Customer Reviews

The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The title of the book says it all, and not to be overlooked. This is a book that seeks to ascertain the passion that underpins the development of the western mind. Tarnas does a tremendous job of what is the Herculean task of tracing the roots of that development from the Ancient Greeks, through the birth of Christianity, the middle ages, the enlightenment and the birth of the modern world.

Make no mistake. This is NOT a text defining the means by which modernist science came to be the one and only defining truth of the cosmos. Those with a modern western mindset or scientific predilection might be lulled into this impression in the early chapters. But such an initial misunderstanding, to be fair to Tarnas, would be more due to the bias of the modern mind, rather than a function of the text. For throughout the development of his narrative, Tarnas is painstaking in his description of the interplay of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the empirical/scientific. I noted that a prior viewer fell into this trap, no doubt expecting Tarnas to conclude with a denunciation of the spiritual and philosophical vestiges of prehistory, depositing these schools into the waste bin of History, whilst announcing the triumph of the modernist worldview. Far from it. Tarnas' penultimate analysis examines what he calls "the crisis in modern science" and the emergence of postmodern thought, both of which undermined the roots of certainty. Yet the postmodernist too may be dismayed when Tarnas concludes in his epilogue with a broad sweep of the hand, finally positing an essentially spiritual teleological thrust to the very human development he has traced. It may be anathema to those within the dominant modernist science and postmodernist schools, where spirituality and grand narrative are respectively derided - but it is nonetheless a brave attempt to make sense of it all beyond the respective materialist and relativist stranglehold of the modern and postmodern discourses.

But it is not necessary to agree with Tarnas' worldview to benefit from this fine text. The 95% of the book that traces the history of the interplay between the often opposing spiritual/metaphysical and skeptical/empirical/scientific forces within western history is well worth the journey. I highly recommend the text for anybody wanting a broad overview of some of the most influential minds of the western world in the last three millennia.

It may be a little light on the twentieth century history of science. So, if you want a History of Science from the modernist perspective read John Gribbin's "Science: a History" or Andrew Gregory's "Eureka!" If you want a summative account of the modernist perspective on History/Evolution, read Bill Bryson's "A Brief History of Everything." But if you want something that broadens the horizons, Tarnas may be the man for you.

Marcus T. Anthony, author of "Sage of Synchronicity" and "Integrated Intelligence."

I went to one of England's " best " schools, and a leading university where I studied Social Anthropology. I assumed I was well educated - until I read Rick Tarnas' book, sitting on a beach in India, and realized that I knew virtually nothing about the history of thought in the West. And I realized that without that knowledge, all that I thought I knew was rendered paper-thin. I could not put the book down. It was an incredible experience to trace the history of Europe, the West and thus the modern world, through the lens of philosophical, religious and scientific thinkers and, for the first time ever, feel that I could see the map, grasp the background to my own personal experience, and thereby address the ever more urgent questions arising in me about our world.

In addition to the question of at last becoming familiar with the underpinning of the Western way of thinking and acting, I found great pleasure in the way Richard Tarnas uses language. He writes with extraordinary lucidity and elegance. It drew me on, feeding my aesthetic appetite, which I found as important as the content, finally, for this book is an experience. It does what all writers hope for in their writing, but few can really achieve.

A few years after that experience, I ended up coming to study in the place where Rick Tarnas teaches, the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I have found him to be as elegant a speaker and teacher as I found his writing to be.

My final thought is that this book should be required reading for ALL students in senior grades of high school, or in the first year of university - whether studying Sciences or Humanities. The way we think is of critical importance for the well-being of the world. The first essential step is to understand how we have got to where we are. From there a creative critique can be born. And at no time has it been more urgent that we learn everything we can about our habits of thought, and become capable of activating our creativity for a more functional, more equitable, more sustainable world. And a world that can value beauty in all its forms. All disciplines, the entire spectrum, developed as they have been in the European mind, need the contribution of aware, creative, innovative minds. This book helps us towards that goal.

I found this book to be an enjoyable introduction to the huge expanse of Western philosophy. It is obviously intended as a "jumping-off" point for individuals (non-professional philosophers) to go further on their own. I particularly enjoyed the Greek Enlightenment and Socrates sections.

The negative reviews on this list seem to be centered on Dr. Tarnas's equally enthusiastic presentation of the major philosophical movements throughout history. That is, he assiduously avoids assigning a value judgment to certain ideas simply because they turned out horribly. I think the reviewers would prefer to see him assign a value, rather than present these ideas uncritically, writing about all the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Patently, the interested student will go on and conduct his own research, creating for himself the principles upon which to assign a value judgment. I have discounted postmodernism and Marxism based on my further readings, readings that I would not have done if not for the enthusiasm of Tarnas's work.

This book starts well. I found the introduction to Greek philosophy rewarding in the way it made clear various strands running through the work of Plato and Aristotle. Later he piqued my interest in medieval scholastic philosophy. His summaries of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler seem sound. In fact as far as Kant it's hard to find fault with this book.

Unfortunately after Kant things become a little different. You see this is not what it purports to be - an introduction to the history of Western thought. It is the history of Western thought from the point of view of a member of a philosophy department in a Western university - and not just any philosophy department - a *Continental* philosophy department. To read this book you'd think that much of the intellectual life of the twentieth century had simply never happened. Tarnas chooses to completely ignore almost all Anglo-American empiricist philosophy in the last 100 years and clearly has little or no knowledge of sc! ! ientific developments. Almost his only mention of twentieth century scientists, besides the obvious Einstein, is a list of scientists who have prominence purely because of popular science literature - and even here Tarnas is unable to distinguish between genius and merely crackpot.

The book has a chapter called the 'Crisis in Science'. Besides the obvious and well known moral issues surrounding science this chapter bears no relation to anything that I experienced as someone who grew up within the scientific tradition. In fact I am at a complete loss to know what his crisis is - unless it be the general problem that academic work (in all fields) is now so specialised that philosophers, who like to make their field *everything*, can no longer hope to understand what takes place outside their field.

It's not just in the 'hard' sciences that Tarnas is out of his depth - I was astonished to find him citing the work of Sapir and Whorf in linguistics which has now been completely! ! discredited. Tarnas believes the feminist so-called critiq! ue of science to be one of the most significant advances in the philosophy of science - and yet a large number of intellectuals would find it laughable (though one might argue, of course, that this is a sign of genius).

Nonetheless I have still awarded this book a generous 3 out of 5 because the earlier parts of this book are so illuminating and because, for all I know, the later parts are a genuine reflection of the author's own particular strand of Western thought if not of a major part of it.

One last word: readers of this book would do well to review the epilogue first - that way they can find out just where the author is coming from.

Tarnas has produced in this book an accessible review of Western cultural developments. By condensing, sensing patterns, and editing as an author inevitably must, he omits some of what more specialized readers might want. However, his intention is less encyclopedic completeness than a hypothesis about the trajectory of Western cultural change. To this end he writes engagingly and informatively. His synthetic, pattern-sensing thought about history is interesting. He appears overly influenced by newer trends in theories about gender roles, psychology, and spirituality. Here he resembles Leonard Schlain of the "Goddess and the Alphabet" ramblings. By the last chapter he is fully immersed in speculation that many, myself included, find unjustified by the preceding survey and assembly of evidence. However, speculation is the stuff of philosophers and theoreticians, and I wouldn't necessarily dismiss the body of the book because of disagreements with Tarnas' prognostications. Alongside other surveys like Daniel Robinson's "Intellectual History of Psychology" and Robert Kegan's "In Over Our Heads," readers can derive fascinating insights about cultural development.

I've just finished 'The Passion of the Western Mind': certainly the most significant book, intellectually, that I've ever read. But it is more than that. I found with great excitement that not only does the 'Passion' contain a profound, remarkably thorough analysis of the history of ideas - one that manages to simplify, order, and interpret without sacrificing complexity and contradiction - it also affirms many of my own shadowy, hard-to-articulate intuitions about the mystery of human-being-in-the-world. As I neared the end of the book, I humbly realized the striking extent to which my own intellectual/spiritual bents, hunches, and patterns of thought are a product of our postmodern times; that indeed the human mind is seemingly moved by larger forces, forces that appear to exist simultaneously inside the human skull and outside in the world of culture and natural phenomena. In other words, Tarnas's book suggests that perhaps the nature of Mind and the mind of Nature are one and the same! By finding this notion, a mystical idea nevertheless active in many major currents of Western thought from Romanticism and Neoplatonism to traditional religious paradigms, explicitly outlined in the content of 'Passion', I was able to read myself reading the book, as it were. In other words, the very urge motivating my reading - the desire somehow to reconcile my personal intellectual intuitions with the complex, often paradoxical nexus of Western thought, and to do so in a manner that merged an open-ended pluralistic outlook with an overarching intellectual/psychological framework - was itself addressed in the content of the pages I read!
From a practical standpoint, the book provides an awareness of the Western intellectual tradition equal in scope to an in-depth classical education; its 400-plus pages are filled with scintillatingly presented ideas narrated with overwhelming intellectual acuity. Yet the Passion is a narrative that, if one perseveres, begins to read like a dramatic novel. On a more meaningful level, the book gives insight into the struggles that face us personally and collectively. Some of our most "personal" problems are best grasped, I think, as transpersonal historical conflicts still working themselves out in the mind of Western man. If Hillman is right and today History is the great Repressed, Tarnas's book - ostensibly about the interrelated development of philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities - is a book of self-discovery more potent than overtly personalistic approaches blind to their own historical context. Indeed, the 'Passion' actually helps one put the idea of context itself in context, a necessary skill in an era characterized by hyper-self-awareness drowning in a sea of multicontextuality. In short, and to say it most simply: Beneath all the trappings of its challenging, hard-thinking ideas, The 'Passion' is a psychology book that will touch your life in its most hidden places.
The daring conclusion presented in the Epilogue relies on various thinkers - most of them existing as seemingly marginal influences vis-à-vis the current intellectual milieu - in order to comprehend the overall trajectory of Western thought. Though this may seem to some an hubristic stretch that would have best been left out of the narrative, I predict that in years to come this little Epilogue will become the most valuable part of the book (though reading all that comes before it is necessary for its full impact to be felt). Tarnas's fundamental conclusion that "the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being," in other words, that self-perception has been spurred all along by an urge to glimpse the self in an inseparable matrix of self-other-world - this is the kind of complex epistemological thinking that will dominate the coming decades: it is epistemological thinking that recognizes epistemology as ontology and ontology as epistemology, a movement of the mind that bridges the Cartesian-Kantian gap by realigning human consciousness with its more-than-human base in the natural world (this notion is indeed found in various degrees of articulation in much postmodern thought, but Tarnas makes it explicit in a thrilling manner).
This 'Passion' is the real thing: passionate insight that allows the thinking person to grapple more consciously with the multivalent, often confusing realities of postmodern culture. Find it today, and if you give it the attention it deserves, it will likely become one of the most important books you've ever read.

The suggestion below to read the epilogue first is good advice, except that if I had done so, I probably wouldn't have read the book. The survey of the history of thought until modern times is superb and objective as well. When Tarnas gets to about Freud, his own opinions start to seep in, with his clear admiration for depth psychology. Finally in the epilogue we see his full-blown new-age, feminist, psycho-babble theory of the world. Amazingly, this does not detract from the vast majority of the book. Still a must read to get a big picture view of Western thought. (Also be aware that Tarnas goes heavily into the Christian world view, unlike most such histories)

I went to one of England's " best " schools, and a leading university where I studied Social Anthropology. I assumed I was well educated - until I read Rick Tarnas' book, sitting on a beach in India, and realized that I knew virtually nothing about the history of thought in the West. And I realized that without that knowledge, all that I thought I knew was rendered paper-thin. I could not put the book down. It was an incredible experience to trace the history of Europe, the West and thus the modern world, through the lens of philosophical, religious and scientific thinkers and, for the first time ever, feel that I could see the map, grasp the background to my own personal experience, and thereby address the ever more urgent questions arising in me about our world.

In addition to the question of at last becoming familiar with the underpinning of the Western way of thinking and acting, I found great pleasure in the way Richard Tarnas uses language. He writes with extraordinary lucidity and elegance. It drew me on, feeding my aesthetic appetite, which I found as important as the content, finally, for this book is an experience. It does what all writers hope for in their writing, but few can really achieve.

A few years after that experience, I ended up coming to study in the place where Rick Tarnas teaches, the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I have found him to be as elegant a speaker and teacher as I found his writing to be.

My final thought is that this book should be required reading for ALL students in senior grades of high school, or in the first year of university - whether studying Sciences or Humanities. The way we think is of critical importance for the well-being of the world. The first essential step is to understand how we have got to where we are. From there a creative critique can be born. And at no time has it been more urgent that we learn everything we can about our habits of thought, and become capable of activating our creativity for a more functional, more equitable, more sustainable world. And a world that can value beauty in all its forms. All disciplines, the entire spectrum, developed as they have been in the European mind, need the contribution of aware, creative, innovative minds. This book helps us towards that goal.

This is a misleading book. It could have been longer and deeper, but most of the final 100 pages (nearly 25% of the text) could have been substantially rewritten. It starts out well enough with the Greeks, goes through Christianity (without much discussion of Judaism), tries to revive itself with discussions of science (mainly astronomy and evolutionary biology) and the Renaissance, slogs through the Enlightenment, and then gets lost in the void brought up by Romanticism, never to escape. It finally bogs down in an epilogue using such terms as "psychodynamic theory," "perinatal experience," the "Great Mother Goddess," and "ego death," while outlining the problems the author has with eurocentrism and masculinity.

Let's just say I found myself growing more and more disillusioned as I went on. Dozens of thinkers and concepts are mentioned, often in the same sentence. Lists (cloaked as long sentences) are passed off as analysis. The index makes this seem like a comprehensive work but many of the entries mainly refer to the inclusion of many thinkers in a long timeline at the end of the book.

The book emphasizes doubts surrounding modern physics and cosmology but then does not even question the existence of such things as the Oedipus complex, archetypes, or a collective unconscious. Late 19th and 20th century thought gets short shrift. Shouldn't the development of sociology or the discovery of the double helix count for something? In fact, it appears that the book leans heavily from the period from Kant on towards discussing "deep" psychology and the "mind" rather than western thought as a whole. Reading backwards it is possible to see this bias from the very beginning.

The author makes the valid and obvious point that women largely have been excluded from the development of the modern world view but himself excludes, for example, any mention of Mary Shelley in his discussion of Romanticism and the crisis of modern science. It is almost as if women were deliberately excluded from discussions of the modern era in order to make the argument in the epilogue seem more powerful. Especially since that argument calls mostly on men to create a new world view by "heroically" casting aside their one-sided perspectives. The final line? "Man is something that must be overcome - and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine." But doesn't this just perpetuate the same distinctions? Here again men are put in the position to act, while women, it would seem, need only sit around and stay "feminine." Are we to believe that only men face spiritual emptiness in the modern era? And that women should be passive? And that masculinity and femininity are in a sense static and essential categories that cannot be changed but only submerged, overcome, or destroyed?

If you buy this book, get it because its historical summary part - admittedly the most substantial part of the work - is adequate enough (I guess) and then skim the last 30 pages. Sadly enough, there really aren't any other one volume chronological introductions to western thought. Just beware - I felt ripped-off at the end when I realized this book is more of a history of the ideas that inspired the author's own world view rather than of those that shaped that of a larger part of the world.

The more philosophically inclined may want to check out the more concept-based Introduction to Western Philosophy by Anthony Flew. It's a bit drier, but much more rigorous. And hey, if you see something you like, you can always pick up the writings of the philosophers themselves as well, can't you?

This is one of the most important and valuable books I have ever read. I had the feeling throughout that I was being given a great gift, namely: the lucid unravelling--strand by strand--of a whole complex of issues that are so deeply intertwined in the Western psyche that many have become lost in the maze. Remarkably, this book somehow unravelled the puzzle, and left a spacious clarity in my mind--about how we got here, and where we're headed--that has remained with me ever since.

I feel especially compelled to comment on the book's masterful treatment of science. The "Crisis of Science" chapter beautifully summarizes the profound epistemological crisis facing science today. As one physicist put it (Ravi Ravinda), "the greatest discovery of modern science is the discovery of its own limitations." Having myself been raised in a scientific community and employed for much of my professional life as a research physicist and mathematician, I am deeply familiar with the complex issues that Tarnas addresses here. And I was very impressed with the non-polemic accuracy of his interpretations. For example, in his summary of quantum mechanics, Tarnas avoids the often facile and sensationalist interpretations that have become familiar in the popular press, and instead he summarizes in clear conceptual terms the major scientific findings, and their consequent philosophical and ontological implications. Indeed, it was Tarnas' careful and precise treatment of subtle scientific issues--with which I was intimately familiar--that increased my confidence in the scholarly integrity of the book as a whole--which covered many areas with which I am much less familiar.