A Cheer for the Great Western Values
COHEN, JACOB
WRITERS and WRITING A Cheer for the Great Western Values Philosophy for a Time of Crisis. Edited by Adrienne Koch. Button. 382 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Jacob Cohen Professor of History, Brandeis...
...it never comes to grips with philosophy itself...
...There is a confusion here about the function philosophy performs in relation to its epoch...
...3) The belief that because there is this universal moral order, discoverable by men, there is also a universe of moral discourse within which all men can participate...
...Can a philosopher know he is a poet and remain a philosopher...
...He understands, for example, why almost all the contributors to this volume, and all the best of them, speak deeply from a particular historical tradition: Buber, the Jew...
...I do not wish to suggest that Miss Koch herself has no philosophic preferences: she does and she states them clearly, but at the same time the range of tolerance exhibited in her collection is so manifold as to make any preferences dubious...
...But positivism will not be changed by name-calling...
...Historicism is a principal cause of the intellectual crisis of our day...
...Reviewed by Jacob Cohen Professor of History, Brandeis University MORE THAN MOST collections, Philosophy for a Time of Crisis aims to draw a unified philosophic portrait...
...The editor may insist that these men are only using different methods to arrive at the same truths, but we must be wary of supposing that men who speak the same words are also uttering the same thoughts...
...Look," the book seems to proclaim to the modern skeptics, Communists and positivists, "see how all these famous men, all of them writing after World War II, can still stand witness to our great Western values...
...The goals which philosophers finally enunciate must be true to their philosophizing...
...Who are you to demur...
...And they collectively support too what she assumes are concomitant values of this position: the belief in the necessity for a new world community and the belief in a "system of personal and political freedom...
...Can a Sidney Hook really believe that he and Niebuhr or Radhakrish-nan are saying the same thing from different historical perspectives, and still remain the Sidney Hook we know and learn from...
...Is the moral universe of the scientist Einstein, impersonal as an equation, the same moral universe as Buber's, illuminated as it is at every moment by intensely personal encounter...
...To the historian, philosophy is historical poetry...
...One should hardly object to such therapy...
...To begin with, Miss Koch, like the philosophes of all ages, tends to confuse philosophy with wisdom...
...Maritain, the Catholic...
...Philosophy does more than enunciate goals and values for its civilization...
...Karl Jaspers...
...Russell, the rationalist...
...For all its high seriousness it is another in what has become a plethora of calls for more positive thinking by our intellectuals and is as vacuous as all such calls...
...But history is not philosophy...
...The book's unity is forged from the perspective of Adrienne Koch's own philosophy, a philosophy which she outlines in an extended introduction, which she then embodies in the heart of the book, with the help of some frankly tendentious editing, and which she finally clinches in a neat postscript...
...I cannot see how we can claim to have alleviated that crisis unless we bring historicism more decisively to terms than Miss Koch has here...
...it must consider perennial problems of knowledge, being, value and human nature, purely, with fidelity to its craft and independent of the pragmatic needs of its civilization...
...if it is to change, it will be a change wrought with that painstaking and excruciating honesty of purpose which is the sine qua non of the positivist mind...
...The aides she enlists in support of her position are "fifteen great modern thinkers"— Toynbee, Einstein, Silone, Forster, J. M. Clark, Fromm, Buber, Mari-tain, Niebuhr, Radhakrishnan, Sartre, Popper, Russell, Hook and Jaspers —and the philosophy they are made to serve is becoming increasingly familiar these days...
...Is "freedom" for Sartre, the radical existentialist for whom essence is the greatest obstacle to freedom, the same "freedom" which Maritain speaks of, Maritain who believes that man is only free when fulfilling his true essence...
...When historical empathy replaces reason the philosopher has become the impresario and not the artist...
...In one way or another all the writers in this volume share the editor's belief in freedom, the moral order and the possibility of moral discourse...
...And this criticism holds as well for her final contributor, the person in whose position she stands most exactly...
...For the modern philosophe historical empathy is added to reason in order to unify the discourse...
...But they do so for drastically different, and, I would argue, mutually exclusive, philosophic reasons...
...Miss Koch rightly excoriates the parochialism of the logical posi-tivists (the vanguard at our universities) and...
...For the 18th-century philosopher the mode of discovering moral truth was termed "reason...
...Miss Koch might be called an updated philosophe...
...It is, I suppose, true that all the thinkers Miss Koch has marshalled here stand for freedom, morality, democracy, etc...
...One of the thousand separate things a civilization does is philosophize about abstruse subjects...
...Taken together, then, this is a forceful and weighty cheer for the great Western values written for an age which has come to doubt these values...
...The historian understands, as an item of self-knowledge, that all human existence is radically historical, that man is recognizably man only in his particularity, in his historical uniqueness...
...The philosopher may be a reflection of his time but he is so without knowing this about himself, or at least without making that knowledge an aspect of his inquiry...
...Niebuhr, the Protestant...
...yes, the truth of his statement...
...What truth he encounters in it is not always the truth indicated by its surfaces...
...Miss Koch, who is a fine historian in her own right, has a feel for the historicity of all philosophy...
...Miss Koch recognizes this briefly in her concluding pages when she records certain technical objections to the positivist position, but the entire drift of her book, which is syncretic in the extreme, is impatient with real philosophizing and thereby weakens its own claims as a philosophy for our time...
...Finally, Miss Koch has not recognized fully enough the deadening seed which is planted in philosophy's soil when we substitute historical empathy for reason as the mode of moral discourse...
...That is, can a philosopher know, as an item of self-knowledge, that his philosophy is but one of an almost limitless variety of valid human utterances and still retain a conviction in the momentousness, the ultimateness...
...It is in this last notion that Miss Koch updates the philosophes...
...Yet, I feel, there are some characteristic confusions and dangers in this position which render it useless as a philosophy for the modern age...
...As a modern, who has learned well what recent history and anthropology have to teach, Miss Koch is more receptive than her prototypes to the myriad other ways in which men encounter and convey truth...
...Her key concepts are the central beliefs of the Enlightenment: (1) The belief in the freedom and dignity of man, the notion, as Miss Koch puts it, "that man can make his own history so that he will be free to realize his best nature...
...Consider the array of strange philosophic bedfellows who are here mated: existentialists and rationalists, relativists and absolutists, humanists and ontologists, exponents of scientific method and recipients of revelation, atheists and believers...
...2) The belief that there is a moral order which pervades the universe and that, therefore, man, who is constituent with this universe, can discover values which he may recognize, without intellectual complications, as valuable...
...to be sure, positivism is a reflection of the gutlessness of the modern age...
...the supposed reasonableness of all enlightened men assured the possibility of universal discourse, and only the reasoners were permitted to enter into it...
...In the last analysis this book only advocates that there be a new philosophy...
...Is not this conviction of momentousness, ultimateness and truth the prerequisite of philosophic expression...
...What have we left philosophically when we factor out the common denominator between Sartre and Maritain, Buber and Einstein...
...Fromm, the Aristotelian humanist...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 47
