My friend Aryeh Kosman died yesterday. He was 85.
Aryeh was a distinguished scholar, the author of many delightful essays on Plato and Aristotle, a charismatic teacher, a sweetheart.
I met him at a dinner party some years ago when I was teaching at Haverford College, where he had worked for many years before his retirement. Immediately I was determined to be his friend; fortunately he was willing to be mine. Since he was older than me — older than my father even — and since he was far more accomplished, it could never be a friendship of equals; but it was a friendship all the same. He would show me things he’d written and I would show him things I’d written, and we’d argue about them and eat sushi.
He was — as all his friends say — a great eater and a lover of food, but also, it seemed to me, constantly dieting; he had a distinguished but not a classical figure, and by the end of his life his look was approaching that of a woodland satyr. That seemed to me well-suited to his personality, but — like woodland satyrs, I assume — he was vain of his appearance.
He was vain. You could say he had a well-developed faculty of self-love. “I was always my own biggest fan,” he told me. But you could also say: he was happy. I think he was the happiest person I have known.
That took work. There were misfortunes, and a few miserable, lonely years. In old age he developed a nerve condition that caused him more or less constant pain. Somehow he got past all that. I am not sure of his method. It seems to have involved certain religious observances: he kept kosher, kept the Sabbath, laid tefillin in the morning. For all that, I do not think he had any belief in God. I know he had no expectation of a World-to-Come. For him the end was the end. The practice itself was the point.
Although he did not really believe in God, he clearly perceived a kind of divinity in things. “A life that includes the gratitude, worship and sanctification that comes through recognizing and invoking the grace of the divine,” he wrote, “is a richer and happier life, just as a life of erotic or culinary or aesthetic prosperity is.”
This was the constant theme of his philosophical writings: “Essentially my work is Rashi on Aristotle,” he would say. I suppose that, from years of reading classical ethics as the Talmudists read Scripture, he became really wise. He was proud of that; he liked to give advice. Once, after I had presented a paper at a conference in his honor in a tone of almost hysterical diffidence, he turned to me and said gravely that I must learn to grow up and “be a man”.
I cannot say whether this particular advice had any effect, but Aryeh — more than anyone I have ever known — made me want to be a man.
He could be grave, but his preferred modality was the Jewish joke. Here is one he particularly liked to tell:
Two men were complaining of their difficulties in life — poverty, bad health, ill-mannered children. “It seems to me,” the first man said, “it would be better never to have existed at all.”
“Yes,” the second man replied. “But how many are so lucky? Maybe one in a thousand!”
And then he would laugh.
What a beautiful tribute. May his memory be a blessing you, dear Ian.
Thank you for posting this, Ian.