This paper draws on Cavell to consider the relationship between educational research and the essay as a form of writing. It begins by considering the essay in the early work of Lukács. The essay is identified as a form into which the writer incorporates the work of others, acting as a conduit for their voices, while at the same time being singularised in her own expression. Voices intermingle in conversation but so as to release a strong authorial message. The form recovers something important in human understanding, associated more typically with aesthetic and religious experience. How is this relevant to theory and evidence? First, the essay does not fall neatly into dichotomies of theory and practice. Second, it resists the instrumentalisation of educational enquiry. Third, it avoids the abstraction of theory, associated sometimes with foundation disciplines, with philosophy especially. Philosophy in a certain guise does not easily address our spiritual experience. Where it attempts to overcome this inhibition, it becomes self-consciously “spiritual”, rightly arousing suspicion. Yet we cannot ignore this dimension of our lives, which is at the heart of education. It is a virtue of essay-form that it circles around such matters, with the indirect approach they properly require.