Word: northrops
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Scientific Succession. Every culture in the past, says Northrop, has had a philosophical basis (a theory of the nature of man and what is good for him). Setting out to prove it in 435 pages of closely reasoned analyses of the histories of Mexico, the U.S., Britain, Germany, Russia and the Orient, Professor Northrop concentrates on science, religion and art, but ranges all over the cultural map. One of his basic theses is that the present forms of all Western cultures belong to the past because the assumptions behind them no longer square with scientific and hence philosophical truth. Indeed...
...Western societies have been based on a succession of scientific philosophies, each of which added its own mistakes in correcting its predecessors. Finally science itself took a turn, with the physics of Einstein, that knocked the props from under even the inadequate philosophies of Locke, Kant and Hegel. Says Northrop: "The traditional modern world is as outmoded as the medieval world...
...worse than that, he adds. With no philosophical coherence at the top, faulty and contradictory Western ideologies have been at war, like the societies that cling to them. Professor Northrop wants to find a worldwide philosophical formula that will synthesize the best of East and West. He does not believe the answer lies in the West going off the deep end into the mysticism of the East (as Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and other Anglo-American intellectuals seem to have done). Nor does he believe that the East should drop its own culture for Westernisms...
Method & Error. Professor Northrop, who teaches the philosophy of science at Yale, will not abide condemnation of science as such. "Nothing," he says, "can do more harm to democracy than the thesis, so popular with many contemporary moral and religious leaders, that science is neutral, if not positively evil, with respect to human values...
Scientific method is all right, the glory of the West; but the "modern" views of the world constructed on it were flawed by a basic error. Northrop is not alone in finding this error in John Locke, whose 17th Century philosophy contained the premises of Jeffersonian democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The error consisted in the theory that "physical substances" (space, planets, flowers) are definable only in Newtonian terms (extension, mass, volume), thus have no sensuous qualities (depth, heat, fragrance) but are supplied with them by the "mental substance" of the observer...