Old-Fashioned Rationalist

THE QUEST FOR BEING (254 pp.)--Sidney Hook--St. Martin's ($6).

In an age when brisk, jet-borne academic types whisk in and out of Washington, the legendary absent-minded professor is an anachronism. But New York University Philosopher Sidney Hook still conforms to that older, homelier image; he has been known to enter the shower wearing pajamas, and he once absently rejected the Oedipus Complex as a tool of philosophy by exclaiming: "I learned that stuff at my mother's knee!"

In several other ways, Hook is oldfashioned. Unlike the predominant neo-positivists, who believe that philosophy is only semantics and that ethical judgments are merely emotional expressions like "Yipee!", Hook still believes in philosophy as a meaningful guide to human actions. On the other hand, he also stands apart from the recent upsurge of Christian existentialism propounded by Jaspers and Tillich. In short, amidst changing philosophical fashions, he has remained steadfast to the credo he learned, not at his mother's knee, but from his spiritual father, John Dewey--a rational humanist whose roots reach back to Enlightenment.

Hook is probably best known to the layman through his writings on public affairs, in which his position is similarly steadfast and similarly directed against what he regards as the extremes: for more than a decade, he has championed liberal anti-Communism against both the political left and right. In his latest collection of essays, he turns from politics back to philosophy, offering finely reasoned argument coupled with a lucid style and humane tolerance. A great many readers will violently disagree with his Dewey-eyed "pragmatic naturalism," his belief that the scientific method is readily applicable to moral problems. Some may find his anti-religious skepticism dated or even antique. But anyone who wants to understand the broad tradition in Western thought which Sidney Hook represents could scarcely find a better, clearer or more honest exposition.

Wrong but Right. Man's existential loneliness, says Hook, cannot be comforted by either resignation or faith, but by courageously facing the facts of his existence. "In the best of societies," he says, "death may be conquered, but not tragedy." Like Dewey, Hook disdains the jargonauts among his colleagues, insists that questions and answers must merely meet the test of common sense. He exhaustively argues, for instance, that the metaphysical term "Being" is, in Dewey's phrase, a "zero word." The term, Hook says, "merely enables those who write obscurely and feel inchoate to imagine that they are being profound. It is a sophisticated substitute for the concept of

God which refuses to accept the responsibilities of traditional faith in a personal Creator."

Not that Hook has any use for such traditional faith. He regards all varieties of organized religion as philosophically unsound and politically dangerous. To him, religious doctrines "constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability" when tested on the scale of logic. Even if a naturalist woke up in the presence of God, and were thus proven wrong, says Hook, the theory he held while on earth would still have been more reasonable than the supernaturalist who is "unreasonable, even if it turns out he is right."

Hook repeats the familiar argument that in actual operation in this world, religious groups have always sought "to make of God an instrument of national policy," and he cites the familiar examples of clerics, on opposite sides of a war, invoking God's blessing for their troops or preaching obedience, for instance, to the Nazi leaders in World War II. Actually, of course, this may prove no more than the fact that philosophers, appealing to their god--Logic--also supported national regimes, including the Nazi and the Communist tyrannies.

Politics of Despair. Hook sees religion as an interpretation of life that seeks to explain and provide consolation for otherwise meaningless suffering, and as such he is willing to tolerate it. In the case of personal beliefs, justified to the individual in the way that love justifies itself, Hook suspends rational criticism. That is the individual's own business. The crux of Hook's position is the question: Where does man's moral sense come from? Hook's rigidly pragmatic answer: practical experience leads to a set of rules that men later attribute to a divine source.

Can man live morally without some reference to the supernatural? A great many philosophers have found mischief or disaster in man's relying only on man. Not so, Hook. He is sure that man can live without searching for meaning in mystery, without seeking to explain the inexplicable, and that he can achieve glory in the attempt. "We need not repine that we are not gods or children of gods," Hook declares. "The politics of despair, the philosophy of magical idealism and the theology of consolation forget that although we are not gods, we still can act like men."

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