[MD] Northrop: The Meeting of East and West III

[Arlo Bensinger]

Some segments from Chapter III, "The Free Culture of the United 
States". I've skipped a bit to present a line of thought directly 
foregrounding Pirsig, namely the appearance of SOM as the dominant 
intellectual pattern of the United States. Northrop briefly touches 
upon Aristotle, but goes into more detail about the Aristotelian 
metaphysics guiding the early formation of the nation traced through 
Descartes, Locke, Galilei, Newton and Hobbes.

This post, because of its length, is being divided into two parts, 
the first traces the foundation up to the proclamations of Locke, the 
second the cultural ramifications in America that resulted from 
Lockean thought.

Part I:

[T]he traditional culture of the United States is an applied utopia 
in which the philosophy of John Locke defines the idea of the good.

...

In fact, there is much in common between the philosophical theories 
of the Frenchman [Descartes] and those of the Englishman [Locke]. 
Both conceived of the nature of things as made up of the material 
objects of physical science which they termed "material substances", 
and of persons, whom they termed "mental substances", the remainder 
of experience being regarded as the product of an interaction between 
these two types of substances.

...

In constructing his philosophy Locke.. found himself confronted in 
Newton's physics with an established experimentally verified theory. 
... According to this physics... nature is to be conceived as a 
system of physical objects located in a public, infinitely extending, 
absolute space. It was to these objects guaranteed by Galilei's and 
Newton's physics that John Locke gave the name material substances. 
Thus one portion of his philosophy was secure.

...

[I]n [Galelei's] conception of nature, which Newtonian particle 
physics proposed and experimentally verified, the immediately 
apprehended colors, sounds, odors, and warmth do not belong to the 
material objects of nature; they are mere appearances projected back 
upon the material object by the observer.

Newton carried one step further this distinction between apparent 
factors wihch we immediately sense and the physical objects of 
nature. Not only are sensed heat, sensed colors, and sensed sounds 
mere appearances, but sensed space and sensed time have this same 
character and status.

...

Modern thinkers, in grasping the meaning and philosophical 
consequences of Newton's physics, had no alternative, therefore, but 
to face a question which arose almost immediately; namely, what is 
the relation between the relative, private sensed qualities with 
their sensed spatial and temporal relations and the material atoms in 
the quite different, mathematically defined public space and time of 
nature? No error could be greater that to suppose that this question 
is of purely academic interest. For it is the answer given to it by 
Galilei and Newton's physics which necessitated the initial modern 
scientific conception of the nature of man, which in turn, as the 
sequel will show, determined the idea of the good for man, the church 
and the state of the traditional modern portion of Anglo-American culture.

...

The physics of Galilei and Newton gave an unequivocal, even though 
somewhat shocking, answer: The warmth which we sense in the stove... 
[does] not belong to the material objects at all, independently of 
the presence of the observer. In fact, sensed qualities in sensed 
space and time are not constituents of nature at all. Instead, nature 
is composed only of colorless, odorless physical atoms located in a 
public mathematical space and time which is quite different from the 
relative private space and time which one immediately senses.  ... 
Put more precisely, what Galilei and Newton assert is that the sensed 
data in sensed space and time are related to the non-sensuous 
physical objects in public, mathematical space and time by a 
three-termed relation of appearance in which the public, colorless, 
odorless, material substances in mathematical space and time are one 
term, the aesthetic sensed data in their sensed spatial and temporal 
relations are a second term, and the individual observer is the third term.

...

Once this three-termed relation between the sensed and the 
scientifically objective factors in nature is accepted, another 
inescapable question arises: What is the nature of the observer which 
functions as the mediating second term in this three-termed relation?

...

The first attempt to answer this question was made by Thomas Hobbes. 
... Hobbes suggested that the observer is merely a collection of the 
atoms of physics. ... Thus Hobbes attempted to derive the whole of 
modern knowledge from nothing but the material substances.

...

Locke saw, consequently, that the observer, conceived of as nothing 
but a system of material substances, does not satisfy the 
three-termed relationship of appearance which is required by the 
physics of Galilei and Newton. ...

...

Thus it is that Locke's modern concept of the soul as a supposedly 
introspected mental substance gave a new, revolutionary, and 
excessively ego-centric form to the emphasis upon the individual conscience...

(Northrop, from "The Meeting of East and West")


Part II to follow...