The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas (PDF)

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The most lucid and concise presentation I have read, of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a novel… It is really a noble performance.–Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand FacesHere are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Tarnas charts the development of Western thought from the ancient Greeks, throwing a sharp light on ideas central to the modern outlook. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review “It is a superb, enthralling book–a masterpiece: as gripping as a detective story; as moving as a poem. Tarnas writes lucidly, brilliantly, passionately, unfolding the great drama of the evolution of the Western mind act by act, scene by scene in precise and scholarly detail.”–Anne Baring, Resurgence”One of the most illuminating, satisfying, beautifully written, lucidly argued–and important–books I have ever read.”–Keith Thompson, Utne Reader”This brilliant classic is essential reading.”–David LorimerThe Scientific and Medical Network Review”The most thrilling narrative of the West’s 3,000-year odyssey in pursuit of truth accessible to a broad public of which this reviewer is aware. . . . A work of genius.”–Harrison Sheppard, The Hellenic Journal”[This] magnificent critical survey . . . allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture as if for the first time.”–Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle”It is stunning; it is brilliant; it is the single best book of intellectual history–in any field–that I have ever read.”–William TanksleyProfessor of English, Fordham University”[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the ‘West’s mainstream high culture’ and the ‘radically changing world’ of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike….Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time.” – San Francisco Chronicle “The Passion of the Western Mind is as fine an account of the story of the Western mind, in all of its complexity and tensions, as I believe exists anywhere.”–Dale CannonProfessor of Philosophy, Western Oregon State College From the Publisher “No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey. Its scholarship is impeccable….For its length it is the best intellectual history of the West I have ever seen.” –Huston Smith, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley “The most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines of what every student should know about the history of Western thought.”–Joseph Campbell From the Inside Flap Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume. From the Back Cover “[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the ‘Westt’s mainstream high culture’ and the ‘radically changing world’ of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike….Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time.”SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEHere are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume. About the Author Richard Tarnas was born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents. He grew up in Michigan, where he studied Greek, Latin, and the classics under the Jesuits. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, James Hillman, and Stanislav Grof, and later served as director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought which became a best seller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. He is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. He gives many public lectures and workshops in the U.S. and abroad. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Greek World View To approach what was distinctive in a vision as complex and protean as that of the Greeks, let us begin by examining one of its most striking characteristics—a sustained, highly diversified tendency to interpret the world in terms of archetypal principles. This tendency was in evidence throughout Greek culture from the Homeric epics onward, though it first emerged in philosophically elaborate form in the intellectual crucible of Athens between the latter part of the fifth century B.C. and the middle of the fourth. Associated with the figure of Socrates, it there received its foundational and in some respects definitive formulation in the dialogues of Plato. At its basis was a view of the cosmos as an ordered expression of certain primordial essences or transcendent first principles, variously conceived as Forms, Ideas, universals, changeless absolutes, immortal deities, divine archai, and archetypes. Although this perspective took on a number of distinct inflections, and although there were important countercurrents to this view, it would appear that not only Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and Pythagoras before them and Plotinus after, but indeed Homer and Hesiod, Aeschylus and Sophocles all expressed something like a common vision, reflecting a typically Greek propensity to see clarifying universals in the chaos of life. Speaking in these broad terms, and mindful of the inexactness of such generalities, we may say that the Greek universe was ordered by a plurality of timeless essences which underlay concrete reality, giving it form and meaning. These archetypal principles included the mathematical forms of geometry and arithmetic; cosmic opposites such as light and dark, male and female, love and hate, unity and multiplicity; the forms of man (anthrōpos) and other living creatures; and the Ideas of the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, and other absolute moral and aesthetic values. In the pre-philosophical Greek mind, these archetypal principles took the form of mythic personifications such as Eros, Chaos, Heaven and Earth (Ouranos and Gaia), as well as more fully personified figures such as Zeus, Prometheus, and Aphrodite. In this perspective, every aspect of existence was patterned and permeated by such fundamentals. Despite the continuous flux of phenomena in both the outer world and inner experience, there could yet be distinguished specific immutable structures or essences, so definite and enduring they were believed to possess an independent reality of their own. It was upon this apparent immutability and independence that Plato based both his metaphysics and his theory of knowledge. Because the archetypal perspective outlined here provides a useful point of departure for entering into the Greek world view, and because Plato was that perspective’s preeminent theoretician and apologist, whose thought would become the single most important foundation for the evolution of the Western mind, we shall begin by discussing the Platonic doctrine of Forms. In subsequent chapters, we shall pursue the historical development of the Greek vision as a whole, and thereby attend to the complex dialectic that led to Plato’s thought, and to the equally complex consequences that followed from it. Yet to approach Plato, we must bear in mind his unsystematic, often tentative, and even ironic style of presenting his philosophy. We should bear in mind too the inevitable and no doubt often deliberate ambiguities inherent in his chosen literary mode, the dramatic dialogue. Finally, we must recall the range, variability, and growth of his thought over a period of some fifty years. With these qualifications, then, we may make a provisional attempt to set forth certain prominent ideas and principles suggested by his writings. Our tacit guide in this interpretive effort will be the Platonic tradition itself, which preserved and developed a specific philosophical perspective it regarded as originating with Plato. Having established that pivotal position within the Greek mind, we can then move backward and forward—retrospectively to the early mythological and Presocratic traditions, and then onward to Aristotle. The Archetypal Forms What has been commonly understood as Platonism revolves around its cardinal doctrine, the asserted existence of the archetypal Ideas or Forms. That assertion demands a partial shift, though a profound one, from what has come to be our usual approach to reality. To understand this shift, we must first ask, “What is the precise relation between the Platonic Forms or Ideas and the empirical world of everyday reality?” Upon this question turns the entire conception. (Plato used the Greek words idea and eidos interchangeably. Idea was taken over into Latin and English, while eidos was translated into Latin as forma and into English as “form.”) It is crucial to the Platonic understanding that these Forms are primary, while the visible objects of conventional reality are their direct derivatives. Platonic Forms are not conceptual abstractions that the human mind creates by generalizing from a class of particulars. Rather, they possess a quality of being, a degree of reality, that is superior to that of the concrete world. Platonic archetypes form the world and also stand beyond it. They manifest themselves within time and yet are timeless. They constitute the veiled essence of things. Plato taught that what is perceived as a particular object in the world can best be understood as a concrete expression of a more fundamental Idea, an archetype which gives that object its special structure and condition. A particular thing is what it is by virtue of the Idea informing it. Something is “beautiful” to the exact extent that the archetype of Beauty is present in it. When one falls in love, it is Beauty (or Aphrodite) that one recognizes and surrenders to, the beloved object being Beauty’s instrument or vessel. The essential factor in the event is the archetype, and it is this level that carries the deepest meaning. It could be objected that this is not the way one experiences an event of this sort. What actually attracts one is not an archetype but a specific person, or a concrete work of art, or some other beautiful object. Beauty is only an attribute of the particular, not its essence. The Platonist argues, however, that this objection rests on a limited perception of the event. It is true, he answers, that the ordinary person is not directly aware of an archetypal level, despite its reality. But Plato described how a philosopher who has observed many objects of beauty, and who has long reflected on the matter, may suddenly glimpse absolute beauty—Beauty itself, supreme, pure, eternal, and not relative to any specific person or thing. The philosopher thereby recognizes the Form or Idea that underlies all beautiful phenomena. He unveils the authentic reality behind the appearance. If something is beautiful, it is so because it “participates” in the absolute Form of Beauty. Plato’s mentor, Socrates, had sought to know what was common to all virtuous acts, so that he could evaluate how one should govern one’s conduct in life. He reasoned that if one wishes to choose actions that are good, one must know what “good” is, apart from any specific circumstances. To evaluate one thing as “better” than another assumes the existence of an absolute good with which the two relative goods can be compared. Otherwise the word “good” would be only a word whose meaning had no stable basis in reality, and human morality would lack a secure foundation. Similarly, unless there was some absolute basis for evaluating acts as just or unjust, then every act called “just” would be a relative matter of uncertain virtue. When those who engaged in dialogue with Socrates espoused popular notions of justice and injustice, or of good and evil, he subjected these to careful analysis and showed them to be arbitrary, full of internal contradictions and without any substantial basis. Because Socrates and Plato believed that knowledge of virtue was necessary for a person to live a life of virtue, objective universal concepts of justice and goodness seemed imperative for a genuine ethics. Without such changeless constants that transcended the vagaries of human conventions and political institutions, human beings would possess no firm foundation for ascertaining true values, and would thus be subject to the dangers of an amoral relativism. Beginning with the Socratic discussion of ethical terms and the search for absolute definitions, Plato ended with a comprehensive theory of reality. Just as man as moral agent requires the Ideas of justice and goodness to conduct his life well, so man as scientist requires other absolute Ideas to understand the world, other universals by which the chaos, flux, and variety of sensible things can be unified and made intelligible. The philosopher’s task encompasses both the moral and the scientific dimensions, and the Ideas provide a foundation for both. It seemed evident to Plato that when many objects share a common property—as all human beings share “humanness” or as all white stones share “whiteness”—that property is not limited to a specific material instance in space and time. It is immaterial, beyond spatiotemporal limitation, and transcendent to its many instances. A particular thing may cease to be, but not the universal property that the particular thing embodied. The universal is a separate entity from the particular and, because it is beyond change and never passes away, is superior in its reality. One of Plato’s critics once stated, “I see particular horses, but not horseness.” Plato answered, “That is because you have eyes but no intelligence.” The archetypal Horse, which gives form to all horses, is to Plato a more fundamental reality than the particular horses, which are merely specific instances of the Horse, embodiments of that Form. As such, the archetype is apparent not so much to the limited physical senses, though these can suggest and lead the way, as to the more penetrating eye of the soul, the illuminated intellect. Archetypes reveal themselves more to the inner perception than to the outer. The Platonic perspective thus asks the philosopher to go through the particular to the universal, and beyond the appearance to the essence. It assumes not only that such insight is possible, but that it is mandatory for the attainment of true knowledge. Plato directs the philosopher’s attention away from the external and concrete, from taking things at face value, and points “deeper” and “inward,” so that one may “awaken” to a more profound level of reality. He asserts that the objects one perceives with one’s senses are actually crystallizations of more primary essences, which can be apprehended only by the active, intuitive mind. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The author makes no claims of being unbiased. Critics should examine their own reference frame. The book is more a philosophical perspective of history, than a historical perspective of philosophy. It represents not group think of the masses but the thinking put forth by the intellectual elite of every age–those individuals who make ideas their business, and ride the crest of the evolutionary wave of meme development. The book is clearly (to me) influenced by the human potential movement. After all, Tarnas was director of programs at Esalen Institute. Had I not read extensively in theology (BA in Religion), philosphy, psychology, and physical science (MD), I would have perhaps had a different reaction to this book. For me, it was the right book at the right time (right in the midst of writing my own critique of my profession of medicine and psychiatry). Just as some have walked out on Eckart Tolle muttering, “What a load of rubbish!”, while others have found a soul-resonating truth, we all bring our own biases and perspectives to every experience. For me, “The Passion of the Western Mind” is perhaps the most enlightening book I have ever read from the perspective of “putting it all together” in a grand synthesis. I disagree with several of the 1 and 2 star criticisms. I read Groff’s work years ago and personally dialogued with him in person. I didn’t appreciate his insights at the time. Anyone familiar with the work of Margaret Mahler on the Psychological Birth of the Human Infant will immediately see the extension of those concepts into the gestational and perinatal periods. Tarnas’s perspective is not the retro-mythological regression called “New Age.” Anyone who thinks that, missed the whole point. Tarnas attempts to move beyond the existential alienation of a completely objectified, meaningless, mechanized world, to a higher synthesis–an integration, where the split between subject and object is ultimately overcome, as revealed in statements such as, “Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind,” and “The evolution of human knowledge is the evolution of the world’s self-revelation.” Similar statements are made by contemporary physicists, biologists, and other scientists, who have gone beyond the reductionist program that has ruled modern science since its inception, and embraced a systems perspective that includes the observer as part of the data to be analyzed. Tarnas insightfully exposes the myth of the unbiased, objective mind so idealized in modern science: “The great irony…is that it is just when the modern mind believes it has most fully purified itself from any anthropomorphic projections, when it actively construes the world as unconscious, mechanistic, and impersonal, it is just then that the world is most completely a selective construct of the human mind…From this perspective, it is the modern mind’s own impersonal soullessness that has been projected from within onto the world–or, to be more precise, that has been projectively elicited from the world.” (Page 432). My sense is that Tarnas has suggested a viable solution to the dilemma facing post-modern man. It seems to be a psychologically and spiritually adaptive way to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity as opposed to the rise of regressive and militant fundamentalism/tribalism that seems to be ensnaring our planet. I cast my vote for “The Passion of the Western Mind” for our next book club selection.

⭐I bought this book as a requirement for one of my classes. At first reading about the book and skimming through it before school started I was very hesitant and already hated it. It seemed difficult to read and I could not imagine reading the whole thing in a semester.Once I got into my class however, my teacher took the book very slow and discussed everything in detail. He had such a passion for this book that it was hard not to fall in love with it as well. It was difficult to get into at first. Even after I got into it I still had some trouble following. But I have never been more involved in any book I’ve read before. When first starting I had to have a dictionary beside me and look up a lot of words. Towards the middle I had caught on to most of the language Tarnas used. I filled the pages with notes in the margins, and thoughts about what was discussed. None of my other text books look like that. I unfortunately did not get time to finish this in class, but with how excellent it has been so far I do not intend to ever sell this and continue reading it over the summer.A word of advice for anyone else having to read this for school: take it slow, reread everything until you understand it, and have a dictionary ready. Or if you have a kindle get the kindle version and use the dictionary on there. But don’t give up on the book so quickly. It really is a gem that I am glad I had the opportunity to read.

⭐The good: This book was beautifully written. I love the way that the author describes the way that people analyze, think and the way that institutions like Christianity and philosophy evolved throughout the ages. The book provides an excellent challenge for anyone who wants to improve their knowledge while reading some very deep writing. You’ll probably learn plenty of new words also. Richard Tarnas is darn smart.The bad: This book is very technically written, very hard to follow in some areas! I could probably read it five times before really feeling like I had a good grasp on the author’s points. The book kind of drags for the latter 15% or so. It has a strange last chapter where the author offers up his prediction on the way that the future will go, kind of comes at you out of nowhere, suddenly he gets a little new-agey on you, but this is probably the final 15 pages or so.If you want a book that elucidates it’s points very skillfully and might give you a better idea of how Western Thought has evolved through the ages through the Greeks, Christianity and philosophy, this is the book for you! Just get your running shoes on and get ready for a very heavy read!

⭐I first bought Tarnas’s book many years ago as a hardback. I highlighted so much of it that reading it a second time became a visually uncomfortable experience. So I bought it again as an ebook.This easily the most enlightening and compelling book I’ve ever read on thinking. Tarnas painstakingly demonstrates how man and earth have steadily shifted away from being the center of the universe to being marginal entities in a presumably indifferent and near infinite universe.No previous knowledge of philosophy is required but reading a quick introduction will help the beginner. I recommend reading ‘Sophie’s world’ before taking on Tarnas.

⭐A comprehensive, but very inaccessible and difficult to read. Almost as if he wants to exclude the layman. Very long sentences and words that are not in common usage. I feel he’s trying to show his knowledge and cleverness.

⭐I haven’t yet read the book through, but I already believe it belongs on every bookshelf. It is a modern classic. I have never encountered a book before that presents the cultural history of the West in such a brief volume so well.

⭐A deeply-researched study, and coherent story, of where we’ve come from in the West, where we are now in these critical post-modern times, and where we may be heading, if we survive.

⭐This is a very good history of the thought, ideas and philosophies that have been part and parcel of the Western Mind. I found the bit in the middle involving the Scholastics a little difficult to grasp but that is more me than Richard Tarnas! The authors analysis and summing up of the complexities of the last few centuries are excellent and for me clarified the various issues involved.

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