The Passion of the Western Mind
The Passion of the Western Mind was a bestseller, selling over 200,000 copies by 2006. It continues to be a widely-used text in colleges. It was hailed as an important work by Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, and David Steindl-Rast. According to Christopher Bache,
Passion is "[w]idely regarded as one of the most discerning overviews of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to postmodern thought." Jorge Ferrer said that it contained a "devastating assault on the Cartesian-Kantian paradigm."
In 1996, Nobel laureate and chemist Ilya Prigogine approvingly quoted Tarnas in a paper entitled "Science, Reason, and Passion." The paper's topic was how modern science appears to be overcoming the duality which separates humans from nature.
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.
"science, Reason and Passion",
Leonardo Vol. 29, No. 1 (1996), pp. 39-42 The MIT Press
In his 2000 book
Wandering God: A Study of Nomadic Spirituality, cultural critic Morris Berman called
The Passion of the Western Mind "a fairly decent summary of European intellectual history, written in a a lucid and accessible style." Berman then wrote that Tarnas "argues for a biological mysticism", and called Tarnas' theory escapist, regressive, totalitarian, and utopian.
In papers posted to the Shambhala Publications website in 2003, Ken Wilber called Tarnas a "boomeritis theorist", and criticized Tarnas for using Abraham Maslow as a "whipping boy",
(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.)
Ken Wilber, "Excerpt D: The Look of a Feeling: The Importance of Post/Structuralism: Part IV. Conclusions of Adequate Structuralism (page 1)" [1] for allegedly misusing Thomas Kuhn's concept of the paradigm,
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.
Ken Wilber, "Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge: Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1)"[2] and for allegedly engaging in "hermeneutic violence" by using a metanarrative which denies hierarchical stages.
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.
Ken Wilber, "Sidebar A: Who Ate Captain Cook? Integral Historiography in a Postmodern Age[3] However, contrary to one of Wilber's claims, Tarnas only mentions Maslow once in
Passion, and this is in a non-critical context.Also, Margaret Masterman has pointed out that Kuhn uses the term "paradigm" in many different senses.
Cosmos and Psyche
Reviews and critiques
Thomas Meaney, literary editor for The New York Sun, wrote in
The Wall Street Journal that Tarnas' book
The Passion of the Western Mind "was hailed as a liberal education in one volume and became a staple in some college curriculums." Meaney panned
Cosmos and Psyche, writing that the premise may sound "like an elaborate joke" and calling it "unadulterated crack-pottery."
In
Inside Bay Area, bookseller Esther Fields wrote,
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."
Anthroposophist and attorney Frederick Dennehy wrote in
Lilipoh magazine, "Tarnas’ deeply radical hypothesis is that the disenchantment of the modern universe is unreal — the result of a “simplistic epistemology” and moral positioning totally inadequate to the depths, complexity and grandeur of the cosmos."
In
The Observer, astrologer Neil Spencer favorably contrasted Tarnas' book
Cosmos and Psyche to the writings of Richard Dawkins:
'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.
John Heron is a theorist who shares Tarnas' philosophical background, who was an astrologer for 15 years, and who accepts a relationship between astronomical entities and human existence.
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.
John Heron, "An Unconvincing Case: A critique of Richard Tarnas' Cosmos and Psyche"[4] Heron critiqued the methodology and conclusions of Tarnas'
Cosmos and Psyche in the journal
Network Review. He described 18 internal problems with Tarnas' theory.
...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 following issue of
Network Review, Keiron Le Grice responded point by point, to Heron's critique.
In
Tikkun magazine, philosopher Jordi Pigem concluded,
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
In 2007, a group of fifty scholars and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the Archetypal Research Collective for pursuing research in archetypal cosmology. An online journal,
Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, edited by Keiron LeGrice and Rod O'Neal, was begun a year later, based on the research orientation and methodology established in
Cosmos and Psyche. Advisory board members include Christopher Bache, Jorge Ferrer, Stanislav Grof, Robert McDermott, Ralph Metzner, and Brian Swimme. Contributors have included Keiron Le Grice, Richard Tarnas, Stanislav Grof, and Rod O'Neal.