THE PHILOSOPHICAL BATTLEFIELD
261
sented at this Congress, affirms that reliable knowledge about the
world can be won only through the special sciences, and, that aside
from concern with questions of pure logic, the activity of philosophy
is
exhausted in refining the methods, results and language of the
sciences, a procedure often enabling us to show that many philoso–
phical problems arise merely from linguistic confusion. Most of the
philosophers present, however, were more sympathetic to the Socratic
view that philosophy is a quest for wisdom. Some felt that the
wisdom of the past was still adequate for our predicaments of the
present if only it were properly applied- which no one attempted
to do. But the great majority agreed with John Dewey's vigorous
paper arguing that reliable wisdom could be found only by grappling
directly with the problems of human life and culture
in
present-day
society, and developing the leading ideas which would resolve the
conflicts of values and traditions defining the crisis of our time. At
this point the agreement ended. One school maintained that such
wisdom could not be won without relating man to some cosmic order
of things whose character could be discovered by metaphysical anal–
ysis; the other school held that insofar as wisdom was knowledge
of the values around which human life and society could best be
organized, no other resource was open to us except the use of scien–
tific method in its widest sense.
This raised in a focal way the question of the nature of man.
It would hardly be too much to say that all the philosophers present
regarded themselves as "humanists," but it was startling to observe
how great the differences were among the humanists. The first great
division was between those conceiving of human existence as a mode
of natural and historical existence, with resources sufficient to build
a significant and dignified life, and those contending that man was
more than a natural being, and that true humanism must recognize
some divine order in which men have their origin and end. Among
the humanists who saw in man a creature of more than one world were
not only the orthodox Christian supernaturalists but also Platonists,
like Madame Vial of France, who argued that human life
is
funda–
mentally made up of the experiences of absence, absence of order,
absence of ideals, absence of past and future, absence of God. For
her human existence is a kind of "mutilated present," and the life
of man a life of "exile from being and eten:iity."
