COMMENT
In the Emersonian sense of the term, Sidney Hook was a repre–
sentative man . And with his passing, we have lost someone who perhaps
was most representative of the gifted and productive liberal anticommunist
community of intellectuals in the thirties and forties. Indeed, he was one of
the boldest and most sagacious of the political leaders of the community.
To be sure, we had our disagreements with him. In fact, the anticom–
munist community was full of disagreements and splits, at times violent and
acrimonious. Some thought that Sidney Hook was too obsessive, almost too
dedicated; he couldn't let go of an issue. Yet
if
it were not for his intellectual
force and his relentlessness in pursuing the cause of freedom and antitotali–
tarianism, maybe we would have faltered. He represented the community at
its highest levels of intensity.
In essence, Hook was a teacher who had gone public. And he was a
consecrated teacher, a secular rabbi-one of the unacknowledged great
teachers of our time.
As
a graduate student at New York University in the
thirties, I took Hook's courses in medieval and contemporary philosophy, and
courses on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, among others. What mostly
ani–
mated the courses was Hook's ability to cut through the texts of these fig–
ures in order to locate their thinking in a broad philosophical and historical
context. His method was essentially Socratic. He constantly raised provoca–
tive questions. He argued with students and encouraged them to argue with
him. Delmore Schwartz, who was also a student of his, a favorite one, told
the story of Hook's illustrating Aristotle's view of immanent development by
saying that only an acorn could become an oak tree, to which Schwartz,
himself a great intellectual arguer, replied that only a pig could become a ham
sandwich. You can imagine what kind of debate followed.
As
a pedagogic
device, Hook played the devil's advocate in class: if most of the students
were atheists he argued for the existence of God; if they were believers, he
argued the reverse. He was not just an enthusiastic teacher-there are no
lack of those-he also had one of the clearest and sharpest minds of his
generation, honed in the classrooms ofMorris
R.
Cohen and John Dewey.
Unfortunately, he spent too little of his time on problems of philosophy
and political philosophy, for which his talents should have destined him, and
too much time exposing the Communists, which he might have left to lesser
talents. Still, he must be credited with a major role
in
the political education of
an entire community. First he taught the left how to read Marx. Then he
was in the forefront of the ideological war against the Stalinists and the fel-
