By MARIA APARECIDA AZEVEDO ABREU*
Gabriel Cohn exercised his critical rationality towards the Enlightenment in a more than rigorous way. His way of relating is practically non-violent communication in a continuous act.
Today, September 29, 2024, Gabriel Cohn turns 86. Visiting him recently and finding him in a good mood, willing and lucid, for a conversation of about three hours, together with Amélia Cohn, his life partner, was one of those joys that nourish us for weeks. I have been friends with Gabriel for 24 years, having been his mentee for the first nine years.
The friendship that followed was certainly marked by this initial relationship, but today, with Amélia and Gabriel, I have one of those few small, safe emotional and intellectual territories in which everything can be said, given the complete trust between the people present. And precisely for this reason, everything is said with great care and honesty, reducing ambiguities as much as possible. This exercise in communication aimed at full understanding still amazes me every time it happens.
When I recall the experience of being advised by Gabriel Cohn, three images come to mind: (i) him watering, with a plastic bottle, a tree that had been planted near his office in the building of the School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences – FFLCH at USP; this activity was so frequent that, on one of his birthdays, I gave him a large watering can, also made of plastic, filled with gerberas; (ii) a walk from FFLCH to Praça do Relógio, where we walked and talked about my master's degree qualification text; (iii) the advisory conversations I had in the parking lot of the FFLCH Administration building, during some meetings in the sun, while he was acting as director of the School; meetings in the sun were expedients invented by Gabriel Cohn so that he could spend some time of his administrative work outside of his office, in the sun.
These three scenes are part of an organic relationship with the university that has perhaps become more common with new generations, following the democratization process that all public universities – including USP – have been going through. For Gabriel Cohn, between 2000 and 2008, when he retired at the age of 70, it was a way of life. He has said on several occasions that USP had given him everything: there he had even met Amélia Cohn, and had achieved all kinds of recognition for his work and intellectual dedication.
His intellectual dedication and his ability to think and ask questions in the classroom, in the form of proposing debates to students, were astonishing. I will mention just one, which I still find myself asking today: “in Hobbes’s social pact that gives rise to the sovereign, does the subject delegate his judgment or his will?” I do not have an answer to this question.
This professor and researcher, whose methodological rigor had as its starting point the researcher's humility in relation to his research object, was in the Political Science department, teaching the mandatory discipline of Political Theory that corresponded to the then so-called classics, which ranged from Aristotle to Marx and several electives of contemporary political theory, in which authors and themes of the 20th century were addressed.
What led me to this world of serious university life was a two-year Scientific Initiation research project funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP. I left the selection process thinking: “no matter the result, I will still study at this Department, which manages to bring together all these professors for a public selection process”. No selection process in my life has been more demanding than this one. There were 20 vacancies. I was selected in position 17. In the provisional distribution of advisors, Gabriel Cohn was assigned to me.
And so, it took at least a semester for Gabriel Cohn to effectively become my advisor and years of delicate deconstruction of youthful arrogance and sublimation of vital energy in the form of intellectual surrender. In the eight years of my postgraduate studies, in addition to classes with Gabriel Cohn, I took courses with Gildo Marçal Brandão, who has already left us, Cícero Araújo, who is currently a professor in the Philosophy Department of the same Faculty, Álvaro de Vita, a retired professor, Fernando Limongi, also retired, Renato Janine Ribeiro, a retired professor in the Philosophy Department, Ana Paula Tostes and Leonardo Avritzer, these two visiting professors who gave a course.
I can say that I never had a bad class and that I prepared myself as much as possible for each one of them. The dedication of the teachers and classmates made the environment stimulating. We had strikes and, at least as far as I remember, if the library was closed, the deadlines for submitting theses and dissertations were extended. The library was not open 24 hours a day, but in the years from 2000 to 2008, the hours were extended. I remember seeing it open from 8 am to 22:30 pm, opening on Saturday mornings.
I just read Marcia Rangel Cândido's book (2024) and I myself research gender equality, so I have to say that I am not proud of having had practically only male professors. On the committees for my master's and doctorate, only men. For a while, this almost male exclusivity in the process of obtaining my academic degrees was a problem for me, mainly because it was only in 2012 that I read the second sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, and only in 2022 did I read Sueli Carneiro's doctoral thesis, which gave rise to the book Raciality device.
But, now that I tell myself, with the help of Cândido (2014), by the standards of Brazilian Political Science, there was a reasonable representation of women in that department. And Marta Arretche and Eunice Ostrenski would also join during the period I was there. Regarding Eunice, I was not her student due to a time mismatch, given the affinity of our research.
In those years, for me, gender inequality was indeed a major problem, but I honestly believed that equality would only be a matter of time. An environment like that beckoned to a social future that, added to the political context in which we live – as we know today – the sophisticated political dispute between the political projects of the PSDB and the PT, gave us an almost euphoric optimism.
In this regard, once again, my mentoring relationship with Gabriel Cohn has always been one of extreme trust. During my postgraduate studies, I went to work for the city government of São Paulo, where Gabriel Cohn was Amélia Cohn’s husband. Furthermore, Gabriel shared with the students, with great pride and affection, the achievements of his children Clarice and Sergio.
Gabriel Cohn was never the desire-maximizing individual. His existence, of unquestionable individual integrity, was affirmed collectively. Gabriel treated me and all the students with a respect that, in my opinion, I can only say was the translation of his way of understanding what a democratic social life would be. In my mentoring relationship, in my memory, I remember an extremely patient guy educating a young researcher. A master. In my opinion, the best I could have had.
Simply saying “the best I could have had” is not enough to describe what Gabriel Cohn shared as a teacher and researcher. I came from a background in which appearances, rhetoric, sometimes unfair argumentative approaches, and petty arguments were allowed and sometimes even encouraged.
Gabriel Cohn did exactly the opposite. Ask him to do an erudition exercise and he would come up with a disturbing question. If he came up with a stratospheric question, he would not even hesitate to answer it. Let me illustrate with an anecdote. The Classical Political Theory course had a very extensive bibliography, which sometimes reached two books in a week. Sometimes, one of these books was by Quentin Skinner, to make it clear the level of reading effort required.
A student made a comment about The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. To change the subject, Gabriel simply said: “I haven’t read it, can you show the book to us all?” This was just one of his always intelligent and elegant and often humorous exits.
This style of Gabriel Cohn and his good humor with my style kind of nerd made me strive to reduce my readiness to absorb everything like a sponge that had long demanded so much conceptual repertoire. With each of my proposals, he would concede, moderate, lose interest or deepen his interest, and so I learned to trust without controlling. There was someone there who was much more demanding than me, but also more talented, who would guarantee the reasonableness of the project's execution.
Of all of Gabriel Cohn's academic production, the article that I always carry with me is the article “Enlightenment and Obfuscation: Adorno and Horkheimer Today”.[I] The article begins with a definition of anti-Semitism that is operational for any current proto-fascist situation. All of Gabriel Cohn's reflections on the theme of the Enlightenment and on the need for a critical interpretation of the Enlightenment deserve to be revisited when we discuss what is real.
I retrieve here an excerpt from the interview conducted by Ricardo Musse[ii]: “Of course, these ideas of clarity and filter are metaphors that I am using here. The important thing is that in both cases the reference is to social processes, and not natural ones, as they evoke. The Enlightenment mistake consists in assuming that every obstacle to the pure radiation of light is obscurantist (a typical term, in this case), because it benefits the enemies of clear and direct reason. However, direct illumination, without deviations and reverberations, is only good for those who emit it (the socially and culturally dominant), not for those who receive it fully (and for this reason would need the filters of the capacity for reflection and criticism).”
Taking seriously what Gabriel Cohn observed above, communicating clearly without evasions can be considered something that can only be done between peers. In any other relationship, if those who have the favorable position of defining what is true, good or desirable speak extremely directly, they will reinforce their privilege. In this case, the enunciation itself would be fraught with oppression.
Gabriel Cohn, at least since 2000, in the moments when I was able to observe him, exercised his critical rationality towards the Enlightenment in a more than rigorous way. His way of relating is practically nonviolent communication in a continuous act.
What can you say about a guy who took the refinement and delicacy of his social relationships so seriously?
An engraving by Goya marked my formation: the dream of reason produces monsters. For the delicate vigil of Gabriel Cohn's rationality produced the most lucid intellectual desires.
Thank you, master!
*Maria Aparecida Azevedo Abreu is a professor at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Notes
[I] COHN, Gabriel. Clarification and obfuscation: Adorno and Horkheimer today. Journal New Moon (43), 1998, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-64451998000100002
[ii] Available in: https://www.scielo.br/j/ts/a/PFLJ77JmnLkpzTC8QDzyBkP/?lang=pt
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