THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR -- WHO IS THIS?

THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR

WHO IS THIS?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007

NOTE: This is a mystery interview and the reader is to attempt to determine whom this “point of view” concerns. The author is prolific as well as polemical. His origins are from humble birth but he has acquired some affluence allowing him to be a peripatetic wanderer and wonderer. There are many that are in accord with his thinking but he continuously offends them by making them out to be the enemy; and he takes pride in his singularity of conscience while triumphing the common man.



My work is virtually impossible to classify. Is it literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology or religious apologetics? In any case, I write with the world in revolution. The age of the “common man” has indeed arrived.

We have moved through many ages and now find ourselves emphasizing the primacy of feeling and fantasy; indeed, a philosophy of personality has arrived. It is opposed in different ways to result in anarchy of subjectivism and individualism.

Consequently, a sense of reality has been lost with people fleeing the requirements of reality, taking refuge in a life of habit or rote religious conformity. Alas, we have abandoned our internal self-definition, which provides understanding as individuals before attempting to relate to a church or government or, indeed, society.

The only way a person is “real” is when in charge of the inner life of the soul as well as outer life of the body. It is a matter of making choices, which is a measure of free will.

We once used our inner world to recognize life’s differences in terms of good and evil, right and wrong and to act with decisive significance. There was no inclination to volatilize our problems into speculative synthesis and nonexistence. We accepted that a human being existed to make choices, not speculative leaps of discernment. The simplest man recognized these differences and didn’t hide behind irrelevant babble, as now do scholars.

Unfortunately, the clutter of learning often interrupts the person’s relationship to himself. As a consequence, the ability to make pure ethical choices is placed in jeopardy. He is unfree and education rather than making him freer has made him even less so for his high mindedness.

Freedom is naked and precisely concrete. It is not an abstraction. It means taking responsibility for virtually every segment of one’s entire life, for only then will the content of that life hold meaning. No matter how different the gifts and talents of the individual may be, he is equal in his freedom to manage and develop consistent with those gifts, nothing less is a travesty. Personal validity can be earned in no other way.

We are faced from birth with everything increasingly external in an eternal and unceasing struggle between opposite tendencies. This is not something to mourn but to use. It starts by fighting to engage our instincts for survival. This is not a fight for a part but for the whole of us, and is commanded by our morality. Everyone knows this; knows we were made for action, not speculation. But our culture entangles us in speculation and contradiction putting up arbitrary signs that confuse and delay action. We must fight through these if not completely at least in part.

I have enthusiasm for the natural sciences, but I would not make them my principal field of interest. The virtue of reason and freedom and life, itself, has always interested me more. But my interests are not subordinated under one heading but coordinated with one another. I will admit I find the natural sciences attractive while theology in general and religion in particular appalls me. Nor will I deny this betrays weakness that would be a sign of strength were I to demonstrate, like many fish, to remain at the bottom of the sea without feeling the need to surface like a glinting sunfish. It is probably why some give me the tag of the idealist while others paint me in caricature as a comic figure.

I am known to read a great deal, and it is a correct characterization. But I have a confession to make. I am quite oblivious to the author’s intention in every book I read because I always have an eye on how it will serve my own self-understanding or particular interest.

I am also known to be repetitious of which I will have more to say later. My focus is always on “actuality.” It appears in life as ideal and in caricature. When I see it in caricature, I attack it, as it is a misrepresentation of the ideal.

In the new spirit of freedom that has embraced our land, I see everywhere around me indolence and self-satisfied mediocrity and the cautious calm produced by wealth. I hear much talk of equality, but I take arms against an abstraction at odds with its concrete reality. Everyone should have access to quality education, the highborn and the lowborn, country people and city dwellers. That is equality not as an abstraction but as reality.

I am suspicious of the crowd and “the public,” of any reference that reduces the individual to an entity with a separate will and calling that may in any way jeopardize his personal sovereignty. I see this demonstrated in the religious who claim the Savior died for the whole world but was resurrected for only practicing Christians.

Some find me vague with my internal self-definition of the individual. What it means is that the individual in the context of choice and making decisions will do himself no harm. I am blunt and emphatic about this. Internal development and integrity cannot be suborned by external authority; indeed, the individual has a perfect right to act in defiance of that authority should it be inconsistent with his personal integrity.

I am committed to the common man. I have no time for fanatics and mystics who attempt to engage him. They lack the imagination to appreciate the wonder of work. You will never find the common man creating heathen mythologies and power breaches, as he is too busy toiling for existence. He understands cruelty and corruption because he is often its victim. When change is proposed, and sacrifice demanded, it is asked always in his name, while he waits patiently in the hall for its spoils. So, when revolt comes or rebellion occurs, he is the one to die for an ill-begotten cause.

I have my problem with the crowd. It represents untruth except insofar as each person in the crowd, separately and as a single individual, relates to its idea. But the crowd invariably is reduced at some point into a mob without conscience and without restraint and therefore I have a total antipathy towards it.

I had an authoritative father. Even as a boy, my glimpse of him was as a troubled human being, a Job or a Daniel in a Lion’s den. He had trouble seeing me, as I am, a dreamer, a kind of poet, an artist of fantasy, a thinker. I must confess I didn’t understand my father fully. But in him I encountered the common man, a man for whom education was neither a crutch nor a mask, and where the pure of heart took easy residence.

There is a chance I would have been a greater writer if my father hadn’t given me a cross to bear. He called it “reality.” He was always bringing me back to earth from my flights of thought, which he saw as conjuring illusion. It would be shallow of me to think my father had a fixation on me. More accurate would be to say he was a great influence. The true upbringing that takes place in any home is always the self-education of the parents, which lives in silence.

My father gave me an appreciation of his self-education in everyday life, which I discovered was the self-discipline and basis of his authority and independence of spirit. I would make it mine. It would be inappropriate to wax psychological about this.

The truth is my father’s triumph of self-discipline over his natural and instinctual life was not the result of complexes and neuroses that constitute psychology. The health of his spirit was the fruit of an anxiety that neither weakened him nor led him astray, but instead led to the rebirth of his integrity by earnestly engaging reality. In that sense, he was the existential foundation of my thought.

I have a brother who has always been conscience-plagued, anxiety-ridden, and what I have used more often than not to describe as being “pusillanimous.” The truth is he has never been young in the spiritual sense and I have never been young in the physical sense, but spiritually always since my youth, and in a good sense. I have been granted certain courage and openness that has enabled me to take life on whereas he has always shied away from it, allowing decisions to be made for him. I see this as the difference between living up to, or not living up to one’s character.

Much as I am indebted to my father, there was a mother, too. She was the silent power behind the unending chatter that has been my life. I am talking about a sort of silence that goes beyond human speech, a silence that communicates to the soul. The simplest person or the most complex individual, should he be attuned to this silent speech, profits beyond his wildest dreams. You see, my mother is always in my mind.

Whereas my father’s melancholy was palpable, my mother’s was concealed behind her high spirits and irony. This was an art she managed to pass on to me, but not my brother. My mother was a great reader but could not write, leaving that too me. She was a kind little woman with an unpretentious cheerful turn of mind. She made me the apple of her eye.

Consequently, I was a frightfully spoiled and naughty child who hung on her apron strings. Where some who came to our home talked in a high-minded fashion, she was silent, possessed of uncomplicated warmth and paid them no mind. Yet, as a bit of irony, I find many of my mother’s words have found their way into my writing.

These words I can best describe as coming out of her silence because they spoke to a language not expressed directly in the Word. By that I mean she is a believer, a hearer of the Word, who has never forgotten the Word. So, she is not distracted by the descriptions of the Word, as she is a person of faith.

She was silent; she is silence. Neither does she talk about religion in the community or at home. I hope this does not imply that she is a simpleminded person because she is not. While everyone is talking in a high-minded fashion, she sits in silence. I often wondered when I was young what this silence meant. She would tend to her house, as though with her entire soul, even down to the most insignificant detail.

She is joyful and full of merriment. She is the joy of the house more than we as children are. Yet when you are looking at her sitting there smiling you cannot but say, she is silence. So often I wanted to ask her what was behind all this, but never found the courage. I find now at this late date that she bequeathed this power to me so that I could capture the silence between the words.

It is in silence that a taste for ironic playfulness, for humor and concealment, for the interesting and the spicy, for the point counterpoint sense and senselessness is found in song. I have it and she gave it to me as a gift.

My father gave me an understanding and appreciation of my common roots, and the pride of that identity with common man. He made me see that many men claim an outward sympathy for them but it is a ruse. They actually see themselves as apart from common man as if on another level. Such fundamental elements of my youth have become primary to my philosophical foundation.

I am an observer, but as such I am among them, but as a consequence not one of them. Is this in the service of deception? I think not. It is necessary to see things as they are.
From my earliest youth, it would be safe to say I have been incommensurable with the opinions of my time. I was an individual looking for the single Archimedean point from which to move the world. My father died and this earnest drive was put into action in his memory.

External relationships and surroundings were abandoned. I was driven totally by the fulfillment of inner needs. Like a person after a shipwreck, the world looked different to me in the absence of my father. I turned to what is highest after this emptiness. It was my absolute dawn; not only in its fullness, but also in the responsibility that I now felt was mine. Shadow and light, joy and perdition, anxiety and courage became amorphous so that at first I didn’t know precisely what I needed to do.

There I was, sitting at the last station of his way, the place where it all began. I sat there entirely alone, thinking of my father and what was past lost in the present. I saw him as a poor boy and felt homesickness because of his descriptions. He was gone and I was a young man lost in what the future held.

What if I now were to fall ill and join him? What a strange thought. His last wish for me was to fulfill my destiny. Could this be the whole of my earthly destiny? From him I learned what fatherly love is, and thus received a notion of divine fatherly love, the only unshakable thing in life, and the true Archimedean point.

Yet, my mind was full of confusion. I remained for three days separate from community, alone with him in my thoughts. I then hurried home anxious for the journey, longing for the embrace of a young girl, and to start my work.

I had come to equilibrium. To one person it is found in joy, to another it is discovered in tears and permission to rest, yet the divine is reflected in the tear-dimmed eyes of a restless person for action, as a rainbow is more beautiful than the clear blue sky.

It was apparent from the first that I would go against the grain. It is the manner of how I would fight for truth. I would not be blinded by hidden social fears where manner is the message, but by reason. I would exalt the common man whom I understood so well. I understood, too, my campaign would be an attack on “the establishment.” How else could it be?

I had studied hard and understood the content and form of culture with a natural loyalty to the triumvirate that determined taste, faith and knowledge. Consequently, even when I was attacking the establishment I would think well of it. It was because I understood the tenor of my times as few others did. The spirit of my age ran the gamut from wit to sentimentality, and despite a dim sadness, it was salted with irony, and irony was my weapon.

I was fighting the cloak of coyness transformed into reciprocal wariness that pulled everyone down to the same level. The tenor of the times was animated with futile conversation that dulled the edge of possible originality. Skepticism was harbored against anything original, particularly when it originated from the lower classes. The world was reduced to polished pretense. Alas, the times lacked pathos and passion, giving me reason to construct my books as bombs to explode this smugness.

This brings me back to my point of repetition.

Repetition is the relationship between perfectibility and metamorphosis. You cannot write well until you write continuously, repetitively. You cannot overcome stage fright until you transform your jittery nerves into composure and ease onstage. You cannot become a polished thinker until you penetrate your ignorance with acumen. You cannot overcome your clumsiness and self-consciousness until you repeatedly place yourself in embarrassing situations. Nor can you hear the beauty of your mind unless you exercise it.

The whole piece is self-examination in playful analysis. Repetitiveness leads to reliability, and reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all this playfulness.

We have it on good authority that high brows think and behave differently than low brows think and behave. This is hypocrisy. Common man is comfortable with his playfulness and does not have to identify it as if something else. He understands without words what the high brows need to commit to volumes.

When he displays unrest, it is genuine and there is purpose behind it. His unrest signifies the first fieriness of essential genius. It reveals something elemental, inexhaustible, like the wind or the sounds of nature. When he feels joy, it is revealed in his playfulness and happy innocence, a triumphant awareness of his indescribable good fortune. Likewise, when angry, it rises from his bowels not his head. It is nature released in storm.

It is so easy to misread him. He displays the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances with the coquettish cackle of calm amidst agitation.

All that is needed to bring out this genius is the possibility of metamorphosis through repetitive opportunity. Then a fresh and lively originality will surface. Passion will have broken out into many facets within a smoldering framework, a sort of torment that is prevented from bursting into flame. The common man is the future.

When I was young and fiery, I rode daringly on ideas, vaulted over stars and down into the abyss. Some admired me and the envious carped. Time has validated me. Some things have been consigned to the past, but the ideal in recollection has cast a brilliant light. It is now a quiet fire with an imperishable glow.

This glow rests in the eternity of the essential genius of the idea. It has no wishful longing after the flames has disappeared. The metamorphosis is too rich for that. Like an idealizing light, pure and reassuring recollection will continue to illuminate.
To make myself clear, the metamorphosis that reveals the idea is in the notion of reliability. Reliability is dependent on the repetitious role of our endeavor. The clumsy act becomes polished over time. Therefore, repetition is the role that makes a simple act imperishable in the glow of genius and recollection.

I will end my introduction to THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR by admitting this is a revolutionary age. Doubt is parent to the man and we live with such parents.

Devoid of passion or pathos in an age of revolution we are ill prepared to find passion or pathos even though essential. It must be cultivated. The elasticity of the inner being is the measure of this cultivation. An unsophisticated woman who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated. A common man who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.

On the other hand, a superficial and fragmentary set of manners as measure of the man, display inner emptiness. Doubt is covered with swagger instead of humility, reducing action to form and affectation.

We live in such an age where reflection is substituted for action. The strength of speculation signals waste and sterility. Spectacular deception has lured us away from all else. People are preoccupied with the past and discouraged in the present content to allow the future to imitate itself.

I am a child of my times and have had to fight without authority, and without the power or influence of that authority. Reluctantly, I have had to assume the role of prophet who wishes only to lead his lost generation back to its time-honored ways. My fight is for the individual against “the public,” as history has shown is the beginning and end of all.


WHO DO YOU THINK THIS IS?

Well, I’ll leave you in no longer in suspense. It is SOREN KIERKEGAARD who was born in Denmark in 1813 and died at the age of forty-two in 1855. He is the father of existential philosophy that permeates virtually every segment of our Western society today from education to engineering, architecture to the arts, social and behavior sciences to the physical sciences, literature to language, politics to governance, economics to ecology, and beyond.

He chose to be eccentric and although well educated and affluent, walked among the people on the street taking pride in his modest roots and their concerns. He was a prolific and polemical writer of books and articles and often was savaged in the press as an oddball, misfit and outsider.

Tall, straight, blond and handsome, he could be seen in his fine clothes in the most drab and rundown sections of the city, conversing with the unemployed, taking notes of their harrowing lives, and always checking the pulse of his city. There isn’t a writer or thinker of our times that doesn’t owe a debt to him and his pioneer work. Yet he was buried nearly in shame first having his funeral refused by state church. Few attended his funeral, while his grave was devoid of a headstone until twenty years later (1875).

None of his books sold well in his lifetime, but he continued to write up to the very end, collapsing on the street and dying shortly thereafter. Fortunately, his books have since become a source for scholars and students over the past one hundred and fifty two years. Most young people may not know his name but it is likely they live consistent with his existential philosophy for he had them in mind.


It is another reason why I have written A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PRORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included); checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.