Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Is Deeply Influenced By Northrop's Meeting of East and West.

by Henry Gurr

I have finished reading The Meeting of East and West. by F S C Northrop. It is a most interesting and valuable book! When Pirsig mentions Northrop's book on ZMM page 108 (Bantam paperback), the ZMM riders are on the way to "the source" in the "high country of the mind" (the first set of mountains in Montana). He has just finished his discussion of Phaedrus' "lateral drift", and by implication Northrop's book was part of the lateral drift.
Northrop's book is a compelling overview of global culture and how to think about the East and West. His book, published in 1946, is on how these ancient and modern, cultures are about to mix and what could happen. His use of photographs to illustrate his major points is impressive! Overall he has proper and very important things to say to us, even 60 years later!
I am happy to report that Northrop mostly escapes my previously stated reservations re academic philosophers. However, as true for philosophers, he uses nearly no analogies, poetic turns, or image based descriptions. He is mostly "long sentence logic and word based".
Pirsig is correct the book is exceedingly difficult to read. It's due to the long convoluted sentences. A true philosopher in this respect but nearly entirely UN-LIKE philosophers otherwise. One major missing ingredient, typical of most philosophers, he has no feeling for how the insides our minds work or even stated awareness our major mental epiphenomena such as our metaphoric responses (poetry) and mental crystallizations (flash of insight or inspiration). The latter two examples (as well as others) are Pirsig's real strengths. Ditto for Owen Barfield.
I would have read this book much sooner had I realized Pirsig based some 20 - 30% of ZMM on Northrop's book. Indeed some very, very, important (and key) ZMM assertions have evidently come from Northrop and probably would not have been discovered by Pirsig in any other way. Therefore a "must read" for Pirsig Pilgrims & ZMM Fans.
I get to wondering how much Pirsig himself read the works of the various other philosophers he quotes, as opposed to merely extracting from Northrop what he wrote in ZMM .
I an surprised that Anthony McWatt in his PhD thesis mostly quoted a different Northrop book, namely "The 'Sciences and the Humanities" (1947), rather than "The Meeting of East and West" (1946).

A Passage From ZMM That Mentions Northrop"s book "The Meeting of Wast and West".

(This excerpt includes several paragraphs before and after the Narrator's discussion of Northrop, so you can see how it fits in to the Narrative.

" ..... His [Phaedrus']letters from Korea are radically different from his earlier writing, indicating this same turning point. They just explode with emotion. He writes page after page about tiny details of things he sees: marketplaces, shops with sliding glass doors, slate roofs, roads, thatched huts, everything. Sometimes full of wild enthusiasm, sometimes depressed, sometimes angry, sometimes even humorous, he is like someone or some creature that has found an exit from a cage he did not even know was around him, and is wildly roaming over the countryside visually devouring everything in sight.

Later he made friends with Korean laborers who spoke some English but wanted to learn more so that they could qualify as translators. He spent time with them after working hours and in return they took him on long weekend hikes through the hills to see their homes and friends and translate for him the way of life and thought of another culture.

He is sitting by a footpath on a beautiful windswept hillside overlooking the Yellow Sea. The rice in the terrace below the footpath is full-grown and brown. His friends look down at the sea with him seeing islands far out from shore. They eat a picnic lunch and talk to one another and to him and the subject is ideographs and their relation to the world. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His friends nod and smile and eat the food they’ve taken from tins and say no pleasantly. He is confused by the nod yes and the answer no and so repeats the statement. Again comes the nod meaning yes and the answer no. That is the end of the fragment, but like the wall it’s one he thinks about many times.

The final strong fragment from that part of the world is of a compartment of a troopship. He is on his way home. The compartment is empty and unused. He is alone on a bunk made of canvas laced to a steel frame, like a trampoline. There are five of these to a tier, tier after tier of them, completely filling the empty troop compartment.

This is the foremost compartment of the ship and

the canvas in the adjoining frames rises and falls, accompanied by elevator feelings in his stomach. He contemplates these things and a deep booming on the steel plates all around him and realizes that except for these signs there is no indication whatsoever that this entire compartment is rising massively high up into the air and then plunging down, over and over again. He wonders if it is that which is making it difficult to concentrate on the book before him, but realizes that no, the book is just hard. It’s a text on Oriental philosophy and it’s the most difficult book he’s ever read. He’s glad to be alone and bored in this empty troop compartment, otherwise he’d never get through it.

The book states that there’s a theoretic component of man’s existence which is primarily Western (and this corresponded to Phædrus’ laboratory past) and an esthetic component of man’s existence which is seen more strongly in the Orient (and this corresponded to Phædrus’ Korean past) and that these never seem to meet. These terms "theoretic" and "esthetic" correspond to what Phædrus later called classic and romantic modes of reality and probably shaped these terms in his mind more than he ever knew. The difference is that the classic reality is primarily theoretic but has its own esthetics too. The romantic reality is primarily esthetic, but has its theory too. The theoretic and esthetic split is between components of a single world. The classic and romantic split is between two separate worlds. The philosophy book, which is called The Meeting of East and West, by F. S. C. Northrop, suggests that greater cognizance be made of the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" from which the theoretic arises.

Phædrus didn’t understand this, but after arriving in Seattle, and his discharge from the Army, he sat in his hotel room for two whole weeks, eating enormous Washington apples, and thinking, and eating more apples, and thinking some more, and then as a result of all these fragments, and thinking, returned to the University to study philosophy. His lateral drift was ended. He was actively in pursuit of something now.

 A sudden cross-gust of cold air comes heavy with the smell of pines, and soon another and another, and as we approach Red Lodge I’m shivering.

At Red Lodge the road’s almost joined to the base of the mountain. The dark ominous mass beyond dominates even the roofs of the buildings on either side of the main street. ..... "

Some interesting finds from a Google search = [ Meeting of East and West Northrop] :

1) The Buckminster Fuller Foundation Web Site shows "East Meets West" as being in a list of some 65 books in Fuller's 1949 "Mobile Library Shelf", along with math, architecture, and design books.

An Essay by Christopher Chantril

“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 the non perfectly formed sentences would come guise ring out of his head as if he were a geyser blowing its top… [W]e were stimulated as I haven ever 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. ......
More at http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/chappies.php?id=84