Fisher-Hoffer III

 

Dr. James R. Fisher wrote a book comparing Hoffer’s writing to his own theory of psychology. The book is titled, Mirror Of The Psyche, A Study of Eric Hoffer’s Writing from the Perspective of The Fisher Paradigm.

 

Pages 89 & 90: Here Fisher (F after this) goes into the most detail so far accentuating how his view and heuristic is similar to Eric Hoffer’s (H after this). F points out H’s engaging writing has an engaging intuitive and counterintuitive construction. F notes that though H was trained in the classical, typical European and American culture with a natural linear cognitive style, there is a trace of empathy with the essence and evanescence in the Chinese sense.

 

My response: I am not a psychologist, so I do not see in Hoffer what Fisher sees, but it likely is an apt analogy to point out, from my cruder analysis, that Hoffer, the great soul, genius, and almost radical individualist, was in touch with the divine, even as an avowed atheist. When one is deeply connected to the divine, the universal, then one is a cognitive-feeling truth-grasper, that moderate core, where all the spokes of the wheel meet in the center, the fountainhead of truth, beauty, goodness, love, creativity, life, and happiness.

 

H, the first Mavellonialist, was a moderate and great soul before I was 7 years old. F is identifying this moderate link to and back from the universal center which is crudely Yangian and Greek-like in focusing on the fundamental nature of the world in terms of first principles and logic, yet to be blended with, in various ways, with the Yinnish, Chinese philosophical envisioning of the world as a seamless whole composed of a single substance viewed in cyclical terms. F points out that we see this endless cycle and basic patterns of movement of the Tao.

 

I think that Eastern moderate metaphysics are going to be Yin majority emphasis and Yang minority emphasis, while the Westernized metaphysical moderation fielded by H and myself are going to have the Yang majority emphasis with a Yin minority emphasis.

 

Still, it was prescient and significant that F identified that H was a metaphysical moderate, if not a Taoist.

 

What would be interesting would be for a disciple of mine, 30 years from now when I am gone, some young genius with PhDs or the equivalent in self-taught terms, in psychology and ethics, to go back and look at the Fisher Paradigm, Hoffer’s works and my project to do an exegesis on each of Hoffer’s books and biographies, etc., to see if F was onto something in his reading of Hoffer.

 

I agree with F that there is a mixture of intuitive and counterintuitive entries by H in his books. It could be that his intuitive pieces are where the American culture and morality seems universally right to him, and as it turns Fascist, Marxist, or ideological, his criticisms of it emphasize counterintuitive objections that are meant to shock the true believers here back to reality.

 

I wish F would have explained how H’s being intuitive or counterintuitive can be translated in terms of whether the intuitive is Yangian and the counterintuitive is Yinnish, vice versa, or no analogy could be drawn.

 

Page 109: F brings up two senses of freedom, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, negative or individualistic freedom, or positive freedom, or personal existence within collectivities of some kind. I imagine the worldview of both F and H would propose a preponderance of negative freedom as the moral ideal.