Meeting of East and West: uniting the world through philosophy

The Prophet Muhammad and the Archangel Gabriel: building a bridge between East and West?

F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West (1946) is a book the sum of whose parts is greater than the whole. Northrop attempts to point to a way on the level of broad philosophy that would allow the nations of the world to establish a more peaceful international system. He suggests that the limits of the world's major philosophical perspectives can be surmounted by building on essential elements of Western Eastern thought. And he has some promising suggestions in this regard.

Northrop was a Professor of Philosophy and Law at the Yale Law School. The book was published in 1946, during that brief period after the Second World War when there was still an immediate possibility for a more cooperative international environment than the Cold War turned out to be. His not-modest goal in the book was to suggest ways in which the major assumptions of Eastern and Western civilizations could be drawn upon to produce a new philosophical foundation for a more free and peaceful world. Like I said, not a modest goal.

In reaching that point, he surveys a considerable number of political, religious and scientific theories, enough to make virtually any reader appreciate how little most of us know about them. A dose of humility is useful now and then. And he goes deeply enough into the theories to highlight important points with major implications for social and political developments. He does a surprisingly good job of writing an "intellectual history" without making it sound like those ideas are the driving forces of history - although he doesn't always succeed in the latter. But his goal requires linking his philosophical points to some broad historical experiences. And some of his assumptions about major historical points are not well-founded, making his broad-sweep suggestions less persuasive than they might have been. This is why I say the sum of the parts is more than the whole.

I actually first encountered this book as an undergraduate in political science. I remembered it as having been substantial and I was curious to see how I would read it now. But the only part of it I specifically remember is a chapter about Mexico. So I can't really do a then-and-now comparison of my reaction. Except that I'm sure whatever parts of the book I read then encouraged me to learn some more about political theory. And that now I actually have a whole range of images and events to associate with events like, say, the 1810 revolution in Mexico, that I'm very sure I didn't have then.

Physicists say that it's easier to understand larger entities than smaller ones. So, for instance, it's supposedly easier to describe the function of a galaxy than of a solar system. There probably is some kind of analogy for history and philosophy, too, making it easier to describe the Grand Theories than the smaller component parts. Sigmund Freud called attention to what he called the narcissism of small differences, which often makes disputes between two very similar groups more intensely felt than differences between more fundamentally different ones. So Protestants are often more worried about Catholics and vice-versa than either worries about non-Christian religions. Southern Baptists and Missionary Baptists can be far more hostile to each other than either would be toward the godless, half-heathen Romanists (as the Hagee-minded might say). And so on.

The Departure of Qetzalcoatl, Jose Orozco 1932-4

So Northrup's proposed grand solution is fairly easy to summarize. He suggests that what the world needs is an integration of the "Eastern" understanding of the aesthetic continuum of the world - "the primacy of the aesthetic component of human knowledge" - with the "Western concern with the theoretic component of things." Strinking a harmonious balance between the artistic sense and science. Sounds like good California hippie philosophy to me. And it definitely has a considerable amount of charm.

But Northrup doesn't get there through some flaky New Agey notion, like, say, one of my (least) favorites, the argument that Albert Einstein's physics proved that Isaac Newton was all wrong and that what Einstein figured out was that we create our own reality. No. And, no. Northrup gets there through the philosophy of science. And he actually understands and articulates how Einstein's physics expanded the Newtonian theory based on new empirical evidence. They were both right in their theories. But there were better telescopes in Einstein's day.

I quoted Northrop in a recent post on how Christian theology and philosophy need science. I mentioned there how the physics of Galileo and Newton postulated what Northrup calls the "three-termed relation of appearance", which distinguished between the observer, the observation and the thing observed. Northrup argues that the three-termed relation was an inadequate assumption and that what is really involved is a "two-termed relation of epistemic correlation". And since the goal is to reconcile the aesthetic understanding of life with the scientific, it just wouldn't be right not to have a pictoral version of it. Which he helpfully provides.


Figure 2 is what the merger of art and science look like. Figure 1 is the mistaken assumption of John Locke (1632-1704) and other Western philosophical heavies about the implications for the human individual in society stemming from Galileo's and Newton's physics. But the Grand Unified Theory of World Philosophy is the merger of the Eastern aesthetic understanding with Western scientific theoretical understanding. I'm guessing that probably as close as I could get to grasping the whole thing as an undergraduate was that he calls for the merger of art and science. Which formulation is descriptive enough not to be totally off-base but vague enough to not really pick up all the cool implications of the "two-termed relation of epistemic correlation".

I love that phrase, by the way. It admire it kind of like Huckleberry Finn admired Tom Sawyer's more obscure explanations: I don't know what it means, but, boy, it sure sounds grand!

But I do understand it well enough to know that it does address a key scientific and philosophical dilemma. In another recent post, I referred to the quip, as phrased by philosopher Paul Piccone, that "the independent existence of the [world] cannot be seriously doubted (or else we fall to the level of psychotics or university professors". But this actually is a major issue in Western philosophy, as Northrop describes well, because of the "three-termed relation of appearance" that Locke and others drew from physics.

Northrop explains that while Locke's conception of the individual in the three-termed relation provided a strong basis for democratic theory and a philosophy of individual freedom, other possible theoretical conclusions from the same relation would eliminate not only the Lockean concept of God but also the implications of his social theory.

Empiricist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753), as Northrop describes him, "accepted the consequence [of Locke's theory of perception] that we must mean by a material object merely the purely subjectively projected assocation of qualities which we immediately sense." In David Hume's (1711-1776) interpretation, this three-pronged relationship became a purely physical phenemenon of the physical object observed acting on the physical body of the observer. To put Northrop's description of the implications in present-day language, Berkeley's and Hume's version left no room for the software of the mind, which was already inadequately described in Locke's philosophy.

Northrop describes the implications of such theories, arising originally from the empirical findings of physics, in a variety of cultural and political contexts: Mexico, the United States, Britain, Germany and Soviet Russia in the West.

Padre Hidalgo (painted by Diego Rivera)

His discussion of the Eastern outlook focuses on China, India, and Japan in the East, focusing especially on Confucianism and Buddhism, and to a lesser extent on Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism and Islām. Some of his terms seem quaint today, like "Oriental" for Eastern or Asian, or "Mohammedans" for Muslims and "Mohammedanism" for Islām. But he cautions his readers to be very careful about forcing Eastern conceptions to equate to Western concepts. And he seems to make a real effort to understand the Eastern outlooks he tries admirably to discuss them on their own terms. With both Western and Eastern thought systems, the effect of his book on me is still to make me more curious about the philosophies and relgions he describes.

In a subsequent post, I hope to discuss some of the historical and political limitations of his book and look further at how his analysis may fit into current theories of the "clash of civilizations", especially as they concern religious differences.

But here I want to use a quote about India which touches on both those themes to illustrate why his attempt to frame a solution for political dilemmas in terms of the philosophy of science are problematic. This was published in 1946 and appears to have been completed before the final defeat of Germany in the Second World War. So India was still a British colony and still included what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh. He writes:

Need one wonder, with all these Hindu, Mohammedan, Jainist, Marxist, Lockean, Elizabethan and Mercantile ideas of the good for man and the state, contradicting each other at many points, and pushing and pulling her in opposite directions, from both within and without, that staid, intuitive, receptive, indeterminate Mother India finds it difficult to make up her contemporary mind? Nor need one wonder that there is indecision in Downing Street also. It is not an easy thing to merge the East and the West under the best of circumstances. It is doubly difficult when the East presents itself as a pyramidal Hindu caste system with "70,000,000 depressed-class peoples at its base" and the intuitive Brahman at its ideal apex, beside, or in the midst of which is a Mohammedan culture, now some dozen centuries old and 80,000,000 strong, dominated by the uncompromising determinateness of a theistic religion; and when the West has established itself under the rule of a Britain divided against herself by her Elizabethan medievalism, her Mercantile and Non-Conformist Protestantism and her Lockean urge to tolerance and democracy. Add to this an Indian nationalistic movement headed by the religious, pacifistic Gandhi on the one hand and the Marxist-inclined Nehru on the other, and the India problem appears as one of the most complicated clashes of ideals which this world of conflict exhibits. This indeed is the test case for any solution of the basic ideological issues of these times. If a criterion of the good can show the way here, it should be adequate anywhere.

First of all, what was then India today is nuclear-armed Islāmic Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, mostly Hindu with a large percentage of Muslims, both of them having faced off for decades and occasionally gone to war, not least over the issue of Muslim Kashmir. There's also desperately poor Bangladesh, also a mostly Muslim country which split off from Pakistan in 1971 after a gruesomely bloody civil war that produced 10 million refugees at one point. If that was the test case for whether we could overcome the basic conflicts in the world, the empirical evidence isn't necessarily looking so good.

Secondly, the example of India as he describes it raises a real question as to just how meaningful it is to try to analyze conflicts in India-Pakistan-Bangladesh in terms of "Eastern" and "Western" outlooks. He doesn't really discuss Islām at length, but he seems to be very aware that it doesn't easily fit into an East/West categorization. And as he describes, Islām first made its presence felt in India within a few years of the Prophet's death. Additionally, as he also describes, Alexander the Great's Macedonian empire brought Greek culture to India, where it had a large and lasting influence. With Greek culture considered a huge part of the basis of Western civilization, and with the Islāmic influence a part of India since the 7th century, the fundamental distinction he draws between Western and Eastern culture doesn't necessarily make so much sense there. Never mind the huge British influence of more recent centuries.

Third, it's hard to supress the suspicion that when he talks about Indian confusion and "indecision in Downing Street", there would seem to be more proximate explanations in 1946 than differing understanding of the aesthetic continuum or the nature of the observer in scientific theory. Like the fact that the Indians wanted the British to get the hell out of there and let them run their own country. That's a more parsimonious explanation, at least.

Fourth, there are various approaches to understanding other cultures. If you were a British imperialist in 1946 who wanted to maintain the Empire in India indefinitely, you probably were looking to understand Indian thinking for the purpose of defeating the Indian independence movement. That doesn't necessarily mean that someone approaching it that way would get things wrong in understanding India. And I don't detect any such distortions in Northrop's book, although there is the occasional phrase suggesting sympathy for the British imperial position. But learning about other countries and cultures for the purpose of taking them over or dominating them is not going to lead to a new era of world peace. And it's also likely to lead in practice to sloppy or dishonest attempts at "understanding", e.g., the hostile interpretation of Islām that is so popular among neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists in the US today.

Finally, his description of India seems to me to be more suited to the notion that Hegel describes in his Philosophy of History that the most culturally creative moments in human history have occurred when two differing cultures came into contact. Presumably, he had instances in mind situations like the Christian-Muslim contacts (friendly and otherwise) in al-Andalus [Spain] during the centuries of Muslim rule there.

But none of these criticisms should detract from the fact that Northrop's book contained a serious vision and an ethical urgency that we still need today. It's particularly interesting at this moment of growing nativist sentiment in the US against Latino immigrants, Mexicans in particular, to see that Northrop featured Mexico prominently as a culture that could provide a critical bridge in developing a more unified understanding of the world that would creatively reconcile the aesthetic vision of the East to the Western understand of the theoretic components of things.

That makes much more sense than the nativist hysteria we're hearing more and more from the Republican Party and the white supremacist right these days.

Previous post on The Meeting of East and West:

1. Why democracy and Christianity need science 01/05/08

Tags: f.s.c. northrop, meeting of east and west