The Meeting of East and West by F. S. C. Northrop (review)

BOOK H.EVIE\VS The Meeting of East and West. By F. S. C. NoRTHROP. Macmillan Company , New York, 1946. Pp. 531. I The modern age is top-heavily interested in technique. Explicitly, there are contemporary formulae like Bridgman's Operationalism in the order of knowing, Instrumentalism in the order of doing, and the Labor valuetheory in the order of making. In more general coordinates, ever since Descartes and even before, in spirits like Occam's, man has been in search of method. The extreme forms which this trend has reached in our own day can be measured, if additional sampling is really needed, by the current view of philosophy as logic. In a deep sense, the whole history of philosophy is a story of method. But in pre-modern times, men were wise enough to see that method and matter must be taken together and that to take method out of this context would be to study a sheer vacuum. All available physico-mathematical measurement, when applied to a violin, could never tell us what music is; we must make the instrument play. The Greeks, like Pythagoras and Plato, when they used mathematical procedures, believed that numbers were more than abstractions and hence that methodology involved more than the merely logical order. The problem of the universals in the middle ages was both a logical and an ontological problem. When this debate was ended, method and matter were united but not identified in the hierarchy of the real. Being, as Aquinas so vigorously insisted, is intrinsically intelligible ; ens et verum convertuntur. Today, being is viewed as intelligible in terms of outside relations, and method has become detached as a machine with a crankshaft to make being intelligible. No longer do we h~J.ve being as self-evident, as coequal with truth. Man is on a treadmill; we need a method to study the bridge between method, when re-applied to matter, and the matter itself. Our machine is in constant breakdowns, always needing an (n +1) th method to study the nth. Once we deny the self-evidence that being is intrinsically intelligible, we can never get back to the inner, ultimate natures of things, no matter how refined our method may be. Ultimately and basically the universe thus becomes an indifferent tabula rasa for man. Sanities like truth and certitude, meaning and value, which alone can rescue modern man from his intellectual anarchy and save our culture, are entombed. 253 254 BOOK REVIEWS Prof. Northrop, in his brilliantly written book, makes the proposal of a mere matterless method as a philosophy of the real and as the basis for the meeting between East and West. Nowhere conceding the relation between self-evidence and intelligibility, he is willing to admit that the content of thought may undergo radical, continuous change like the universe of Heraclitus. The constant in s·uch change is mere method. The so-called scientific procedure is elevated to a philosophical principle into which, it would seem, the theoretical component of knowledge, emphasized by Western thought, and the intuitive component, of the East, can be compatibly distributed. In the broad bosom of the scientific method, it appears, the intellectual problems of man and his cultures are to be resolved. But how can mere method establish agreement among men and how can it ever enter into communion with the content that men live by, in, and for? How, moreover, can method ever enter into contact with anything outside its own self? II The method employed by Prof. Northrop himself, in developing his central thesis, is an historical one. He discusses the chief components of various nationalities and cultures, drawing in the end inductive generalizations to exemplify. his general theme. He then proposes a method for harmonizing the diverging national and cultural aspects of the knowledge problem. Mexico is examined and depicted as a mixture of various world views. On the one hand, there is a genus of art, philosophy, and institution which reflects " the Spanish and Mexican soul whose essence is passion . . ." (p. 55) In this view is seen the intuitive, aesthetic component of thought. Expressive of this spirit is the painting of Jose Orozco whose...