PREFACE

by Hugh M. Lewis

These essays were written about a decade ago, and this is the first and probably only form of their publication. I have explored the essay form periodically in my private career as a writer over the last twenty years. Perhaps it comes with the territory of Academic Anthropology that I have managed to mark out for myself over this span of time.

The essay form is now a largely neglected genre that has taken a peculiar place of importance in the history of English literature. It is most commonly found today in encyclopedias, academic textbooks, student reports and journals. I have found it to be an especially suitable form for the expression and exploration of basic ideas and concepts that otherwise are either difficult to clarify in juxtaposition with competing ideas or else lack the appropriate context their elucidation and elaboration when broached in other, more elaborate textual frameworks.

I believe that the traditional and neo-classical role of the essay in English literature has been largely usurped by the prevalence of journalism and newspaper articles that have a fundamentally different style and function than that of the formal essay. The conventional structure of the essay puts as a premium, as inherent to its form, a certain expressive parsimony and efficacy that is lacking in any other literary context. Thus, if a clear and simple style of English is sought, a kind of elementary Strunk and White, then the essay in its simplest and most stereotypical form would be preferred over almost any other kind of framework. But concision of expressive style is not all that an essay is about. The beauty of Bacon's essays are as much in their unity and style of expression as they are in any prosaic formalism. If these essays were one word less or more or one sentence or phrase lacking, then they would fall short of the standard that they have set for all good essay writing in English.

Most in our day and age would find the conventional essay boring stuff compared to the television or the Internet. We live in an age of McLuhan where the medium is both the massage and the message. The effect of the communication often does not extend beyond the moment of its mechanical transmission. In approaching the essay form it must be understood that form and function are intertwined and interdependent, but that both are conceptually dependent upon the ideas and range of experience they are bound within. If they are sublime and profound, then they will come to us like a bottle of musty old wine, or a good piece of poetry that is meant to be read, reread, and savored for all the nuances to be found within. Indeed, an essay that transcends its own mannerism and style of expression becomes a disembodied and unpetrified text that generates new meanings and accumulates meanings with each passing moment.

The essays contained in these pages are a departure from the hierarchical outline formalism of such writing that is taught in elementary school or that is found still in encyclopedias. I have taken an unconventional tack in essay writing with the purpose of exploring the structure and forms to which essays may be effectively put. Some of the essays are long, and others are short essays, intended to be only one or two pages in length at most.

The essays within this work are eclectic, but they have been unified in a framework that I would call "meta-thematic." There are ten meta-themes under which these essays have been grouped, and these meta-themes make these essays somewhat philosophical in orientation. I would define a meta-theme as a larger, more general frame of reference within which a variety of diverse topics can be grouped in service of a deeper philosophical understanding of the basic truths each relates to.

In hindsight, I would say that in my philosophy I have managed to blend a form of Eastern Buddhist-Taoist perspective with a traditional American Transcendentalism. I find the notion of earthboundness as adequate and sufficient for a wider range of conventional philosophical topics, from metaphysics to aesthetics and ethics. Earthboundness is a concept that has perhaps greater relevance in the present day than at anytime in our collective history.

I have been mostly a strong empiricist, and for much of my adult life had rejected any form of Platonic or continental rationalism. I have only recently returned to the fold of rationalism, especially in terms of scientific theory and metaphysics, upon the realization that empiricism alone is blind and insufficient to a complete understanding of reality and knowledge.

If one is to write and do philosophy in a creative and interesting manner, then I would suggest that one must eventually come to the essay as the most adequate framework for the expression of many of the most important and fundamental ideas to be found in philosophical inquiry. This comes with only one caveat. Though an essay can stand upon its own, as least hypothetically, an essay achieves its greatest strength when bound into a larger collection of thematically grouped essays.

Though I have periodically explored the essay form in my writing throughout my anonymous career as a writer, this work represents the greatest and most intensive effort in exploration of the essay form I have yet undertaken. Subsequently I undertook several works in essay writing relating especially to topics in anthropological knowledge, but these were focus upon things anthropological and largely esoteric in relation to the everyday experience of most people.

Essays blend naturally to a larger textual structure that I would call the article that are more conventionally and commonly found, especially in Academia and academic textbooks. The article is fundamentally different from the essay in addressing thematic issues that appear at least upon the surface of things to be more complex. Thus the focus of an article is more functionally distributed in the exploration or explanation of structures of knowledge within a thematically defined framework, whereas in an essay the focus comes to rest upon a single topic that can be said to contain its own framework in a meta-logical manner. Thus the voice and style of the essay may often come to mechanically embody the topic of the essay in a way that is more difficult to achieve in a longer and more elaborated article. I would claim that though the topic of a short essay might not appear as complex on the surface compared to the thematic structure of an article, an effective essay in general tends to be a much deeper and more profound exploration of basic concepts.

Another neglected form related to the essay is the more personal style of letter and note writing that harks back to a much earlier era in which an epistle had its own purpose and penmanship. Letter writing tends to deal with a more personal and subjective side of experience compared to the essay. Letters thus are inherently concrete in their discussion of feelings and thoughts, in the description of events and experiences, or in the recording of facts and figures. Letters, when they are published as collections, constitute their own literary form with their own distinct qualities. They are related to essays, but serve different purposes than the essay that is meant to inform and persuade, expound and critique on divers topics.

But the essay as a form and conventional style in and of itself has survived the ravages of changing media technologies and fashions, and remains today an important element of expression and thought in English literature regardless of how few writers may actually employ it any longer.