The Meeting of East and West - FSC Northrop

Traversing cultures and their philosophies across the Occident and the Orient, philosopher FSC Northrop has created a complex and at times seemingly-comprehensive account, aimed, basically, at trying to understand why the cultures of our world function as they do. At its core The Meeting of East and West is focused-upon synthesizing the different - and Northrop argues, complimentary - understandings and approaches to knowledge taken by different peoples. Northrop hopes that by applying critical standards to different conceptions of the good we might create a world that is at once more intelligible across cultural divisions and unified in its assessments of how we ought to move forward.

In reviewing how different cultures have come to understand human interaction within the the world, Northrop argues that his work illuminates the core of why societies function as they do. In so doing he puts himself in a position to critique the outcomes of such conceptual foundations. Why do Germans and Americans have different ideas about the relationship between the individual and society? How is the Catholic conception of the hierarchy of creation informed by Aristotle? Why do westerners seem to frequently misunderstand eastern societies? These are some of the more basic questions thrusting his work forward.

Crucial to understanding Northrop's position is an acceptance of his claim that questions of right and wrong, that concepts of the good, are not wholly subjective moralities nestled in people's minds, with neither resonance nor potential for comparison within the lived world. If he had accomplished nothing else than a review of the underlying premises of his cultures of focus, Northrop would have accomplished much indeed. However, he has hazarded an attempt at considerably more. Northrop sets-out to overturn the subjective-objective divide and replace it with a unified reality - what he terms the 'undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.' For Northrop both the West and the East have something to teach us about how the particular and the universal interact, and what role human thought plays in this system. Whether he has created some form of coherent, new world philosophy may never really be known. What is certain is that his work calls to task many of our unexamined tropes and foundations and provides one potential, meaningful way forward.