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

by Richard Tarnas

Book Overview

" [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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345368096
• ISBN13: 9780345368096
• Release Date: March 1993
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Passionate Mind - Note the Passion!

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.

A Passionate Mind - Note the Passion!

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."

The Passion of Reading 'The Passion'

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 conclus

At last I understood the roots of my Western education

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.

History and Philosophy Overview

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.