Great-Souled Outsider

 

I often disagree with biographer Tom Shactman about Eric Hoffer’s motives. I see Hoffer as a noble loner, and Schactman regards Hoffer as brilliant but not always admirable or as moral as he should be.

 

For example, I will quote from Page 18 of Schactman’s biography, American Icoloclast, on Hoffer.

 

Apparently, Hoffer identified with The Idiot, a fictional character by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a talented outsider.

 

Shactman quotes from Herman Hesse but insists—correctly I think—that Hesse’s view is Hoffer’s self-appraisal: This gentle ‘idiot’ completely denies the life, the way of thought and feeling, the world and reality of other people. His reality is something quite different from theirs.

 

My response: Hoffer as a pure loner and self-actualizing genius and great soul, might seem unfit to live with others, and perhaps was self-referencing himself as an idiot or social inferior, as well as being a great soul at the same time.

 

Here is another short quote from Page 18: The chief thing is that (all the other people in the novel) need him, wrote Dostoevsky in his notebook about Prince Myshkin. In his most tragic, most personal moments, the notebook continues, the Prince is concerned with solving general problems. Throughout Hoffer’s adulthood he sought to create a similar persona for himself: the detached and brilliant outsider who addressed his mind to the larger problems of mankind.

 

My response:  I do not think Hoffer is posing as Shactman seems to think here: I think he was an idiot in the eyes of the social world of nonindividuators, but that is because he was a detached and brilliant outsider addressing the human condition, as his forte, not as a role to impress others.