The Unfinished Argument: Why Intellectual Incompleteness Was Never a Flaw

There is a particular kind of frustration that attends the careful reading of Michel de Montaigne. His essays circle their subjects without quite landing on them. He contradicts himself across chapters—and sometimes within a single paragraph—without apparent embarrassment. He raises questions he has no intention of answering. To the modern reader, trained by decades of structured argumentation and five-paragraph essays, this can feel like intellectual negligence. It is, in fact, the opposite.

Montaigne's incompleteness was deliberate. So was Diderot's. So was Hume's. These were not thinkers who failed to reach conclusions; they were thinkers who understood that a conclusion delivered too cleanly forecloses the very mental activity that makes reading worthwhile. The fragmentary, the provisional, the openly contradictory—these were not stylistic quirks. They were invitations.

The Essay as Collaboration

The word essay derives from the French essai: an attempt, a trial, a weighing of possibilities. Montaigne invented the form precisely because he wanted a container for thinking-in-progress rather than thinking-completed. His Essais are not arguments so much as demonstrations of a mind at work—a mind that changes direction, reconsiders, and occasionally doubles back on itself without apology.

Diderot operated similarly. His Rameau's Nephew, unpublished in his own lifetime and circulated in manuscript, is structured as a dialogue in which neither speaker wins. The philosopher and the parasite exchange positions, undermine each other's certainties, and arrive at no resolution. Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion follows the same pattern: three interlocutors, none of them fully trustworthy, none of them fully wrong. The reader is left holding the argument, responsible for resolving what the text deliberately refuses to settle.

This was not intellectual cowardice. It was a theory of the reader.

What the Polished Argument Costs Us

Contemporary intellectual culture has moved decisively in the opposite direction. The op-ed, the think-piece, the TED Talk, the podcast monologue—each of these forms rewards the complete, the confident, and the conclusive. Ambiguity is edited out. Contradictions are resolved before publication. The writer arrives at a destination and escorts the reader there along a clearly marked path.

This has real virtues. Clarity matters. Precision matters. But something is sacrificed when every argument arrives pre-digested. The reader, relieved of the obligation to complete the thought, becomes a consumer rather than a participant. Reading—which was once understood as an active, even combative engagement with another mind—collapses into a form of intellectual spectatorship.

The philosopher and literary critic George Steiner once observed that a great book reads us as much as we read it. He meant that genuine intellectual encounters disturb us, reorganize us, leave us uncertain in productive ways. The perfectly argued essay, by contrast, confirms us. It gives us something to agree or disagree with, but it does not genuinely implicate us in the work of thinking.

The American Appetite for Resolution

This preference for conclusiveness has particular cultural roots in the United States. American intellectual life has long been marked by a pragmatist bias—a suspicion of ideas that do not cash out in practical conclusions. William James and John Dewey, for all their genuine greatness, bequeathed to American culture a tendency to evaluate ideas by their usefulness rather than their fertility. An argument that ends in uncertainty can feel, in this tradition, like an argument that has failed.

The result is a reading public that is often uncomfortable with genuine intellectual open-endedness. When a writer says I do not know or this question may not be resolvable, it can register as evasion rather than honesty. When an essayist presents two incompatible views with apparent sympathy for both, readers frequently demand to know which side the writer is really on.

But the Enlightenment thinkers who gave us our best models of free inquiry were not on sides. They were in motion. Hume did not know whether the universe had a designer. Montaigne did not know whether virtue was teachable. Diderot did not know whether civilization was a net benefit to humanity. These were not failures of nerve but commitments to the actual difficulty of the questions.

Restoring the Reader to the Text

There is a practical dimension to this argument that goes beyond nostalgia for the eighteenth century. The problems most urgently confronting American society—political polarization, technological disruption, climate adaptation—are not problems that yield to clean, confident argumentation. They are problems that require the capacity to hold multiple frameworks simultaneously, to resist premature closure, and to remain productively uncertain while still acting.

These are precisely the cognitive habits that the incomplete, provisional, dialogic essay cultivates. When Diderot arranged his Encyclopédie so that readers were constantly referred from one article to another, forced to triangulate meanings across disciplines and perspectives, he was not being disorganized. He was training a kind of mind—one that understood knowledge as relational, contextual, and permanently subject to revision.

That training is available to us still. But it requires a different relationship to the texts we read and the arguments we encounter. It requires a willingness to sit with the unresolved, to resist the comfort of the decisive conclusion, and to accept that our role as readers is not merely to receive an argument but to extend it.

The Invitation We Keep Declining

Every time we reach the end of an essay and feel satisfied because the writer has told us exactly what to think, we have declined an invitation. The Enlightenment's great essayists extended a different offer: here is a problem I have been living with; come live with it alongside me. They trusted their readers to be capable of that partnership. They assumed an audience that could tolerate complexity, pursue contradictions, and find intellectual pleasure in the unresolved.

To recover that relationship between writer and reader would require changes on both sides of the page. Writers would need to resist the editorial pressure toward tidy conclusions. Readers would need to resist the impulse to treat ambiguity as a defect. Both would need to remember that thought, genuine thought, is not a product to be delivered but a process to be shared.

Montaigne wrote, near the end of his life, that he had painted himself. He meant that the Essais were not a collection of arguments but a portrait of a mind in the act of inquiry—incomplete by definition, because the mind itself was incomplete, still working, still changing. That incompleteness was not a limitation. It was the most honest thing about him.