Sidney Hook at Sixty

...And is not this sense of myth increasingly felt in our time...

...And won't this lead to totalitarian socialism—to the idea, for example, that political freedoms have to be sacrificed for economic rights...

...the attainment of some human rights necessitates the limitation of others...

...For a rationalist like Hook, however, a paradox exists only because a writer has failed to make the necessary logical distinctions between different orders of relationships (or because a man is engaged in obscurantist word play—one of his impatiences with "Germanic" philosophy), rather than from any inherent contradiction in meaning...

...Yes, says Hook, and it lies in the realization that every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity "takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good...

...or one man's desire, be it sadism, brutality or sheer perversity, is as "right" as another's...

...For one reason, because it presupposes a community of good will in which men can gain self-consciousness by becoming aware of their differences and seeking to reconcile them rationally...

...Hook may deplore it, and seek to convince the majority to change its mind, but since there is no other method which can tell, a priori, what will be satisfactory to men, one accepts the democratic process as the best way, established by experience, of assuring social peace and of giving men what they want, or a chance to work for what they want...

...Perhaps the best way of noting this event—best only in deference to Hook's dislike for personal tributes—is to "think aloud" about some of his recent work, particularly his latest book, The Paradoxes of Freedom, which in many ways is a summary of his political philosophy...

...for within the framework of his cpistemology, knowledge or warranted assertions are verified or tested in the objective context of inquiry and scientific discourse...

...The sense of optimism and buoyancy which was a characteristic feature of pre-World War I life, and the apocalyptic utopianism which swept the intelligentsia in the early 1930s has been shattered by the horrors of totalitarianism...

...Its purposes, he would insist, are positive and creative...

...What if the majority want something "foolish...

...He is against the power of the Supreme Court to review legislation passed by due process by a democratically elected body (thus taking a stand with Justice Frankfurter against Justices Douglas and Black...

...At any rate, I console myself with lustice Holmes's observation that sometimes the vindication of the obvious is more important than the elucidation of the obscure—especially when the obvious is challenged...

...It may seem strange for Hook to entitle his book the "paradoxes" of freedom...

...He is for the right of inquiry of a Congressional committee, subject to the ground rules of an ethic of procedure...

...What people proclaim to be their "basic" values (decency, righteousness, beauty, happiness, etc...

...In the tradition of the Enlightenment, Hook would deny such a negative function to the intellectual role of scientific inquiry...

...The paradox of Hook's position is that what seemed radical and daring 40 or more years ago, now sounds old-fashioned and even dated...

...There is no other method, be it revelation, tradition or the training of an elite, which can assure men what they want, in accordance with their own sense of their own needs...

...Paradox, after all, is the language of theology, as ambiguity is the mode of modem poetry...

...But does such a community exist or is it a "necessary myth"—similar to Nietzsche's insistence on the necessity of the church to keep "the sheep" in peace—to maintain the fragile consensus of intellectual peace, lest the forces of nihilism, aggression and aggrandizement tear it apart...

...Yet it is indicative of Hook's embattled feelings that his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association three years ago was on "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life...

...Agony over death," writes Hook, "strikes me as one of the unloveliest features of the intellectual life of our times," and the fear of death, leading to abasement, capitulation or compromise with an oppressor, "has been the greatest ally of tyranny, past or present...

...Religion has always based itself on paradox (in the famous phrase of Paul, "as deceivers, yet true"), for its ultimate ground is a mystery which rational thought cannot penetrate...

...The function of "critical intelligence" therefore, says Hook, is "to negotiate conflicts of value in the hope of finding or discovering shared interests that may be equitably enjoyed...

...The real conflicts arise, however, when people establish different priorities for their values or when they fail to see that the effort to instate one value necessarily means the relinquishing of others...

...The ground of these arguments being really a religious or a poetic view of life, couched in the personal metaphors of paradox (e.g...

...they represent the only way, perhaps, for men to realize their potentialities...

...Even if the world were base and evil, Hook would say, I suppose: "Here I stand, I can do no other...

...And when such rejection involves basic choices of love, friendship or vocations, according to Hook, "the moral dilemma emerges more clearly" and the quality of the conflict becomes poignant...

...often turn out to be devoid of content and are so general that most persons can easily agree with them...

...The central dilemma of freedom, most crudely put, is that the guarantee of some freedoms involves the foregoing—perhaps momentarily, perhaps longer—of other freedoms...

...The worse or evil," says Dewey, "is the rejected good...

...At the root of this conception is the argument that there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract, or universal rights valid for all men, but different freedoms and different rights, based upon the varying needs of human beings in specific times and places...

...THINKING ALOUD Sidney Hook at Sixty By Daniel Bell Sidney Hook does not like pieties, so I shall not, even in this mark of respect and affection, attempt the praise we would like to give to a man who has just passed his 60th birthday and has spent a vigorous life fighting obscurantism and the enemies of freedom...

...If Hook uses the idea of paradox, it is with tonguein-cheek, which with him is an old combative trick: In the opening sentence of his first book, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism, published in 1927, he wrote, "The title of this study has been selected with malice prepense...

...It conjoins two terms whose connotations are generally regarded as opposite...

...What Hook means by paradoxes of freedom are really the dilemmas of freedom, and it is his task, as a philosopher of democracy, to indicate some way out of the thicket...

...To the second charge...

...Modem poetry, driven from the world of fact by science, has resorted to ellipses, simultaneity, contradiction and other forms of ambiguity, in order to maintain the autonomy of its meanings...

...Even in culture he is the complete democrat ("I have no desire to impose my judgment of values and my taste upon other people in the community, and I certainly would resent it if they tried to impose their tastes and value judgments upon me...

...If we already know what is evil, the moral inquiry has never really begun...

...The rationalist concept of social change as social engineering has been challenged powerfully by Michael Polanyi and J. L. Talmon...

...The tension between liberty and democracy (i.e., the rights of individuals as against the power of the majority), which Tocqueville, Burckhardt and "the other" Mill saw as the characteristic feature of 19th century society, has emerged in a new form and vigor in the writings of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin...

...Why does all this, intelligent, stoic and humane as it is, seem uncongenial to the present mood...

...You or I may have a very specific conviction as to which freedoms and rights are more desirable than others—based on a conception of the potentialities of human creativity, the need for privacy, a belief in equality and so forth —but neither you nor I can impose these desires on others, or have them impose their desires on us, outside the processes of democracy...

...And in this personal choice, the paradox of existential reality, he would come full circle with all men who have felt and thought profoundly of what is obscurely called "the human predicament...

...For Miguel Unamuno, the Spanish religious philosopher, the "tragic sense of life" (the title of his famous book) arose from the desire of individuals for eternal happiness and the fear that death was a final eclipse of consciousness rather than the prelude to an immortal life...

...Not so...

...But if this is the case, does it not result in a moral relativism in which one man's freedom "is as good as" another's...

...The present attack on "mass society" is really an attack—explicitly in the case of culture (vide the views of Irving Kristol)—on democracy...

...As with the argument that there are no a priori moral absolutes, Hook argues that there are no philosophical ultimates in the realm of values...

...In short, there are no absolutes, not even of "freedom...

...Hook responds (paradoxically, in the same way that Freud dismissed the quest for happiness) that the "tragic sense of life," as the phrase is commonly used, is a paltry thing...

...In the last decade, Hook has become increasingly sensitive to the charges that naturalism cannot "create" values or give individuals a sense of purpose in life, and that pragmatism, as a "once-bom" philosophy— one without a sense of travail and anguish—fails to convey a "tragic sense of life...

...Has pragmatism, then, a tragic sense of life...

...As Hook says: "My conclusions will not be startling —originality in this sphere is almost always a sign of error...

...This is the ground of Hook's naturalistic "faith...

...And Hook is a consistent democrat, in every sphere: In politics, he is against the "right to revolution" in a democracy as a self-contradictory proposition in a self-governing community (the basis for his distinction of "heresy yes, conspiracy no...

...Kierkegaard's confrontation of one's own appropriation of truth as against objective truth), Hook is more and more impatient or baffled with them...