254
PARTISAN REVIEW
and inaccurate, I shall report its deliberations at some length. Even
those who are not professional philosophers should find its proceed–
ings instructive.
The Tenth International Congress of Philosophy was the
fi~t
meeting of the world's philosophers convened since the Second World
War. It was eagerly awaited. Never was there a more auspicious
moment for philosophers, the traditional lovers of wisdom, to pro–
nounce a "saving word," to express a new vision, to effect a funda–
mental clarification of ideas.
More than seven hundred philosophers from twenty-five coun–
tries attended. The theme-song of the Congress had been bravely
announced as "Man, Mankind and Humanity," and some of the
sessions were held under the joint auspices of the Congress and Unesco.
It
seemed as
if
philosophers were to return to the great problems
of human experience which had been lost sight of in the special
pursuits of the profession. Few were the
philosophe~
who had not
heard the complaint that when men asked them for wisdom, they
gave them the history of other men's opinions about wisdom, when
they asked for truth, they gave them a diet of methods of finding
the truth, when they approached heavily laden with doubts and
problems, they sought to lighten their burdens by changing their
habits of speech.
The Congress opened on a dramatic and promising note. The
convocation speech paid honor to Dr. Leo Polok, the eminent Dutch
jurist who had originally been scheduled to be the Presiding Officer
of the Congress when it was
fi~t
planned. When the Nazis invaded
Holland he refused to flee; because he came under their barbaric
Aryan laws and because he aggravated this offense by protesting
against their actions, they sent him to a concentration camp where
he died as a result of the treatment he received there. In invoking
the spirit of Dr. Polok there seemed to be an implied promise that
the Congress would reckon with those forces in the world which were
responsible for his martyrdom and for the death of free thought
in
many countries.
At the end of eight days of deliberations and discussions, it
became overwhelmingly evident that far from contributing to the
solutions of any of the problems of men, the Congress reflected the
same crisis of values, the same conflicts of ideas and feelings which
