The Passion of the Western Mind

Epilogue

Thus the modern condition begins as a Promethean movement toward human freedom, toward autonomy from the encompassing matrix of nature, toward individuation from the collective, yet gradually and ineluctably the Cartesian-Kantian condition evolves into a Kafka-Beckett-like state of existential isolation and absurdity--an intolerable double bind leading to a kind of deconstructive frenzy.

This participatory epistemology, developed in different ways by Goethe, Hegel, Steiner, and others, can be understood not as a regression to naive participation mystique, but as the dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial undifferentiated consciousness through the dualistic alienation. It incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it. The interpretive and constructive character of human cognition is fully acknowledged, but the intimate, interpenetrating and all-permeating relationship of nature to the human being and human mind allows the Kantian consequence of epistemological alienation to be entirely overcome.

Prometheus the Awakener

Cosmos and Psyche

Tarnas makes a compelling case for the idea that we are not an isolated oddity of consciousness floating in a meaningless, indifferent universe. And more: that we are participating in one that is conscious and exquisitely ordered, albeit mysteriously. Tarnas supports this case by laying the philosophical ground for a radical shift in perspective, supported by a sweeping body of evidence that illustrates an uncanny correspondence between the movement of the planets and the timing and character of historical events, from September 11th to the French Revolution, from the unfolding creative genius of Descartes and Darwin to Beethoven and the Beatles.

The greater bulk of Cosmos and Psyche is devoted to making correlations between each of four kinds of world transit on the one hand, and human events in diverse fields in the history of the Western cultural tradition on the other. A world transit is a temporary alignment, also called an aspect (angular relation), of two planets with the earth, such that, according to Tarnas, the distinctive archetypal principles linked to those planets have a potent interactive influence within the human psyche throughout the world for the duration of the alignment. The four planetary alignments Tarnas considers are Uranus-Pluto, Saturn-Pluto, Jupiter-Uranus and Uranus-Neptune. With each of these world transits Tarnas correlates a large amount of data drawn from the Western historical tradition, as illustrative of the special archetypal dynamics involved.

In the perspective I am suggesting here, reflecting the dominant trend in contemporary astrological theory, the planets do not “cause” specific events any more than the hands on a clock “cause” a specific time. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state or archetypal dynamics at that time.

The Passion of the Western Mind

This is the anxiety expressed in so many recent writings, like those of Jacques Monod, who speaks of man as a gypsy on the outskirts of the Universe, or of Richard Tarnas, who writes "For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being." I believe this is true, and that our period is indeed one of reunification, of a quest for unity---witness the deep interest in nature shown by so many young people today, and man's growing sense of solidarity with all living beings.

(Maslow has been a favorite whipping boy of boomeritis theorists...e.g., Richard Tarnas, Jorge Ferrer...but he is, by any balanced assessment, one of the three or four greatest psychologists America has ever produced.)

The way Kuhn used the term "paradigm," of course, has been badly misunderstood by the public and by most critics and appropriators of the term, who incorrectly use it to mean some sort of theory or super theory. Fritjof Capra, Stan Grof, Duane Elgin, Richard Tarnas, Charlene Spretnak--the list is virtually endless--would say that a new holistic or ecological theory should replace the old atomistic, Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, and that would be a new paradigm. But that typically incorrect use has Kuhn exactly backward. "Paradigm," for Kuhn, does not mean the theory or the superstructure, but the base or social practice. Paradigm is an almost exact equivalent of techno-economic base, social practice, behavioral injunction, or exemplar.

In other words, the denial of hierarchical stages is itself an invalid metanarrative. From Ferrer to Tarnas to Hickman to Delores to Beliot, you can see these invalid and inauthentic metanarratives parading as sensitive, caring, empathic resonances, whereas they are hermeneutic violence by any other name.

Cosmos and Psyche

Reviews and critiques

Cosmos and Psyche, by Richard Tarnas, is the kind of book that comes along only once in a great while. Not only does it challenge modern assumptions about how the world works, but it also points the way toward a new way of understanding your place in the cosmos. Like Tarnas' previous title, The Passion of the Western Mind, it is large in scope, but instead of exploring the past, it examines the present and the near future and shows how we are on the brink of world changes as great as those of the time of Galileo and Copernicus."

'In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism,' Richard Tarnas says in his remarkable book Cosmos & Psyche, an attempt to heal that schism, to 're-enchant' the cosmos and redeem what he calls the 'pathos' of the modern condition. By contrast, Dawkins' one-eyed view turns reason, as Blake warned, into the enemy of imagination and of art.

I believe that I (and any human being) can choose an idiosyncratic mutual engagement between self and earth and a unique pattern of two or more heavenly bodies (including planets, stars and deep space entities and locations), and find in that engagement a distinctive qualitative transformation of being. It is an existential mutual dialogue of co-creative participative resonance.

...there is surely something arbitrary, simplistic, naïve — and plain imaginatively unconvincing - about inexplicable linkages being stirred into interactive activity by rudimentary bits of geometry. Is this really how our local bit of the cosmos is dynamically ensouled?

In the last ten years, landmark works like David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words, and David Kidner's Nature and Psyche have been reflecting and kindling a growing awareness that nature is not merely a sum of molecules obeying physical and chemical laws, but a living, sensuous, and ensouled matrix in which we fully participate and belong. Tarnas' Cosmos and Psyche extends this rising awareness beyond the bounds of the biosphere. Our psyche is not only deeply connected with our immediate natural environment, but with the whole of the cosmos encompassing us, with the rhythms of the planets we can see above us on clear nights. Searching beneath the depths of the psyche, Tarnas has found the heights of the cosmos. Cosmos and Psyche may radically transform the way we see cultural and political history, individual life journeys, and our sense of participation in the universe.

Organization

• LSD psychotherapy, theoretical implications for the study of psychology, 1976
• The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, 1991; Ballantine
• "The Western Mind at the Threshold," The Quest, Summer 1993
• Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus, 1995; Spring Publications, Woodstock, CT
• Foreword to Revisioning Transpersonal Theory by Jorge Ferrer, 2002; SUNY
• Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006; Viking (ISBN 0-670-03292-1)
• Jung, Cosmology, and the Transformation of the Modern Self 3 DVD recording of an Eranos conference [5]