G. A. Cohen (1941-2009) was the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, University of Oxford, from 1985 to 2008. At the time of his death, he held the Quain Chair in Jurisprudence at University College London. His books include Karl Marx’s Theory of History and Why Not Socialism? (both Princeton). Michael Otsuka is professor of philosophy at University College London.

FINDING ONESELF IN THE OTHER

By G. A. Cohen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14880-9

Contents

Editor’s Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiiiChapter 1 Isaiah’s Marx, and Mine…………………………………………………………………………………………….1Chapter 2 Prague Preamble to “Why Not Socialism?”………………………………………………………………………………16Chapter 3 A Black and White Issue…………………………………………………………………………………………….20Chapter 4 Two Weeks in India…………………………………………………………………………………………………26Chapter 5 Complete Bullshit………………………………………………………………………………………………….94Chapter 6 Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?…………………………………………………115Chapter 7 Ways of Silencing Critics…………………………………………………………………………………………..134Chapter 8 Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value (All Souls version)…………………………………………………..143Chapter 9 Valedictory Lecture: My Philosophical Development (and impressions of philosophers whom I met along the way)…………………175Chapter 10 Notes on Regarding People as Equals…………………………………………………………………………………193Chapter 11 One Kind of Spirituality: Come Back, Feuerbach, All Is Forgiven!……………………………………………………….201Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………209Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………213

Chapter One

ISAIAH’S MARX, AND MINE

1. Isaiah says that nothing is historically inevitable. Maybe he is wrong to think that nothing is, but it is surely true that many things are not. If, for example, I had not happened to attend—I was not required to be there—the seminar on “Identity and Individuation” given by David Wiggins and Michael Woods in New College, Oxford, on October 9, 1961, then I might never have come to know Isaiah Berlin. Although he was not at the seminar himself, my presence there was the first link in a loose causal chain that led to our friendship.

I had arrived in Oxford on September 14 of that year, having boarded ship eight days earlier in my native Montreal, in fresh possession of a McGill University Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy and Political Science. At McGill I was educated well in the history of European political theory, and in parts of the history of European philosophy, but I had not learned how to handle philosophical issues in their own right. I could expound, quite effectively, what Descartes and Hobbes and Hume said, but I was not well placed to comment on whether what they said was true. I was, moreover, almost entirely untouched by the philosophy then current in Oxford, a philosophy which my McGill teacher Raymond Klibansky had described, without derision, as “talk about talk.” I was not arrogant. Although I had satisfied my teachers at McGill, I did not expect to shine at Oxford, nor did I feel any need to do so. But I was also not terrified at the prospect of having to master something quite new. I expected to get by, and to come away with a B.Phil. The seminar meeting on “Identity and Individuation” dissolved that expectation.

At the time, I hardly knew what identity and individuation were, and I was going to the seminar to learn about them, and also to learn about Oxford seminars, since this was to be my first one, on the first day of my first Oxford term. At the head of the table sat Wiggins and Woods, and Woods proceeded to read a paper to the meeting. He began by saying that he would call a criterion of identity a “CI” and a principle of individuation a “PI.” He then said that his purpose was to investigate how CIs and PIs were related to one another.

This was not a good beginning, as far as I was concerned. Since I did not really know what identity and individuation were, reflection about the relationship between the criterion of the first and the principle of the second was, for me, premature, I did not understand what Woods went on to say. I could not construe particular sentences, nor did I get the general drift. Woods was and is a lucid expositor, but he reasonably took himself to be addressing graduates who were accustomed to high-powered argument, and that did not include me.

In the discussion following Woods’s paper, things got worse. A young man began to examine Woods’s claims, using (what I would learn was) the touchstone of Oxford philosophy, a particular example. The young man was Willie Charlton, who went on to become a professional philosopher. The particular example concerned a character called a “pursuivant” The word sounded French, and, for a Montrealer, that was, initially, reassuring. I thought it must mean something that follows, and, although I had not followed Woods’s paper, I had noticed that whether or not this followed from that seemed in these parts to be an important issue. But if we had words in Montreal which sounded like `pursuivant’ (such as the word ‘poursuivant’), we did not, in my recollection, have any pursuivants there, and before long I realized that I was, once again, lost. I could not achieve control over Willie Charlton’s example.

I left the seminar in a state of apprehension. The big frog from the small pond was at sea, and likely to sink without trace. As I have said, I did not need to excel at Oxford, but I did need to get the B.Phil. degree: for self-esteem, for the sake of making a living, for the old folks at home. And now I was confident that I could not master this difficult thing, Oxford philosophy, in the two years available to me. Or, if that statement is a misremembering overdramatization of the sense I then had of my plight, what is certainly true is that I was not confident that I would be able to pass the B.Phil. examination. Feeling threatened, I sought a risk-reducing strategy, a way of meeting the B.Phil. requirements which was consonant with my unpromising undergraduate preparation.

Those requirements, then as now, were a thesis of thirty thousand words and three written examinations: two on selected branches of philosophy, and one on a great dead philosopher or great superseded school of philosophy, a list of these being provided. With respect to the branches, almost all B.Phil. candidates chose at least one of Epistemology and Metaphysics and Logic and Scientific Method, since those subjects were thought to constitute the center of philosophy, and they were, moreover, ones in which Oxford was preeminent. They were also, and not only as far as I was concerned, the hardest options, and the Wiggins/Woods seminar had convinced me that they were too hard for me. Moral Philosophy and Political Philosophy were also available, and they were less redoubtable, but few chose more than one of them, and almost no one chose Political Philosophy. That was partly because Oxford then participated in the neglect of political philosophy which characterized the Anglophone philosophical scene generally. In 1961, the “sixties;” which were to put many political topics on the philosophical agenda, had not yet occurred, and there was no commanding work in political philosophy to inspire the student: John Rawls’s Theory of Justice had begun to germinate in the fifties, but it did not appear until 1971. Moral philosophy was in better shape, locally, with Richard Hare and Philippa Foot locked in fierce illuminating controversy, and Alan Montefiore looking on nearby and ruminating wisely. But moral philosophy was nevertheless thought to be relatively easy to master, a softish option; and political philosophy was thought soft to the point of viscidity, held in contempt (not entirely unfairly, considering the quality of most of the very little that was then produced within the field) if not by the paid professionals then certainly by most of my B.Phil. cohort. It was regarded, at best, as a byway or curio. As for the dead thinkers and schools, they were Plato, Aristotle, Kant, the Rationalists, the Empiricists, Medieval Philosophers, and the Original Authorities for the Rise of Mathematical Logic. But candidates could also choose alternative philosophers, provided that they had “special permission.”

My first decision, which I thought cowardly but to which I was resolved to stick, was to do Moral Philosophy and Political Philosophy: the combination was, after all, allowed, even if it was not encouraged. The problem of the historical paper was thornier. Of medieval philosophers I had only a smattering of Aquinas; as for the Rationalists and the Empiricists, there were, in each case, too many of them for either paper to be a prudent option; Kant was also out because, although I had read his Groundwork and Prolegomena, his formidable Critiques were unexplored territory; I knew quite a bit of Plato and Aristotle, but I also knew that, to study them seriously in Oxford, I would need to know (what I did not) Greek; and, since I had not done even unmathematical logic, the Rise of Mathematical Logic could not be contemplated.

I decided that I would be well advised to sue for “special permission” to do something else. Yet I could not think of a philosopher whom Oxford would regard as appropriately major and whom I thought I might master in an Oxford way in the available time. Marx might be regarded as major, but certainly not as a philosopher. Hegel might be regarded as major, and even (albeit with some reluctance) as a philosopher, but I had not read much Hegel and I did not think that two years would be enough time for me to be able to absorb his forbidding texts, let alone for me to be able to present and criticize their content at the required level of competence.

Anxiously examining the Regulations, I noticed that there existed a B.Phil. (later to be renamed “M.Phil.” so that Americans might realize that it was a higher degree) in Politics, and that one of its papers was the Political (and so, presumably, not the other) Theories of Hegel and Marx. Those theories I felt pretty sure I could manage.

In the wake of these reflections, I approached my supervisor, Gilbert Ryle, and I asked him whether I could do Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy, and, in place of a historical paper in Philosophy, the Politics paper on Hegel and Marx, and a thesis on some aspect of Marxism. “Yes;” he said, “as long as you keep your ears open for other noises.” I made (and kept) a promise to do so. The frog from the small pond was now treading water.

2. Halfway into that first Michaelmas Term, Ryle decided that it was time for me to address the Hegel and Marx side of my program. He announced that he would arrange a meeting with Isaiah Berlin. I gulped, and looked forward to the occasion.

It was, however, deferred. I received one of Ryle’s little notes, famous for their brevity, often saying just “yes” or “no” to would-be contributors to his journal, Mind. The note I got was a bit longer, and more mischievous. It read: “There will be a delay, since Isaiah is in India, helping to celebrate—as who would not?—the death of Rabindranath Tagore” (Tagore was born in 1861 and he died in 1941, so probably it was the centennial of his birth, rather than the vigesimal of his death, that Isaiah was helping to celebrate.)

For me, at that time, Isaiah was the author of three works which I had admired as an undergraduate: Karl Marx, Historical Inevitability, and The Hedgehog and the Fox. I had no quarrel with the last of these, but I was hostile to the message of each of the others. I believed in Marx, and in the historical inevitability in which he believed. Isaiah was negative both about my hero’s personality and about his doctrine. My attitude to Isaialis negativity was not, like that of some other young leftists, contemptuous. I thought of his books as weighty challenges.

Eventually, the Tagore engagement over, Isaiah summoned me, and I turned up at his comfortable All Souls room with its superlarge armchairs and sofa. There ensued our first interview, and it was rather a trial, as far as I was concerned. For Isaiah was tough, even severe; the only time, indeed, that I have known him to be so, whether towards me or about anybody else, across twenty-nine years of an otherwise consistently giving attitude towards people and their projects. I do not know why he presented himself sternly on that first occasion.

I said that I wanted to do a thesis on Marx. Isaiah said that that was a bad idea, that so much had been written about Marx that there was little interesting left to say. With some trepidation I said that, even so, I wanted to work on Marx. Isaiah yielded. He then said that if I wanted to work on Marx, I would have to start with Hegel, and that Baillie’s translation of the Phenomenology was abominable. Next, he asked a question: “Do you read German?”

The frog from the small pond was at sea again, for I did not. “No;” I croaked. A moment’s silence, then, “Well, do you read French?” “Yes;” said the drowning frog, grasping the bouée de sauvetage, and feeling suddenly grateful to the pond from whence he came. “Very well: then, read Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology. It’s not at all bad.” “Yes;” I said, “I will.”

That afternoon my friend Marshall Berman and I went to Parker’s bookstore and I bought Hyppolite’s two-volume translation of Hegel, and, for good measure, his two-volume commentary, Genése et structure de la Phéoméologie de lésprit. I am afraid that I have not yet cut the pages of any of those four volumes, and that I never read The Phenomenology, in any language, while at Oxford: it was not required for the Hegel and Marx paper, and I did not, in the end, do a thesis on Marx anyway. (Some years later, I read vast stretches of The Phenomenology, though not, thank God, the whole thing, in A. V Miller’s translation, which is not easier, even if it is, as they claim, more faithful, than Baillie’s.)

3. At my second meeting with Isaiah, we talked not about Marx but about a character invented by Isaiah to make a point about morality. This character enjoys sticking pins into people. When you ask what the pleasure of that is, he says that it is the way the skin first resists and then gives way: it is the puncturing of the skin that supplies the fun. When you ask whether he can get the same pleasure in any other way, he says that he can, by sticking pins into tennis balls: they are just as good. When you then ask why he does not concentrate on tennis balls and leave people alone, he looks puzzled. Tennis balls are not more enjoyable than people are, he explains.

The pin-pusher knows that he causes pain, and he knows what pain is, but he fails to see in the fact that people suffer pain, and tennis balls (which are easy to get) do not, a reason for leaving people alone. The pin-pusher is blind to its being a reason against doing something that it causes a person pain. And, since he is not mistaken about any pertinent facts, his blindness shows that there is such a thing as a specifically moral perception (which he lacks).

I was fascinated by Isaiah’s construction, and persuaded of its point, and, for our third meeting, I prepared a short essay called “Brave New World and the Pin Pusher.” I do not remember how I used Isaiah’s fable. In any case, Isaiah listened attentively to my effort and he responded to something I said by reflecting that, although he thought that Jews should either assimilate or go to Israel, he could do neither himself. He began to talk about being Jewish, about Weizmann and Namier and Disraeli and other Jews, about Marx as a Jew, about the Holocaust, about great rabbis, about the Zionist movement, and about the Bund in Russia, whose attitude to “the Jewish question” was comparable to the one I had been taught growing up in a communist Jewish community in Montreal. He went on and on and I found it riveting and hugely instructive. Our common Jewishness, and not a shared interest in Marx, connected us in that third session of supervision.

According to Isaiah, “all Jews who are at all conscious of their identity as Jews are steeped in history.” I was very conscious of my Jewish identity, from an upbringing which gave me near fluency in Yiddish and a certain familiarity with its literature, even while I was taught to reject Jewish (and all other) religion and also, after Israel’s initial honeymoon with the Soviet Union, the claims of Zionism. But I was not “steeped in history,” if that implies knowing a lot about it, and here I was, getting steeped (or, at least, dipped) in it by Isaiah, in so engaging a way.

That afternoon, so I felt, and I basked in the thought of it, Isaiah accepted me. I saw him frequently as a student at Oxford, and he told me about many things, and we talked very little about Marx. One thing which we did talk about was Oxford philosophy, about whose claims I had developed some doubts, partly as a result of an unsettling reading of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, which said that Oxford philosophy was terrible. Isaiah helped me to negotiate and contain the Gellner challenge. He defended a posture towards Oxford philosophy which was, characteristically, neither fanatically pro nor obstructively anti.

One doctrine then still sovereign in Oxford was the Wienerkreis tenet, brought to Britain by A. J. Ayer, that all a priori truths (ones that can be known by thinking about their content, without empirical research) are analytic (true by virtue of the meanings of the terms used to express them). I could see that synthetic a priori truths would be peculiar things, but, so it then seemed to me, the true sentence “nothing can be red and green all over” was undoubtedly synthetic, and yet not something we know to be true just because we have not found a counterinstance to it. Isaiah said that I might be right, but joked that in the reigning climate one should perhaps not call the thing “synthetic a priori.” That might be too provocative, and some sort of Marrano strategy was wiser.

I have continued to see Isaiah regularly over the ensuing years, and I learn from him on every single occasion. As is widely recognized, his erudition is deep, and it covers an immense range. Less well known are the ingenuity and resourcefulness with which he is able to justify his claims, for they become evident only in his responses to the relentless questioning which not everyone will have had the opportunity of directing at him.

But I am supposed to be saying something about Marx, and I must make my way back to that.

4. In June of 1963 I left Oxford, B.Phil. in hand, to lecture in philosophy at University College London. In my first couple of years at UCL I worked little on Marx, being more occupied with trying to reduce my persisting ignorance of central areas of contemporary philosophy. But in the autumn of 1965 I went back to Marx, having sailed to Montreal to teach for a term at McGill University. There I taught a lot of Marxism, and, as a result, I conceived the idea of writing a defense of Marx’s theory of history. On my return in January to UCL, I set to work.

(Continues…)

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