Reason and Political Power

In times of crisis and transition the common man is a political philosopher. An example of how, as part of the widespread concern with the basic problems of our politics, the learned world and the world of practical politics today find themselves close neighbors, was the Tenth International Congress of Philosophy. That this Congress, meeting in Amsterdam in August, 1948, has been described by Professor F. H. Heinemann of Oxford in an article entitled “The West in Search of a Metaphysics,” may also indicate how those who think in terms of practical political leadership for the West and those concerned with wider inquiries concerning life and nature have not yet found acceptable common answers. On the one hand at the meeting were the Thomists, or Neo-Thomists, who had already at their disposal some twenty-five Thomist periodicals and who were, in general, “the best organized contemporary philosophical school.” There were also the Marxists and socialists, who, although they had recently gained some professorships in the French and Italian universities, aroused no very great interest. A third organized element was that of Unesco, the leadership of which achieved for itself an organizational control to extend over future Congresses and their affiliated activities; yet Unesco, with its attempted promotion of a scientific humanism, failed to make progress toward either the integration of a western outlook or the building of a bridge between East and West. The speech of its director-general, Julian Huxley, advocating his well-known evolutionary humanism, “fell flat,” evincing, as Dr. Heinemann put it, that “this sort of naturalism … is totally inadequate for the solution of the spiritual crisis of our time.” It appeared also that a spiritual regeneration probably cannot be achieved by means which are largely political.