Road to the Middle Class - F.S.C. Northrop

“F.S.C. Northrop… remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call… a genius for teaching.” Thus wrote the British popularizer of philosophy, Bryan Magee, in Confessions of a Philosopher of Northrop’s graduate seminars at Yale that he attended in the mid 1950s.

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top… [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them… and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

Northrop flourished at Yale in the years after World War II as a professor both of philosophy and law. But he had spent several years in Germany in the 1920s getting into the middle of the intellectual furnace that developed quantum physics. Science and First Principles in 1931. Thus he became an unusual scholar, one who had acquired deep knowledge both in the sciences and the humanities.

His magnum opus is undoubtedly The Meeting of East and West published just after World War II in 1946. The book is a tour d’horizon of the great high cultures of the world, including Anglo, American, German/French, India, China, and Mexico. But it views all these cultures through Northrop’s very own, and very particular lens, developed in his Science and First Principles and The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities. In Meeting he proposed, after a survey of all the world’s cultures, that the solution to the world crisis was an integration of the excessively deductive culture of the West with the excessively inductive culture of the East. And indeed, the half-century since Northrop wrote has seen the educated elites of the West taking an unprecedented interest in the religion and spirituality of the East; it has also seen a frantic adoption worldwide of the scientific and commercial culture of the West.

Northrop also called for a demarche between the Anglo-American world and the continental tradition of Germany and Russia for, he wrote, “The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.” In other words, German and Russian thought is post-Kantian, recognizing that reality is neither reason nor empirical experience, but a dance between experience and theory.

In Northrop’s The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities he developed his theory of knowledge around the process by which knowledge is discovered by natural scientists. He spends the first chapter pondering what happens at the beginning of an inquiry into acquiring new understanding, and comes to the important conclusion that “inquiry does not start unless there is a problem. And the presence of a problem means that the traditional beliefs are in question.” But how should the investigator proceed from there? To hypotheses? To deductions? The first thing to be done is to analyze the problem. Having done that, it is time to proceed upon the natural history stage of the inquiry, gathering facts and classifying them as natural historians gather flora and fauna. Then it is time to start making some inductive theories about the facts that predict the general from specific behavior, and finally, in the mature stage of the inquiry, develop deductive theories that point from the general to the particular. All this is discussed, it should be emphasized in perfectly formed sentences of remarkable clarity that gush forth just as Bryan Magee experienced in the 1950s from the master himself.

It is in The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience published in 1959 that Northrop turns to the question of the law and the problem people have in separating the “is” and the “ought.” He disembowels the legal positivist Hans Kelsen, exposes the feet of clay in natural law jurisprudence that claims an absolute rather than relativistic foundation, and examines the relations between living law and written law. His final book The Prolegomena to a 1985 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica which was published posthumously, is an almost mystical work on the nature of knowledge.

Nearly all of Northrop’s books remain in print thanks to niche publisher Ox Bow Press. You can read here a rather charming personal reminiscence of Northrop by a Latin American woman, who appreciated his understanding of Latin American culture. “I could not believe that such a whole American person had written such deep and profound pages on our Latin American culture and society. He understood our soul as no Latin American had.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing