Sidney Hook 1902-1989

...the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia...

...His most poignant essay was entitled "Pragmatism and the Tragic Senseof Life" (1960), and it became the title piece of his best collection of essays published in 1974...

...the abortive Doctor's Plot in 1953, when Stalin was ready to unleash violent anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union following the arrest of the Kremlin doctors...

...Before the War, he initiated the American Committee for Cultural Freedom to counter a Communist intellectual front headed by Franz Boas...

...In 1932 he had been a supporter of the Communist Party and an organizer of the famous list of intellectuals backing William Z. Foster and James W. Ford, the party's Presidential ticket...

...the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...Hook's first major book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933), presented Marx as a naturalist whose early works were continuous with the developments of pragmatism and the instrumentalism of John Dewey...

...In later years, when the teacup history of the New York intellectuals had become a cottage industry for young historians, Hook always insisted that many of their readings, often through the prism only of Partisan Review and Commentary, had neglected the more important role in the War years and after of The New Leader and its executive Editor Sol Levitas, for whom Sidney retained an undying affection...

...His second, more detailed book, From Hegel to Marx (1936), was a meticulous tracing out of the intellectual origins of Marx' philosophical thoughts...

...Long before Wittgenstein, pragmatiste believed that language was a form of life...

...A tragic choice, true, but Sidney, as a rationalist, could not believe in the pervasive phenomenon of radical evil...

...IN MEMORIAM Sidney Hook 1902-1989 BY DANIEL BELL "PHILOSOPHY," John Dewey once wrote, "recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men...

...For those who knew Sidney personally, as a student or friend, his greatest prowess was as a teacher...

...At Sidney's 80th birthday celebration hundreds of individuals, now leading figures in American intellectual and political life, turned out to greet him with fondness...

...Thus, when the McCarthy issue arose, Hook published his essay, Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No...

...His greatest demand was for clarity...

...They sought to reduce differences concerning supposed first principles and ultimate necessities to their varied fruits and consequences in experience...

...Hook never became anti-Marxist, continuing to argue for the many virtues of Marx' ideas...

...He was a compulsive letter writer, too, often working until the early hours of the morning to reply to correspondents...

...He defended the full rights of all honest dissent...

...His The Hero in History (1943) anticipates Isaiah Berlin's later strictures against historical determinism...

...He always had a calmness about death...

...Yet what appalled Sidney was the brutal, de facto alliance the Communist Party of Germany had made with the Nazis to overthrow the Weimar Republic, and its justifying this by the theory of " social fascism"— the argument that since fascism was the last stage of monopoly capitalism in economic crisis, Hitler would only be a transient figure, and the main task of the Communist Party was to smash the rival Socialist movement...

...With Orwell, Koestler, Silone and Manes Sperber, Sidney epitomized a generation of intellectuals who fought in the combat of ideas against Sartre, Brecht, Lukacs and other deceivers defending the Soviet Union and its repressions under the abstraction of "the March of History...

...In his essay on "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life," he remarked that "the fear of death, the desire to survive at any cost or price in human degradation, has been the greatest ally of tyranny, past and present...

...Sidney never flinched from the phrase "Cold War liberalism," and lived to see every one of his arguments and charges sustained first by Khrushchev and finally by Gorbachev—the rehabilitation of Bukharin, the admission that the Moscow Trials were a frame-up, and the complete denunciation of Stalin in the Soviet Union...

...For Sidney, philosophy and action were intertwined...

...Pragmatism, he continued, "clarifies the meaning of ideas by uncovering their consequences in use—not merely consequences in linguistic use but in the behavior of things and people in the concrete situations in which language functions...

...Given his public and combative role, many of Sidney's more reflective works were eclipsed, yet they remain enduring in the history of ideas...

...Living in later years on the campus at Stanford University must have been a trial...

...One of his earliest essays, "The Ethics of Suicide" (1927), defended the act as sometimes rational...

...In the last decade, the intellectual tide had begun to tum...

...Sidney's essay, "The Fallacy of the Theory of Social Fascism," in the Modern Monthly of July 1934, became the most influential essay in the early break of many American intellectuals with the Communists...

...All of this—he clearly led three lives—was also taken up with Sidney's organizational activities and his full schedule as a teacher...

...In the last decade of his life, he suffered much pain and many onslaughts...

...He himself lived a full life...

...Still, the most remarkable aspect of Sidney was his courage, intellectual and personal...

...Hook began as a Marxist, but his reading of Marx was fresh and novel...

...From that time on, Sidney was an unyielding enemy of the Communist Party, his beliefs reinforced by the dread ful repetitions of the Moscow Trials...

...It is death on bunkum and pretentious abstractions especially when they are capitalized," he stated in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1960...

...InFebruary 1934, the American Communists sought to disrupt and break up a Socialist Party rally in Madison Square Garden called in support of the Austrian Socialists, then under military attack by Dollfuss and the Heimwehrt...

...Chafing at the growing influence of Reinhold Niebuhr and the interest in the ?ntinuing authenticity of religious thought expressed by those—such as Irving Kristol and myself—whom he had regarded as protégés, Sidney denied that pragmatism was a once-born cheerfulness toward the future, but he also understood tragedy...

...That may be taken as the credo, and themeasure, of the lifeof Sidney Hook, who died on July 12 at age 86...

...Although subsequent studies have supplemented the two books with greater detail, they remain original readings of Marx...

...Sidney, beholding these men and women as if in a time warp, observed wryly: "Iknowthatfew of y ou are any longer friends to one another, but I am glad that you are still friends of Sidney Hook...

...He helped organize the Commission of Inquiry on Trotsky and the Independent Moscow trials headed by John Dewey...

...For him, "the tragic sense [is] a very simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of...

...No less compulsively, he would venture out at night to mail those letters (life was more tranquil then) as soon as possible, and he knew the different collection times of every post-office deposit box within the radius of a mile of his house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn...

...And that was all he asked for—and achieved...

...This was one of the many ironies in Sidney's life, since Burnham with his schematic view of politics became the eminence grise of the National Review and Shachtman, toward the end of his life, became astrong supporter of theU.S...

...in the war in Vietnam (originally because of the murder of Trotskyists by Ho Chi Minh in the North, a story still not fully told to this day...

...William Phillips observed later, apropos of Lillian Hellman: The Communists wanted us to defend their right to lie...

...Beginning with the publication of his PhD thesis, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism in 1927 (though he actually started publishing some short essays and reviews as early as 1922), Sidney's written output was enormous, comprising 36 closely printed pages of bibliography by 1982...

...Philosophy for Hook was a method of criticism...

...Though Hook—the impersonality is too difficult for me to maintain—though Sidney was not an anti-Marxist, he did become a thoroughgoing anti-Communist...

...As the Cold War unfolded it refused to take an open and principled stand against McCarthy...

...The range of his writings, and involvements, was prodigious: from democracy, religion, education, Marxism, morality, metaphysics, to specific problems of civil disobedience, racial segregation and affirmative action, nuclear war, to questions of judicial activism (which he opposed) and the defense of legislative actions and majority rule...

...after the War, he was one of the organizers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, perhaps the most successful effort of intellectuals to oppose totalitarianism...

...the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, etc...

...Years before McCarthy, following the Duclos letter and the expulsion of Earl Browder, the American Communist Party had set up an underground apparatus and a parallel leadership abroad...

...Having spent an academic year (1928-29) in Berlin and Moscow, going through the early (and hitherto unpublished) philosophical works that had been assembled by David Riazanov, what struck him was Marx' emphasis on praxis and an activity theory of knowledge, in contrast to the mechanical Marxism and the copy theory of knowledge that had been codified by Engels in Anti-Dühring...

...a pity that fax had not come into more widespread use before Sidney's death...

...Sidney was a staunch and dedicated friend of The New Leader, for which he began to write in 1939, an action that led his erstwhile friends Max Shachtman and James Burnham to write a denunciatory essay in the New In ternational entitled "Intellectuals in Retreat...

...An Op-Ed essay in the New York Times defending voluntary euthanasia, elaborated later in a longer essay in the New York Review of Books (a remarkable reconciliation on its part with Sidney), won wide attention for its emphasis on personal dignity and selfawareness as the greatest good for the close of one's life...

...His greatest skill was his emphasis on distinctions relevantto anissue...

...moral choice, the genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity where the question 'What should I do?' takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good...

...But the difficulty for civil libertarians was that both McCarthy and the Communists were lying, and each sought to enlist attackers and defenders behind those smokescreens...

...But like Leszek Kolakowski later, he rejected the fashionable idea of seeing Marx' early, andoften unformed, works as the fons et origo of Marxism...