Sidney Hook
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 121st anniversary of the birth of Sidney Hook (20 December 1902–12 July 1989), who was born in New York City on this date in 1902.
Hook wrote a review of Emil Fackenheim’s Metaphysics and Historicity in which he appreciates Fackenheim’s views on history while at the same time distancing himself from Fackenheim’s particular formulations:
“Fackenheim is concerned with the question whether the historical self-consciousness of our age necessarily leads to historical scepticism concerning the validity of the basic religious and ethical beliefs which underlie conflicting Weltanschauungen.The classical tradition has asserted that metaphysical truth is independent of history. But for more than a century this view has been challenged by metaphysicians who have denied not only the existence of a timeless God but of the very notion of an historical-transcending metaphysical truth… In pursuing this question, Fackenheim maintains that the doctrine of historicity rests both on a belief in the radically disparate character of nature and history, and more important, on the belief that man, the historical agent, has no essential nature but is continually developing, and that the laws of his development also change. Since in historical action ‘man makes or constitutes himself,’ we cannot legitimately endow him with ‘a proper nature’ at all.”
The denial of any human nature became familiar in the twentieth century (Sartre especially urged this view), and in the twenty-first century it has gone on to enjoy mass appeal, as though denying human nature would free us from the human, all-too-human failings and foibles to which we are heir. At the same time, those who did not deny a human nature came to place an almost unsupportable burden on the concept, using it to explain everything, therefore explaining nothing.
Among historians, Pirenne in particular laid stress on the role of human nature. Here is what Pirenne wrote in “What Are Historians Trying To Do?”:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”
This appears to flatly contradict Hook’s description of Fackenheim’s position, but that is the black-or-white interpretation; if we see the question in shades of gray, what Pirenne called “changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same” could well be taken to be the same thing as man having “no essential nature but is continually developing” — but since both Pirenne and Fackenheim explicitly invoke the idea of human nature as an essence, probably we should take these two positions to be mutually exclusive.
While Hook’s review of Fackenheim is at times sympathetic, Fackenheim’s views on history are not Hook’s, and Hook ends his review with a reflection on the ultimately pointlessness of Fackenheim’s essay:
“As a historian of philosophy he has written with brilliance and insight. But I doubt very much whether any historian concerned with the issues of his craft or anyone interested in the theory of historical explanation, the existence and nature of historical laws, or the role of personalities and social institutions in history will find this discussion of historicity illuminating.”
While Hook cannot endorse Fackenheim’s views, his review is interesting for its engagement with the idea of human nature and and the degree to which it is either inherited unchanged or self-made. In The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility, Hook took up the Carlylesque theme of the hero in history, but does so in subtly Marxian terms that are also never far beneath the surface of his review of Fackenheim:
“Every philosophy of history which recognizes that men can and do make their own history also concerns itself with the conditions under which it is made. It assesses in a broad and general way the relative weight, for a certain period, of the conditions under which men act and of their ideals, plans, and purposes. These ideals, plans, and purposes are causally rooted in the complex of conditions, but they take their meaning from some proposed reworking of conditions to bring them closer to human desire. The same theme is also involved in the specific inquiries of scientific historians. It is difficult to give a satisfactory account of what happened, how it happened, and why, without striking a plausible balance between the part men played and the conditioning scene which provided the materials, sometimes the rules, but never the plots of the dramas of human history. Philosophers have treated this question in the large; historians, in the small. The first have offered wholesale solutions usually in the interest of programs of action or hopes of salvation. The second have eschewed large-scale generalizations and cautiously gone from case to case. This is pre-eminently true of the role of the ‘great man’ or ‘hero’ in history.”
I assume that in this passage, and in his review of Fackenheim, that Hook has continually in his thoughts the famous line from Marx that opens “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852):
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
Hook had been a communist, and while he distanced himself from communism starting in 1933, eventually becoming something of an anti-communist, he continued to work through Marxian themes, as in the above passage, which has its echoes in his work. But Hook did not follow Marx’s ideas on history, and rather took this Marxian idea of human nature to imply a different philosophy of history than Marx’s now-familiar cultural evolutionism. Much of Hook’s The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility is an argument against any deterministic reading of history. Hook holds that heroic individuals can materially influence the development of history:
“The existence of possible alternatives of development in a historic situation is the presupposition of significant heroic action. The all-important point for our purposes is whether there are such alternatives of development — their nature and duration. The position taken so far commits us to the belief that there have been and are such alternatives in history with mutually incompatible consequences that might have redetermined the course of events in the past, and that might redetermine them in the future. Such a view does not controvert the assumptions of scientific determinism, although it controverts the monistic organic determinism we have previously considered. For it does not assert that all alternatives are possible. It recognizes limitations on possibilities, including limitations on the possible effect of heroic action, grounded on the acceptance of generalized descriptions or laws of social behavior.”
Here Hook has retained the Marxian conception of human nature as self-made, but only within certain limits, and used it to formulate a non-Marxian conception of history, in which the heroic individual, while working within limitations, can nevertheless shape the historical process. Coming at this same problem from another angle, in his “Philosophy and Human Conduct,” Hook argues for the influence of ideas on history, which latter is a condition of human beings acting on their belief being able to shape history:
“It requires considerable intellectual sophistication to deny causal influence to ideas in human affairs. For aside from instinctive and habitual conduct, what we do is largely determined by what we believe. Even habitual conduct often presupposes that certain beliefs have been accepted as true in the past. The world we live in is an interpreted world. The evidence for this is so massive that no one but philosophers would doubt it. Ideas are sometimes stronger than the strongest natural impulses. We know that human beings have starved to death in the sight of nourishing food because they believed certain animals to be sacred or certain plants poisonous. Nor is it necessary for ideas to be true to have determining significance for conduct. Witches do not exist. But how many unfortunate creatures have been brought to a miserable end because of the belief in the existence of witches? To be sure one may believe in witches and not burn them but put them to work on useful tasks. This testifies only to the influence of other ideas about witches. It still remains true that if we did not believe in witches, thousands of innocent women would not have been tortured to death.”
We note that Hook’s example of witchcraft shows that the influence of ideas on history can be malign no less than beneficent. Ideas can shape history for good or ill, as individuals who are “heroes” in Hook’s sense might shape history for good or ill. The point here is not that human beings and their beliefs are good, and that all will turn out well in the end, but that human beings have the power to shape history, and this means that deterministic accounts of history are misleading at best, false and pernicious at worst.
Further Resources
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Hook, S. (1932). The Contemporary Significance of Hegel’s Philosophy. The Philosophical Review, 41(3), 237. doi:10.2307/2179783
Hook, S., & Fackenheim, E. L. (1964). Metaphysics and Historicity, the Aquinas Lecture. History and Theory, 3(3), 389. doi:10.2307/2504240
