Sidney Hook, Robert Nozick, and the Paradoxes of Freedom

Summary

What cannot be tested in action is dogma.

–Sidney Hook, 1933

[W]e strongly feel that the causal determination of action threatens responsibility and is undesirable. It is puzzling that what is desirable for belief, perhaps even necessary for knowledge, is threatening for action. Might not there be a way for action to parallel belief, to be so connected to the world, even causally, in a way that is desirable? At the least, it would be instructive to see where and why the parallel fails. If it did not fail, causality of action would be rendered harmless- determinism would be defanged.

–Robert Nozick, 1981

PRAGMATISM, MARXISM, AND LIBERTARIAN HUMANISM

“Freedom is a fighting word,” declared Sidney Hook in the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. As a philosopher who found himself inescapably drawn into the strident world of contemporary politics, Hook was forced to think about human freedom far removed from its expressions in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He recognized that the term “freedom” was as ambiguous as any abstract concept such as justice or truth or love. He also recognized that as an idea freedom was shot through with ironies, antinomies, and paradoxes. A fighting word, its many meanings would not easily be recollected in tranquility.

The character of freedom cannot be fully grasped by referring only to older notions of natural law and natural right, as though the imperatives of duty and the capacity to pursue happiness as a self-determining agent draw their inspiration from “Nature and Nature's God,” to use the terms of Thomas Jefferson.