[MD] Northrop: The Meeting of East and West

[Arlo Bensinger]

My summer "project" (one of them) this year is to digitize Northrop's 
The Meeting of East and West (or at least get this well underway). 
Here is an interesting segment from Chapter Two "The Rich Culture of Mexico"...

"The criticism is that a philosophy of life which shuts its eyes to 
the creative fire in man's nature, to the eros or frenzy in all its 
human manifestations so cuts man's soul off from the fresh, warm, 
bodily, earthly feeling of life and from the emotional, aesthetic and 
spiritual component of man's nature, that one becomes artificial, 
stereotyped, without individuality of the feelings, sentiments and 
imagination, afraid of one's emotions, tense and often colorless or 
neurotic. One's Kantian or pollyannic ideals, being so purely formal 
and artificial, become so separated from one's real, emotional, 
bodily, and spiritual being that the sparkle goes out of both. The 
pupils and practitioners become as dull as their teachers and 
preachers. Moreover, a faulty political idealism is created in which 
the ideal is so divorced from the actual in human nature or 
international relations that art becomes empty or vapid and one's 
political aims become equally unrealistic and ethereal, while one's 
actual conduct and behavior tend to be left to crass, independent, 
self-centered opportunism, the reverse of one's idealistic professions. ...

The initial modern conception of the personality, especially for the 
English-speaking portion of the modern world, was introduced and 
defined by John Locke. For Locke, as Chapter III will show, the soul 
in its essence is a blank tablet. It is precisely this contrast 
between such an Anglo-American soul and the Spanish and Mexican soul 
whose essence is passion that Jose Orozco is portraying.... [Orozco] 
presents man not as a blank tablet but as a vibrant living flame, a 
frenzied spirit, an eros, living dangerously, making his free choice, 
and staking his life without compromise upon its consequences. One is 
reminded of Plato's Phaedrus with its account of human frenzy."

Just as an aside, speaking of "living dangerously", if you haven't 
checked out Ant's video of Pirsig describing his Atlantic crossing, I 
highly recommend it.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pirsigfilms#p/a/u/0/CijYZyOb4kI