Rating: 
Summary: The Great Birth Canal of History
Review: "Patriarchy is the 5,000-Year Birth Canal of the Great Mother
Goddess" There comes a point in every civilization when it must
soften to the emergence of new values, and Richard Tarnas' The Passion
of the Western Mind describes the influences leading to this
transitional struggle in our contemporary world. He does this with
the elegance of epic poetry and the high seriousness of philosophy,
presented in an even, accessible style that will appeal to both the
interested layperson and the professional scholar. There is a
"fascinating lucidity" in this writing. It has been called a
humanities education in one volume, a masterpiece, and the finest
treatment ever written on the grand lines of Western culture. Tarnas
matches a deep, sustaining vision with impeccable scholarship,
balance, and the sheer effort required to create something of
world-changing quality. The Passion covers the long, bittersweet
journey of the Western mind from the end of the goddess-worshipping
era to the present global crisis. The ancient Greeks, Hellenism,
Judao-Christianity, the medieval era, the development and then massive
deconstruction of the modern world view, are all impartially
approached on their own terms. Tarnas says that the history of a
civilization is like a kind of great unconscious. Just as individuals
must rediscover their roots, the shaping forces of their past, in
order to become more fully free and conscious, so too must a
civilization. Tarnas was deeply influenced by the depth psychology of
C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Stanislav Grof, and he complements a
Harvard academic background with a very credible exploration of his
own unconscious. Living for ten years at the Esalen Institute where
he was director of programs, these insights were cross-fertilized by
many of the most innovative currents of thought in the world. The
deconstruction of "patriarchal, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric
assumptions and values," accompanied with the rise and return of
feminist, ecological, multicultural, archaic, aboriginal,
psychological, and Eastern perspectives have a prominent role in
Tarnas' writing. But he seeks also to redeem the heroic-tragic
Western history as not merely an "imperialist-chauvinist
plot," but as a necessary part of larger evolutionary process.
Tarnas is suggesting that the long Western trajectory--from an
original "participation mystique" with nature and the Great
Mother Goddess, through the rise of patriarchy and science, to the
increasing and finally intolerable alienation of modern humanity--may
reflect the ordered contractions of a universe struggling to give
birth to a new consciousness on this planet. Like the loss of the
womb paradise that the infant must suffer through in order to be born
as a human and ecstatically reunited with the mother, the
disintegration of old structures may be a necessary prelude to an
enormous collective rebirth, coming home again to nature, psyche, and
the feminine. The Passion of the Western Mind is already widely used
in graduate faculties across North America and has been met with
almost universal admiration, as a major cultural watershed. The
implications of this writing, and a second volume nearing completion,
challenge the old modern and postmodern world views to their very
cores, and offer a new and sustaining cosmology, consistent with the
holistic vision emerging to us from all sides. Tarnas has bridged
between the old world and the new. If you need to renew your faith in
our human ability to evolve and overcome this most serious of
historical crises, this book will encourage you.
Rating: 
Summary: Has a glimmer of brilliance but disappointing...
Review: After reading this impressive work I come away with mixed feelings. Tarnas covers the major and many minor figures in the canon of Western Philosophical thought. At times his synthesis and intepretation of some rather difficult philosophical concepts was truly brilliant. The book does suffer from being a translation from a Spanish work. Tarnas seems to be actively trying to demonstrate the importance of Spain's 20th century philosophers. However, what I feel seriously detracts from the book are phrases and whole lines of spanish, latin, french and german which are used repeatedly and never translated. I feel that I missed many points because my latin is not up to snuff. In one particularly egregious incident a french passage is translated into spanish but not into english. With the polyglot requirement aside this is an excellent text and Tarnas is clearly a gifted thinker if not a gifted writer.
Rating: 
Summary: Useful text
Review: For a historical analysis of how and why philosophy has failed mankind, then look no further than this book by Tarnas. It seems to be well researched; there is a large bibliography and a series of footnotes, but I recommend you avoid the pomposity and unintelligible verbiage of the author's epilogue, so typical of the modern day university educated philosopher. Indeed, within the epilogue he introduces a discussion concerning latest developments in the "depth psychological" work of a man called Stanislav Grof. This work is distastefully and non-objectively venerated by Tarnas as "the most epistemoligically significant development in the recent history of depth psychology, and indeed the most important advance in the field since Freud and Jung..." Praise indeed. A Google search soon reveals this is simply a case of professional back-scratching as both Grof and Tarnas work in the same department in the same university - funny that!
Aside from this distasteful and non-illuminating epilogue, the rest of the book is a useful history book, but it is totally uncritical of the dominance of the influence of Platonism on intellectual thought in the West. Again, there is good reason for this non-critical approach. Another Google search on Tarnas reveals an online interview where he comes right out with the confession that he is a fully blown Platonist.
So it is far from being an objective critical analysis, and I am amazed the book is used in the Universities for this very reason.
So, reader/buyer beware. The book does provide an insight into the ideas promulgated over the centuries, detailing the influence of Plato, Kant, Hegel etc and will give much technical content summarising the variety of positions.
But, whilst the epilogue is quick to determine the problems of current society, it is funny how the Platonic influence on intellectual development is not seen as the reason as to why people are disillusioned with Western intellectual development though! A paradigm shift intellectuals such as Tarnas are incapable of making such is the investment they make in Platonism.
Rating:
Summary: I *think* this is the book I was looking for
Review: I *think* this is the book I was looking for. I knew practically nothing about Western philosophy; I knew the names Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and so forth, but I didn't know anything about their ideas, nor did I have any grand framework in which to place all these people. I wanted to find a good overview of Western philosophy that could teach me about all of these people and help direct my own further, more in-depth exploration of them and their writings. I'm pretty sure this book did the trick. Now that I've finished reading it, I know who all those great thinkers are and what they thought, and I have a structure within which they all fit. The book coheres, and it tells a great story. That's what I was looking for. But now I fear I might have been sold a bill of goods. Tarnas has an adventurous thesis about the trajectory of Western philosophy, and I suspect that this has caused him to leave out or de-emphasis certain concepts that don't fit in with his thesis. He doesn't mention pragmatism at all, despite the fact that pragmatism was a major force in the 20th century. William James, John Dewey, etc -- nowhere to found. But perhaps pragmatism doesn't fit with his thesis. And I'm not sure the idea of a "thesis" is even appropriate in a supposedly introductory book. Some philosphers, this book taught me, have showed how tempting it is for human beings to discern patterns and structures where there are none. And yet Tarnas concludes the book by presenting his own structure, his own analysis of patterns. His conclusion is kinda wacky but kinda makes sense, too. I'm not sure what to think of it. Although I enjoyed this book and feel more educated, I'm left wondering if Tarnas has twisted the narrative of Western philosophy for his own ends. And I, previously knowing nothing about Western philosophy, have absorbed it. Uh-oh.
Rating:
Summary: At last I understood the roots of my Western education
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Passion of Reading 'The Passion'
Review: 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 conclusion presented in the Epilogue relies on various thinkers - most of them existing as seemingly marginal influences vis-à-vis the current intellectual milieu - in order to comprehend the overall trajectory of Western thought. Though this may seem to some an hubristic stretch that would have best been left out of the narrative, I predict that in years to come this little Epilogue will become the most valuable part of the book (though reading all that comes before it is necessary for its full impact to be felt). Tarnas's fundamental conclusion that "the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being," in other words, that self-perception has been spurred all along by an urge to glimpse the self in an inseparable matrix of self-other-world - this is the kind of complex epistemological thinking that will dominate the coming decades: it is epistemological thinking that recognizes epistemology as ontology and ontology as epistemology, a movement of the mind that bridges the Cartesian-Kantian gap by realigning human consciousness with its more-than-human base in the natural world (this notion is indeed found in various degrees of articulation in much postmodern thought, but Tarnas makes it explicit in a thrilling manner).
This 'Passion' is the real thing: passionate insight that allows the thinking person to grapple more consciously with the multivalent, often confusing realities of postmodern culture. Find it today, and if you give it the attention it deserves, it will likely become one of the most important books you've ever read.
Rating:
Summary: superb except for the surprise wacky ending
Review: If one ignores the epilogue, this is an excellent book. Tarnas has performed a magnificent task with his historical review of western philosophical thought and development - from Socrates to Camu and Jung with fascinating chapters reviewing the tremondous role of Christian theology (good and bad) in our "western" philosophical development. Portions of the book are a bit dense - but to be fair such is the nature of the material. The epilogue however is another story. During my career as a physician, I have found that the worst lectures and presentations are given by those who are discussing their own research as opposed to analyzing and synthesizing other people's works. Tarnas falls victim to this hubris. The notion that Grof/Jungian psychodelic regression therapy in which one relive's his or her birthing trauma is an effective therapy for one's current psycho-social maladies is truly comical. On one hand science is experiencing an epistemological crisis, yet LSD tripping confabulations about the traumatic birthing expulsion from the "mother ship" is rigorous psychology? Gimme a break. I will stick with science for now.
Rating:
Summary: History and Philosophy Overview
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A masterful review of the history of philosophy
Review: The epilogue in Richard Tarnas' book is bold, inventive and exciting. This is the part I read first while browsing in the bookstore. It prompted me to buy the book. The balance between the development of Christian thought and secular philosophy is masterfully interwoven in lucid style. When I finished the book and studied the epilogue I realized that the excitement I felt when I first read abstracts of the the epilogue was based on the scientific side of the concepts presented. As a physician and scientist, I have marveled at the speed of technological discovery in the twentieth century. Most of the biological advances were made possible by the Newtonian-Cartesian revolution. While the human genome will soon be completely sequenced, neuroscience still has not revealed the nature of memory and consciousness. Western thought is dependent on our awareness and it is appropriate to incorporate Grof's observations of the transpersonal realm of human understanding in looking to the future development of philosophy. Thirty years of careful research in the psyche produced information of a perinatal consciousness which promises to advance our understanding of the world around us. The other major theme in the epilogue is the narrowing of the gender identity, which also influences our understanding of consciousness. I gained new insights from this book. It should adorn the shelves of every college freshman and every thinking person.
Rating:
Summary: THE BEST into to phil available
Review: The list of introductory works to the history of philosophy is never-ending. Tarnus' is THE WORK that stands out. Tarnus presents the history of thought with a level of insight and understanding that reaches depths previously not considered possible for an introductory work. Not only do you get the particular ideas of each philosophy and era of thought, you get the cultural influence and the context out of which each philosophy arose. What motivated each thinker? What particular convictions influenced the philosophy of the era? What were the pressing concerns building in history of thought that motivated each thinker to construct his particular system? These are the invaluable truths Tarnus makes clear for the reader. In this respect his "introductory work" can also be considered important even for readers who are well educated and familiar with the typical history of philosophy. Tarnus' education in the field of psychology offers the reader a rare insight. I can't recommend it enough.
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