Decide as You Go

To the villagers of Minsk in Czarist Russia, little Morris Raphael Cohen seemed definitely feebleminded. He was painfully shy, so listless, awkward, and clumsy that neighbors called him Kalye-keh (a colloquialism for half-wit). Only his mother really knew him. "Never mind," she would say when people taunted him. "Some day they will all be proud to have talked to my Meisheleh."

Mother Cohen's prophecy came true. She lived to see her son become a professor of philosophy at the College of the City of New York, the most brilliant man on the faculty and one of the most respected of U.S. philosophers.

He was a relentless prober, tough as a drill sergeant with philosophy students, a hollow-cheeked scholar who despised automobiles and movies (the only movie he ever saw was a documentary on the theory of relativity). But hundreds of students flocked to his classroom to join his lifelong search for truth. Where did the search lead him? This week, a year after his death, Morris Cohen gave his answer in the form of a posthumously published autobiography, A Dreamer's Journey (Beacon Press; $4).

Voyage on Bread. Morris Cohen began his journey in the strict Orthodox Jewish schools of Russia. He continued it in the public schools of New York City, after traveling steerage to the U.S., living during the whole trip on bread because the ship's food was not kosher. Later, he worked in a poolroom to get enough money to go through City College, finally was sent to Harvard on a scholarship. In 1902, he joined the City College faculty.

Morris Cohen had not gone far on his journey before he realized what his fate would be: he was a "stray dog" among philosophers, doomed to bite at many theories, but never to find one that answered all his questions. And so, he wrote, "I resigned myself to a position of skepticism towards all philosophical systems and system-builders." He refused to be one of the men & women who try to "remake God and the universe in their own images." His own plea to philosophers: "Why assume that where two philosophies differ one must be wrong? Two pictures of the same object taken from different points can both be true . . ." Philosophy, he contended, was not a science, it was "a way of ... vision." It was that sort of vision that skeptic Morris Cohen tried to give his students.

Training for Thinkers. For his students, it was not always a pleasant experience. Morris Cohen seldom answered questions; he preferred to ask them. Like a modern Socrates ("though ... I lacked, except on rare occasions of good health, the courtesy of Socrates"), he wanted to whisk away his students' prejudices. Unlike Socrates, he felt that if their convictions vanished too, there was little he could do about it. He supplied no new doctrines to take the place of the ones he destroyed, gave his students no Cohen-made faith. His job as he saw it was to train "thinkers rather than . . . disciples."

When Morris Cohen resigned from C.C.N.Y. in 1938, he hoped to spend the last years of his life writing down all that he had learned on his journey. Though he wrote several books (Faith of a Liberal, A Preface to Logic, etc.), he never felt he had quite finished his task. Until his death, he was tortured by the books still unwritten, "haunted by the things . . . left unsaid." Actually, he knew that his books, like his teaching, would probably provide the world with no pat solutions. They could only underline his constant faith in "keeping the windows open on the Beyond . . ." and a sort of decide-as-you-go "liberalism based on ... sad experience as well as on hopes."

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