File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 477


Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 11:44:56 -0500
Subject: M-TH: Christopher Phelps' *Young Sidney Hook*--chapter 1
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)


   
     CHAPTER ONE 
     
     Young Sidney Hook
     Marxist and Pragmatist
     
       _______________________________________________________________
     
     By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS
     Cornell University Press
     
     [IMAGE] Read the Review
     
     
     
     
     
     Revolution and Philosophy, 1902-30
     
     By the beginning of the 1930s, when he gained a reputation for his
     dialectical skills and formidable knowledge of Marx, Sidney Hook had
     become perfectly comfortable with the role of socialist philosopher.
     Confident of the value of a dual commitment to intellectual life and
     political action, he understood that practice to be in keeping with
     the tradition exemplified by Marx himself: the fearless polemicist
     who drafted The Communist Manifesto; the gifted historian who
     published The Eighteeenth Brumaire; the prodigious researcher who
     wrote Capital; the leader and organizer of international
     associations of revolutionary workers. That such a combined form of
     scholarly and political life--both philosophical and
     revolutionary--was possible, however, was not at all self-evident to
     Hook in his adolescent and collegiate years. Only with time was he
     able to imagine it possible to connect his professional commitment
     to philosophy with an openly socialist politics.
     
     Until the middle of the 1920s Hook's commitment to revolutionary
     action and passion for philosophy acted as countervailing forces and
     ambitions, pulling him first one way, then the other. In high
     school, he opposed American intervention in the World War,
     unsettling school officials who viewed him as a troublemaking young
     "Bolshevik." At college, however, Hook retreated for a time from
     political activism, affected by the conservatism of the period and
     enticed by a conception of philosophy which rested upon
     contemplative disengagement from worldly concerns. Only through a
     series of influences--including firsthand exposure to the pragmatism
     of John Dewey, personal links to the Communist Party, an epic debate
     with Max Eastman, and extensive research into the intellectual
     origins of Marxism--did Hook finally become confident by the end of
     of the 1920s that he could harmonize his socialist convictions with
     his scholarship, his philosophical inclinations with his
     revolutionary aspirations.
     
     Philosophy and Revolution in Tension, 1902-23
     
     When Saul Hook entered the world on December 20, 1902, he was the
     fourth child born to immigrants from Central Europe who had met and
     married in the United States. Isaac Hook, thirty-one, was from
     Moravia, a former province of Bohemia, then of Austria, and then of
     Czechoslovakia. Jenny Halpern Hook, four years younger than her
     husband, had arrived at age sixteen from Galicia, a province of
     southwestern Poland controlled for much of the nineteenth century by
     the Hapsburg empire. The surname Hook was probably adapted from
     Czech. By the late nineteenth century, when the Hooks separately
     left Europe behind, both Moravia and Galicia were experiencing a
     mass emigration of Jews as anti-Semitic restrictions mounted. In
     Europe, Isaac Hook had worked the land, but upon arriving in New
     York City, where agriculture was at best a marginal occupation, he
     became a tailor. He worked such long hours that he would arrive home
     exhausted, sometimes falling asleep over dinner, to the amusement of
     his children. Jenny--whose high cheekbones and black hair made her
     very attractive, her daughteter-in-law Ann would later recall-- was
     [Illegible] a witty, warm, temperamental woman who worked all day
     caring for the children and household. She had a passion for
     romantic novels, however, and often became so engrossed in her
     reading that she burned the family supper.
     
     When he was enrolled in school at the age of five, Saul became
     Sidney at his mother's instigation. She may, her grandson Ernest
     Hook speculates, have come across that name in a novel she was
     reading at the time; in any case, Sidney Hook lived by that name for
     the rest of his life, with little confusion. The boy had two
     sisters, Lillian and Selma, and a brother, Herbert. (David, the
     first Hook child, died while still a toddler from an accident
     resulting in severe burns.) Brooklyn's Williamsburg district at the
     time was one of the worst slums in New York. The Hooks lived first
     on Bushwick Avenue and then Locust Street, occupying gaslit railroad
     flats in vermin-infested tenements and sharing bathrooms with others
     in their building. The family was forced to endure the seasonal
     periods of slack in the needle trades, sometimes going for three
     months without income. The only source of heat in the winter was a
     single coal stove in the kitchen.
     
     In elementary school, Sidney and his friends formed a Jewish street
     gang and engaged in fistfights with Irish and Italian boys, perhaps
     steeling the young Hook for later rounds as an intellectual
     pugilist. He found his teachers and the curriculum at Public School
     145 stultifying, but he compensated by making frequent visits to
     corner branches of the public library. By the age of eight he
     already needed spectacles to correct myopia and a squint that he had
     developed from reading in dim light during the evening. He was
     thrilled by American history and historical fiction, and he had
     patriotic fantasies of commanding battleships, winning the
     presidency, and becoming a general. He quickly acquired a grandiose
     and precocious vocabulary.
     
     Many writers, noting the heavily Jewish composition of the New York
     anti-Stalinist left, have located the political and cultural
     predilections of the New York intellectuals--modernist, Marxist,
     cosmopolitan--in their ethnicity. Since all sectors of American
     radicalism in the twentieth century, from anarchism to Communism,
     have had Jewish adherents in proportions far beyond the percentage
     of Jews in the general populace, attempts to credit ethnicity for
     the special radical sensibility of the New York intellectuals are
     dubious. That many of the New York ensemble, including Dwight
     Macdonald, F. W. Dupee, and Edmund Wilson, were not Jewish further
     complicates things. The interpretation that Jewishness was the
     defining attribute of the New York circle ultimately forces its
     defenders to resort to pirouettes such as Irving Howe's deftly
     evasive remark that "by birth or osmosis," all were Jews.
     
     Especially when compared with Howe, or Alfred Kazin, Sidney Hook was
     never especially preoccupied with his ethnicity or the New York
     Jewish experience (not in his writings, at least). He consciously
     rejected Judaic belief and practice at a very early age. Even as an
     adolescent he viewed Talmudic scholarship as mystical scholasticism,
     rejecting it as a viable release for his intellectual interests.
     Hook initially refused the bar mitzvah, only capitulating in the end
     to save his father and mother from the stigma of community
     disapproval. From this experience he discovered that he had no
     conventional religious faith, and he remained militantly secular for
     the rest of his life.
     
     It might be said, however, that lack of faith is the definitive
     problem of the modern Jewish intellectual. Howe contends, too, that
     the Jewishness particular to the New York intellectuals was shaped
     by their standing as "the first group of Jewish writers to come out
     of the immigrant milieu who did not define themselves through a
     relationship, nostalgic or hostile, to memories of Jewishness." But
     these qualities obviously diminish the force of Jewishness as a
     defining factor in the thought of even those New York intellectuals
     who were Jews. Because of the origins of his parents, moreover, Hook
     was given to the German rather than the Yiddish phrase. He never
     displayed the intense personal sensitivity to issues of
     assimilation, tradition, and alienation that propelled even
     irreligious writers such as Howe to the study and interpretation of
     their culture and heritage.
     
     Exposure to socialism came from beyond the family flat for the young
     Hook. His father, like many European immigrants thrust suddenly into
     a bewildering urban world, adopted fairly conventional political
     beliefs. In 1912, the heyday of the Socialist Party, when Socialist
     presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs received a higher percentage
     of the national vote than he or any other revolutionary socialist
     candidate achieved before or since, Isaac Hook supported Republican
     William Howard Taft on the grounds that he advocated a tariff that
     would benefit the needle trades. But as war loomed in Europe, the
     ethnic enclaves of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn experienced
     a new wave of radicalism. Russian immigrants, remembering the
     czarist regime bitterly, tended to be skeptical of a war to make the
     world safe for democracy in which Russia was an ally. German
     immigrants, for their own reasons of background and ancestry, saw no
     reason for the United States to enter into a war against their
     homeland. Irish immigrants, too, were deeply suspicious of British
     war aims. Around this time Hook made a friend whose father, a
     skilled metalworker, often made sarcastic jokes at the expense of
     the rich. Soon Hook began to read socialist writings. By the age of
     thirteen he considered himself a socialist, and before long he was
     reading the Socialist newspapers avidly and had begun to delve into
     the writings of Karl Marx. He especially loved the fiction of
     socialist Jack London, whose novel Martin Eden (1909), the story of
     a working-class autodidact in San Francisco who becomes an ardent
     admirer of Herbert Spencer, whetted Hook's interest in philosophy.
     
     In February 1916 Hook enrolled at the scholastically rigorous Boys
     High School, where his political adamance repeatedly landed him in
     hot water with teachers and administrators. Sender Garlin, a
     classmate in 1916 when both were fourteen years old, remembers Hook,
     his Adam's apple sticking out, arguing with right-wing classmates
     about capitalism. "How about poverty?" Hook would exclaim, pressing
     his point mercilessly. "How about misery? How about prostitution?"
     His adolescent dialectical skills, combined with his anti-war
     convictions, did not endear him to his stiff, formal teachers. One
     of them attempted to get Hook expelled by alleging that he had
     refused to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" during a school assembly,
     though Hook denied the charge. In several separate incidents Hook
     was told by teachers to leave the room: once when he defended the
     conspirator Catiline against the Roman statesman Cicero; and once
     when his essay on the assigned topic "Love of Country" held that
     patriotism was a ploy of hypocrites and exploiters to stir an
     unsuspecting proletariat to war, making love of country "detrimental
     and derogatory to the progress and advancement of civilization."
     
     In 1917 Hook was a campaign volunteer and soapbox speaker for the
     Socialist candidate for mayor of New York, Morris Hillquit.
     President Woodrow Wilson's push for American entry into the World
     War was a formative moment for Hook, who like most of the left
     opposed the war on revolutionary internationalist grounds, arguing
     that only a decisive working-class victory resulting in the
     abolition of capitalism could produce a lasting peace. In 1919, his
     senior year, Hook and several other radical students formed the Red
     and Black Party, a name that referred to school colors but also gave
     rise to fears of socialism and anarchism in the administrative
     corridors at Boys High. Meeting in the school's basement lunchroom
     and, occasionally, at the Brooklyn Socialist Party headquarters on
     Tompkins Avenue, the rebels drew up a program calling for
     representative student government and an aid fund for needy
     students--mild reforms already in place in some other New York City
     schools. In the election to the largely symbolic student activities
     board, the Red and Black Party slate did surprisingly well. Hook,
     given the nickname "Brainy" in its campaign literature, ran for
     president of the board and won a majority of the senior class vote,
     but the more easily intimidated younger classes sent the radical
     slate down to defeat by voting disproportionately for the
     superpatriotic Active Allies slate. The margin was narrow, as Hook
     got a total of 608 votes and the Active Allies candidate 821. The
     election attracted sensational attention from the Brooklyn daily
     press, which branded the Red and Black Party "Bolshevik" and raised
     the spectre of reds overrunning the schools. Boys High officials,
     braced by the newspapers' charges, took action: Hook and his
     comrades were blocked from Arista, the school's honor society,
     solely on the basis of their activities in the Red and Black Party.
     In retaliation, Hook wrote a letter that was published anonymously
     in the Socialist Party's New York Call, exposing the undemocratic
     practices of administrators. The Call published several successive
     articles, all of which kept their author's identity secret. Bravado
     characteristic of the fresh initiate to radicalism ran through the
     youthful missives. "Capitalism must indeed be on its last legs,"
     Hook proclaimed, "if it is convulsed with fear when school boys
     voice their demands for the amelioration of conditions vitally
     affecting them."
     
     During his City College years, 1919 to 1923, Hook kept his radical
     beliefs alive, but his activist orientation was gradually supplanted
     by a newfound engagement with scholarly philosophy. He had become
     interested in philosophy through the socialist movement--not through
     the rigid scholasticism of Boys High--so it was ironic that enhanced
     interest in philosophical scholarship would cause an ebb in his
     political activity. Initially, though, his activism continued
     unabated. City College during Hook's undergraduate years was not yet
     the legendary hotbed of socialist politics that it would become
     during the Depression years when Stalinists and Trotskyists would
     hold down their own cafeteria alcoves, but the thoroughly urban,
     largely immigrant, and predominantly working-class character of its
     students did leave room for a small campus left to operate, even in
     a period of deepening national reaction. As a freshman in 1919, Hook
     helped to organize a Social Problems Club, a group of socialist,
     communist, and syndicalist students who met, usually in secret, to
     share their excitement about developments in Russia, where the dual
     revolution of 1917 had replaced one of Europe's monarchical powers
     with the first lasting revolutionary socialist government in
     history. Hook was part of the club's dominant Communist tendency,
     led by a few older students, above all by one named George Siskind.
     Although the Social Problems Club had no perceptible contact with
     the national Communist movement, it considered itself Communist and
     collectively discussed V. I. Lenin's State and Revolution (1917).
     Even as the Red Scare heated up, Hook stayed the course. He passed
     out pamphlets on behalf of Upton Sinclair when it was announced that
     a City College journalism professor was going to give a talk
     denouncing Sinclair's piercing indictment of the American press in
     Brass Check (1919). On May Day 1921 Hook and his friend Sam
     Chovenson went to pick up some literature at the city headquarters
     of the Industrial Workers of the World and were apprehended in a
     surprise police raid, but the pair managed to escape by dashing out
     a rear door. The next year, when British philosopher Bertrand
     Russell (a thinker greatly admired by the undergraduate Hook)
     returned from a trip to the Soviet Union and reversed his previous
     endorsement of Bolshevism on the grounds that it was a threat to the
     heritage of Western civilization, a disappointed Hook sent him a
     letter suggesting that the inevitable wars of capitalism were far
     more destructive of art and beauty than any social revolution could
     be.
     
     For the most part, however, traditional philosophical concerns came
     to absorb Hook's attention. City College was an intellectual
     hothouse, featuring a quality education for poor students, lack of
     "school spirit" in the conformist sense, and an openness to Jewish
     students unmatched elsewhere in higher education in a decade of
     rising xenophobia and anti-Semitism. A toll was undoubtedly exacted
     on Hook's political activism by his time-consuming jobs as a
     salesman at the City College Book Store and a hat checker at the
     Broadway Dance Casino in Brooklyn. But the academic environment of
     City College and the inspiration of his powerful mentor Morris Cohen
     were paramount in luring him from activism to scholarship.
     
     Hook was not free from censorious treatment even at City College. He
     was driven from one government class for defending the rhetorical
     abilities of John C. Calhoun over those of Daniel Webster. "Young
     man!" the instructor thundered. "When you're not preaching sedition,
     you are preaching secession!" But Morris Cohen, one of only a few
     Jewish professors at an institution where the student body was
     overwhelmingly Jewish, was a paragon of independent thought. He left
     an indelible impression on his students, who remembered his mode of
     presentation more often than they adhered to his ideas. Literary
     critic Irving Howe once described a course with Cohen as "an
     experience of salutary terror." In the lecture hall Cohen would
     issue a question and then pounce on his students' answers, cutting
     them apart with even more precise questions. His hope was to deliver
     a sense of the grandeur and seriousness of unresolved issues, and he
     thought of himself as a "logical disinfectant," stimulating an
     appreciation for dissent and scrubbing out poorly formulated,
     one-sided ideas. Hook made some of his best friends at City College,
     including Ernest Nagel--a modest, quiet, extraordinarily intelligent
     student who would accompany Hook to graduate school in philosophy at
     Columbia and remain a friend for life, even though, as a lifelong
     liberal, he never took to Marxism. The friends began reading Cohen's
     published work outside of class so as to anticipate his line of
     questioning, which spared them from being called upon in the
     classroom but not from the professor's withering scrutiny in private
     sessions. Although Hook would later come to consider Cohen's
     educational method unnecessarily cruel, Cohen was the first of his
     teachers and professors to win Hook's deep respect. His own
     subsequent renown for skilled intellectual contentiousness surely
     owed something to his training under Cohen.
     
     Like others, Hook was impressed by Cohen's cleverness and agility.
     Daniel Bell recalled that a student once asked Cohen to prove to him
     why he should study logic. "How will you know it is a good proof?"
     Cohen replied. In his writings, Cohen advanced a "principle of
     polarity," which held that the world was composed of opposites
     requiring each in order to exist. Ideal and real, universal and
     particular, actual and possible, objective and subjective: each
     element represented a partial, incomplete solution to the problem at
     hand; a desirable outcome would permit neither one victory. Cohen
     was at odds with Hegel and Dewey, whose philosophies would inform
     Hook's subsequent writings. Against Hegel, whose idealism posited
     that history was the unfolding of an idea, Cohen defended the
     naturalist position that thought interacts with a strictly physical
     external world. Against pragmatism, which contends that knowledge is
     created by humanity, subject to revision, and never fully
     descriptive of nature, Cohen posited the ontological existence of an
     innate logical order from which principles of human reason are
     deduced. Only constant logic, Cohen insisted, makes it possible for
     the mind to understand contingent matter.
     
     Inspired by Cohen to pursue philosophy with intellectual rigor, Hook
     shelved activism for study. His grades in some subjects,
     particularly physics and chemistry, were poor, but he received
     several commendations for his efforts in philosophy, including the
     Ward Medal of Logic, presented to him after his success in Cohen's
     course "Logic and Scientific Method." A precocious undergraduate, he
     wrote letters to a number of leading philosophers of the day, from
     whom he received brief replies on technical points related chiefly
     to scientific method. Hook must have adopted Cohen's philosophical
     perspective rapidly, for by 1920 he had already written a somewhat
     convoluted paper that purported to refute pragmatism from a realist
     point of view.
     
     Hook retained sympathy for Communism but found activism incompatible
     with scholarship. The bifurcation was reflected intellectually in
     his two debut articles, which were published in the philosophical
     journal Open Court. Appearing in 1922, when Hook was still an
     undergraduate, "The Philosophy of Non-Resistance" argued for
     revolution and against Tolstoyan pacifism. The philosophy of love
     and nonresistance, Hook wrote, was appropriate only to some
     circumstances: "The danger to society arises when the pragmatic
     criterion is not retained, when those modes of conduct which are
     adapted to specific situations are reified above the dialectical
     flow of natural and social forces." References to a pragmatic
     criterion, dialectical flow, and reification might seem the seedbed
     for a pragmatist Marxism, but Hook's second article revealed that
     the terms did not reflect a lasting synthesis. He had originally
     written "A Philosophical Dialogue" for Harry Overstreet, the head of
     City College's philosophy department and a Dewey enthusiast.
     Overstreet was amiable, but his intellect was insufficiently sharp
     to impress Hook and his friends. Hook's paper imitated the form of a
     Platonic dialogue. An imaginary Pragmaticus argues with a companion,
     Universalus, that philosophy should move from contemplation to
     practice. Universalus replies, "Were philosophy to readjust itself
     to your eloquent plea that it devote its energies primarily to the
     solution of pressing social and moral problems, then philosophy
     would no longer be philosophy but a phase of social science." In the
     end, Universalus emerges victorious and has the final say: a vague
     assertion that abstract thought can be removed from temporal
     concerns and yet offer intrinsic rewards.
     
     John Dewey might have had no disagreement with the views Hook
     attributed to Universalus, but the young Hook clearly considered
     them a refutation of pragmatism. By counterposing contemplation to
     experience, Hook had in his writing, as in his life, made philosophy
     and politics divergent. His first article argued adamantly for the
     politics of forceful revolution, summoning to his defense
     philosophical arguments against quietism and supernaturalism. His
     second piece insisted that philosophy had a special obligation to
     remain aloof from worldly concerns. Hook thus simultaneously
     proposed a politics of revolution and a philosophy of disengagement.
     "My first impression was that your philosophy was a method to be
     summed up best in the term deductive logic," a friend wrote him in
     confusion after reading the two articles. "Then I thought you were a
     rationalist, then an idealist and now abacadabra--I give up." The
     incongruity was unlikely to endure.
     
     From Cohen to Dewey, 1923-27
     
     Although Hook would not reconcile his politics and philosophy for
     several years, he did move toward a more harmonious arrangement in
     the middle of the 1920s, when he shifted his philosophical
     allegiance from Morris Cohen to John Dewey. Hook graduated from City
     College with a degree in social sciences in February 1923 and was
     accepted for the Ph.D. program at Columbia University, which he
     planned to enter in the fall. That summer he taught elementary
     school at Public School 43 in Brooklyn, where he was assigned a
     class of undisciplined, overgrown sixth-graders who had been held
     back. Throughout his years at Columbia, Hook taught elementary
     school in Williamsburg during the day, and night classes in English
     to working adults at the Seward Park Evening School. Only in his
     last year at Columbia, when he received a tuition scholarship, was
     he able to drop the daytime teaching job. Because his demanding
     schedule left only late afternoons free for attending lectures, Hook
     at first took philosophy courses mainly from W. P. Montague, F.J. E.
     Woodbridge, and Irwin Edman. As soon as he could, however, he
     enrolled in courses taught by John Dewey, one of the foremost
     intellectuals, let alone philosophers, in America.
     
     Dewey's pragmatism had its roots in late nineteenth-century American
     philosophy, especially the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce and
     William James. Beliefs are rules for action, the pragmatist theory
     of inquiry argues, and thinking is the production of habits for
     action. Our conception of an object, pragmatists maintain, is
     determined by our understanding of its potential effects. The
     coherence of any idea, therefore, is insufficient to judge the
     idea's veracity or "warranted assertibility" (the substitute term
     for truth that Dewey came to prefer because of its less absolutist
     connotations). Ideas must be verifiable in experience. Dewey, in
     fact, called pragmatism "experimentalism." This extension of basic
     scientific method into the realm of social and moral life he
     distinguished from preceding empiricisms by its emphasis upon
     creative thought in the generation of knowledge. Pragmatists contend
     that people are not mere creatures of physical or spiritual forces.
     Humans anticipate, aim toward, and thereby shape--to one degree or
     another--future outcomes. Since consequences cannot always be
     foreseen, pragmatism requires that all propositions be treated as
     hypothetical, fallible, and provisional. At the same time, classical
     pragmatists refuse to condone cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism;
     they strive to enhance self-critical intelligence and expand
     democracy.
     
     Hook had first read Dewey's writings when they were assigned by
     Harry Overstreet at City College. He had been impressed by the
     similarity between Dewey's historical method in Reconstruction in
     Philosophy (1920) and Marx's historical materialism. In
     Reconstruction, Dewey traced the origins of philosophy--especially
     the dualistic tendency to pit concepts against each other as stark
     opposites, such as mind and matter--to the initial division of
     labor, when religion, myth, and historical memory came into conflict
     with and separated from technical knowledge. The conceit of
     philosophy, Dewey argued, was to try to resolve this contradiction
     by pursuing higher purposes and ultimate ends, allegedly timeless
     and supernatural, while denying the very real connection between
     philosophy and social development. "When it is acknowledged," he
     wrote, "that under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality,
     philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in
     social traditions, that it has sprung from a clash of social ends
     and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible
     contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future
     philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral
     strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly
     possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts."
     
     Reconstruction in Philosophy contained all the key elements of
     Deweyan pragmatism: the inseparability of knowledge from action; the
     testing of ideas in meliorative practice; the replacement of
     absolute universality and certainty with fallibility and provisional
     truth; the value of education; and the requirement of democracy for
     the all-rounded growth of individuals and social life. Dewey also
     refuted common misunderstandings of his ideas. He wrote, for
     example, that pragmatism "does not mean the lowering in dignity of
     philosophy from a lofty plain to one of gross utilitarianism. It
     signifies that the prime function of philosophy is that of
     rationalizing the possibilities of experience, especially collective
     human experience." Rather than dispense with morality, wrote Dewey,
     pragmatism would rescue morality from formalism by connecting it to
     actual life, with democracy as both the means and end of practice.
     
     Though impressed by Dewey's social approach to intellectual history,
     Hook remained under Cohen's sway. He was especially unpersuaded by
     Dewey's theory of logic. In Reconstruction in Philosophy Dewey
     argued that logic is an account of the procedure of thought, the
     means of intentional reconstruction of experience, and thus neither
     simply empirical nor simply normative but both. Hook, following
     Cohen, saw logic instead as an immutable and fixed source of human
     reason. At Columbia, Hook would periodically interrupt the famous
     philosopher in the middle of his lectures to challenge him from the
     standpoint of Cohen. "It was only at the end of the year," Hook
     later recalled, "when I sat down to write a definite refutation of
     pragmatism, that I discovered to my astonishment, as I developed my
     argument, that I was coming out in the wrong place. Instead of
     refuting Dewey's views, I was confirming/them!" Hook's adoption of
     pragmatism was an intellectual, not a personal, conversion. Though
     congenial, Dewey lacked Cohen's charisma and was monotonous and dry
     at the lectern. But Hook decided that Cohen had misunderstood Dewey.
     For Dewey, "practical" was synonymous with "experimental," not
     "useful." Cohen's failure to perceive this basic distinction, Hook
     decided, had led him to the false impression that Dewey was arguing
     against the possibility of abstract thought. By early 1926 Hook had
     become a pragmatist.
     
     He was also an outstanding student. Art historian Meyer Schapiro,
     then a brilliant undergraduate who was permitted to enroll in
     Columbia graduate courses, vividly recalled Hook's precocious
     behavior toward one of their professors in a seminar on the
     philosophy of science: "Sidney was always challenging him in the
     class, and it caused a lot of feeling, because his way of
     challenging the professor was rather graceless. But he made very
     good points. When this professor referred to some old philosopher,
     trying to quote him, Sidney would correct him. This happened a few
     times, and some of the students felt annoyed by Sidney's
     interventions, but his points were always interesting and
     well-taken." Hook won the respect of the entire department at
     Columbia, as he had at City College. He and Dewey established an
     especially loyal and close friendship that would extend, almost
     without antagonism, until the latter's death in 1952. Dewey treated
     Hook as an intellectual colleague, consulting with him on
     philosophical questions, sending him drafts of his books to read and
     criticize. Hook's devotion to Dewey, in turn, extended beyond the
     intellectual. When Dewey's wife died in the summer of 1927, Hook
     wrote to his mentor, "Let me assure you that there is at least one
     person, the warmth of whose affection for you is more `filial' than
     professional--who considers it an honor and delight to be of help to
     you in any way and at any time." Dewey, meanwhile, had a superlative
     admiration for his pupil, writing in a formal evaluation that Hook's
     "range of information in the history of thought ... was as broad,
     accurate, digested and lucidly expressed as that of any student I
     have ever seen examined." In a private 1927 letter to the social
     psychologist George Herbert Mead, Dewey wrote, "I almost feel I am
     ready to quit, as he has not only got the point but sees many
     implications I hadn't."
     
     Hook's dissertation, written under Dewey, was published as a book in
     1927. The Metaphysics of Pragmatism was a mischievous title that
     Hook selected, he admitted, with "malice prepense." (Significantly,
     the phrase "malice prepense" was used first by Dewey in a similar
     context, to describe his historical account of absolute Being.)
     Metaphysics, the study of the nature of things, usually indicates a
     search for absolute reality and a claim to totalizing knowledge
     about the sciences. Pragmatism, by contrast, emphasizes flux and
     change, forsaking philosophy's traditional pursuit of timeless
     truth. How, then, could there be a "metaphysics of pragmatism"?
     Pragmatism, Hook maintained, rules out only a certain type of
     metaphysics. Insofar as it presumes to have a method, he asserted,
     pragmatism must necessarily refer to a theory of existence and,
     hence, to a metaphysics.
     
     By that, Hook took metaphysics to mean something more watery than it
     often does, enabling him to situate pragmatism within the classical
     philosophical tradition while defending Dewey against Cohen's
     detractions. Dewey's foreword to The Metaphysics of Pragmatism
     praised the volume because "more than anything on its subject with
     which I am acquainted, it expresses an equilibrium which is
     constantly and deliberately sustained between that newer movement
     which goes by the name of pragmatism and instrumentalism and
     essential portions of classical thought." In an indirect challenge
     to Cohen, Hook argued on behalf of the principle of inference, which
     holds that guiding principles are not intuited but are instead
     habits of thought that have through practice over time become
     accepted. Logic, therefore, was historical and experimental. As Hook
     wrote, "The intelligibility of any deductive system or even of a
     solitary definition demands at some point an objective
     signification." The Metaphysics of Pragmatism conveyed other Deweyan
     theses that would become staples of Hook's thought: that "copy-book"
     epistemologies, which consider knowledge a mirror of reality, fail
     to account for the mind's active participation in creating
     understanding; that instrumentalism, purposive reasoning, cannot be
     separated from social and moral judgment; that understanding the
     limitation of possibilities leads to the liberation of
     possibilities; and that social reform and revolution require not
     blind revolt against abuses but resolute, intelligent action guided
     by social theory.
     
     This new theoretical emphasis on action, democracy, and the testing
     of ideas through inquiry was an important opening for the
     reconciliation of Hook's philosophical interest with his radical
     politics. Yet in The Metaphysics of Pragmatism Hook remained bound
     to such classifications of traditional metaphysics as categories,
     epistemology, determination, and freedom. His tendency to cloud such
     topics in a thick fog of jargon reflected a lingering desire that
     philosophy stand above the world and an affection for the special
     vocabulary of a profession that was on its way to becoming an
     isolated preserve of the technically trained. Except for a few
     flashes of humor that prefigured his mature polemical adroitness,
     the prose of The Metaphysics of Pragmatism was ponderous. This was
     not a merely stylistic matter but part of a greater weakness, for
     even as Hook endorsed purposive action in theory, his conception of
     philosophy remained removed from the world. He did not emulate the
     historical approach to philosophy that he had admired in Dewey, and
     his brief references to Marx and Engels, though uncommon for an
     academic dissertation of the day, were incidental to the book's
     major themes.
     
     The Rapprochement of Revolution and Philosophy, 1927-28
     
     In addition to transferring his fealty to pragmatism, during his
     last year at Columbia Hook had begun to move, hesitantly, toward
     socialist activism again. In his first significant public protest
     since his high school days, he helped to organize a picket on the
     steps of Low Library against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti,
     the Italian immigrant anarchists accused of murder in Massachusetts,
     whose fate became a cause celebre among liberals and radicals. He
     also teamed with David Kvitko--a Russian-born Columbia student and
     Communist who had been an official in the Amalgamated Clothing
     Workers of America--to translate Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
     the principal philosophical work of the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin,
     into English. Kvitko had translated Lenin's book from the Russian at
     the request of Alexander Trachtenberg at International Publishers,
     the Communist publishing house, and Hook used the published German
     translation to improve upon Kvitko's crude rendering. The product of
     their collaboration appeared in 1927.
     
     (C) 1997 Cornell University All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-8014-3328-2
     
     
     [    The New York Times on the Web
      
      Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

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