THAT HAVE SHAPED OUR WORLD INTRODUCTION The world is said to have been built on ideas, that which has so far shaped our conception of it. The Western mode of thinking and doing things has evolved through the ages bringing it to where it now stands. The book ‘Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped our World’ by Richard Tarnas aims at producing a chronological narratives of how ideas and thought have evolved in the Western world through time especially in the history of philosophy and how also these thought and ideas have changed the world and it’s still undergoing some transformation. Tarnas approaches this history from a chronological dimension beginning with the ancient Greek period down to contemporary time. He believes it is the task of every generation to examine the ideas that have helped shaped its understanding of it. I. THE GREEK WORLD VIEW The foundation of Greek philosophical thinking was the quest to understand the nature of the cosmos up until the time of the Athenian, the Greek tended to view the world through archetypal forms but a more profound refection about this archetype transformed into an intellectual dimension. The Greeks believed that the universe was ordered by a plurality of timeless essences which underlay concrete reality giving it form and meaning. That is things were always in cosmic opposites (e.g. male and female, good and evil e.t.c.) bringing us to the idea of constant flux and that there could yet be distinguished specific immutable structure or essences that could be enduring and believed to possess an independent reality of their own. It was on this that Plato based his metaphysics and theory of knowledge. Plato’s perspective now happens to be the starting point and foundation for the evolution of the western mind. The Archetypal Forms Platonism as it’s commonly understood revolves around the cardinal doctrine of ideas or forms. Plato’s conception of form is not actually conceptual abstract thoughts created by the mind but their derivates in concrete reality. Reality possesses a quality and degree of being. For example, to say something is beautiful means that thing possesses a quality of beauty in it. In other words, the/that object of beauty participates in the absolute form of beauty. Some critics of Plato have said they can only see things as they exist not as they are (they can perceive particulars and not ideas) but Plato says a person has to have gotten the notion of idea/forms before actually knowing that which is particular. operandi of the Judeo-Christian deity ill fitted the real world discovered by science as the process of salvation was now seen as a matter of personal relationship between God and man. The “leap of faith” not the self-evidence of the created world or the objective authority of the scriptures, constituted the principal base for religious belief. Even though Christianity now assumed a new and far less encompassing intellectual role, the Christian moral teaching and ethical precepts was quite relevant and was closely been followed still and upheld even by agnostics and atheist but the Christian revelation as a whole could not be taken seriously as there was an increasing doubt about her metaphysical and religious claims. In the eyes of some scientist and philosophers, science contained some religious meaning or was open to some religious interpretations or could serve as an opening to a religious appreciation of the universe while for some, the entire scenario of cosmic evolution seemed explicable as a direct consequence of chance and necessity the random interplay of natural laws. In the light of this, any apparent religious implications had to be judged as poetic but scientifically unjustifiable extrapolations from available evidence. God was an “unnecessary hypothesis.” Philosophy, Politics, Psychology Philosophy underwent some development during these centuries and gradually took on the cloak of secularization. Religion continued to hold its own amongst philosophers but was already being transformed by the character of the scientific mind. Voltaire argued in favor of “rational religion” or a “natural religion” as against the traditional biblical Christianity since what was been sought was the requirement for a universal cause. The need to affirm God’s existence now took a rational course as most philosophers of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment believed that the knowledge of God could be got through reason and not faith as in the case of Descartes and Locke while Hume and Kant said reason could not be definitely sustained. The inevitable and proper outcome of both empiricism and critical philosophy was to eliminate any theological substrate from modern philosophy since no justifiable assertions about God, the soul’s immortality and freedom could transcend concrete experience. At the same time, the bolder thinkers of French Enlightenment increasingly tended towards skepticism and atheistic materialism as the most intellectually justifiable consequence of the scientific discoveries. Such thinkers include Diderot, chief editor of the encyclopedia; La Mattrie, the physician; Baron d’ Holbach, the physicist. Atheism was necessary to destroy the chimeras of religious fantasy that endangered the human race. Man needed to be brought back to nature, experience and reason. The secular progression of the Enlightenment reached its logical conclusion in the nineteenth century as Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, and in somewhat different spirit, Nietzsche all sounded the death knell of traditional religion. For them, God was man’s own creation which in turn necessarily dwindled with man’s modern maturation. By the late nineteenth century, the philosophical relationship between Christian belief and human rationality had grown ever more attenuated with few exceptions, that relation was effectively absent. The following non-epistemological factors – political, social, economic, psychological – were also pressing towards the secularization of the modern mind and its disintegration from religious belief. In the area of politics, power was centered on the Feudal Lords and the Church’s hierarchical structure and by the eighteenth century, that association had become mutually disadvantageous. The French philosophes – Voltaire, Diderot Condorcet – and their successor among the French revolutionaries viewed the Church as an obstacle to the process of civilization because of its vast wealth and allegiance to the regime. Yet the Swiss born Jean-Jacque Rousseau saw things differently. For him, the celebration of reason also negates the actual nature of the human person because embodied in a person is the ability to feel, intuition and spiritual hunger which transcends all abstract formulae. Though he does not believe in the organized churches and clergy because even Christianity notoriously disagrees on what was the exclusively correct form of worship. He therefore advocates ‘theism’ of the heart – reverent awe before the cosmos, the joy of meditative solitude, the direct intuition of the moral conscience, and the natural spontaneity of human compassion. Rousseau used the combination of the religiosity of the orthodox Christians and the rationality of the reformist to arrive at his conclusion but he inadvertently gave a new impulse and dimension to how religion came to be viewed in the Enlightenment era which initiated a spiritual current in Western culture that would first lead to Romanticism and eventually to the existentialism of later age. Karl Marx in the nineteenth century subjected organized religion and religious impulse to a socio-political critique. He believes religion serves only the needs of the ruling class and does not aid the poor in its plight. He then advocates that for the society to develop, the human person must rid itself of religious delusions. Liberalist advocated that organized religion’s influence on political and intellectual life be reduced and argued for a pluralism accommodating the broadest freedom of belief consonant in with social order. Religion became tolerated but metamorphosed into religious indifference as it was no longer mandatory in Western society to be a Christian, and coincidentally with this new freedom, few persons found Christian belief system intrinsically compelling or satisfying and the contemporary age seemed to be offered more cogent programs and activity than the traditional religions. The Christian churches also contributed to their own decline; for the Roman Catholic Church, its counter-reformation response to protestant heresy and its unresponsiveness to any changes necessitated by the evolution of the modern era. The protestant churches sole reliability on the literal interpretation of the scriptures also left its members susceptible to the scientific discoveries that were antithetical to the sacred scriptures and the influence of the modern age. Christianity now experienced itself not only as a divided church but as a shrinking one, dwindling away before the ever-widening and ever- deepening onslaught of secularism. All religions seemed to have one thing in common, a fading precious truth than dispute. Nevertheless, the Judeo-Christian tradition sustained itself as many families still continued to nurture their children in the tenets and images of their inherited faith. The Catholic Church began to open itself to modernity and churches in general moved to embrace wider congregations by making their structures and doctrines more relevant to the challenges of modern existence. Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced “the death of God” because for him, the death of God signified not just the recognition of a religious illusion but that of an entire civilization’s world view that for too long had held man back from daring, liberating embrace of life’s totality. With Freud, religion became evaluated by the psychological disposition of the human person. In the light of this, Judeo-Christian God came to be seen as a psychological pl forms which developed in new directions by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and Emerson, and articulated within the past century by Rudolf Steiner. Each thinker gave his own distinct emphasis to the developing perspective, but common to all was a fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately no dualistic but participatory. This conception did not oppose the Kantian epistemology but rather went beyond it and in a way acknowledged the validity of Kant’s critical insight, but held the concept of participation are subjective principles that are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation. That is nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. In this perspective, nature pervades everything and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being. This gives room to imagination as it also becomes an essential tool. The human imagination is itself part of the world’s intrinsic truth; without it the world is in some sense incomplete. If we take the participatory epistemology, and if combined with Grof’s discovery of the perinatal sequence, we would arrive at a surprising conclusion: namely that the Cartesian-Kantian paradigm reflects much deeper archetypal process impelled by forces beyond the merely human. And if this is true, several long-standing philosophical paradoxes may be cleared up. The works of Popper, Kuhn and Feyeraband has left philosophers of science with two notoriously fundamental dilemmas – one by Popper, the other by Kuhn and Feyeraband. For Popper it was the question of luck while Kuhn it was the question of the differing modes of interpretation and Feyeraband own question was how and why do we judge the superiority of a paradigm over another? Tarnas answers the question by saying that a paradigm emerges in the history of science. One paradigm is considered superior, precisely when that paradigm resonates with the current archetypal state of the collective psyche and when this paradigm begins to experience limitations or gets into crisis, a genius puts forth another that becomes relevant to that situation and time and also inadvertently becomes superior to the previous one(s). This is the dynamics that marks the progress in the pursuit of knowledge and is also the case with human thought, and the emergence of new philosophical paradigms is never simply the result of improved logical reasoning from the observed data but a reflection of the emergence of a global experiential gestalt that informs that philosophers vision taking into consideration every context that surrounds the philosopher. One could then say that every new worldview’s appearance rest on the underlying archetypal dynamics of the larger culture. From the foregoing, we can recognize a multiplicity of these archetypal sequences, with each scientific revolution, each change of worldview culminating in our eyes. In this light, we can better understand the great epistemological journey of the western mind from the birth of philosophy out of mythological consciousness in ancient Greece, through the classical, medieval and modern eras, to our own post modern age. Bringing it all Back Home The history of the Western mind rightly from the start to finish is simply dominated by men. This does not mean that women were less intelligible but the western intellectual traditions had been produced and canonized almost entirely by men, and informed mainly by male perspective. The western mind in its evolution had repressed its feminine aspect thereby creating a denial of this aspect of nature and thus, the Western mind has been pounded on this progressive denial. This separation calls forth a longing for a reunion with that which has been lost but now, there is the tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture: visible not only in the rise of feminism, growing empowerment of women and other areas but in the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it and in deepening recognition of the value of partnership, pluralism and the interplay of perspectives. As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the cotemporary psyche, reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a sacred marriage between the long- dominant but non alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but not ascending feminine. This dramatic development is not just compensation. The teleos of inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and unconsciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while transcending human alienation. But for re-integration of the repressed feminine to be achieved, the Western mind must be willing to open itself to a reality the nature of which could shatter its most established belief about itself and about the world. The feminine side then becomes not that which must be controlled, denied, exploited, but rather fully acknowledged, respected, and responded to for itself. It is recognized: not the objectified ‘other’ but rather source, goal and immanent presence. For Tarnas, he believes that the western mind has been slowly preparing itself to meet for its entire existence. He considers that much of the conflict and confusion of our own era reflects the fact that this evolutionary drama may now be reaching its climatic stages. For our time is struggling to bring forth something fundamentally new in human history. Perhaps the end of “man” himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome – and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine.