Word: northrop
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...What Northrop calls the esthetic component is what Western artists have sometimes called the sense of life. It is existence appreciated. It is what we know of life by seeing and feeling, by intuition, not by reasoning...
...know this, Professor Northrop says, is the wisdom of the Orient; and in the great religions of the East, most purely in Buddhism, it has been cultivated through thousands of years as the ultimate reality. In the West, even artists were rarely content to render the sensuous world-the esthetic component-for its own sake until 19th Century Impressionism. Yet if all devotees of the theoretic component-Anglo-Americans in particular-can learn the religious value of direct experience, fanaticism and confusion would cease...
This would mean, for one thing, that the arts would gain greater importance than the West has ever given them. Professor Northrop holds that the sensuous and passionate art of Mexico's Orozco, the sensuous and tranquil art of Georgia O'Keeffe, are essential insights into the nature of things-as are Chinese paintings...
Conclusion & Criticism. Professor Northrop's concluding chapters, describing the culture of Asia, argue lucidly for the soundness of its basic values and their availability to the West. A reciprocal exchange is now possible, he claims...
Professor Northrop has a characteristically heavy-footed phrase for what is needed. He thinks East and West can get together by a "two-termed epistemic correlation" between the esthetic and theoretical components of reality...