Recently, I have undertaken an experiment: I will write the essay along with my students. However, I am doing more than just writing an essay and presenting them with the finished product. Instead, I have been writing all of my brain-storming sessions, my process of figuring out what I want to say, and how I am going to incorporate the course texts into my essay.
I am going to post these entries on this blog, every day for the next few days. I started this project last Thursday, so I already have a backlog of things to post. Some of them are quite long, and so readers will need to click on blog post title to view the entire entry.
Before this makes much sense, you would need to know something about my approach to teaching and understanding the essay. In my view, an “essay” is not merely a paper. It is certainly not a statement of one’s beliefs, or arguing for the beliefs that one already has. That sort of paper is not enlightening: it does not teach the writer or the reader anything interesting, new, or useful. This is especially true in philosophy, where the subjects of our inquiry are often nebulous, and which, if they are to be useful, need to strike at the heart of the writer’s own assumptions and prejudices. An essay is an attempt to overturn old thoughts, and to see old beliefs under new lights. The “essay” is, literally, “an attempt,” and it is an attempt to find some new truth, or at least some new way of understanding. Much, if not most, of the project here is to construct a problem. That is, to take what one has normally thought, examine it, and find some way of looking at it that shows the necessity of thinking about it in a new way. I pulled much of this from the University of Chicago’s writing program, but also from the philosophy and writing styles of Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche. If you have a copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, read section 45 and 46, and you will get the basic idea (make sure to read Kaufmann’s footnote for 45 too). It may also be useful to read my “Teaching Philosophy,” which I will post as a permanent page soon (hopefully immediately after I post this).
I have two classes that I am doing this for: “Enlightenment to the Present,” and “Ethics.” The subject matter in the former is currently the epistemological theories (loosely) of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx. I count Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (Phenomoenology of Spirit), Kierkegaard’s objective-subjective dialectic (Concluding Unscientific Postscript), and Marx’s alienated labor (Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844) as epistemological works, because they all deal with how we conceive the self and/or our relation with truth.
The essay questions are probably annoyingly broad, but I intended them to be this way because I believe so much of the valuable project here is in constructing one’s own problem, rather than letting the teacher provide you with one. Independent thinking has more to do with defining one’s own questions rather than answering them.
The basic questions are these:
Enlightenment: Consider something that you believe, examine it, and utilize the philosophies of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx to help this examination. (choose 1 or 2 authors: do not overburden yourself)
Ethics: What does it mean to be noble: not in the sense of rank or caste, but in the sense of an excellent character. Use Nietzsche to help examine your ideas.
The first part of the task is to narrow the question. It would be impossible to write a good essay simply responding to the question “what is noble,” especially in 5-pages. Both of these essay questions are exactly what they were asked in their first paper, but all the essays came back with theses that were too broad and unmanagable. That is expected on the first paper, and so we take a second and third attempt at it. There are usually some pretty amazing essays by the end of the semester.
The last thing I’ll note is that I sincerely attempted to enter into this without excessive seriousness, or without any agenda as to what I would write about. I tried to wipe my mind clean, and to start by simply asking the question, “what should I write about?” From there, I work to something more specific.
Natural Causes 
Novelty is what I live for, but initially on writing I generally do point out some assumptions and thesis-like statements to just sort of “start” writing so I can figure out how I can start working with these assumptions and statements and take it from there. I then see where the exploration goes from there. I’m not sure if this is the same as what you describe but I do believe you have to start somewhere. It’s not what I see as an agenda but a way to work with what’s there. If there’s some sort of covert agenda that I may not even be aware of, I work with that because I know that to do write, something needs to be written. At times, the best may not be there. But at other times, it’ll come. And that’s when it’s great.