Morris R. Cohen in Retrospect
By Ernest Nagel

Cohen himself confessed that he never felt quite at home in even the grandest intellectual mansions which philosophers have been constructing for several millennia. He found no evidence whatsoever for the frequently made assumption that the universe is a unitary process, or even a closely knit pattern of different processes, which conforms to the categorical schemata of any of the past of current philosophical systems. He rejected as utterly provincial attempts to map the contours of existence in terms of anthropomorphic notions, which pretend to find a likeness to human characteristics in all areas of nature And while he saw no inevitable progress in the events of human history, he found no cause either for lachrymose agonizing or for romantic postures of defiance, in the fact that the cosmos is not especially arranged for the furtherance of human aims.

Cohen was therefore no philosophical system builder in the grand manner. But to my mind he was something much more valuable. He was a man with an almost insatiable intellectual curiosity, highly sensitive to the variety of colored strands with which the web of existence is woven, and possessing an extraordinarily acute critical faculty for exploding the pretentious shams of our society as well as of the intellectual life. He liked to refer to himself as being primarily a logician. But he prepared himself for the function he believed a philosopher should exercise, not only by learning the conventional skills of the logician's craft, but also by acquiring unusual mastery over a tremendous range of disciplines and materials. He had a consuming interest in both the natural and the social sciences, in logical theory as well as in history, in mathematics and also in law and social philosophy. In consequence, philosophy as practiced by Cohen was a ancient credos to win assent for ideas foreign to the accepted meanings of the terms used.

Cohen was a genuine liberal, in matters intellectual as well as political. He stressed the importance of exploring in a responsible manner untried possibilities, alternative to those realized in actual beliefs and actions; and he accepted as part of his own outlook Justice Holmes's dictum "To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man." But Cohen's liberalism was not a spineless eclecticism, which refuses to take a stand on any issue on the specious ground that since every distinct perspective reveals something not visible in another, no perspective whatsoever can be rightfully adopted. The absolute and total truth is a matter that may be of concern to an Infinite Intelligence; but it was part of Cohen's wisdom to be gladly reconciled to our actual human finitude, and to accept therefore without demurrer the incomplete yet frequently adequate character of the knowledge of things we may achieve. Cohen's liberalism was the liberalism of a critical sanity, which was undismayed by the clamors of the market place. He was a knight errant in the cause of human enlightenment, and on behalf of the ideal of beliefs clearly formulated and rationally established. It is an ideal from which men often turn away, but it is also one to which many men frequently return. It is his service to this ideal which keeps Cohen's memory lustrous, and which calls forth our homage to him. *

Columbia University.

* "An Hour of Commemoration and Song," January
20,1957, at the Temple Emanuel, New York City.
Earnest Nagel, "Morris R. Cohen in Retrospect," Journal of the History of Ideas, 18 (Oct. 1957), pp. 548-551.

Morris R. Cohen helped to launch the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1939. Cohen served as one of the original editors and as a reviewer.