The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View | 
|  | | | Title: | The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View | | Author: | Richard Tarnas | | Publisher: | Ballantine Books | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 16 March, 1993 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0345368096 / 9780345368096 | | List Price: | $17.95 | | You Save: | $5.74 | | Amazon Price: | $12.21 | |
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Product Description
"[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 CHRONICLE
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 WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.
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Customer Reviews:
• A Nice Survey And More Importantly, Critique Of The Western Mind 16 August, 2007
Tarnas begins with Plato, working backward and forward from him. Plato's Forms, in particular, set the stage for the rest of the book, in my view. According to Plato, there are transcendent Forms for 'Man', 'Tree', 'Woman', for example, that the soul was exposed to before birth and remembers later in life. These Forms are timeless, trancendent and most, Beautiful.
Aristotle, the tenth in line from Pythagoras, quickly relegates Plato's Forms to the particular, noting their birth, maturation and decay within the object with no recourse to a transcendent realm.
The important thing is, in the greek rationalism of both Plato and Aristotle, the world is knowable and is a Cosmos, an ordered whole that can be readily understood by the human mind.
The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle move to the Arabics during the Dark Ages, until the medieval times, when the Arabics courteously return the two behemoths to western civilization where St. Augustine applies Platonic thought to theology, while St. Thomas Aquinas later does the same with Aristotle.
Somewhere in the mix, Ockham applies his razor to the idea of the Forms, being the first to deny a Form's transcendent or immanent reality, but rather positing that the Form is a construct of the human mind. Party pooper.
Modern science, which has divested the world of anything human,where the universe now contains no spirit or transcendent form, sets it's sights on a disenchanted universe that is now viewed as being mechanistic at best, lifeless at worst.
Man is taken, by way of Copernicus, then Kepler and Galileo, from being the absolute center of the Ptolemaic universe, to being a nondescript inhabitant on a planet moving about a sun, which is one of potentially millions of such stars in the now vast space of the experienced world.
During the Enlightenment, man having eaten the soul of the Cosmos and stolen it's intelligence and claimed it for himself, suddenly turns the lense on himself thorugh Descartes and Kant.
Not only is the Cosmos dead and lifeless and altogether inhuman, but man is incapable of perceiving said Cosmos in an objective way. Man inherently attaches Reality to the universe by viewing the world through the apriori lenses of time, space, cause and effect and so on.
So now, we have a dead and lifeless vast impersonal universe inhabited by man, who, due to his psychological makeup, can never understand said world objectively.
Nietzsche sounds the death knell. He says God is dead, but really, it is man, glourious understanding, at one with the world, man who is crucified. Nietzsche pronounces the birth of the modern era, where not by intelligence, which has been discounted, not by religion, which is suffering cognitive disonance due to the emerging scientific worldview (Darwinism, Atomism, the everexpanding nothingness peered at through ever stronger telescopic lenses), but sheer Will that will decide who is right.
Finally on to the postmodern picture. History has been dominated by white european males. Not only is the universe (and man) unknowable, but we don't even know the proper questions to ask. Language is a prison, seeking to encapsulate experience and reduce Reality to the constructs of the human mind. Western man, through the prevailing dichotomy of his science and religion, has raped women, the environment, destroyed the ozone, produced the atomic bomb, and on and on. No one has hold of the Truth. Truth is provincial, localized and relative, dependent upon a contingent human being. No world view has precedence over another. There is no prevailing meta-narrative that can capture global humanity and unite it.
But dear reader, there is hope. There is hope from the beginning pages of this book through to the epilogue. Tarnas wisely weaves a thread throughout that offers a glimpse into a potential new birth for mankind. Tarnas points out history seems to be coming to a culmination, something is definitely on the horizon for all of us.
I leave it to you, to read this wonderful book, to discover what possibilities (if not facts) lie ahead for humanity.
The book is well worth the read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1GHJ7SZEMAMQR
• Pity About The Lapse Into New Age Speculation 28 September, 2007
I won't write much here as many have done a great job of summation, however I did just want to voice my disappointment with the epilogue. Much of the book seems to have the intellectual and reasearch rigour I like to see in such books, but the new age nonsense really leads me to question his credibility and so doubt I read till I reached it. Though its obviously not as up to date or the same in its attempted scope I would personally recommend Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" for a more insightful look at Western thought or even Watson's "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud".
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2Q9D8PDVR9E3H
• Bias Of Reviewers Prevents Them To See The Positive 04 December, 2007
I think, Richard Tarnas has done a spectacular job of compressing the whole history of the west into one comprehensive volume. Being a PhD student of science who has also explored spiritual ideas, I really like the fact that the author tries to highlight the existential crisis facing the world today.
I really recommend this book and would suggest people to be wary of negative
reviews on the book. The people who have negative opinions about the book and consider the eplilogue wacky are in denial of the fact that every opinion that they make can also be classified as wacky and subjective. In this pluralistic and subjective world they need to tolerant of opinions if they consider themselves reasonable. But if people want to be completely close minded about anything except their apriori judgements about things like depth psychology, what can be done. They ignore the fact that inconsistency rules even the most precise branch of science --mathematics. Godel's incompleteness theorem actually led to this conclusion.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2A3QPMHEDSHX4
• A View From The Inside 02 February, 2008
A single-volume history of the ideas that have shaped the Western mind. Unique in its capacity to empathize with all the variant worlds it describes, bringing history to vibrant life. It's a page turner. You can't wait to read what happens next in this complex narrative, and then you realize it is telling your own story.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A15ZWTG71ONW1M
• A Page-turner I Don't Entirely Trust 10 June, 2008
The comment on the jacket is right, the author has made quite a story of what could be pretty dry material. As an introduction to the history of Western thought on the level of, say, Joseph Campbell's work (one of those quoted as praising it), I'd recommend it. In fact I got so interested in the the implications of what looked like a quote from Justin Martyr that I went looking for the original.
Fortunately, what we have of Justin Martyr's work is on the web, and it does not take very long to read it all. Unfortunately, the quoted phrase was not present in that work. Instead of unreservedly praising Plato as a "Christian before Christ", Justin Martyr actually spent a lot of time saying unkind things about him and the harmfulness of his philosophy. He did in one place suggest that a virtuous man like Socrates should indeed be regarded as a christian, following the spirit of Christ before his appearance, but Plato was not mentioned in that connection. I saw nothing that would really support the point that Tarnas seemed to want to make. And then in the last chapter Tarnas went off on a tangent that seemed to me of minor significance and doubtful validity.
So a good read, and worth the time as a first introduction or as a source of interesting ideas, but not entirely trustworthy. Anything you are going to rely on from it should be checked.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AUMMXNYB6MAYR
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