Sidney Hook – Anthony G. Flood

The First Esthetic Judgment

James T. Farrell (1904-1979), ex-Catholic, ex-Trotskyist novelist and social theorist, a quintessential “New York Intellectual” (by way of Chicago).

Immersed as I now am in the world of American Marxist creatives in the ’20s, ’30s, and beyond (e.g., James T. Farrell, his friend George Novack, their rival [my professor] Sidney Hook, et al.), I’m struck by their appeal to philosophical naturalism (materialism) to anchor their work in reality, thereby giving their work ultimate meaning. That’s their touchstone. This presupposition is rarely laid bare and argued for; when it is, its rationale wears its inadequacy on its face. I’ll explore this in future posts.

They all wanted, as I once did, to bring about a more just, more beautiful world, one of peace and prosperity for all, even though they and their revolutionary projects, according to their metaphysics, bore no more significance than the bathroom insect I crushed this morning. As an event, neither its crawling nor my crushing was less significant than, say, Beethoven’s composition of his Ninth Symphony or any performance thereof. When leftists achieve anything they deem success, they crush, not insects, but human beings, by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions.

Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), however, they know in their hearts that they’re divine intentions, not byproducts of a cosmic explosion, the extrapolation to which their veneration of Received Scientific Opinion drives them and constrains them to honor.

Their symbol-making and -using nature, without which neither science nor art is possible, is just a “lucky accident”; the very effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, the “fit” of number and matter, is admitted to be “unreasonable” on naturalistic terms.

They’d go mad if they believed they were accidents. To inoculate themselves against this cosmic nightmare, they tell themselves stories, including one about how man became a storyteller. These “scientific materialists” project romantic images of themselves in every sentence they dream, utter, or write. In so doing they suppress what they know, wickedly (Romans 1:18).

Before Moses wrote a word of Genesis, God had beheld “every thing that he had made” and said “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The first esthetic judgment was divine. Human esthetic judgment, if untethered to that primordial truth, may tickle the fancy of its hearers or readers, but it inevitably floats back into in the void from which it emerged—which evacuates it of any noble sentiment it may have borne for a cosmic split-second.

Milestones and Memory’s Millstones

I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.

For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).

For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.

I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.

Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.

Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.

Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”

Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission

Shortly after my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness was published in 2019, Lloyd Billingsley reviewed it for Frontpage Magazine. John Hamelin commented on his review at the time, but somehow I missed it, and comments are closed. It attempts to defend Aptheker’s scholarly credibility; it warrants an answer.

Hamelin starts off with:

While The Black Jacobins [hereafter, TBJ] is certainly a significant work in its own right and Aptheker’s avoidance in citing it can be considered an example of petty political rivalries, the idea that it somehow demolishes Aptheker’s writings on Black American history is absurd.

It would be absurd, but that’s not what I wrote. It’s not even in the review. The reviewer got it right: “Flood aims to modify the received opinion that Herbert Aptheker was a historian.”

I sure do.

What I argued for in the book, which Hamelin gives no evidence of having read, is that Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted. That doesn’t mean everything Aptheker wrote is a lie. It means that nothing he has written can be taken at face value.

Continue reading “Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission”

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

When George Novack was an “entranced disciple” of Whitehead

George Novack, 1905-1992. Circa early 1930s.

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 in 1933, six years after leaving Harvard.

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. Continue reading “When George Novack was an “entranced disciple” of Whitehead”

Sidney Hook: a halfway house for a recovering Stalinist

“That monster!”

Such was Herbert Aptheker’s reaction when I mentioned my having enrolled in “The Philosophy of History and Culture,” a course to be taught by his nemesis, Sidney Hook (1902-1989). That was in 1972. I was a New York University (NYU) philosophy undergraduate. The class would be Hook’s last in an NYU teaching career that began in 1926 (including chairing its philosophy department from 1948 to 1969).

I was checking in with Aptheker, the Communist historian, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois and, at the time, my “boss,” at his AIMS office to see if he had research tasks for me. The casual announcement was my idea of chit-chat.

Herbert Aptheker Earlier that year I had dropped into Hook’s office at 25 Waverly Place to ask about the class. As a young Red, I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet this infamous anti-communist in the flesh.

A letter of mine in support of Angela Davis, then on trial for aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder, appeared recently in the student newspaper. I had forgotten about it.

After a few minutes of chit-chat I rose and turned to leave. But before reaching the door . . .

“What did you say your name was?”

Busted. I complied.

“This should be very interesting.”

“Yes,” I muttered.

Continue reading “Sidney Hook: a halfway house for a recovering Stalinist”