Odyssey of a Jewish Sage
A Dreamer’s Journey.
by Morris R. Cohen.
Beacon Press. 318 pp. $4.00.
The Meaning of Human History.
by Morris R. Cohen.
Open Court. 304 pp. $4.00.
Studies in Philosophy and Science.
By Morris R. Cohen.
Henry Holt. 278 pp. $4.50.
Morris Raphael Cohen did not establish his reputation as a jewish philosopher, and in the body of his work there is little that is directly concerned with Jewish thought or scholarship. But in a larger sense he stands in the very midst of a great Jewish tradition. He approximated, as no other Jew in America has, the superb tradition of the talmid chacham, the devoted lover of torah le-shmo, of truth for its own sake. And with the Jewish sage this has always meant a love of truth for life’s sake. If Hasidism is, in Buber’s phrase, “mysticism become ethos,” then the teaching of the sage of New York (like that of the Gaon of Vilna, who was a contemporary of the founder of Hasidism) is that “ethos” must be wedded to reason.
Cohen’s first major work was entitled Reason and Nature, and another work was similarly entitled Reason and the Social Order. He avoided the term “experience” not at all in the sense in which philosophers from Plato to Bradley have disparaged it (identifying it derogatorily with “appearance” and excluding it from “reality”); he accepted it as the source and matrix of value but not as its standard. From this, there has emerged the erroneous impression that Cohen’s philosophy was rationalistic, detached, and non-social. The little piece, a sort of epilogue to Reason and Nature, bearing the startling title “In Dispraise of Life, Experience, and Reality,” tended to confirm this impression among those who read it literally and missed its fine irony and poignancy. It is a small matter in itself, and perhaps of no account, but in his autobiography this “stem” philosopher tells us, in almost child-like fashion, how on several occasions he was moved to tears. And why should not a philosopher who defined logic as a “study of the exhaustive possibilities of being” be moved to tears?
There is no doubt that his autobiography, A Dreamer’s Journey, will enhance Cohen’s stature. There is a quality of piety about it, and the wish to write it had been long with him. A letter to his son Felix, who had gently chided him for taking time from his philosophical studies to do the autobiography, reveals why he could not relinquish it: “I have, however, for forty years nourished the hope of writing the story of my life as an illustration of the various forces which have met or found expression in my life, especially of currents which have molded Jewish history and which are vividly illustrated in the heroic struggles of my father and mother, under diverse conditions, to earn their daily bread and to bring up their children in decency. You, and the men of your generation, seem to have no conception of the magnitude of this struggle and the immense fortitude which sustained it. I thus have a burning desire to . . . outline the basic facts of the great epic—the Odyssey, if you like—of the generation which cut its roots in the old home and crossed the ocean into a strange land without any resources other than their own unconquerable fortitude. . . .”
_____________
Cohen’s remarkable career as a teacher and philosopher is inseparable from New York, but his spiritual and intellectual roots were in Neshwies and Minsk. The greatest single influence in his life, for example, was his grandfather, who was responsible for his early education, and who, while eking out a meager livelihood as a tailor, discussed with him Aristotle, Maimonides, and similar topics. To some among us—“the men of your generation”—that may seem incredible, or, at any rate, exceptional, until we learn from autobiographies such as this one how ubiquitous and how pervasive learning, not merely literacy, was in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and how real to our ancestors were the values of the mind. (Even Hasidism, with its gospel of “joy” and “emotional” communion with God, did not, on the whole, descend into “evangelical revivalism.”) Lucidly and without embellishment, Cohen portrays his parents and grandparents, describes his childhood, in a sense recreates an environment for us as he saw and knew it. In reading these chapters, one is reminded of the autobiography of Solomon Maimon, whose home had also been in Neshwies. But Maimon’s, the product of a brilliant and yet divided mind, is not wholly honest, while Cohen’s reflects a mind characterized by profound integrity.
The second half, dealing with Cohen’s life in America, is, of course, more familiar to us, and interest shifts from milieu and surroundings to Cohen himself—to his boyhood here, his sudden transition “from medieval to modem times,” his philosophical education, his friendship with Thomas Davidson (who was for him in America what his grandfather had been for him in Neshwies), his career as a teacher at City College, his achievements and recognition as a philosopher, and, finally, his preoccupation in later years with Jewish affairs as founder and guide of the Conference on Jewish Relations.
Here, too, there is humility, and although Cohen is the central figure he is nevertheless part of a larger setting. Much has been written in English about the Jewish East Side and its varied social and cultural life in the late 90’s and the first decade of the 20th century, but little of it has the merit of insight and objectivity, and most is either maudlin or false. Cohen’s sketch, brief and incomplete as it is, is unsurpassed in its sympathetic understanding of the struggles and hopes of immigrants on the new soil and in its comprehension of the forces, old and new, that helped shape their life here.
Against this background Cohen stands out as a kind of Jewish “culture hero.” He represented thousands of other young men whose mothers, like his own, insisted that they would “scrub floors, if necessary, so that their children might go to college.” And to college they went, and some of them came to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, authors le-shmo, “for the sake of truth,” regarding their occupation as an intellectual enterprise, in the tradition of the talmid chacham. But Cohen was the talmid chacham as such; if you wall, the consecrated talmid chacham, turning to contemplation without turning away from life because some men must concern themselves with “the exhaustive possibilities of all being.”
_____________
Cohen’s acclaim as a teacher went beyond City College, although his students were, of course, the direct beneficiaries of his famed “Socratic method.” Studies in Science and Philosophy contains several transcriptions of questions put to Cohen after some of his general lectures, and in the succinctness, pertinence, and acuity of his answers can be glimpsed the quality of his teaching. The “Socratic method” was used by Cohen with wisdom and to the advantage of his students, but there are others who resort to it now in ways—and out of motives—almost the opposite of Cohen’s. It should be noted, however, that its uses, even in the hands of a master, can miscarry: too much emphasis may fall on the process of reasoning and too little on its content, and the method may induce in the student an unwarranted sense of intellectual assurance, despite the teacher’s desire to render him less dogmatic and more circumspect; or it may, on the other hand, induce in the student with a “sympathetic” and “imaginative” type of mind, a sense of inferiority because of his apparent lack of logical skill. Little of this happened in Cohen’s classes, because of his own liberal and humanistic philosophy, but much of it may happen—and probably does—in the classrooms of Cohen’s “imitators.”
Studies in Science and Philosophy discloses what none have disputed: Cohen’s enormous erudition and his rigorous thinking in technical philosophy. It also shows his ability in presenting technical philosophical issues in language that is non-technical, readable, and, one might even add, “popular.” The papers included here were written over a number of years, but few, if any, are dated, and the volume as a whole is quite unified. It contains his intellectual autobiography, “The Faith of a Logician,” essays on scientific method, and a friendly but effective critique of what he calls Dewey’s “anthropocentricity.” It is this, Cohen believes, that led Dewey away from the enduring issues of metaphysics, from “the stellar universe”—as he writes elsewhere—“[whose] forces . . . create and destroy man, while the converse is not true.”
As a piece of writing. The Meaning of Human History is probably Cohen’s finest book. It does not consist of separate papers, but was planned, to begin with, as a book, and, by way of preparation, was delivered as the sixth series of the Paul Carus lectures at the University of Chicago. Containing no strikingly “new” and “original” interpretation of history, and altogether too clear and sane for the fashions of the day, it will in all likelihood be overlooked. Cohen examines various hypotheses on the nature and meaning of history, discloses the untenability of that view which would restrict historical facts to a single dimension and category, and applies to history his own principle of polarity (according to which progress and degeneration, structure and contingency, necessity and freedom, and so forth, are not contradictory but complementary). He points out the need for a knowledge of the past as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the understanding of the present, and while admitting the irrationalities of history and even deploring the classical liberal’s inclination to neglect or simplify them, does not reject the methods of free and critical inquiry in behalf of irrationalism and intuitionism.
_____________
The problem in the philosophy of history would seem to stem from the need to recognize the uniqueness of historical events and then, upon such recognition, to discover some intrinsic relationship between these events and an underlying pattern or patterns. As Cohen phrases it, the historian must take up residence within the fact (which is an event in time). Now obviously history is not merely a chronicle of particulars, as Aristotle thought it (holding it therefore to be less philosophical than poetry); it has an import going beyond the particulars, and sometimes attains “universal meaning.” May it not be that the “universality” of historical meanings is more like that of art than that of science (though its method of inquiry must be that of science)—a “universality” in depth, concrete and contagious, rather than in breadth, formal and abstract. In saying that the historian must take up residence within the fact, and in differentiating history from sociology, Cohen appears to suggest this without developing it, and he might have been willing to read into Hillel’s famous utterance—“Do not judge your fellowman until you find yourself in his place”—the very essence of the historian’s enterprise.
Many readers will be stirred by the final chapter in the book, “The Tragic View of History.” It is a kind of confessio fidei. Indeed, Cohen is here in the company of Spinoza and Samuel Alexander, and what he is confessing is a “natural piety.” No “teleology” is here imposed upon the universe, no attempt is made to construe history as a guarantee of the “triumph” of the “heart’s desire,” there is no explaining away of the cruelty and suffering found in history, past and present. Yet in his awareness of man’s tragic predicament as a limited and finite being in a world not of his making, Cohen still proclaims him to be a rational and moral being, capable of equating his destiny, through hard and persistent effort, with his dignity as a rational and moral being.
_____________
Legend has it that when the Gaon of Vilna was about to die, his family and friends sent for the Maggid of Dubno to say vidui with him. The preacher, carried away by his eloquence, soon began to reproach the sage, not on the ground that his life was blameworthy, but because it had been an untroubled and sheltered one, and hence had exposed him to no temptations. The preacher went on to assure him that although he was entitled to a “portion of the hereafter,” he was getting it at no great cost. “How would you have lived,” he asked, “if you had been a plain, simple Jew, with a wife and children to support? Suppose you had been in the place of that Jew one Friday afternoon, trudging along a country road trying to sell some wares to the peasants who wanted none of them—and as the sun sank in the sky and the Sabbath approached, had gone on, violating the sanctity of the Sabbath, because you did not have the heart to return home to a sick wife and hungry children empty-handed? Oh, suppose you had been that Jew, what would you have done?”—And the story tells that the sage was too weak to reply but that as he died tears were rolling down his cheeks. No sheltered life is recorded in A Dreamer’s Journey. It was the journey of one who knew hunger and want, who came to the “promised land” as a boy, and here too knew poverty, sorrow, and even despair, who never forsook his own, and was generous in his dealings with others. It was the journey of one who in the measured fulfillment of some of his hopes and by virtue of the legacy he has left behind him, stands out as a Jewish “culture-hero” in America, as an admirable representative of the tradition of the talmid chacham.
_____________
