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Hook, Dewey, and Marx
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20514 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
3,958 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Capaldi
Nicholas Capaldi is editor of Public Affairs Quarterly and is
McFarlin Endowed Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Tulsa in Oklahoma. |
Sidney Hook was the most distinguished of John Dewey's students, and, depending upon your point of view, the most famous or infamous proponent of the American pragmatic mode of thought during the last half of the twentieth century. Hook was also the first Marxist professor in the United States, that is, the first to introduce and critically explore the views of Marx in the American classroom. Within the context of twentieth century thought, it would be fair to say that Hook was the first thinker to recognize and to develop the continuities between Marxism and pragmatism. In one way or another this has become an important theme in much recent philosophy that seeks to transcend the parochial boundaries between continental and Anglo-American thought.
Let us begin by sketching the starting point in Dewey. There is a crucial division in modern philosophy between, on the one hand, those philosophers who believe that how we understand ourselves is more fundamental than how we understand the nonhuman world and, on the other, those who maintain that how we understand the nonhuman world is more fundamental than how we understand ourselves. Pragmatism allies itself with the former. That is, the basic tenet of pragmatism is that how we understand ourselves is more fundamental.
This tenet raises the subsequent question of just how are we to understand ourselves? Pragmatism's answer to this question constitutes its second tenet, namely that action is more fundamental that thought, and hence that practical reason is more fundamental than theoretical reason. In the light of this tenet, efficient practice precedes the theory of it; theory both emerges from and subsequently modifies the practice. Failure to ground theory in practice produces the sterile intellectualism that continues to give philosophy a bad name, and it leads as well to dangerous utopian schemes.
The origin of pragmatism it the Copernican revolution in philosophy introduced jointly by Hume and Kant, and it has significant epistemological and metaphysical consequences. Pragmatism develops and expands in significant ways the insight that practical reason is fundamental. What emerges is the pragmatic insistence that we are agents primarily and observers only secondarily. In his dissertation, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism, Hook went so far as to criticize Kant for not being radical enough and for wanting to offer a timeless characterization of what we are.
A third tenet of pragmatism, and the one for which Dewey is most famous, is the insistence that agency cannot be
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