Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life
Ross, Ralph
Book Review/Ralph Ross The Theory and Practice of Pragmatism • This book shows Hook at his best and his best is very good indeed. People who don't know his career will scarcely believe that for...
...In his warnings, he is a kind of Jeremiah who predicts our doom if we do not change our ways...
...The tragic sense comes because the nature the moral experience is a conflict of goods, or rights, or of a good with a right...
...Unlike Dewey, but like Russell and Cohen, Hook is a fighter and a talker...
...The tragic sense of life does not come because we know we will die...
...Large...
...Much can be recommended in this collection of essays, the pragmatic attack on existentialism, the appraisals of Tillich, Popper, and Niebuhr, even more the study of Hegel and liberalism...
...This is a tribute to Hegel and the Hegelian elements in Dewey...
...But in the end, it seems to me, we must abandon or purge a moral right that is opposed to the interests, needs, and values of men...
...Shall we pay tribute to the minotaur who devours the innocent youth and maidens we give him but leaves the rest of us alone or risk all and fight to a bloody finish, so justice may conceivably triumph...
...For Hook, the pragmatist's business is to clarify and so often "debunk" the inflated, the absolute, the pretentious...
...He also writes much better all the time, both more simply and more eloquently...
...Much of what we think right came from Hebraism while much what we think good came from Hellenism...
...He is somewhat in the the mold of those men he found congenial, but he does not sacrifice truth to quips...
...Moore and Sidney Hook...
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...They would not be silenced, until Russell became so offensive to Moore, who had gone to the blackboard to make a point, that Moore threw down the chalk in his hand, said he had a headache, and walked out...
...The pragmatic faith is a little less extreme than it was in Dewey, and although that qualification may be increasing, it has been true for years...
...We serve the good by avoiding a war but we violate the right if, in order to have peace, we repudiate our treaties...
...And Hook debunks as he clarifies...
...You can't eat this turkey, but you can wear it...
...Not only was it unnecessary to supersede Dewey, but Hook believedmost of what Dewey thought, though always qualifying it here and there...
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...The old philosopher, inveterate worker, busy in a hundred causes and filling a library with his books and articles, answered, sincerely, "I'm lazy...
...And, like them, he is bold...
...By "good" Hook means values and by "right" obligations...
...I think Feuer misreads Hook...
...Further, Hook feels compelled to say, "John Dewey was not a saint," which no one would bother to say about Russell, adding that even when Dewey disliked people he was "fair to a fault...
...When he tells us that we cannot escape the antinomies between the right and the good by defining good as the object of right or the right as the means to the good, he may overstate the case...
...Hook himself is a liberal, although never a party man, never a "ritualistic liberal," as he puts it...
...The good is often confused by custom, veneration, habit, and tradition...
...Irony," he tells us, "is compounded with tragedy in the fact that many of the rights we presently enjoy we owe to our ancestors, who in the process of winning them for us deprived others of their rights...
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...Our perennial moral task is the purification of good and the rationalization of right, so that in our institutional structures right is indeed a means, or at least an aid, to good...
...few were neutral or unconcerned...
...Or in a different vein, "The Christian and especially the Buddhist ethics of purity, which seek to transcend this conflict and avoid guilt by refusal to violate anyone's right in such situations, can only do so by withdrawing from the plane of the ethical altogether...
...But, as I have written elsewhere, "Man is not made for morals, but morals for man...
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...The years have brought him a greater sense of limitation, and he has learned that a solution is not salvation, that most solutions are only tentative and partial, and that many ways of reducing existent evils produce still greater evils...
...In this t Jok, Hook writes, "And although we are seeking to settle conflicts of value by the use of intelligence rather than by force, is it not true that sometimes intelligence requires the use of force...
...That is something for which we must prepare, not of which we must despair...
...People who don't know his career will scarcely believe that for years (in the thirties and forties, for example) educated American youth waited for his point of view on almost all political and social changes before making up their own minds...
...Lewis Feuer, writing about Hook in the October 1975 issue of Encounter, suggests that Hook still calls himself a pragmatist only because of personal loyalty to Dewey...
...True, the most inhumane of crimes and the bloodiest agonies of history have resulted from doing what is "right," regardless ofconsequence...
...The first principle of Hook's pragmatism is not a theory of meaning and truth, which was the origin of pragmatism, but a belief that intelligence helps, "that the logic and ethics of scientific method can and should be applied to human affairs," and that intelligence can yield knowledge about the best ends to seek as well as the best means to attain them...
...In peace and prosperity, perhaps, we may sacrifice the good to the right, clinging to the communal and established, for they seem to guarantee our welfare best...
...In contrast, Dewey was shambling, very casual, far from brilliant in conversation, and constantly interested in listening to you, not in telling you...
...What Hook sees so well are the dangers in such attempts and the highly provisional nature of individual solutions...
...In that he contrasts Cohen's "ambiguous rationalism" with Dewey's (and Peirce's) "experimental naturalism," and says that Cohen had "little original vision...
...He seems to be getting even better, choosing his illustrations from wider types of activity...
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...I remember a meeting at which Russell alone spoke (Dewey was not there), when his answers to questions from the floor were so devastating he clearly frightened all possible opponents...
...But he remains a pragmatic prophet for he does not tell us to change our hearts or to rely only on compassion and love but, as strenuously and carefully as possible, to think...
...And that happened all the time...
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...One was for or against him...
...This may succeed in God's eyes, but not in man's...
...Dewey laughed that of course he did and Hook challenged him to name one...
...We want what serves those, not what destroys them, even it if is called "right...
...At a meeting years ago, Dewey read a paper (which later appeared as a chapter in Liberalism Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life by Sidney Hook Basic Books $12.50 and Social Action) in which he distinguished the method of intelligence from the method of force as a way of resolving difficulties, arguing that what was done by force always had enough unfortunate consequences that it had to be redone and that this was not the case with intelligence...
...Hook had studied with Morris Raphael Cohen at City College in New York, with John Dewey and Frederick J. Woodbridge at Columbia (he wrote his dissertation on the metaphysics of pragmatism under Dewey's supervision), developed a great admiration for Bertrand Russell, and became a foremost Marxist scholar, writing about Marx at first as though he were an intellectual colleague of Dewey's...
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...Hook is a warrior of the mind, not, like Dewey, a kind of intellectual saint...
...Hook asked a typically Hookean question: can there never be an intelligent use of force...
...In revolutions we are more likely to sacrifice the right for the presumed good, redefining right as whatever serves the cause...
...The difference is between interests, carefully reflected on, and the demands and laws of the community...
...What may mislead readers like Feuer, basically sympathetic to Hook, is Hook's confession that, temperamentally, he always found Russell and Cohen more congenial than Dewey...
...He does not add what I suspect was one of their great attractions for him as compared to Dewey: they were intensely combative and almost incredibly quick, like Hook himself...
...The right is sometimes age-old and grows out of religion, piety, superstition, and community...
...That, of course, was Dewey's belief and Hook has kept the faith...
...Yet he clings to Dewey's insight that philosophers should not spend all their time on the problems of philosophy, but concentrate on "the problems of men...
...Neither was Socrates...
...Years ago a very distinguished American philosopher, who was Hook's close friend, told me that if Hook would only stop dealing with particularly human and social problems and deal with large-scale theory, he was the one person of our time who could become another Karl Marx...
...What Hook is one of the few to realize about Dewey is something I learned first from Woodbridge, who told me that Dewey was a great dialectician...
...True, also, some conflicts between the two seem insuperable...
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...He adds, "The rationalism of his early teacher, Morris Raphael Cohen, has become dominant in Hook's thought as the Deweyan strain has become recessive...
...He reminds me of Nietzsche's comment, "And if you can not be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you, be at least its warriors...
...They are the companions and forerunners of such saintship...
...Although the knowledge of fact, the mastery of ideas, and the dazzling dialectical skill were present in the very young Hook, he has grown in all of these...
...But the very best pages here, like the title essay, have little to 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 do with debunking and much to do with the great and tragic choices forced on every man...
...The best answer to this greatly complimentary complaint is that there already was a Karl Marx, and one was enough...
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...Another matter is that Hook was always a different kind of man, carefully consistent but no system-builder...
...And Hook's point of view and pungent argument came almost immediately, usually in print, the ideas pouring so fast they seemed to jostle each other...
...And of course he was...
...But there were two exceptions, G.E...
...Of Russell, Hook says, "The world is too thick for him and because it has no one pattern he has long since given it up as a higgledy-piggledy mess...
...Hook once told me a story about Dewey that I wish he would record somewhere...
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...He is a meliorist, but a meliorist acutely aware that although there is no substitute for intelligence—surely not pessimism or optimism, nor a faith in any change at all nor a total opposition to all change—intelligence may not be enough...
...Sorry, no C.O.D.' s or Big Mac Bonds accepted...
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...Awed by Dewey's quiet and constant courage as well as all his other personal qualities, young Hook once asked him if he didn't have any faults...
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...They are philosophers of the clean line," he says, "incisive, witty, rarely hesitant about sacrificing the dull or exact truth for the sake of a bon mot...
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...Fortunately for the reader who may think Feuer was right, one of Hook's chapters is "Some Memories of John Dewey...
...Who can ever forget attending a philosophical meeting in which it became unclear what the issue itself was, so many irrelevant words were being said, until Dewey asked the question and we all suddenly knew what we should have been saying...
...Out of all this, Hook became a pragmatist, especially in the tradition of Dewey and Charles S. Peirce, calling himself an experimental naturalist for a time and a Pelagian naturalist...
...When there is a conflict of goods or rights, however intelligent our choice is, harm will be done to something that is good or something that is right...
...Hook has always been good in the use of examples and epigrams which not only illustrate but enlarge his point...
...That is one of the qualifications of Dewey's belief, which was often more extreme than Hook's...
...Our ideas of both need purification and subtle application...
...When a choice is clearly between a moral good and a moral evil there is no need for moral inquiry and no genuine moral experience...
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...Too Large...
...Are there some things we should never do even if the result is more good in the world if we do them...
...How shall we act if the survival of the group means the abandonment of the innocent...
...The same thing could be said of Dewey and Hook...
Vol. 9 • January 1976 • No. 4
