On his way to becoming a Marxist-Leninist philosopher before the stock market crash of 1929, George Novack (1905-1992) was a student of Alfred North Whitehead, to whose writings I once paid a great deal of attention. After noting that the “disconnected writings of C. S. Peirce were then being collected and edited by one of my teachers [at Harvard], Charles Hartshorne” (another erstwhile hero of mine), Novack wrote:
However, the attention of the more serious students was drawn toward Bertrand Russell’s collaborator, A. N. Whitehead, the erudite modernizer of Platonism with scientific-mathematical trimmings. He read several chapters of his major treatise Process and Reality to our class. Obscure and enigmatic as much of its metaphysics was, it appealed to my need for a comprehensive, rational interpretation of the universe. For a while I became an entranced disciple of Whitehead, although as an atheist I was disconcerted to hear that my guru occasionally sermonized at King’s Chapel in Boston. This immersion in Whitehead’s system, with its infusion of scientific, mathematical, and philosophical concepts, immensely widened my intellectual horizon. I also learned from his Science and the Modern World that the clash of doctrines speeds progress. (“My Philosophical Itinerary,” Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, Pathfinder Press, 1978, 15-16.)
Philip Johnson (1906-2005), the notable architect whose mailroom I managed in the early ’80s, told me that Whitehead had convinced him that the future builder was not cut out for philosophy. (I had asked him about Whitehead at a firm outing held on the grounds of his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut in July 1982, the last such party he hosted.) Since Johnson had finished his Harvard studies in 1927, he likely crossed Novack’s path in Whitehead’s classes.
Novack mentions having been acquainted with Sidney Hook (forty-five years later my professor) who had studied under Morris Cohen at The City University of New York. I’m interested in whether and how Novack and Hook worked together in the late ’30s with John Dewey’s Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow trials of Leon Trotsky and others.
I was once attracted to Whitehead because of his nontraditional theism, not, as in Novack’s case, in spite of it, especially the promise it held out to me of meeting the challenge that the occurrence of evil poses for theism. The promise, however, was predicated on a compromise: define “god” down to a universal “lure” of lesser “occasions of experience,” deny this “god” the power to exnihilate, and the result is a superhuman but intra-cosmic agency that, however powerful, cannot act locally within creation to prevent evil. Whitehead’s god is always working to overcome evil, but will never have the victory.
Novak’s pre-Marxist atheism was based on a fallacious inference:
The conclusions of science had rendered belief in divine ghosts a ridiculous anachronism. I shed faith in God and immortality early and easily, despite the perfunctory ceremonials of a fast-fading Judaism in my home, and sought enlightenment from some secular source. (Ibid., 14.)
This seems to imply that for Novack, science was the final arbiter of what can, and cannot, exist, and what science’s net can’t catch ain’t fish. (The possibility that a future discovery might render his scientism “anachronistic” seems not to have occurred to him.) What, for example, is the metaphysical status of numbers, upon whose reality science utterly depends? Do they exist, or not? Numbers do not impinge upon our senses; only material things can do that. Empirical inquiry presupposes their reality; it cannot account for them. They’re not material. (Let scientistic materialists deny the reality of numbers, if they dare.)
As metaphysical naturalists, social theorists and historical thinkers—who do not show but merely presuppose that there is nothing beyond natural and social history—Marxists reduce belief in God to a psychic and social phenomenon, thereby distorting their perception of what they’re talking about. If they bothered to ask about the kind of question “Does God exist?” is, they might have realized it’s in the same boat with “Does the cosmos (their metaphysical absolute) exist?” It’s not like “Do ghosts exist?” When Marxists (and other atheists, like Objectivists) assert that the cosmos is “all there is, ever was, or will be,” they burst the limits of empirical inquiry. They’re committing an act of metaphysics.
(I explore this, with an Objectivist as my foil, in Atheism Analyzed: The Implosion of George Smith’s “Case against God.”)
My chosen field, like Novack’s, was philosophy; that of my Stalinist apothecary, Herbert Aptheker, history. The accidents of geography may have played a role in my meeting the latter rather than the former. The Stalinists (Communist Party) and the Trotskyists (Socialist Workers Party) both had offices in Xavier High School’s neighborhood, but the CP’s educational center was only two doors away on West 15th Street; their book store was located at 100 East 16th Street across Union Square (near the subway that took me to and from my Bronx home). My diaries may show whether my memory of having attended a lecture of Novack’s in the early ’70s is true.
Had I come under Novack’s influence rather than that of Aptheker’s, my sojourn through Marxism might have been prolonged. Once I broke with the Marxism, however, no form of it held any attraction. My distaste for Leftism in all its infernal incarnations remains visceral, and that understates things. My interest in people like Novack is historical, a function of my interest in the kind of intellectual and moral mistakes I (and others) made. Entertaining the dialectic involved in this self-reflection only slightly bevels the sharp edges of guilt.
If you can shed any light on Novack’s life and times, please do so in the combox. Thanks.
