Adventures of a Passionate Rationalist
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Adventures of a Passionate Rationalist Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century By Sidney Hook Harper & Row. 628 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by John P. Roche It is simply impossible to...
...I don't want to embarrass Sidney by being too nice to him...
...I particularly recall a lecture he gave at Brandeis in the late 1950s...
...Defenders of human freedom, whatever their feelings about his epistemology, his rejection of transcendent values, owe him a debt for his example and his wisdom...
...I didn't know much about philosophy, but with my religious background I knew eschatology when I saw it (human history as a television series written by a transcendent force) and dropped Marxism...
...Typically, Hook set out immediately to organize the resistance, and the usual suspects began to do a job on us as a bunch of academic reactionaries—or worse, elitist men and women who wanted to revert to Oxbridge snobbery...
...Episodic as this may be, it is also life imitating art: His career has been an avalanche of episodes...
...Like me, he was accused in the early 1950s of being an "objective McCarthyite...
...We were, in effect, excommunicated as fossils out of tune with the "relevant" dimensions of education...
...This was pretty funny: the Jew from the City College of New York who was John Dewey's leading interpreter and a vigorous advocate of genuine progressive education (as distinct from the let-it-all-hangout cant that would nauseate Dewey) billed as a devotee of the Cambridge Apostles...
...Never mind that we were both on the record in vigorous opposition to the Wisconsin demagogue...
...From my viewpoint, his support of American intervention in World War II made him rhetorical enemy Number One: He was the only pro-War Socialist who could effectively debate Norman Thomas (maybe, I will concede in retrospect, often winning on points...
...Lyndon," hesaid, "I'dfeel a hell of a lot better about that crowd if even one of them had ever run for sheriff...
...He throws in one tidbit, however, that indicates he did penance for his early Bolshevik affiliations: The poor man had to put into decent English the International Publisher's edition of a German translation of Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism, a horrendous compendium of philosophical detritus...
...Possessing the mania of an autodidact in exile from a Coughlinite family, I was initially attracted to Marxism and read everything I could find on the subject...
...Instead, through Americans for Democratic Action I devoted my energies to revitalizing the Democratic Party in Philadelphia and later in Pennsylvania as a whole, and to the American Civil Liberties Union's efforts in the early 1950s to desegregate Philadelphia's swimming pools and other public facilities...
...How Sidney, whom I consider a mentor of sorts, managed to put up with all that palavering I will never understand, except that it provided him with a platform for his elegant, hard-hitting statements and they were subsequently given wide dissemination...
...Mister Sam" listened to the soliloquy for a while and then interrupted...
...In the question period he was very severe with me for suggesting (with reference to our dispute over the eschatological thrust of both Hegel and Marx) that Hegel was best understood as "Aristotle on a tricycle...
...It isa hard faith to live by (and I can see his eyebrows rise at my use of "faith"), but Sidney Hook has done so with wonderful zest and passion...
...It is difficult to find a serious public issue of the past half century on which he has not taken a strong published position—and, it might be added, where his views have not been distorted by illiterate and/or malignant critics...
...In my opinion, Eastman's point could very well serve as a generic criticism of Hook's Marxism...
...For the first time in my life I questioned my vocation, and now I learn that Sidney, with far more experience in the academic foxholes, had the same profound trauma...
...On the contrary, we must be prepared to die if necessary for the truth only dimly perceived, truth contingently discerned by the light of human reason...
...But one can pick out some of the highlights and attempt to find the essential Hook...
...Indeed, for more than four decades I have suspected that Sidney Hook is the common name of identical quintuplets, even though the New York University philosopher I first encountered in 1940, while a member of the Young People's Socialist League, was ferociously energetic...
...It was not that our fellow professors believed the bizarre slogans they were mouthing (those who did believe them were actually the only honest vigilantes...
...At the same time, every topic —the volume is arranged topically rather than chronologically—is infused by his fundamental commitment to rationalism...
...Most of the professional intellectuals in New York are, and in my memory always have been, allergic to action...
...Until the day I die I will remember the stench of soggy, smoking books after my Brandeis office was fire-bombed, and the reaction of most of my colleagues: "If Roche didn't support the War, it wouldn't have happened...
...Our problem was that we knew there was an international Stalinist apparat, we knew there were Americans who followed the Moscow Party line, and we knew that unfortunately some of them had engaged in espionage and other acts of disloyalty to the United States...
...Hook's Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was the most persuasive interpretation, presenting as it did the image of Marx as a humanistic democrat, yet to my simple mind it seemed Sidney had exorcised the eschatology that was built into Marx' concept of teleologica...
...In our view Joe McCarthy should have been awarded the Order of Lenin for blurring the critical line between, in the title of Hook's 1953 treatise, Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No...
...Being by nature, perhaps by culture, an organizer myself, I remained outside the various New York intellectual talk-shops...
...It may have been frivolous...
...Allegedly this had the same effect on him that the administration of the Last Rites had three times on my late father: It revived his lust for life...
...It is a testament by an immensely creative, unnervingly energetic man who has dedicated his life to the quest for truth (small "t")— fully recognizing that while we may not (he would say "can't") ever know the entire Truth, if such there be, we must not wander into the swamp of ethical relativism...
...What is admirably distinctive about Sidney Hook's incredible range of involvements is his constant reiteration of the question, "What shall we do...
...This must have been the equivalent of 10 years in the philosophical gulag...
...Hook devotes a relatively small segment of his large book to philosophical concerns...
...He said in the common dialect of both our childhoods that this "was absolutely absoid...
...In fact, I have heard from a reliable source that when Sidney, whose recent years have been plagued by serious heart problems, asked that the life-supporting machines be turned of f (he is a longtime advocate of voluntary euthanasia), John Bunzel turned up in his hospital room and began to read aloud from the works of Corliss Lamont...
...Alas, I was never a student at NYU so I did not get the opportunity to witness his penetrating mind at work in a classroom...
...I didn't, and still don't, think it all that "absoid," but he was reaching for his rapier so I stood down...
...Hook's vignettes of Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Morris Raphael Cohen and other political and cultural figures demonstrate a sensitivity that may surprise many...
...Moreover, notwithstanding my own belligerent tendencies, from time to time Hook's addiction to rhetorical overkill has made me squirm a bit inside...
...Fortunately, Out of Step is written in a contemplative mood that almost entirely avoids unnecessary bloodshed...
...Faced with a crisis, a Philip Rahv—to take one of the Partisan Review gurus whom I knew well during my years at Brandeis University—would sit down and write an article...
...Fewtoday can appreciate the meaning of this accolade: Over the years I have witnessed innumerable debates between quickwitted opponents, but Norman Thomas, Max Shachtman and Sidney Hook simply belong in the Forensic Hall of Fame...
...Reviewed by John P. Roche It is simply impossible to review Sidney Hook's intriguing memoir of a life on the American Left adequately in less than a full issue of this magazine...
...Hook was not merely a political polemicist...
...history...
...On occasion he could be quite mean...
...Every reviewer will find a different aspect of this multifaceted work that most appeals to the intellectual appetite...
...Although I can't say I dared to argue with him—despite his being very gentle with serious students—I did discuss the matter at length...
...I wonder how many of the Brandeis faculty who voted for that preposterous manifesto even recall the event today...
...As one who has shared the trench with him, I found most poignant the chapter on the craven behavior of the academic community in the '60s and '70s when confronted with "The Rebellion of the Clerks" (as I called it in my article in The New Leader of June 23,1969...
...Nor will I forget the faculty vote following Cambodia-Kent State—156-3 in favor of a resolution consisting of anti-American gibberish...
...I was invited to some conferences by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom—one of Sidney's finest creations in its pre-War manifestation—but one exposure to that variety of deep-think cured me of conferencitis...
...The term may seem (as they say in Moscow) an internal contradiction, but Sidney Hook is the ultimate passionate rationalist...
...Our worst sin, in the eyes of the "useful idiots," was that we flatly denied them status as "radicals": They were undeviatingly orthodox members of a foreign church who tried desperately to identify "Left" with "East...
...In Out of Step—a fascinating record of the activities of all five Hooks—Sidney does admit that Max Eastman's review of his From Hegel to Marx, entitled "What Karl Marx Would Have Thought Had He Been a Student of John Dewey," would "have been more appropriate had it been directed at my earlier work, Towards the Understanding...
...it was simply a shameful retreat from the principles of academic freedom and, more broadly, from the whole value system that underpins a free, rational society...
...In rhetorical battle Sidney has a tendency not only to go for the jugular, but for every capillary...
...But those occupying the commanding heights of education theory in the country—notably the trendy foundations—set the terms of the debate...
...Once Richard Nixon abolished the draft, the students forgot the War and the teachers dropped all their lunatic resolutions into the black hole...
...As I told the Brandeis faculty assembled to flagellate over CambodiaKent State and countless racist sins, I thought I had gone to work in an academic institution, not an intellectual whorehouse...
...The cynicism of the pusillanimous whom one had (albeit with some skepticism) thought to be members of a "community of scholars" was literally stunning...
...Lyndon Johnson used to tell a rueful story featuring his own naivete: In 1961 after John F. Kennedy had named his Cabinet, LBJ went to see Speaker Sam Rayburn to rave about the high quality of the appointees...
...In contrast, Hook would throw himself into organizing a response, setting up a committee —in short, serving as a precinct captain...
...Irving Howe, to mention another onetime Brandeis colleague, would dedicate an issue of Dissent to a symposium on "Why did it happen...
...Subsequently, I think, he finally forced Lamont to admit that there may have been something slightly fishy about Stalin's Trials...
...If that was too much work, he would sign an Open Letter to the Times...
...once he sheathed his dagger, he would engage in genial discourse about philosophical problems with puzzled youngsters like myself...
Vol. 70 • March 1987 • No. 4
