LIONEL ABEL
41
being an attempt to relate hard-core Communism to a particular and
still controversial theory related only to certain social sciences, and
with no relation to science as a whole.
When it is understood that Hook's role as a believer was to
reconcile the religion of Communism with modern science, we can
better understand the role he played as an unbeliever, when he lost
his faith in "the God that failed" and began to criticize those liberals
who after the Moscow trials, and the Doctors plot, continued
to
be
soft on Communism.
Hook is, I think, like a Thomas Aquinas who, having completed
his
Summa,
finally throws in his lot with an avant-garde of the En–
lightenment (there was of course nothing corresponding to the En–
lightenment in the thirteenth century), raising against the new secu–
lar church Voltaire's old slogan, "ecrasez l'infame." So the philosopher
has had two distinct periods of opinion and of opinion-making, rep–
resenting two distinct directions of his thought. Such a dividedness
of opinion was something the Parisian friends I saw, when I visited
them in 1962, held against Wittgenstein. They claimed it was surely
a fault in a philosopher to have held more than one view, at least
after maturity. There may be a real point here, speaking generally,
but I feel that some exception to the argument must be made for
those philosophers who are our contemporaries. The age we live in is
a strange one, and one of its strange aspects may be seen in the fact
that some of our better philosophers have felt the need to change views
once deeply held. Wittgenstein was not the only modern philosopher
to contradict his previously held positions . Husser! changed his views
at least twice in his career, so did Heidegger, and Sartre also. So we
should be less surprised by the fact that Hook changed his views of
Marxism and Communism so decisively. But his views in justifica–
tion and in denunciation of revolutionary Marxism as a set of be–
liefs, and as motives for action, were in both cases centered on what
is certainly the major problem as it is - to borrow a phrase from the
late Hannah Arendt-"the burden of our time."
