About book The Passion Of The Western Mind: Understanding The Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (1993)
This was a very interesting book about cultural philosophy. 95% of the book is a survey from Plato to Postmodernism. In the last 5% of the book, Tarnas uses the entire trajectory of western thought to present his reflections regarding the direction in which culture may be headed. Although my comprehension of what he describes remains incomplete, I'll attempt a brief review of only the epilogue:Tarnas shows that the Scientific Enlightenment created a paradigm shift in the collective human psyche, which resulted in a disenchanted worldview and the modern characteristic of existential alienation. The inner tension between the quest for meaning and a cold impersonal world tends to lead to an entire spectrum of psychological distortions and disorders. The solution to the modern predicament is to be found in epistemology. The counter cultural response to the Enlightenment was expressed by the Romantics who turned inward to discover the mysteries of life. Rather than relying on the scientific method, the Romantics placed more emphasis on the emotions, imagination, and intuition to explore a vast array of human experience. But it was the scientific mind that dominated the cultural paradigm. Tarnas believes that the missing key in the philosophical quest can be found in depth psychology and the exploration of the unconscious. Drawing upon powerful psycho therapeutic methods that serve as catalysts to reveal the realms of the unconscious, Tarnas identifies numerous implications with respect to religion, psychology, and philosophy. But the most important implication has to do with epistemology. Particularly the subject-object dichotomy that has defined modernity.According to Tarnas, the dualistic shift that began with Descartes and the Enlightenment was not just a fractured way of seeing the world nor the opposite of the Romantics, but rather an archetypal birth process in the evolution of the human mind. All of cultural history can be seen not just as random events, but an evolving process where every contraction and death provides for an expansion and birth; the mind participates in this archetypal process.Modernity begins in a movement toward freedom and individualism, but inevitably evolves into existential alienation leading to a 'deconstructive frenzy'. Yet this existential crisis is necessary for new birth. This archetypal process found in culture and every aspect of nature is the same potentially unfolding process found within us. Tarnas suggests that a very different epistemology is called for, which has its roots in thinkers like Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Coleridge, Emerson, and Rudolph Steiner. What these thinkers have in common is the understanding that mankind's relationship to the cosmos is not dualistic, but participatory.A participatory epistemology implies that these archetype processes within us are in fact an expression of nature itself. And it is through the inner life of the mind (using a plurality of faculties) that the deeper truths of nature can be revealed. Thus, the mystical experience is not just a private distorted experience of an isolated ego, but rather the emergence of nature herself, a direct intuitive apprehension of reality itself. Or in Tarnas' words, the "imaginal intuition is the human fulfillment of that reality's essential wholeness, which had been rent asunder by the dualistic perception."Tarnas claims that this is not a regression to a naive participation mystique, but rather an evolution through dualistic alienation. It incorporates postmodern thought, but transcends it. "The human spirit of nature brings forth its own order through the human mind when that mind is employing its full complement of faculties - intellectual, volitional, emotional, sensory, imaginative, aesthetic, epiphanic. Then the world speaks its meaning through human consciousness." Finally, Tarnas reflects on the past several decades, with its deconstruction of so many cultural components suggesting that a new birth is emerging. This new birth can be seen in the holistic approach now seen in nearly every field of study (social ecology, feminism, going green, alternative medicine, etc.). Culture is beginning to discover a more holistic ecological worldview that sees the interconnectivity among all living systems and that the mechanical worldview may turn out to be an ironic projection of man's alienated condition. Last, Tarnas shows how this trajectory of the Western mind "has been driven by a heroic impulse to forge an autonomous rational human self by separating itself from the primordial unity with nature." To achieve this, the Western mind has repressed the feminine. Western culture tends to be characterized by rationalism, masculinity, individualism, contractual relationships, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and science. It is an imbalance. Eastern culture (that has not been westernized) has been the counter balance to the west. It’s characteristics tend to be collective, passive, intuitive, feminine, and mystical. Tarnas believes it is time to embrace the feminine in all its various forms as well as ecological, archaic, and other countercultural and multicultural perspectives. The social and environmental problems we now face are rooted in dominatory political and social systems. The hope for western culture is a synthesis between the east and west, mysticism and science. When the masculine is balanced with the feminine, not only are they complimentary to each other, but the balance also enables each to transcend themselves.
Though this book was written in 1991, it still serves as an excellent analysis of the paralysis of the modern world. Richard Tarnas is primarily focused on philosophers and philosophy, but a glance at the present political situation reveals how strong the connection is between the loss of a common paradigm (or even two or three) and the confusion that confounds the global society.Tarnas, though, grounds that grasp of the present in the intellectual traditions that shaped the modern world, and begins in ancient Greece. Though he is distilling numerous complex philosophical and religious views into a (relatively) few pages, he does so with grace and precision. His long analysis of Christian thought, and how it affected our ways of thinking, is excellent, and he also shows how the cracks in the iron theology of the middle ages allowed the light of the Renaissance to seep in.And though his lining up the Copernican revolution (which removed man from the center of the cosmos), the Darwinian revolution (which removed man from the crown of creation), and the Freudian revolution (which removed reason as the master of humanity's future) is far from new, he clearly states the postmodern dilemmas, and makes it clear why it is so hard to reach consensus on any aspect of 21st century life.Tarnas' semi-mystic embrace of Stanislav Grof's theory about how an infant's passage through the birth canal echoes the constrictions of our culture, and how human culture can be saved by the masculine domination of the past 5,000 years returning to the feminine (womb) that it left so long ago seems like the product of a few too many psychedelics, it cannot detract from Tarnas' achievement. And who knows? Maybe he's right, and maybe we will, as a culture, step back from the dangerous excesses of our male-dominated culture. As Leonard Cohen said, "I wish the women would hurry up and take over" -- and twenty years on from the publication of "The Passion of the Western Mind," I feel safe in saying Tarnas would agree.
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I really can’t remember how this book ended up on my to-read shelf. As I recently wanted to read a book on the history of thought like that of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I picked this up since it is relatively recent and thus it would give an idea of some modern schools of thought like those of Postmodernism and Deconstructionism, something Russell’s book lacked since it is written in 1945. As a history of western thought, this book is excellent. I would highly recommend it if you are seeking to understand how the modern mind developed from the Greeks all the way to the present era. It is erudite and beautifully written. The author is extremely intelligent and observant (up to a point anyway) that I was aghast at the thought trajectories he cleverly traced and by which he connected thinkers from diverse periods and contexts with one another. However, as the book drew to its end, I became more and more surprised by the claims Tarnas started making. What these boil down to is that it is inconceivable that the world we live in is materialistic and without meaning. Why it is inconceivable we are unfortunately not told. Also, he believes that our mere understanding of the world implies that there is meaning in it and the subject-object duality (separation between us as observers and the world) is an illusion. That how someone who wrote a history of western thought (including empiricism) that is so eloquent and perceptive is making such insupportable claims is really beyond me. Consider for example the following excerpt: " Why do these myths ever work? If the human mind has no access to a priori certain truth, and if all observations are always already saturated by uncertified assumptions about the world, how could this mind possibly conceive a genuinely successful theory? Popper answered this question by saying that, in the end, it is “luck”—but this answer has never satisfied. For why should the imagination of a stranger ever be able to conceive merely from within itself a myth that works so splendidly in the empirical world that whole civilizations can be built on it (as with Newton)? How can something come from nothing?I believe there is only one plausible answer to this riddle, and it is an answer suggested by the participatory epistemological framework outlined above: namely, that the bold conjectures and myths that the human mind produces in its quest for knowledge ultimately come from something far deeper than a purely human source."This is certainly amazing, especially if you read what he had to say about Galileo, Kepler and Newton in his rendering of some of their mistakes resulting from their flawed assumptions and worldviews, let alone Popper's notion that whenever a theory is non-falsifiable it is outside the purview of science. This certainly is the most peculiar author I came across. I read in incredulity the extraordinary claim he made that the modern materialist scientific worldview (which supposes that humanity may very well be an accident that is very likely not to occur if we rewind and replay the tape) is, wait for it, anthropomorphic since it presupposes that the human mind can understand the Cosmos in a mechanistic framework, whereas the participatory epistemological framework (outlined in the excerpt agove) is not anthropomorphic at all (!!!). I really, really kid you not.
—Carlo
The subject matter is fascinating. I can't say the same thing for Tarnas' writing style, however. Tarnas seems to think his book is a game of Scrabble. But you don't win points with readers when you employ unnecessary extended metaphors every other page, write the same thing over and over in different ways, and use complicated words when simpler ones would suffice. With a good editor, this book could be condensed into a more readable form- one that allows the average person to engage the material a bit better. That said, the material itself is interesting, and Tarnas does make good points here. I just wish I didn't have to plow through a pile of sludge to get to them.
—Maria
This is an amazing overview of the entire history and legacy of Western thought from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary times, covering along the way the Medieval and Renaissance mind as well as the development of the modern worldview. Though it necessarily glosses over more detailed explorations of specific philosophers and movements, the author includes the ideas that are most fundamentally important to how we think today and puts them in a historical context. I now feel like I have a much better understanding of philosophies that I formerly found difficult to grasp, particularly Kant and Postmodernism.
—Sarah
