes of discovery?
If writing is an act of discovery rather than mere dictation, the tool shapes what is discovered. A pen forces a linear, deliberate flow; because you cannot easily erase, the synthesis of ideas must happen in a continuous forward motion. A keyboard, however, allows for instant revision, creating a rapid-fire, almost violent micro-dialectic between the sentence you just typed and the backspace key.
This physical realization reveals a startling truth: the writer is also the reader. There is always at least one outside observer to the text, even if that observer is the author themselves an instant later. Writing is not an administrative chore; you are not transcribing truths you already possess in full. You are discovering them in real-time and there is a moment of synthesis found in the friction between the abstract idea of the essay and the concrete words of the essay.
Crucially, this friction is what renders the writer an outsider to their own work the very moment it is put into form. This dialectic of alienation extends through time. Though a person’s core identity may not change in five hours or five days, they can wake up to view their own essay with radically different eyes the next morning.
The conversation does not stop when the drafting ends. Between writing and editing, between outlining and drafting, the dialectic continues its march.
III. The Diegesis of Proof
There is an inherent tension here. Plato famously distrusted writing because a written text cannot defend itself; it cannot adapt in a live dialectic. By trying to write an essay, we are attempting to freeze a dynamic process into a static medium.
If we try to solve this by anticipating every possible objection, we run into a wall. It is like writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you attempt to account for every opening and every divergent path, the complexity very quickly catches up to you.
The task isn’t necessarily hopeless. Let’s look at the somewhat limited domain of mathematics. If you provide a solid mathematical proof, you don’t need to preemptively consider all possible attacks upon it. (At least, not directly. Critics could certainly attack whether the proof has any practical use, whether it subtly moved the goalposts of the original problem, or whether it is truly profound versus an unnecessary construction. The list goes on.)
We can draw a parallel here to topics far beyond mathematics. What we are trying to build within an essay is a proof, rather than a random walk. Now, this ideal isn’t something we will necessarily ever reach in perfect form, but it is the target to aim for.
Let’s think about this for a second. If an essay is defined by the idiosyncratic, wandering nature of the writer’s mind, as we established with Montaigne, how can it also be a proof? A proof feels absolute. It feels stripped of personality.
An essay doesn’t achieve universal, objective truth like 2 + 2 = 4. Instead, it borrows the structural mechanics of a proof.
We must begin at a point of agreement. A place within the domain of the accepted or the believable. The axioms, if you will.
These axioms will vary for both the reader and the writer. In fact, part of the point of writing the essay is to actively extend this domain. If you don’t start in the shared domain of the believable, the dialectic never engages. You are just shouting across a void.
While the destination might be entirely subjective or unique to the writer’s grand narrative, the steps taken to get there must follow a necessary, sequential logic. The reader doesn’t have to agree that the conclusion is a universal law, but they must be forced to admit: “Yes, given where we started, this is the only place we could have ended up.”
This is how we step outside this domain. This movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar is what makes an essay a proof. Let’s refer to this as the Crux. We can compare it to the Volta or the Turn in poetry.
If an argument lacks a Crux, it has no surprise; it remains fundamentally simple. What if it has two or more Cruxes? Then we apply the same reduction we used earlier to distill a crowded discussion into a binary dialogue. We keep distilling until we find the single, true Crux that is most central and subordinates all lesser cruxes.
This idea of the Crux’s centrality organically enforces a form upon the essay itself. Establishing the right axioms becomes just as important as drawing out the conclusion. With a single central Crux acting as the fulcrum, the essay naturally divides in half.
We began this thought with Plato, and considering the course this discussion has taken, we cannot help but end with Plato—specifically the Meno, the Slave Boy, and the doubling of the square. By starting at a point of shared agreement and carefully navigating the Crux, the writer acts as the guide, allowing the reader (and themselves) to discover the synthesis on their own.
If the cold aesthetics of a mathematical proof still seem too distant from the reality of an essay, we might be looking at the wrong part of the mathematical process. We are thinking of the proof as it is published, rather than the proof as it is first conquered by the mathematician’s mind.
When a mathematician is actually trying to solve a problem, the process is not a straight line. It is organic, messy, and full of intuitive leaps and dead ends. They are, in essence, growing a tree. It’s only after the Eureka moment that they trim away all the dead branches and present the work as a clean, sequential, deterministic line.
The essay, mirroring the mathematical proof in the mind, is an erratic search for the Crux. But once that Crux is found, the structure you use to explain it borrows the sequential necessity of a proof so the reader can actually follow you upward.
Therefore, an essay must be both a Tree and a Proof.
The appropriate balance between the two will constantly change, but if there is one vital thing to remember, it is that we often remove too much of the tree under the false assumption that parsimony and clarity is identical to elegance.
(c.f. Willaim Thurston - On Proof and Progress in Mathematics)
A good proof and therefore a good essay doesn’t hide the friction of its own discovery. It leaves enough of the “Tree” intact so the reader has branches to hold onto, rather than leaving them to stare at a perfectly smooth, unscalable trunk.
IV. The Tree of Argument
The strength of an essay’s argument rests on three things.
The Roots in the Ground
Every argument must first anchor itself in the earth, the Domain of the Accepted. The deeper these initial roots go, the stronger the resulting argument will be. You want to begin from the indubitable, drawing upon facts and axioms that are often so obvious they have become practically invisible to the reader. The width and tightness with which your premise grips this earth determines how much weight the essay can eventually bear.
When we actually attempt to plant an idea, we quickly discover that the ground itself is treacherous. Human assumptions, especially when we cross between different disciplines, are rarely coherent. The soil is loose. This reveals why the opening of an essay is so vital: you aren’t anchoring yourself to pre-existing solid ground; you are actively doing the work of compacting the soil. You are making the ground itself stronger. The beginning of an essay is an act of constructing a shared reality robust enough to support the philosophical weight of what comes next.
The Width and Straightness of the Trunk
Once the ground is secured, we move upward. The trunk is the foundation of the argument itself, the logical structure that carries us from the roots to the branches.
But as we build this, we have to ask: is your argument a single, monolithic piece of wood? Or are there multiple arguments at play? If there are multiple, do they support each other, or do they create cleavage points where the logic might split and collapse under pressure? We must consider whether our single tree is actually a grove.
A grove of arguments can stand together effectively in one of two ways: either the trunks must grow perfectly parallel to one another, never interfering, or they must be so intimately entwined that they form a unified braided structure. Both work to make a strong essay, but they require entirely different sorts of intellectual alignment.
This forces us to refine our understanding of the Crux. The Crux is not a single, isolated argument, nor is it a collection of arguments. Instead, the Crux is the pivot point of the entire structure. This is how we extend an idea beyond a single trunk. Complex essays weave multiple threads of logic that might begin in entirely different places and remain parallel, yet they are all bound together in their ultimate goal, bending at that exact same pivot point.
Roots in the Sky
This brings us to the canopy, and to a seeming paradox. Roots belong in the dirt, but at the apex of our argument, we aren’t growing leaves to passively catch the sun. We are thrusting roots into the sky.
The Sky represents the new reality you are establishing. In this final phase of the process, the height and spread of the branches equate to the size of the new truth you have built. Just as you had to actively construct and reinforce the ground at the beginning of the essay, you are now building a new structural foundation in the air.
The implication here is that this newly established truth becomes the new Domain of the Accepted for whatever comes next. We’ve built a new ceiling, but that ceiling is just the floor for the next intellectual inquiry.
The Dialectic is the engine, the Tree is the shape of the growth, and the Proof is the map we leave behind.
V. Nurturing Life in Practice
If we want to construct an essay that yields a strong argument, we need a process that respects both the organic form of the Tree and the dynamic engine of the Dialectic.
To begin, we must confront the Fallacy of the Presumed Conclusion. The deep treachery of this fallacy is that, more often than not, people get away with it. We concede that writing backward from a conclusion is a highly effective tactic for essays of utility. But that is entirely beside the point for the sort of essay we are exploring.
You cannot begin with a conclusion if you genuinely respect the nature of the dialectic. When a writer succeeds with a presumed conclusion, it is because they are safely operating within the domain of what they already know or assume. But if the destination is pre-determined, you aren’t engaging in a dialectic; you are doing public relations for an idea you already hold. It is a monologue disguised as an inquiry.
A process that starts at the end cannot support discovery. It is true that while solidifying your Domain of the Accepted, you might inadvertently stumble into something new as the essay unexpectedly pulls you off course. But as we established with the geometry of the tree, reaching for the sky requires intention. It is much more than just growing leaves that passively shiver in the wind.
Truth does not expand through a slow, sedimentary creep outward. Arguments are not mere numbers; they cannot simply be added together without deliberate structure and curation.
If we remove the conclusion, we are left with only one valid point of origin. To ensure that we begin in the right place and are pointed toward the right trajectory, we must start with a question. This need not be a literal question mark. Rather, it is a quandary—a tension that strains our pre-existing intuitions. It must be a problem that cannot be neatly solved using the familiar tools we already possess. This ensures two things: we are positioned at the very edge of our known Domain, and our trajectory is inherently pointed outward.
From this edge, the idea grows. We explore the earth around the quandary. As we discussed earlier, this serves the dual purpose of compacting the soil to bear weight, but it also reveals the gaps, the fissures in the ground where the sky shines through.
It is here, that our tree metaphor begins to reach its limits. In nature, a tree implies a strict gravity of Up and Down. But in the landscape of thought, the Sky is the unknown unknown. It is the negative space. There is no absolute Up or Down when pushing into new intellectual territory.
Because of this, the growing process is fragile and may very well fail. We might realize our initial judgment was flawed and the quandary was actually solvable with our pre-existing tools. Or, the argument may fail because the branches never quite reach the sky; they find no new reality to root into.
But when the process does succeed, the realization of that new truth is what allows us to finally categorize the Crux. The Crux is not planned; it is discovered in the act of growth. Once we have found and navigated that pivot point, we can consider the essay at some minimal level, to be complete.
Further exploration is, of course, always possible. But before that exploration can truly begin, the essay must be written. The dialectic must be frozen into form. This follows the the Form of the Tree. For the growth to continue, the Roots in the Sky must take hold. The Sky must become Ground again.
VI. The Ecosystem of Growth
As we move into the concrete mechanics of this process, our conclusions naturally become more specific and arguably more useful. In doing so, we must sacrifice some of our clean, universal abstraction; the process demands a context. To figure out how this organic growth actually functions, it helps to look at a tangible environment.
I will outline a system of four stages that I am currently using and can thus deliver empirical analysis on with some authority.
Stage 0: Idea Collection
Any process that claims to manufacture something is, ultimately, an economic one. In the landscape of thought, the limiting factor is the writer’s own time and attention.
To manage this, I keep a single note, a bulleted list of loose quandaries. There is a Power Law at play here: we will always possess vastly more ideas than we have time to explore, and we will initiate far more explorations than we will ever finalize into essays. Given the massive difference in energy required between jotting down a passing thought and doing the hard work of actual exploration, a highly permissive zeroth stage is necessary to capture the raw seeds before they blow away.
Stage 1: Idea Growing / Exploratory Stage
How does an idea graduate? It must grow substantial enough to demand its own space, taking root in its own dedicated document.
Here, the idea is grown until a Eureka moment is reached. We are looking for something that feels genuinely clever, entirely new, or suddenly pulls the disparate threads of the essay together. This is an emotional verification that a Crux has been found. Because the Sky (the unknown reality we are trying to reach) is by definition unfamiliar, you cannot use your existing logical tools to verify you’ve actually reached it. You can only feel the sudden, unmistakable snap of the connection.
This is where it is useful to discuss a system that one has actually used. I can tell you that in practice, most ideas die right here. The time spent exploring the dead idea isn’t strictly wasted. Any thinker knows that no time spent wrestling with ideas is truly lost. But because no clear structure was found, the exploration does not live. Lacking a narrative skeleton, it fails to dwell in memory, fading alarmingly quickly despite the investment.
Stage 2: Essay Outline / Developing Stage
If an idea survives and a Crux is found, we begin actively cultivating the arguments. We gather the branches, including material and explorations that may eventually be cut.
This is where the friction between the ideal structure of the dialectic and the practicalities of publishing begins to spark. We have our pivot point, but we must now somewhat artificially define the scope of the growth. To figure this out, I place the working outline onto a larger Canvas of essays to visualize its connections to my previous ideas. Its position on this canvas determines its scope. Do I want the branches of this new essay to overlap with older work, or do I need to force it in a different direction? Both approaches carry their own risks and rewards.
This raises a quandary: where does the essay truly live? Is it in the scaffolding of the outline, or in the final polish of the prose?
The answer has to be both. As we established earlier, the physical friction of writing is an active participant in the discovery process. That dialectical friction occurs both when wrangling the broad strokes of the outline and when typing the final, concrete sentences.
Stage 3: Essay Completion / Writing Stage
Finally, we arrive at the actual writing of the essay. For my own process, by the end of Stage 2, I consider the essay to be mostly complete.
For a different writer who prefers a looser, less rigid outline, Stage 3 might be where the vast majority of the heavy lifting occurs. This isn’t a contradiction of our earlier rules regarding the physical constraints of writing; it simply means that my own negotiation between the idea and the words happens earlier in the timeline. Empirically, my outlines often account for 70% of the final word count and already contain the best sentences the final prose will offer.
Once an idea survives the culling of Stages 0 and 1, it will almost certainly become a finished essay. Occasionally, the friction of this final stage reveals a reason to return to the exploratory phase, or more commonly forces me to divide the essay, realizing that the roots would be better served if they were split into two distinct works.
This brings us to a final tension. If we accept that parsimony isn’t necessarily elegance, and that we shouldn’t strip away all the dead branches, how do we actually figure out which messy idiosyncrasies help the reader climb the tree, and which ones are just noise that needs to be cut?
Often, we place the entirety of this burden on the writer. But this is a mistake. It assumes the writer does all the heavy lifting while ignoring the fact that the reader brings their own complex idiosyncrasies to the text.
If we look at this abstractly, there is no audience. There are only individuals. And the very first of those individuals is the writer themselves.
A practical rule of thumb is the following: what works for you will likely work for more people than you think. By trusting the weird idiosyncrasies of your own mind, you are are staying true to the fundamental spirit of the essai (and perhaps being a bit self-indulgent, but that I see as the prerogative of a creator.)
I will make a short confession here, where few are likely to read it. This is highly idealized outline of my process. The truth is that I am just as lazy as anyone else.
VII. The Circle and the Proof
If this essay and the process it describes is a philosophy of thought, its greatest influence might be Hermeneutics.
So far, we have focused entirely on the internal dialectic. We have explored the friction of a single mind wrestling with a blank page. But no writer is an island, and Hermeneutics demands a deep respect for traditions and the voices outside our own skull. To complete the dialectic, we look outward and consider how we read the essays of others.
At first, engaging with another mind feels daunting. Another writer will inevitably possess a different Domain of the Accepted. Their Crux will pivot on foreign logic, and their Roots will reach for a Sky you cannot yet see. Worse still, as we noted earlier, the writer might not be a person at all, but a machine generating stochastically. An artifact of pure accident devoid of any internal landscape.
How do we navigate this?
There is a very simple rule: read the essay as if it were your own.
The Hermeneutic approach demands that you approach a text with a charitable suspension of your own axioms. But given everything we have discussed about the mechanics of an argument, this suspension is not an act of charity; it is a necessity for intellectual rigor. If you do not step onto their soil, you cannot climb their tree.
We must recognize a fundamental illusion in writing. Unlike the strict Axiom-Corollary-Proof models found in formal logic, many philosophical arguments are inherently circular. They have no canonical order. The presentation of the essay mimics a sequential proof—a straight, unbroken trunk designed to guide the reader upward. But the reality of the ideas is circular and deeply interdependent. They demand the Hermeneutic circle to be truly understood.
This reveals the deepest reason why reading is not writing.
When writing, you are building forward. The writer experiences the essay as a chronological sequence of discoveries, pushing upward from the dirt. The reader, however, encounters the essay as a fully formed object. They do not get the luxury of chronological discovery; they are dropped into the middle of a completed structure. To make sense of it, they have to navigate in circles, looking from the branches down to the roots, and the roots up to the branches.
A reader has to understand the whole essay to make sense of its individual arguments, yet they can only understand the whole by reading those individual arguments. Therefore, reading an essay is the process of reverse-engineering the Tree. And crucially, what you reconstruct might not be the writer’s original Tree at all. The writer’s perspective or a machine’s lack thereof is merely one side of the text.
The goal of reading is not to preserve the author’s intent. The goal is to walk away with the strongest possible tree to add to your own truth.
An essay is not a monument to the writer’s intellect; it is raw material for the reader’s own internal dialectic. In the end, the reader chops down the writer’s tree to build their own ground.
The Roots in the Sky fall to become the compacted soil for the next inquiry. The journey is cyclical, and the dialectic is complete.
Summary and Post Scripts
The Funnel: We narrow the universe down to two opposing forces.
The Attempt: The writer’s raw thought collides with the physical page.
The Proof: We borrow mathematical diegesis to structure the journey.
The Tree: We compact the soil, grow the trunk, and push roots into the sky.
The Practice: We start with a quandary, not a conclusion, to ensure real growth.
The Ecosystem: We map this to a tangible, human reality (and confess our laziness).
The Circle: The reader chops the tree down to start the process over again.
Post Script
Currently my working title for the document is “Essay Writing System”
It won’t stay like that, but it reflects the evolution of this essay, which began with my realization that many of my essays had a Crux. Often in the Third or Fourth section. Section Five was the first to be written in concept if not in words.
This means the philosophical apparatus of Sections I through IV was grown downwards to justify what I was already doing. While, Sections VI and VII were grown upward to deal with the aftermath.
The Crux of this essay, is by my accounting, Section III. The Diegesis of Proof.
Sections I & II are the Axioms. The Domain of the Accepted. We know the dialectic (Socrates/Hegel), and we know the essay is a wandering attempt (Montaigne/friction).
Sections III is the Pivot. This where we try force a collision between Montaigne’s messy, subjective wandering and smash it into the deterministic sequence of a mathematical proof.
Section IV through VII is the Sky. We have crossed the bridge and everything that follows (the Tree, the ecosystem, the Hermeneutic Circle) relies on that specific synthesis of wandering and determinism.
Post-Post Script
Where does essay fit in the philosophy of thought?
I already mentioned Hermeneutics. But I can’t think of a school of thought that dives this deeply into the mechanism of truth discovery. Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong essays? Or maybe comparable essays exists but are written in an hopelessly obscure manner? (Because it’s stuck in the Phenomenology of Language where philosophers, I would argue, are bit too aware of self-referential paradox of their inquiries.)
Epistemology doesn’t get the same innate interest like Ethics or even Metaphysics.
I feel many consider the topic solved in the analytic sense once we reach Münchhausen Trilemma. Instead of treating this as the Game Over screen we have re-purposed the three outcomes.
Dogmatic Assertion becomes Domain of the Accepted
Infinite Regress becomes Tree reaching into the Sky
Circularity becomes the Hermeneutic Circle
Not sure what others might make of my choice to rebrand the failures of logic as the starting points of meaning-making. The Pragmatist probably wouldn’t mind. Truth for them is what survives the friction of the attempt.
We might call it “Essay Games,” because I always thought Wittgenstein’s Language Games was a bit too reductive. We are both describing an epistemological technology and the essay as defined here is very much a tool in the same vein as Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Taking a broader social view of the matter lets us reach Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.
(To those not familiar with Kuhn. Domain of the Accepted is Kuhn’s Normal Science. Quandary / Friction is the Anomaly. The Crux is the Crisis. The Sky is the New Paradigm.)
Or perhaps I should have taken tips from Imre Lakatos and written the entire essay as a Socratic dialogue.
So no not alone. We are never alone.