CONVICTIONS
Sidney Hook
Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990
310 pp., $ 24.95
The late Sidney Hook was one of the most remarkable figures in American academic life, almost from the time he began teaching philosophy at New York University in 1927 until his death last year at the age of eighty-seven. This was not so much because of his technical excellence as a philosopher but rather on account of his contributions to important national debates, his vigor as a polemicist, and his ability to write about complex ideas with clarity and force. Many of his twenty-one books were about Marx or Marxism, but he had a wide range of interests. His best or best-known books include The Hero in History, Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No - a highly controversial book on the limits of free expression - and Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life. The areas to which he paid the greatest attention were Marxism, initially as a believer, later as the ideology's most powerful American critic; individual freedom; pragmatism, which he had studied under John Dewey, and education, an interest that also owed much to Dewey.
The Right to Die.
Hook had been famous among intellectuals and academicians since the 1930s, but in his last years he became more generally known as an advocate of the right to die. On March 1, 1987 the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Hook "In Defense of Voluntary Euthanasia," which attracted widespread attention and led him to write more on the subject. Hook, who chose the essays in this collection but did not live to write an introduction to them, had the happy idea of including not only the Times editorial and an essay in the New York Review of Books further developing his ideas but also "The Ethics of Suicide," an article he wrote in 1927 that remained the basis for his thinking on the subject sixty years later. His op-ed piece was based on personal. A few years earlier, he had been felled by a stroke and was, to use his own expressive phrase, "drowning in a sea of slime," During a lucid moment, he begged to be disconnected from his life-support system, but physician refused to do so.
Though Hook pulled through and lived another four or five years, he never agreed with his doctor, who had told Hook that someday the philosopher would thank him. To the contrary, thereafter, and especially in these elegantly reasoned essays, Hook denied that others had a right to keep mentally fit people with valid reasons for dying alive against their will. I am absolutely convinced by his case, except for one thing. Had Hook been allowed to die, this book would never have been published. So far as I can determine, at least half the essays in it were written after his near-fatal stroke and show him to have retained every bit of his intellectual edge and vigor. He did much else in his last years, but if he had done nothing except write the post-1985 essays in this book, he would have accomplished more than most nonfiction writers do in a lifetime.
Equality
Among the questions that interested him most at the end was equality, about which he wrote as a dedicated egalitarian and a pragmatic philosopher. No contemporary writer brought as much hard-headed precision to this subject, as can
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