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A Philosopher's Stone
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F. S. C.Northrop, The Taming of the Nations, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1952, 362 pp. $5.00.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
The enunciation of what has since been dubbed the Point Four Program sprang from a variety of motives. There was in the aim a very generous portion of sheer American idealism and a desire to help the less fortunate; there was a note of response to a challenge posed for people who believed deeply in what Weber called ascetic mastery over the things of this world; and there was an attempt at a hard-headed realistic program that would “win friends and influence the peoples” of the world in favor of the West in general, but most especially in favor of the United States, in the struggle with the Communists of the USSR for safety and a world of peace. The history of this period and the corollary assessments of good and bad intentions will not be written for some time; for the present, we are concerned with one of the fragment arguments about how these “worthy goals” should be obtained. The goals themselves have found wide agreement in the most divergent camps. No one has effectively challenged the desirability of peace and cooperation among nations, of increased standards of living throughout the world, of improved health conditions, better education, and the like.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953
References
1 New York, Macmillan Co., 1946.
2 Plate XIV is a reproduction of a Sung Dynasty painting, which is identified as such. The plate is then labeled: “The Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum.”
3 Plate x is a reproduction of a painting by Seurat. It is identified as such, and is then labeled: “Hume's Atomic Sense Data as Associated by a Frenchman.”
4 See The Meeting of East and West, p. 335.
5 See The Taming of the Nations, p. 75.
6 Professor Northrop notes that “The word ‘aesthetic’ was used there [in the phrase ‘the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum’] in the sense of immediacy, but not in the sense of sensed immediacy.” See The Taming of the Nations, p. 76.
7 See, e.g., ibid., pp. 77–78.
8 E.g., one sees in ibid., pp. 77–78, that the differences between Confucianism and Taoism are reconciled, both being examples of orientation to the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.” Emphasis on compromise and peace-making is given as an example. This is done despite the possibility (if not probability) that such an emphasis, in one case, is considered a rational adjustment to an imperfect world and, in the other, struggle is considered to be the ultimate involvement in things of this world and hence is to be avoided.
9 In this field, at least, George Bernard Shaw's emendation of the Rule holds: Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different customs.
10 For example, prior to the last century the types of decay so prominent in China were typical of the dynastic cycle there for some two thousand years; whereas within the last century a radical change in the society, rather than a refurbishment of the “traditional” patterns, seems to have been in the making.
11 Tides from the West, New Haven, Conn., 1947.
12 The Taming of the Nations, pp. 77–78.
13 Ibid., p. 78.
14 E.g., ibid., pp. 126, 187.
15 Incidentally, anyone familiar with the practice of civil law in the United States is well aware that lawyers who are considered highly expert here strive to keep their clients out of the courts; they frequently prefer settlements out of court, and so advise their clients. Does this indicate a basically “Asian mind” in these lawyers—overlaid, no doubt, by some “Aryan influences” that account for such recourse to the courts as exists?
16 See, e.g., his Industrialization and Labor, Ithaca, N.Y., 1951.