My Critique of Richard Tarnas' Book.
The Passion of the Western Mind.
- Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View.
As a Preliminary Investigation.
Over the next months in between other writing here, I will systematically and extensively critique this book.
Books I will read next: Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud- Peter Watson and A Terrible Beauty- Peter Watson
The growth and evolution of the Greek world view is the beginning of all that has gone wrong with humanity ever since. It is the very reason why most humans alive today blindly support the technological singularity that by the end of the 20th century had taken a deep hold of all human mental faculties.
Richard Tarnas warmly concludes his book by saying that the Promethean rebellion of the Western male throughout history
was indeed accompanied by great atrocities and Samuel Beckett-like human existential alienation.
But then he pads his financial coffers by saying that it was only a necessary painful birth-like stage in preparation
of an optimistic, more integrative, and more cognitively female future for humanity. How post-post-modern! What he does not realize is that he is supporting a broad philosophical movement constituting a final, fatal 21st Century submission of humanity to the process of technological emergence and technological singularity. Not only was the "Promethean male hubris," as he calls it,not responsible for the atrocity of technology. While hubris does exist, it is not male and it has always been subjectively engaged in first-principles submission to the metaphysical directions of the process itself.
I will begin to show that it is not without function that humans are focused on chronically as the directive agency
in the process of the evolution of civilization. (as a diversionary mechanism.)
I will show that it is instead the technology of the metaphysical meaningmaking movement of philosophy religion and science, as determinant of the very form of the human mind, which should be held accountable, and not humans. This single metaphysical atrocity stretches all the way from the early civilizations to our modern versions of it.
I will show in my critique on this first chapter how this utter delusion, in which Tarnas shares, as one of a species of utterly
metaphysically compromised humans,
can be traced all the way back to beyond the so-called wisdom of Plato.
Tarnas essentially gurgles out the usual old-man guilt-trip reconciliatory final chapter conclusion in insubstantial reference to the depth psychology theories of Carl Jung and those who followed him. Really new-age fashionability.
The pathetic thing about his analysis is that all humans share in the powerful emotional imperative and that the emotional imperative is NOT exclusive to females in such a way that the "Promethean" sentiment is masculine and the opposite is feminine. Men need emotional bonding as much as women do. It doesn't have to be clothed in reconciliatory tones.