When I read Tarnas' first book, "The Passion of The Western Mind," I was incredibly impressed by the depth of his insight, especially in the Epilogue, which expressed a whole constellation of profound ideas concerning the dialectical progression of world views and the relationship of self and world that I (and probably many others) had been blindly groping towards but had neither the breadth of knowledge nor the integrative power to articulate. In those thirty pages, Tarnas managed to formulate not only a tenable, but a rigorously convincing theory of how the subject-object dichotomy and the disenchantment of the cosmos (which he renders intelligible as the necessary price that we have paid for the individuation of the modern human subject) can be overcome. Since then, through years of study and thought, I have gone back to that Epilogue many times, always impressed, not only by the unique depth and clarity of the insights expressed therein, but by those insights' applicability to a vast number of unresolved intellectual and practical issues that constellate our current, postmodern world view.
After reading "Passion," I did some research on Tarnas and I discovered that he was interested in astrology. At first, I was disappointed that the man who had written "Passion" could believe in something as obviously naive and ridiculous as astrology. However, after reading several elegant and rigorously reasoned essays Tarnas had written about archetypal astrology, I was forced to reconsider my position. Over the next few years, I bought several books on astrology, and I found them to be interesting, though I remained unconvinced since the philosophical arguments contained in the books that I read (when they bothered at all) were generally cursory and unsophisticated.
Over the last few months, I have been waiting for "Cosmos and Psyche" with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, hoping that it would live up to the enormous promise of "Passion" while fearing that Tarnas might have gone a way that I could not follow. However, I have just finished reading "Cosmos and Psyche" and it surpasses all of my expectations. I think it can be safely said, without exaggeration, that this book could initiate a global transformation of world views on the level of the transformations initiated by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Not only is the argument the clearest, the most rigorous, and the most inspired feat of sustained philosophical inquiry I have ever read, but the sheer volume of the evidence that Tarnas presents blasted away the last lingering shreds of skepticism I had been holding onto. Anyone who reads this book will be stunned by the synchronistic (not mechanistically causal) correlations of events in human history with the movements of the planets. There are too many of these incredible revelations to list here. Just read the book. Even if you're ultimately unconvinced, which I find highly unlikely assuming that you're willing to question all of your most basic assumptions (the primary philosophical task), you will still be impressed by the consistently high level of discourse that Tarnas has brought to bear on this "outsider" (at least academically speaking) subject. It's impossible to say whether this book will have an immediate catalyzing effect or whether it will take decades for it to come to popular consciousness, but I sincerely hope that its genius is recognized sooner rather than later.
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