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The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View, by Richard Tarnas
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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.
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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
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Product details
Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (March 16, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345368096
ISBN-13: 978-0345368096
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
124 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#73,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is not just reading material. It's essential study material, to be read and re-read, for anyone interested in comprehending the intellectual evolution of Western civilization and, by extension, the human race. From up close, the world can often appear chaotic and absurd. From a distant perspective, however, like the one Tarnas provides in Passion of the Western Mind, the apparent chaos of human behavior settles into a stunningly ordered and dialectical progression, and we see the emergence and maturation of consciousness on glorious, heroic display.Tarnas is eloquent in his articulation of the big ideas of civilization. He has a visionary command of history's depth. He understands and explicates the psychological narrative of history and communicates like no author I've read before what it was like to actually inhabit the various stages of humanity's intellectual progression. We see how much of culture evolves around a spiritual center, which rises, falls, and evolves through the ages.The book has its flaws. At times it becomes overly-detailed and repetitive. There is too much Christian dogma. The section on Aquinas is heavily redundant. The text could have benefited from several more passes from a skillful editor.Yet, if you stay with it, the book is incalculably rewarding. Like no other author, Tarnas tells an epic story of the birth and maturation of the human mind, and, in a majestic conclusion, he presents a positive vision for the future in the reunion of the masculine and feminine principles of consciousness.
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.
To my knowledge, this is the best available intellectual history in a single volume (e.g., Copleston’s and Durant’s histories run many volumes), the only comparison possibly being Bertrand Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy.†(I would like to hear of equally comprehensive single-volume histories in the comments section, if they exist.) The book traces the development of the Western mind, as it transitions through loosely categorized periods, beginning with the ancient Greeks, through the Hellenistic period, and onward. Unlike Russell’s history, which is enjoyable and informative in different ways, Tarnas’ project is a positive one that is made clear in a collection of statements constituting his thesis; whereas Russell’s history, in grinding its axe, is one that attempts to mitigate the import of some thinkers, while creating a semi-whiggish history. On that last point, Tarnas is wholly sympathetic to the contexts of the times, the (temporally) local and (temporally) global import of worldviews. If there is one word that must strike the reader, in order understand how clearly Tarnas has understood the Western intellectual tradition, it is the word “passion,†as the birth of thought (especially in the greatest of thinkers) originates in the agitating grain that stimulates the passion. That agitating grain is the historical context. That is to say, understanding the passion of the individual, the importance of the individual’s thought, and the individual’s project, one must likewise understand, beforehand, the nature of the collective context handed down in the form of the individual’s intellectual environment. However, in examining the historical trajectory of all intellectuals, we get this sense that the collective mind of the West also has a passion, a passion to “reunite with the ground of its being’ (pg. 443). That is the overarching value of “The Passion of the Western Mind,†in tracing the protean nature of thought in the West.The positive project extends beyond this, however, though it is a little less imposing, allowing the reader to come to her or his conclusion. It is this: the base constituents of thought, archetypes, play an extraordinary role in constituting any particular period’s thought. Tarnas develops many comparisons between thinkers to illustrate this, but doesn’t really provide much in the way of a metanarrative on this point. One point he does make clear, which I found unexpected and extremely thought provoking, is that “[e]ach great epochal transformation in the history of the Western mind appears to have been initiated by a kind of archetypal sacrifice’ (p. 395). When read as a whole book, this subject of archetypes and temporal holism is clear, and repays careful reading.It is worth noting that the author pays much more attention to philosophical and scientific literature than other literature, such as poetry, fiction, and so on, though he does include these to some extent. If I have a minor complaint to make on construction, it is that I wished there were more citations given, because some of the points made are very fresh or the interpretations of history very original; and so I would have liked to examine a few particular points in the source literature, as I was going through the book. Certainly, the author has very good reasons for his perspectives, as he is able to (seemingly) effortlessly sew them into a single historical fabric that is internally consistent. However, the unfortunate thing in this is that there is some value lost in the forum of scholarship, being that disciplinary historianship is as much about the construction of the primary and secondary texts into a support structure of an historical text as it is about the narrative supplied. Nonetheless, I see this book as a lasting contribution to scholarship. More importantly, perhaps, is how immediately available this book is to the common reader. For instance, it is an entirely self-contained book, requiring no outside knowledge to begin reading it. I believe there is no competent individual, regardless of educational background, that can pick up this book and glean endless profit from it. In my view, I think it should be everyone’s first romp through Western thought, thus its pedagogical worth is beyond quantification.The writing of the book, per se, is beautiful from two standpoints: the prose composition is delightful, yet the general sentence construction flows very smoothly, never distracting the reader from the content being presented. Between intelligent writing and sophisticated verbiage to describe and explain, this work avails itself to no grounds for serious criticism, so far as construction goes. For me, it was a great joy to read.The only shortcoming I think the book has is a missing portion between part IV (the transformation of the medieval era) and part V (the modern world view) on the conversion of the mystical religious thought into magic, which then seems to become science proper, in the modern sense. Some mentions of Bacon’s alchemical, etc. thought were made, but not too much of Newton’s copious involvement. (See chapter four of John Henry’s “The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science†(Studies in European History) for more.) It’s a period of thought and an historical link than many (with a set view of what science) don’t like to deal with, yet many of the thinkers and practitioners of science acknowledged that what they were doing was magic (e.g., Giambattista della Porta’s “Magia Naturalis†[“Natural Magicâ€], which, unlike other texts that mix magic and natural science, is entirely natural science, yet is referred to as “secret knowledge†and “magic.â€)Before closing, I must comment on some the originality of the text’s ideas and writing. One example of the strikingly bizarre, yet quite probably true insight, that:‘With the rise of Christianity, the already decadent state of science in the late Roman era received little encouragement for new developments. Early Christian experienced no intellectual urgency to “save the phenomena†of this world, since the phenomenal world held no significance compared with the transcendent reality’ (p. 114).Given the on-going debate (see Duhem’s “To Save the Phenomena†and subsequent oppositional commentary by William R. Newman, in his oeuvre), this is a fascinating proposal based on the prevailing worldview of the time. In another instance, a beautiful and simple contrast that Tarnas presents is: ‘While Socrates had equated knowledge with virtue, Bacon equated knowledge with power’ (p. 273). Such contrasts are fruit directly born of reflection, something that happens quite often throughout the book.My final point is about Tarnas’ thesis, which couples with my rejection of other reviews that claim “intellectual dishonesty,†an absolutely reprehensible assertion, in this case. First of all, Tarnas does not lay out his thesis until the very end of the book. Many persuasive essays and books will try to convince the reader before the body of the text is encountered, yet Tarnas does not do this, choosing a slightly heterodox approach of allowing the reader to conclude as they would, beforehand. In the body, there are no salient features that make the reader say, “oh, this is a biased composition,†concluding that such and such intentions were the reason for the false construction. Instead, I haven’t a clue how the history provided could be intellectually dishonest, because the thesis feeds off of the history of thought, as it is typically given. Tarnas’ conclusion, that a masculine approach to thought has pervaded the West, could be tacked onto Durant’s or Copleston’s history, just as well. He admits Hegel’s point that it is difficult, probably impossible, to see why a particular epoch is most important (and what the nature of the Weltgeist is at that time), while presenting his positive project, thesis, and conclusion that the prevailing worldview in thought has been extremely masculine, but, now, there are indicators that the shift is moving towards a feminine mode of thinking. In my opinion, this point has been beautifully argued, and is not awkwardly supported by some contrived representation of history; it is supported by history as it has been written by many others, the current presentation attempting to provide a version of those in a single volume, so as to conclude as Tarnas would.The book is great, and I think it should be read by all, middle schooler to university scholar. I suggest reading it with Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael,†which is only bound to amplify this work’s effect.
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