Morris Cohen's Last Book:
FEUER, LEWIS S.
WRITERS and WRITING Morris Cohen's Last Book American Thought: A Critical Sketch. By Morris R. Cohen. Free Press. 360 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Lewis S. Feuer Associate Professor of Philosophy and...
...Immigration kept alive the American "ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity...
...To this very day, the dead hand of the theological seminary rests heavily on the American college...
...There is much in this volume to reward the reader who seeks to answer these questions...
...Cohen never mellowed, and he conformed only grudgingly...
...And I doubt that a statistical count of our legislators and administrators would give the lawyers quite the hegemony which they had in Cohen's youth...
...The spread of logical positivism, especially, has gone far toward undermining philosophy as Cohen understood it...
...To some extent, the picture has changed since Cohen wrote...
...Apart from generals, even college professors are more conspicuous in Government than they used to be...
...Here again, however...
...In substance, it is the same as Veblen's, although Cohen regards the latter as lacking "sufficient scholarly detachment...
...An idealist metaphysics still has an economic differential value over its competitors, but there are also centers in which naturalism and logical positivism have become orthodoxies...
...The very pressures to conformity which Cohen described make the escape to "technical philosophy" a natural one...
...He fails to discuss Charles Beard...
...his remarks concerning Whitehead are trivial...
...College students are looked upon as children who are to be taken gently in hand by men of mellowed conformity, and indoctrinated against radical ideas...
...The bar in America may call itself a learned profession, but it is in the main devoted to business activity...
...Whereas in other countries a university is regarded as a society of scholars, in America it is "so much properly administered by trustees...
...Businessmen control American civilization and its universities: as a class, they arc "indifferent, when not hostile, to really intellectual interests...
...Cohen's expositions are memorable when his personal sympathies are evoked...
...Besides the logical positivists...
...There remains, of course, the basic problem: To what extent can philosophy thrive in an academic setting...
...And I hope that some friend will now publish the writings of Cohen's remarkable son, Felix, who died at the age of 46 while editing this posthumous volume of his father's works...
...Function sometimes determines structure, and it may be that philosophy departments, for lack of function, will become obsolete...
...At the same time, it must be acknowledged that basic studies critical of American civilization have been made by foundations and universities...
...Reviewed by Lewis S. Feuer Associate Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Vermont ONE GREAT generalization is suggested by Morris R. Cohen's last work: that "the fact of immigration, so long as it remained a dominant fact of American life," was a principal molder of its intellectual development...
...This experience underlies the somber picture he draws of American education...
...Perhaps, in retrospect, these studies may prove to have been the scientific by-product of the New Deal and temporary in character...
...there are today "analytic" philosophers who say they are specialists in ordinary language...
...So-called teachers of philosophy were professing to be specialists in an unreal subject called "epistemology...
...Such limitations, however, we may well overlook...
...Cohen felt that philosophy, as he prized it, was being destroyed in the American universities...
...This fact Cohen also regards as unfortunate for American thought...
...In large measure, it remains true today, despite the fact that it is no longer fashionable to say so...
...With great subtlety, these schools undertake to say that they have nothing to say...
...So Cohen says: "The older ideas of philosophy as a kind of universal knowledge or a way of life have fallen into desuetude.' At the same time, however, as far as numbers were concerned, "the idealistic tradition continued to be the strongest force in American academic philosophy," because idealism provided an apology for traditional values...
...Certainly the student with philosophical interests in logic, science, history, religion or politics will today find more to learn from teachers other than those of "philosophy...
...Hitherto, historians have emphasized the significance of the frontier in shaping American democracy...
...The law schools have made notable progress in infusing their curricula with the social sciences...
...America, Cohen observes, is still "a country not only politically but intellectually governed by lawyers...
...But they are in the position of the child who noted the state of the Emperor's clothes...
...Clearly, the development of American intellectual institutions has taken an unforeseen turn, the precise nature of which is not clarified by Cohen's premises...
...As an immigrant with a Jewish and Marxian background, Cohen met the closed doors of American universities until late in his life...
...American anti-intellectualism had its roots in frontier soil, and the radicalism of rural America was personified in the tormented narrowness of William Jennings Bryan...
...What he says about Royce and Adler is striking...
...The so-called "technical philosophy," as Cohen was aware, is largely verbal exhibition without philosophy, a manufacture of banalities which, as Russell recently said, has made the subject unimportant...
...This critique of the universities reflects the experience of the first thirty years of this century...
...Cohen's work helped make the proposition less true today than it was in his lifetime...
...This generalization is more implied than clearly stated in Cohen's powerful first chapter, "The Background of the American Tradition," and I wish he had organized more of his book around what seems to be his basic theme...
...The Myrdal work on race relations and the Kinsey report on sexual mores are examples which have aroused the ire of a Congressional committee...
...But, as Cohen points out, America owes to the frontier "not only its revivalisms and its 'Chautauquas,' but also its lynch law and its distrust of the contemplative life...
...Why whole departments are needed for this purpose naturally perturbs some students and an occasional philosopher...
...His students therefore adored him...
...Consequently, "the present conception and organization of the universities is profoundly antagonistic to free research...
Vol. 37 • December 1954 • No. 49
