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selves that makes for good in the Universe," Hook excluded any rein–
terpretation of theism within the confines of naturalism.
Similarly, Hook rejected as " anti-naturalistic" any interpretation of
human nature which considered mankind to be irremediably evil, as in
the Christian doctrine of original sin, or even in the Kantian dictum,
canonized by Isaiah Berlin, that "out of the crooked timber of human–
ity, nothing straight can be made." For Hook, the neutralism of nature
left open the question of the possibilities of human perfectibility through
the melioration of the human environment or the scientific mastery of
psychological motivation.
Hook's naturalism included a belief in the possibilities of the trans–
formation of nature and of human nature. This Enlightenment faith in
the possibility of progress through science was reinforced by the Prag–
matic methodology that stressed the systematic application of scientific
method to human affairs. Consequently, if Hook's naturalism viewed
any divine guarantee of human triumph to be wishful, it also led to his
optimistic belief that any interpretation of human history as tragically
fated to destruction went beyond the empirical record of a neutralist
naturalism. He was sensitive to the counter-claim that this version of nat–
uralism could be characterized as projecting an excessively optimistic
vision of the future of the human condition. For his Enlightenment natu–
ralism rejected any ultimate pessimism that was derived either from the
view that the immensity of nature, with its potentialities for catastrophe,
was bound to overwhelm the transformative capacities of human intelli–
gence or from the view that the perverse and self-destructive tendencies of
human nature were irremediable and imperfectable.
Hook was acutely aware that his optimistic projection was required to
confront the twentieth-century phenomena that moved beyond the "hor–
rendous excrescences" of the nascent Soviet state to the subsequent
development of the "Gulag archipelago" and to the unimagined concen–
tration camp universe with its death camps. Moreover, recent scientific
and technological development indicated, in Winston Churchill's memo–
rable phrase about the bombing of London by unmanned rockets, that
"the Dark Ages return on the winged tips of Science."
Hook confronted this challenge in several essays on evil in history,
and in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Associa–
tion, when he chose to question whether Pragmatism had an adequate
"tragic sense of life." Hook's Pragmatic view of tragedy allows for
innumerable sites for human failure and defeat. He also stressed that
history is not simply a drama of good against evil, but involves a tragic
conflict between one good and another good, between the good and the
