synthesis of the development of Western thinking starting with the Greeks, but with a a very narrow focus on philosophy metaphysics and epistomology and strangely also on astrology.
The firstpages seem really excellent, at times even brillant, but then Tarnas deviates into a rather psychedelic ally.
It's not often I read a book that changes my entire world view but it's the case with this one.
A thorough, fascinating, utterly engrossing look at Western philosophy, science and religion from their inception with the ancient Greeks through to the lateth century.
Although the book is academic in tone and written by an academic it's also extremely accessible to read which is quite incredible given the sheer scope of the text and the amount of things that the author ties in.
It took me six months to read, on and off, purely because it's so wideranging and allencompassing and a lot of the concepts and the ideas were completely novel to me so it took me a while to get to grips with them in my head.
Certainly I got a lot better understanding of the West's history and where our thoughts and ideas come from after reading this and it also serves as a great starting point from which to go into more depth into the philosophers explored.
I particularly love the ending, which has almost a surprise twist in the epilogue, and the way the author veers into esotericism at certain points.
A great read while I wholeheartedly recommend not just a book of the year, but of the decade too, perhaps of my lifetime.
Richard Tarnas' book, The Passion of the Western Mind, descriptively and eloquently chronicles the evolution of human discoveries and consciousness from the time of ancient Greece to modern times.
I'm a homeschooling mom and am currently using Tarnas' book to prepare myself for history lessons with my child.
It provides a wonderful context by describing the leading ideas of an historical time period, In that way I can help my daughter understand the culture and motivations of a people so that she can acquire more than a stale chronology of history.
An impressive synthesis of a lot of material excellent review of the "Greek mind" and how it persists of the "JudeaoChristian mind" and how it persists.
Perhaps most provocative is the suggestion that we are somehow mystically evolving into a new consciousness Gaia, and that the roots of this come out of Freud, Jung, Groff, and the psychedelics, with an accompanying shift from a masculine dominated intellectual culture to a feminine one.
One HUGE omission: what about the nonWestern mind There is no attention to where the rest of the world's "world view" has come from and no mention of whether this revolution in Western thinking is visible anywhere else.
It may be, but there's no case for that in this book, Joseph Campbell called this book "the most lucid and concise presentation I have read of the grand lines.
. . of Western thought. " High praise from someone who would know! Tarnas' greatest achievement, to my mind, is the lucidity of his prose which makes this an enormously readable survey of the Western Mind from the Greeks to the Post Moderns.
Tarnas' objective for creating this opus is similar to what Campbell wished to do: that is, to create the possibility for an integration of all cultures and all peoples into a new holistic consciousness.
In his Epilogue, he says that "as the plant at a certain stage brings forth its blossom, so does the universe bring forth new stages of human knowledge.
" His effort in this book is to show the stages that have led up to where we are now, and to contribute to our discovery of the next stage.
This next stage largely involves synthesizing the masculine nature of Western philosophy and science with a feminine, holistic understanding of the unity of all living things.
For Tarnas, doing this involves delving deep into consciousness, where we find that "the bold conjectures and myths that the human mind produces in its quest for knowledge ultimately come from something far deeper that a purely human source.
They come from the wellspring of nature itself, . . "
One of our favorite things about this book is the way it builds upon itself.
When Tarnas describes the ideas and influence of any particular philosopher, event, or innovation, he does so in such a way that he can refer to it again later on and you will understand the connections.
For example, in medieval times, scholars working within the Church the only institution capable of supporting scholars went through a transition in thought similar to the transition from Plato to Aristotle.
Plato believed that truth took the form of otherworldly ideals, and that this world was but a poor reflection of them.
Augustine seized upon this concept to reinforce the Christian emphasis on life after death, Plato was followed by Aristotle, who elevated the importance of this world and the importance of this life to the center of his philosophy, and something similar happened in Europe in the Middle Ages:
That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the West's rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle's writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now translated into Latin.
With these texts, which included the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima, On the Soul, came not only learned Arabic commentaries, but also other works of Greek science, notably those of Ptolemy.
Medieval Europe's sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries.
Yet Aristotle had such extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement.
His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of the human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West and were attractive to many Church intellectuals, men whose reasoning powers had been developed to uncommon acuity by their long scholastic education in the logical disputation of doctrinal subtleties.
The arrival of the Aristotelian texts in Europe thus found a distinctly receptive audience, and Aristotle was soon referred to as "the Philosopher.
" This shift in the wind of medieval thought would have momentous consequences,
Under the Church's auspices, the universities were evolving into remarkable centers of learning where students gathered from all over Europe to study and hear public lectures and disputations by the masters.
As learning developed, the scholars' attitude toward Christian belief became less unthinking and more selfreflective, The use of reason to examine and defend articles of faith, already exploited in the eleventh century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the discipline of logic in particular, championed by the fiery twelfthcentury, dialectician Abelart Ranidlv ascended in both educational popular and theological importance.
With Abelard's Sic et Non Yes and No, a compilation of apparently contradictory statements by various Church authorities, medieval thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the possible plurality of truth, with debate
between competing arguments, and with the growing power of human reason for discerning correct doctrine.
It is not that Christian truths were called into question rather, they were now subject to analysis.
As Anselm stated, "It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.
"
Moreover, after a long struggle with local religious and political authorities, the universities won the right from king and pope to form their own communities.
With the University of Paris's receipt of a written charter from the Holy See in, a new dimension entered European civilization, with the universities now existing as relatively autonomous enters of culture devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.
Although Christian theology and dogma presided over this pursuit, these were in turn increasingly permeated by the rationalist spirit.
It was into this fertile context that the new translations of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators were introduced.
Anselm was the Archbishop of Canterbury who created Scholasticism, a means of dialectical reasoning that he used to prove the existence of God.
He also openly opposed the Crusades, which means he was incredibly bold and defiantly compassionate, From here, and in the same snowballing, storytelling mode, Tarnas goes on to describe Thomas Aquinas in one of my favorite parts of the book.
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