A Cleaner of Stables

There was something intensely irritating about Morris Raphael Cohen; he was always making students think. In his crowded classroom at the College of the City of New York, Professor Cohen carefully, clinically exposed soft spots in a dozen philosophers. Once, on the last day of a course, a student spoke up desperately: "Professor, you have taken many of our beliefs away, but you have given us nothing to substitute." Snapped Cohen: "It is not recorded that Hercules was asked to do any more than clean the Augean stables."

To a colleague who chided him in the same vein, Morris Cohen had an equally acid answer: "The students are getting information from all of the other teachers. What would you think of a plumbing system with all faucets and no outlets?" It was small wonder that Professor Cohen often inspired more admiration than affection.

Eight years ago, Professor Cohen retired from C.C.N.Y. Now 66 and ill in his Washington (D.C.) home, he is no longer able to take 20-mile hikes in the Adirondacks or root for the Giants (he remembers plays from every game he ever saw).

Two secretaries and his son take turns reading books aloud to him or taking dictation. He is writing an autobiography, a history of American thought, one or two other books at the same time. Last week appeared The Faith of a Liberal,* a provocative collection of his random essays. As much as a book can, it captures the flavor of Cohen's Socratic search for "not answers but understanding."

The Valley of Humiliation. Since he left Russia as a twelve-year-old, Morris Cohen has taken and given many a hard knock. After crowding eight years of public school into three, he cleaned a poolroom to work his way through City College. A Scottish Fabian, Thomas Davidson, woke Cohen to an interest in philosophy; as a scholarship student at Harvard, where he roomed with Felix Frankfurter, he became a protege of William James. Then came what Cohen refers to as "dark and weary years ... in the valley of humiliation." As a poorly paid mathematics teacher at City College, he barely made ends meet, vainly sought transfer to the philosophy department.

It took him ten years to get the philosophy post, and only a few more to become the biggest drawing-card on the faculty. Characteristically, he did not relish so much success: large classes obliged him to give lectures; he preferred small groups.

When he resigned from the faculty in 1938, in poor health, the Campus editorialized: "We Won't Let Him." In 1940 he emerged from retirement to defend Philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was first appointed to C.C.N.Y., then dismissed (on grounds that he was not of "moral character"). Cohen's essay on this "scandalous denial of justice" reflects both his intense enthusiasms and his considerable legal abilities. Though a layman, he has influenced Frankfurter and many another jurist. In his writings, he is as unsparing of friends like Holmes, Brandeis and Einstein as he is of his enemies.

Petrified Complacencies. Morris Cohen is skeptical, but he has a faith of sorts: that man is fallible and should therefore be humble, tolerant of other people's ideas, always ready to apply the "robust skepticism of science" to his own cherished beliefs. Only by this constant "free and fearless use of reason," Cohen believes, can we free ourselves from the "charnel house of petrified complacencies." As philosophy, it is more method than content. That is why, as one C.C.N.Y. graduate puts it: "There is no Cohen school; there are no Cohenians. There are only students of Cohen."

Henry Holt ($3.75).

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