Hoffer's Views On Nature

 In the Calvin Thomkins biography of Eric Hoffer, on Page 54 he captures Hoffer's quote on nature: " . . . I have this idea about man fighting nature on two fronts. There is nature around you, which you have to combat in order to make a living; and there is nature within you, the animal lusts, the part that Freud talks about. So you are fighting nature on two fronts. But here is a terrible thing: When you win on one front, you lose on the other! The triumph of the engineer brings affluence, brings victory over external nature, but it also sets up the stage for the psychiatrists. On the other hand, if you win the war against nature inside you, and end up with a population of yogis and ascetics, you are going to starve in the street. The idea of course, is not to win on either front. Man needs that tension, that stretching of the soul between two polarities . . ."

Hoffer, like Jordan Peterson, is an ethical and ontological moderate. Any set of polarities are to be won more than lost, against both poles at the same time--that is victory, and that ishow human flourish, invent and create. 

Concerning nature outside of us, we do not want to impose too much order upon it. Regarding nature within us, we do not want to succumb to being so natural that we cannot think or rise above nature. We want neither too much order nor too much chaos in our lives.