Hoffer And Fun

 

I will type out all of Chapter 14 of Eric Hoffer’s book, The Ordeal of Change; this chapter runs from Page 112 through Page 116, and the Chapter is entitled, The Playful Mood. I will respond to his text where appropriate.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “I have always felt that the world has lost much by not preserving the small talk of great men. The little that has come down to us is marked by a penetration and directness not usually conspicuous in formal discourse or writing; and one is immediately aware of its universality and timelessness. It seems strange that men should so effortlessly attain immortality in their playful moments. Certainly, some have missed immortality as writers by not writing as they talked.”

 

My response: This good and wise genius says so much with so few words. Note that he is referring to great men, or great souls. A great-souled person is of such original and profound insight that her intuitive grasp of—often best formulated and expressed on the fly—and her uncanny ability to characterize the nature of reality and the human condition, can be best be shared and expressed by her on the fly, perhaps in a playful mood. Were she giving a lecture, or writing a white paper, she may not hit the mark with such brevity, alarming clarity and truth being spoken by her in all its universality and timelessness.

 

Hoffer, the master of uncovering and discovering instructive paradoxes, may be recommending that as individuated great souls, just living life and observing casually, any individual could reach such penetrating conclusions, just by freelancing, working off-the-cuff conversationally, generalizing about the world and people, rather than writing a daunting but verbose, turgid tome like a German professor could write.

 

H: “Clemenceau is a case in point. His books are dull and difficult reading, yet he could not open his mouth without saying something memorable.”

 

My response: Hoffer inadvertently may be pointing out that as people informally dialogue, then they would best able to think and express their communication thusly, so that the conversation between individuators, unregulated and spontaneous, might well contribute to a huge growth in human knowledge, wisdom and understanding.

 

H: “The few scraps we have of his small talk throw a more vivid light on the human situation than do shelves of books on psychology, sociology, and history. Toward the end of his life Clemenceau is reported to have exclaimed: ‘What a shame that I don’t have three or four more years to live—I would have rewritten my books for my cook.’ It is also worth noting that the New Testament and the Lun Yu are largely records of impromptu remarks and sayings, and that Montaigne wrote as he spoke. (‘I speak to my paper as I speak to the first person I meet.’)”

 

My response: It occurs to me it is newsworthy that, at times, Hoffer the incomparable truth-detector, may not have been consciously aware of what he was revealing, or where its fully expressed implications led to. Here, for example, he insists that casual, informal thinkers may communicate more seminal, profound, universal thoughts and sentiments, utilizing the technique of play and conversation, more and better thoughts than serious, self-conscious and self-congratulatory, of full-time professional thinkers.

 

He may have discovered that professional thinkers, solely dedicated to mastering their subject matter, specializing as narrow experts, somehow are going about it wrong with a cumbersome, narrow epistemology. The best way to unpack what is knowable and how to know it might be to pursue other occupations, play, work, converse and live—all jumbled together, and then, somehow this mishmash or moderated intellectual and intuitive inputs and outputs, more pursued by the amateur than by the specialist, yields more in-depth and powerful intellectual insight.

 

H: “We are told that a great life is ‘thought of youth wrought out in ripening years’; and it is perhaps equally true that ‘great’ thinking consists in the working out of insights and ideas which come to us in playful moments. Archimedes’ bathtub and Newton’s apple suggest that momentous trains of thought may have their inception in idle musing. The original insight is more likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then coalesce to form new combinations. It is doubtful whether a mind that is pinned down and cannot drift elsewhere is capable of formulating new questions. It is true that the working out of ideas and insights requires persistent hard thinking, and the inspiration necessary for such a task is probably a by-product of a single-minded application. But the sudden illumination and flash of discovery are not likely to materialize under pressure.”

 

My response: Hoffer is onto something here: the expert and logician can single-mindedly work out a framed argument for the newly discovered thesis, but in the method of play and daydreaming and aimless conversion, the flash of intuitive insights can be most likely to show itself, and the individual consciousness must not e overly regimented.

 

H: “Men never philosophize or tinker more freely than when they know that their speculation or tinkering leads to no weighty results. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys. In the Occident the first machines were mechanical toys, and such crucial instruments as the telescope and the microscope were first conceived as playthings. Almost all civilizations display a singular ingenuity in toy making. The Aztecs did not have the wheel, but some of their animal toys had rollers for feet. It would not be fanciful to assume that in the ancient Near East, too, the wheel and the sail made their first appearance as playthings.”

 

My response: Hoffer is onto something when he explains that playful research and unaccountable, open-ended experimentation may be the most productive (indirectly so) research method.

 

H: “We are told that in some of our oldest cemeteries in the world the skeletons showed that the average of the population at death was less than twenty-five—and there is no reason to assume that the place was particularly unhealthy. Thus the chances are that the momentous discoveries and inventions of the Neolithic Age which made possible the rise of civilization, and which formed the basis of everyday life until yesterday, were made by childlike, playful people.”

 

My response: This historical record, which Hoffer alludes too, that the young, childlike, and playful, were prehistorically responsible for momentous discoveries and inventions, gives me hope that the young today in an enthusiastic, playful mood, as blooming individuators, can provide us with new inventions, theories, and art forms, and can do so when they are 86, too.

 

H: “It is not unlikely that the first domesticated animals were children’s pets. Planting and irrigating, too, were probably first attempted in the course of play. (A girl of five once advised me to plant hair on my bald head.) Even if it could be shown that a striking desiccation of climate preceded the first appearance of herdsmen and cultivators it would not prove that the conception of domestication was born in a crisis. The energies released by a crisis usually flow towards sheer action and application. Domestication could have been practiced as an amusement long before it found practical application. The crisis induced people to make use of things which amuse.

 

When we find that a critical challenge has apparently evoked a marked creative response there is always the possibility that the response came not from the people cornered by a challenge but from people who in an exuberance of energy went out in search of a challenge. It is highly doubtful whether people are capable of genuine creative responses when necessity takes them by the throat. The desperate struggle for existence is a static rather than a dynamic influence. The urgent search for the vitally necessary is likely to stop once we have found something that is more or less adequate, but the search for the superfluous has no end.”

 

My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox that seems intuitively correct to me: that crisis and necessity are not the mothers of invention. Scarcity and a brutal struggle to exist promote collectivism, stagnancy, and nonindividuating; also, when people are severely stressed and worried about the future, they united loss of self-esteem much increases the likelihood that they will shun experimentation, and cling to one another out of feeling desperate. They will run into and stay in packs, where passionate non-individuality, nonindividuating  and mandated conformity will militate against acceptance or tolerance for individual invention and artistic adventuring; these latter options are strangled and eliminated.

 

By contrast, in times of comfort, luxury, ease, liberty, individualism and egoist morality, it is likely that these are the mothers of new thinking and original thoughts. When plenty, leisure, tolerance, affluence, and individualism abound, people will feel good about their worldly lives, then and there will be collectively experienced a rather healthy, large self-esteeming per capita; concomitantly, individuating and individual-living will be increased and then technical experimenting and poetry writing will surely upsurge and abound.

 

H: “Hence the fact that man’s most unflagging and spectacular efforts were not made in search of necessities but of superfluities.”

 

My concern: We must reward the young and other individuators to chase after superfluities (not just hedonistic pleasure, luxury, and ease, but art, creativity, and invention for their own sake, for the fun of it).

 

H: “It is worth remembering that the discovery of America was a by-product of a search for ginger, cloves, pepper, and cinnamon. The utilitarian device, even when it is an essential ingredient of our daily life, is most likely to have its ancestry in the nonutilitarian. The sepulchre temple, and palace preceded the utilitarian home; ornament preceded clothing; work, particularly teamwork, derives from play. We are told that the bow was a musical instrument before it was a weapon, and some authorities believe that the subtle craft of fishing originated in a period when game was abundant—that it was the product not so much of grim necessity as of curiosity, speculation, and playfulness. We know that poetry preceded prose, and it may be that singing preceded talking.”

 

My response: It may well be that the non-utilitarian, impractical, worldly activities are the foundation of human advancement.

 

H: “On the whole it seems to be true that the creative periods of history were buoyant and even frivolous. One thinks of the lightheartedness of Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, and the age of the Enlightenment. Mr. Nehru tells us that in India ‘during every period when her civilization bloomed, we find an intense joy in life and nature and pleasure in the art of living.’”

 

My response: Creativity, godliness, intellectual and artistic advancement, and ingeniousness require happiness, play and worldly enjoyment as much as and perhaps more than grim, dark, puritanical, grimness, drudgery, asceticism, and a one-sided, completely, other-worldly, focus, that renounces pleasures for the self, and repudiates interest in life here and now in this world. To be too hedonistic and too worldly, or too self-abnegating and heaven-gazing are immoderate, not God-approved nor God-sanctioned.

 

H: “One suspects that much of the praise of seriousness comes from people who have a vital need for a façade of weight and dignity. La Rochefoucauld said of solemnity that it is a’a mystery of the body invented to conceal the defects of the mind.’  The fits of deadly seriousness we know as mass movements, which come bearing a message of serious purpose and weighty ideals, are usually set in motion by sterile pedants possessed of a murderous hatred for festive creativeness. Such movements, bring in their wake meagermindedness, fear, austerity, and sterile conformity. Hardly one of the world’s great works in literature, art, music and pure science was conceived and realized in the stern atmosphere of a mass movement.”

 

My response: Notice that being imbued with the spirit of ultraistic idealism, deadly fanatical seriousness of purpose and focus, mass-movementized masses allow for no creativity in literature, art, music and in pure science: that requires, cool reason, a popular acceptance of mass but harmless nonconformity, individualism, prosperity, tolerance, liberty, and a love of worldly achievement for the self-realizing individual.

 

H: “It is only when these movements have spent themselves, and their patterns of austere boredom began to crack, and the despised presence dares to assert its claims to trivial joys, that the creative impulse begins to stir amidst the grayness and desolation.

 

Man shares his playfulness with other warm-blooded animals, with mammals and birds. Insects, reptiles, etc., do not play. Clearly, the division of the forms of life into those that can play and those that cannot is a significant one. Equally significant is the duration of the propensity to play. Mammals and birds play only when young, while man retains the propensity throughout his life. My feeling that the tendency to carry youthful in characteristics into adult life, which renders man perpetually immature and unfinished, is at the root of his uniqueness in the universe, and is particularly pronounced in the creative individual.”

 

My response: All are briming with talent and potential. All can and should maverize, making being playful, pleasure-loving (good pleasure and moderately indulged), loving the world, expressing their talented enjoyment of people, God and reality, by making their cultural exhibits  reflect this enjoyment and appreciation of being born, and making the most of the presence, tinkering and chasing idealistic and non-utilitarian interests for their own sake.

 

Her developing her innate traits render her as a person ever immature and unfinished, but ever-evolving—if she has so elected as her telos. Of all mammals on earth, only humans uniquely should and can aim to grow their personal consciousness and talent for a lifetime, playing and working at self-improvement, a useful, meaningful, noble lifestyle.

 

 

H: “Youth has been called a perishable talent, but perhaps talent and originality are always aspects of youth, and the creative individual is an imperishable juvenile. When the Greeks said, ‘Whom the gods love die young’ they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.”