Richard Tarnas > Quotes

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
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― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The forms of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the motions of the planets, and the gods of the mysteries were all essentially related for Pythagoreans, and the meaning of that relation was revealed in an education that culminated in the human soul’s assimilation to the world soul, and thence to the divine creative mind of the universe.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“education is a process through which truth is not introduced into the mind from without, but is “led out” from within.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“our intellectual quest for truth can never be separated from the cultivation of our moral and aesthetic imagination.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Cognition begins with sensation.”
― Richard Tarnas

“Knowledge based on the senses is therefore a subjective judgment, an ever-varying opinion without any absolute foundation. True knowledge, by contrast, is possible only from a direct apprehension of the transcendent Forms, which are eternal and beyond the shifting confusion and imperfection of the physical plane. Knowledge derived from the senses is merely opinion and is fallible by any nonrelative standard. Only knowledge derived directly from the Ideas is infallible and can be justifiably called real knowledge.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“Thus Western man enacted an extraordinary dialectic in the course of the modern era - moving from a near boundless confidence in his own powers, his spiritual potential, his capacity for certain knowledge, his mastery over nature, and his progressive destiny, to what often appeared to be a sharply opposite condition: a debilitating sense of metaphysical insignificance and personal futility, spiritual loss of faith, uncertainty in knowledge, a mutually destructive relationship with nature, and an intens insecurity concerning the human future. In the four centuries of modern man’s existence, Bacon and Descartes had become Kafka and Beckett.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“At the foundation of Hegel’s thought was his understanding of dialectic, according to which all things unfold in a continuing evolutionary process whereby every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite. The interaction between these opposites then generates a third stage in which the opposites are integrated —they are at once overcome and fulfilled— in a richer and higher synthesis, which in turn becomes the basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis... Hegel’s overriding impulse was to comprehend all dimensions of existence as dialectically integrated in one unitary whole. In Hegel’s view, all human thought and all reality is pervaded by contradiction, which alone makes possible the development of higher states of consciousness and higher states of being.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“the striving (and anxious) Christian, deprived of the Catholic’s recourse to sacramental justification, could find signs of his being among the elect if he could successfully and unceasingly apply himself to disciplined work and his worldly calling. Material productivity was often the fruit of such effort, which, compounded by the Puritan demand for ascetic renunciation of selfish pleasure and frivolous spending, readily lent itself to the accumulation of capital. Whereas traditionally the pursuit of commercial success was perceived as directly threatening to the religious life, now the two were recognized as mutually beneficial.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind

“I believe that the disenchantment of the modern universe is the direct result of a simplistic epistemology and moral posture spectacularly inadequate to the depths, complexity, and grandeur of the cosmos. To assume a priori that the entire universe is ultimately a soulless void within which our multidimensional consciousness is an anomalous accident, and that purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depths are solely attributes of the human being, reflects a long-invisible inflation on the part of the modern self. And heroic hubris is still indissolubly linked, as it was in ancient Greek tragedy, to heroic fall.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its own unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms.”
― Richard Tarnas

“For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its own being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally,
to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus to recover its connection to the whole: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“The suggestive patterning and often delicate precision of detail in such coincidences notoriously escape the net of objective assessments and experimental tests. Synchronicities seem to constitute a lived reality the experience of which depends deeply on the sensitive perception of context and nature.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Il mondo esprime il proprio significato attraverso la coscienza umana. […] Attraverso l’intelletto umano in tutta la sua individualità, contingenza, e lotta personale, il contenuto del pensiero del mondo, sempre in evoluzione, raggiunge la propria formulazione cosciente. Sì, la conoscenza del mondo si struttura grazie al contributo soggettivo della mente; però tale contributo è teologicamente convocato dall’universo nell’ottica della propria autorivelazione. Il pensiero umano non riflette né può riflettere come uno specchio una verità oggettiva predeterminata del mondo; al contrario, la verità del mondo raggiunge l’esistenza quando nasce nella mente umana. Nello stesso modo in cui durante una determinata fase del proprio sviluppo una pianta produce fiori, anche l’universo produce nuove fasi della conoscenza.”
― Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View

“When God had completed the creation of the world as a sacred temple of his glory and wisdom, he conceived a desire for one last being whose relation to the whole and to the divine Author would be different from that of every other creature. At this ultimate moment God considered the creation of the human being, who he hoped would come to know and love the beauty, intelligence, and grandeur of the divine work...”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“When God had completed the creation of the world as a sacred temple of his glory and wisdom, he conceived a desire for one last being whose relation to the whole and to the divine Author would be different from that of every other creature. At this ultimate moment God considered the creation of the human being, who he hoped would come to know and love the beauty, intelligence, and grandeur of the divine work.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cultural Crisis and Transformation: Exploring Archetypal Patterns in World News and Culture

“knowledge to be ultimately emancipatory rather than constricting, bringing a potential increase of personal freedom and fulfillment through an enlarged understanding of the self and its cosmic context.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The evidence suggests not that the planets themselves cause various events or character traits, but rather that a consistently meaningful empirical correspondence exists between the two sets of phenomena, astronomical and human, with the connecting principle most fruitfully approached as some form of archetypally informed synchronicity.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“La mente umana segue il sentiero archetipico numinoso che parte dal suo interno.”
― Richard Tarnas

“Astrology,” he stated, “represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.”
― Richard Tarnas

“the tricksterlike unpredictable spontaneity of the divine,”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Within the time span of a single generation surrounding the year 1500, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael created their many masterworks of the High Renaissance, revealing the birth of the new human as much in da Vinci's multiform genius and the godlike incarnations of the David and the Sistine Creation of Adam as in the new perspectival objectivity and poietic empowerment of the Renaissance artist; Columbus sailed west and reached America, Vasco da Gama sailed east and reached India, and the Magellan expedition circumnavigated the globe, opening the world forever to itself; Luther posted his theses on the door of the Wittenberg castle church and began the enormous convulsion of Europe and the Western psyche called the Reformation; and Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory and began the even more momentous Scientific Revolution. From this instant, the human self, the known world, the cosmos, heaven and earth were all radically and irrevocably transformed. All this happened within a period of time briefer than that which has passed since Woodstock and the Moon landing. (p. 4)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“Wisdom, like compassion, often seems to require of us that we hold multiple realities in our consciousness at once. This may be the task we must begin to engage if we wish to gain a deeper understanding of the evolution of human consciousness, and the history of the Western mind in particular: to see that long intellectual and spiritual journey, moving through stages of increasing differentiation and complexity, as having brought about both a progressive ascent to autonomy and a tragic fall from unity – and, perhaps, as having prepared the way for a synthesis on a new level. From this perspective, the two paradigms reflect opposite but equally essential aspects of an immense dialectical process, an evolutionary drama that has been unfolding for thousands of years and that now appears to be reaching a critical, perhaps climactic moment of transformation. (p. 14)”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View