Ebook: The Passion of the Western Mind - Understanding the Ideas that Shape Our World View

This book presents a concise narrative history of the Western world view
from the ancient Greek to the postmodern. My aim has been to provide,
within the limits of a single volume, a coherent account of the evolution of
the Western mind and its changing conception of reality. Recent advances
on several fronts—in philosophy, depth psychology, religious studies, and
history of science—have shed new light on this remarkable evolution. The
historical account presented here has been greatly influenced and enriched
by these advances, and at the end of the narrative I have drawn on them to
set forth a new perspective for understanding our culture’s intellectual and
spiritual history.
We hear much now about the breakdown of the Western tradition, the
decline of liberal education, the dangerous lack of a cultural foundation for
grappling with contemporary problems. Partly such concerns reflect
insecurity and nostalgia in the face of a radically changing world. Yet they
also reflect a genuine need, and it is to that growing number of thoughtful
men and women who recognize such a need that this book is addressed.
How did the modern world come to its present condition? How did the
modem mind arrive at those fundamental ideas and working principles that
so profoundly influence the world today? These are pressing questions for
our time, and to approach them we must recover our roots—not out of
uncritical reverence for the views and values of ages past, but rather to
discover and integrate the historical origins of our own era. I believe that
only by recalling the deeper sources of our present world and world view
can we hope to gain the self-understanding necessary for dealing with our
current dilemmas. The West’s cultural and intellectual history can thus serve
as a preparatory education for the challenges that face us all. Through this
book I have hoped to make an essential part of that history more readily
accessible to the general reader.
Yet I also simply wanted to tell a story I thought worth telling. The history
of Western culture has long seemed to possess the dynamics, scope, and
beauty of a great epic drama: ancient and classical Greece, the Hellenistic era
and imperial Rome, Judaism and the rise of Christianity, the Catholic Church
and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific
Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism and onward to our own
compelling time. Sweep and grandeur, dramatic conflicts and astonishing
resolutions have marked the Western mind’s sustained attempt to
comprehend the nature of reality—from Thales and Pythagoras to Plato and
Aristotle, from Clement and Boethius to Aquinas and Ockham, from Eudoxus
and Ptolemy to Copernicus and Newton, from Bacon and Descartes to Kant
and Hegel, and from all these to Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and beyond. That
long battle of ideas called “the Western tradition” has been a stirring
adventure whose sum and consequence we all bear within ourselves. An
epic heroism has shone forth in the personal struggles of Socrates, of Paul
and Augustine, of Luther and Galileo, and in that larger cultural struggle,
borne by these and by many less visible protagonists, which has moved the
West on its extraordinary course. There is high tragedy here. And there is
something beyond tragedy.
The following account traces the development of the major world views
of the West’s mainstream high culture, focusing on the crucial sphere of
interaction between philosophy, religion, and science. Perhaps what Virginia
Woolf said of great works of literature could be said as well of great world
views: “The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their
freedom from faults—indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all—
but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely
mastered its perspective.” My goal in these pages has been to give voice to
each perspective mastered by the Western mind in the course of its
evolution, and to take each on its own terms. I have assumed no special
priority for any particular conception of reality, including our present one
(which is itself multiple and in profound flux). Instead, I have approached
each world view in the same spirit that I would approach an exceptional
work of art—seeking to understand and appreciate, to experience its human
consequences, to let its meaning unfold.
Today the Western mind appears to be undergoing an epochal
transformation, of a magnitude perhaps comparable to any in our
civilization’s history. I believe we can participate intelligently in that
transformation only to the extent to which we are historically informed.
Every age must remember its history anew. Each generation must examine
and think through again, from its own distinctive vantage point, the ideas
that have shaped its understanding of the world. Our task is to do so from
the richly complex perspective of the late twentieth century. I hope this
book will contribute to that effort.
R. T.