The need of a broad philosphical vision for our own global health (post 1)

Post 1 on Richard Tarnas wonderful book

Here is a few notes on the wonderful recap of western philo and thinking at large entitled : THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND,

BY RICHARD TARNAS
(EX PROGRAM MANAGER AT Essalen and PHD…)

Joseph Campbell says of it: ‘The most lucid and concise presentation I have read, of the grand lines of what every student should know about the thought of history of western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a novel’

Huston Smith : ‘The best intellectual history of the west in one volume I have ever seen’

I tend to think like them. It is quite well written and has some depth of analysis.

In black ink you will find quotes from his book (form page 404 to 410).

In blue there will be my small comment

The postmodern collapse of meaning has thus been countered by an emerging awareness of the individual's self-responsibility and capacity for creative innovation and self transformation in his or her existential and spiritual response to life. Following suggestions implicit in Nietzsche, he "death of God" has begun to be assimilated and reconceived as a positive religious development, as permitting the emergence of a more authentic experience of the numinous, a larger sense of deity

This might be one of the most optimistic paragraph of the whole book. The previous pages went on and on to describe the collapse of the post-modern way of thinking which basically turned upside down every conception that came from the greeks, the Christians, the renaissance humanist and the positivist scientism of modern man.

Now, his conception of the antidote for post-modern dysentery is quite romantic, but also very similar to Ken Wilber ‘spirit in evolution’. Basically : the Kosmos is evolving in consciousness trough us.

On the intellectual level, religion no longer tends to be understood reductively as a psychologically or culturally determined belief in nonexistent realities, or explained away as an accident of biology, but is recognized as a fundamental human activity in which every society and individual symbolically interprets and engages the ultimate nature of being.

That seems to me a very liberal conception that only a minority of elite may have

Science too, while no longer enjoying the same degree of sovereignty it possessed during the modern era, continues to retain allegiance for the rivaled pragmatic power of its conceptions and the penetrating rigor of its method.

Yes, let’s recognize the empirical value of science. But Scientist should stop claiming to be experts in metaphysics. They are quite adolescent and dogmatic at it, making bold dogmatic declaration like : ‘’there is no god, the soul does not exist…’’

Because the earlier knowledge claims of modem science have been relativized by both philosophy of science and the concrete consequences of scientific and technological advance, that allegiance is no longer uncritical, yet in these new circumstances science itself has seemingly been freed up to explore new and less-constricted approaches to understanding the world.

‘Tao of physics’ and all that stuff… that is often naïve but at least an attempt to get out of the reductionnist ghetto.

It is true that individuals who subscribe to an allegedly unified and self-evident "scientific world view" of the modem type are seen as having failed to engage the larger intellectual challenge of the age hereby receiving the same judgment in the postmodern era that the ingenuous religious person received from science in the modem era.

I hope more of this will happen. I see so much blind faith in science around me in this culture were deep analysis is minimal

In virtually all contemporary disciplines, it is recognized that the prodigious complexity, subtlety, and multivalence of reality far transcend the grasp of any one intellectual approach, and that only a committed openness to the interplay of many perspectives can meet the extraordinary challenges of the postmodern era. But contemporary science has itself become increasingly self-aware and self-critical, less prone to a naive scientism, more conscious of its epistemological and existential limitations. Nor is contemporary science singular, having given rise to a number of radically divergent interpretations of the world, many of which differ sharply from what was previously the conventional scientific vision.

That is where a global and integral approach like Vedanta and Global Helath could be helpful for our era… if truly lived Vedanta doesn’t die before it can deliver the goods.