Sidney Hook on Heroes in a Non-Deterministic World

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Friday 20 December 2024 is the 122^nd 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 was a Marxist as a young man, attending Karl Korsch’s lectures in Berlin in 1928 and even did research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1929. But Hook gave up his Marxism, and when he gave it up, he really gave it up, and didn’t try to straddle the fence. He wasn’t an internal critic of Marxism, like Ernst Bloch or Leszek Kolakowski, who distanced themselves from orthodox Marxism, but who continued to employ a Marxist framework in their philosophical thought, however unorthodox their Marxism may have been. Hook entirely disassociated himself from Marxism, but he nevertheless retained the influence of Marx, so even though Hook became something of an anti-communist, eventually ending up at the Hoover Institution, he continued to think in Marxist terms throughout his life, and this makes him an interesting case.

While Hook gave up the overarching Marxist framework for his thought, it’s worth observing that Marxist concepts can be used outside the context of Marxism. Generally speaking, we should be more careful in distinguishing the framework within which a given philosopher’s thoughts move, and the occasional use of a concept borrowed from another framework of thought. Even granted this distinction, Hook’s framework is difficult to identify, because he used a sufficient number of concepts from Marxism that he is, in a sense, partially still within that framework, though he gave up the ideological commitments of Marxism. Many others followed a similar path.

Twentieth century intellectuals were overwhelmingly influenced by Marxism, but different individuals left the Marxist fold at different times and for different reasons. Bertrand Russell visited in Russia in the 1920s and had his heard turned around pretty quickly. He left early, though Russell was never a Marxist. Some left during Stalin’s purges and show trials during the 1930s. Sidney Hook first broke with communism in 1933, and by the end of the decade he had fully separated himself from communism, so he was in this tranche. Some left with the put down of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Some left with the put down of the Prague Spring in 1968. Some left with Jaruzelski’s crack down on the Solidarity labor union in 1981. Some left with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and more left a couple of years later with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. And some never left the Marxist fold.

Many of those who never left didn’t leave because they insisted, rightly or wrongly, that the historical record of actual communist regimes shouldn’t be the test Marxist theory. Like the best laid schemes of mice and men, theories often suffer in their implementation. Just as capitalism always falls prey to greed no matter how many safeguards are put in place, communism always falls prey to envy and resentment no matter how many safeguards are put into place, and both systems fall prey to corruption, because they are human forms of social organization that are perennially vulnerable to what is human, all-too-human. As Kant once said, no straight thing was ever made from the crooked timber of humanity.

Kant had also said “justice be done though the heavens may fall,” though he wasn’t the first to say this. This was, for example, the motto of the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I, but Hook cited it and attributed it to Kant in his essay “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life” from 1960, where he wrote: “…the willingness to act on a position like Kant’s fiat iustitia, pereat mundus may sometimes—I repeat, sometimes—be the best way of preserving a just and free world…” (p. 25) Earlier in the same essay Hook had said of Kant,

“…few are prepared to take the position of Kant in those agonizing moral predicaments that are not uncommon in history… in which the survival of the group can be purchased only at the price of the pain, degradation and death of the innocent.” (p. 15)

Hook is here placing Kant in the position of the stern moralist who not only sets up a moral code to which human beings are rarely equal, not also a seemingly absolutist doctrine that fails to take into account the complexity of history. This sort of absolutism didn’t get its start with the simplistic ethical emotivism of A. J. Ayer, but has deep roots in philosophy, as Kant shows.

The tragedy of human life for Hook is our being forced into agonizing moral questions, such as having the sacrifice the innocent to preserve the community, which are often the function of history be woven of many inseparable threads of very different individual value. I can imagine that someone with the experience of being deep in a given ideological community but eventually coming out the other side would be in a position to appreciate the kind of “agonizing moral predicaments that are not uncommon in history,” as Hook put it. Ideal theories like Marxism are like this too, more than a little deaf to the realities of history, which forces us into compromises we would rather avoid. So Hook’s conception of history is something the complexity of which forces us into terrible moral dilemmas, and these dilemma’s can’t be solved by a absolutist moral doctrine like Kant’s.

Hook’s appreciation of the complexity of history is evident in his 1943 book The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility. In this, Hook took up the Carlylesque theme of the hero in history, which we might think of as being simplistic or even vulgar, but in Hook’s hands we find that he doesn’t dodge any of the hard problems. On the contrary, one could even say that Hook focuses on the difficult problems that tend to produce the moral agonies he later wrote about. Interestingly, while taking up the problem of the hero in history, Hook does so in Marxian terms: He wrote:

“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.”

I assume that in this passage 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.”

Hook continued on from the previous quote:

“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.”

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 he’s 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. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that the heroic individual may shape history, but since this shaping of history takes place within limitations we do not ourselves set or control, the heroic individual may also fail to shape history through no fault of his own. 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.”

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.

Despite Hook’s criticism of determinism, he was also highly critical of Karl Popper’s criticism of determinism on what Hook believed to be wrongheaded grounds. Hook, being a Marxian scholar, wasn’t having any of Popper’s conflations of Plato, Hegel, and Marx as a kind of totalitarian monolith. Since Popper was so passionate in his condemnation of totalitarianism in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, many were inclined to let the slovenly scholarly standards slide because Popper was believed to be doing the Lord’s work. Not Hook. Hook took Popper to task in his 1948 essay “On Historical Understanding,” which appeared shortly after The Open Societies and Its Enemies. Hook’s essay leads with an epigraph from a different work by Popper, The Poverty of Historicism:

“…it is necessary to recognize as one of the principles of any unprejudiced view of politics that everything is possible in human affairs.”

Of this epigraph Hook wrote:

“…one of the marks of sanity is the realization that not everything can happen in nature. Wishes cannot be ridden like horses and pious thoughts cannot turn away flying missiles. If it is false that everything can happen in nature, it is also false that everything can happen in human affairs because all human affairs depend upon regularities in natural affairs. We must therefore conclude it is one of the principles of any sane view of politics to disbelieve that everything is possible in human affairs. And Popper himself in his less splenetic moods must agree with this. For otherwise everything he says about the desirability and practicability of piecemeal social engineering is nonsense.”

This is Hook again being mindful of limitations, as throughout his book on the hero in history he is mindful not only of the possibilities the hero represents, but also the limitations under which the hero must operate. When we think of heroes we typically think of the great men of the past. Maybe this is a function of what Huizinga called historical ideals of life. Huizinga said, “…a historical life-ideal may be defined as any concept of excellence man projects into the past,” and his opening example of an historical life-ideal is Charles the Bold’s desire to imitate Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander the Great. I discussed this in my episode on historical exemplarism. But heroes aren’t exclusively historical ideals. The role of the hero in history resonates with us because it appeals viscerally to human nature, and so we can expect heroes to be a part of human history for as long as human nature obtains in its present form. Hook makes his account of heroes contemporary, asking questions like whether there can be genuine heroes in a democracy, and whether democracies can trust their heroes.

Recently I had a paper published in the journal Heroism Science, with the title, “Heroic Virtues in Space Exploration: Everydayness and Supererogation on Earth and Beyond.” I wanted to consider what Hook called the problem of the hero in relation to future social roles, so I discussed astronauts as heroes. There’s a sense of the astronaut as hero that’s already a part of the past, already an historical life-deal, if, for example, we consider Neil Armstrong to be a hero. But if space exploration continues, and especially if it expands, our future spacefaring history will likely prominently feature astronauts as heroes, and they will be heroes embedded within the technological civilization that makes their heroism possible. This technological civilization is still in its infancy, but as it continues its history could be as dramatic as anything Earth has seen to date in human history, if not more so.

Heroes will play a role in this future history as they have played a role in our history to date, and they too will face the kind of agonizing moral choices that Hook thought made human life tragic, but which generations of writers and poets have celebrated as among the most admirable moments in the human story. In my episode on Thomas Carlyle I quoted a line that has often been attributed to Carlyle, who is supposed to have said, when looking up at the stars, “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” As we stand on the cusp of a future history that may dwarf our history on Earth, we face the prospect that the misery and folly that will inhabit the stars and the planets will be human misery and folly, and for precisely that reason we will need heroes, both to overcome the misery and the folly and to compensate us when the misery and folly is our own.

One more observation of Hook’s understanding of history. One essay in Hook’s The Question for Being is titled “The New Failure of Nerve,” which references Gilbert Murray’s classic work Five Stages of Greek Religion (the first edition was Four Stages of Greek Religion), which I discussed in my episode on Gilbert Murray. Murray had diagnosed a “failure of nerve” in late antiquity that led the peoples of that time to neglect public affairs in favor of private salvation. To get a sense of what Murray wanted to critique, read the famous Funeral Oration of Pericles in Thucydides’ History of the Pelopennesian War, and compare the attitudes expressed by Pericles to the attitudes expressed by the early Christian writers. The contrast is palpable. Hook thought that he saw signs in a new failure of nerve in his time, and in this essay he concludes thus:

“The new failure of nerve in contemporary culture is compounded of unwarranted hopes and unfounded beliefs. It is a desperate quest for a quick and all-inclusive faith that will save us from the trouble of thinking about difficult problems. These hopes, beliefs and faiths pretend to a knowledge which is not knowledge and to a superior insight not responsible to the checks of intelligence. The more fervently they are held the more complete will be their failure.”

In the light of what Hook wrote about the hero in history, namely, that heroes play an important role in history, and that they may or may not be successful in overcoming the limitations that history imposes upon their efforts, we can say that a failure of nerve in history, which Gilbert Murray diagnosed in late antiquity, and which Sidney Hook thought threatened the twentieth century, is either when no hero appears, or when a hero appears who cannot overcome the intrinsic limitations of the historical situation. And it could well be the case that no hero could overcome the limitations of a given historical situation. In the non-deterministic world that Hook believed us to inhabit—and I share his belief—both the hero and the triumph of the hero are possible, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, neither the hero nor the triumph of the hero are guaranteed.

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