Richard Tarnas: “The Cosmological Situation Today”

In the course of the past century, the modern world view has seen both its greatest ascendancy and its unexpected breakdown. Every field and discipline, from philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics to physics, ecology, and medicine, has brought forth new data and new perspectives that have challenged long-established assumptions and strategies of the modern mind. This challenge has been considerably magnified and made more urgent by the multitude of concrete consequences produced by those assumptions and strategies, many of them problematic, some catastrophic. Today, twenty years into the new millennium, almost every defining attitude of the modern world view has been critically reassessed and deconstructed, though often not relinquished, even when failure to do so is costly. The result in our own, postmodern time has been a state of extraordinary intellectual ferment and fragmen­tation, fluidity and uncertainty. Ours is an age between world views, creative yet disoriented, a transitional era when the old cultural vision no longer holds and the new has not yet constellated. Yet we are not without signs of what the new might look like.

Recently there have been emerging from the deconstruc­tive flux of the postmodern mind the tentative outlines of a new understanding of reality, one very different from the conventional modern view. Impelled by develop­ments in many fields, this shift in intel­lectual vision has encompassed a wide range of ideas and princi­ples, among which can be iden­tified a few common themes. Perhaps the most conspicuous and pervasive of these can be summed up as a deeper appre­ciation of both the multidimen­sional complexity of reality and the plurality of perspectives necessary to approach it. Closely related to this new appreciation, as both cause and effect, is a critical reappraisal of the epistemo­logical limits and pragmatic consequences of the conventional scientific approach to knowledge. This reappraisal includes a more acute sensitivity to the ways in which subject and object are mutually implicated in the act of know­ing, a revised understanding of the relation­ship of whole and part in all phenomena, a new grasp of complex interdependence and subtle order in living systems, and an acknowledg­ment of the inadequacy of reductionist, mechanistic, and objectivized concepts of nature.

Other major characteristics of this emerging intellectual vision include a deeper understanding of the pivotal role of the imagination in mediating all human experi­ence and knowledge; an increased awareness of the depth, power, and complexity of the uncon­scious psyche; and a more sophisticated analysis of the nature of symbolic, metaphoric, and archetypal meaning in human life. Behind many of these themes can be seen a rejection of all literal­istic and univocal interpretations of reality—of the tendency, as Robert Bellah has put it, to identify “one conception of reality with reality itself.” [i] Equally fundamental to this shift is a growing recognition of the need for and desirability of a radical opening of the mainstream Western intellectual and cultural tradition to the rich multiplicity of other traditions and perspectives that have evolved in other cultures and within the West itself.

Yet this emphatic embrace of pluralism has been balanced by –and to a great extent been in the service of– a profound impulse for reinte­gra­tion, a widely felt desire to overcome the fragmentation and alienation of the late modern mind. Underlying the variety of its expressions, the most distinctive trait of this new vision has been its concern with the philosophical and psychological reconcilia­tion of numerous long-standing schisms: between human being and nature, self and world, spirit and matter, mind and body, conscious and unconscious, personal and transpersonal, secular and sacred, intellect and soul, the sciences and the humanities in the academic world, science and religion in the larger culture.

For some time this emerging consensus of convictions and aspira­tions has seemed to me, as to many others, the most interesting and hopeful intellectual development of our age and perhaps the one most likely to produce a viable successor to the rapidly deteriorating modern world view. Yet from its beginning this new vision or paradigm has confronted a seemingly insurmountable problem. The present world situa­tion could hardly be more ripe for a major paradigm shift, and many thoughtful observers have concluded that such a shift, when it comes, should and very probably will be based on principles resembling those just cited. But to succeed in becoming a broad-based cultural vision, or even to achieve its own implicit program of psychological and intellectual integration, this new outlook has been lacking one essential element, the sine qua non of any genuinely comprehensive, internally consistent world view: a coherent cosmology.

In retrospect, it is evident that a fundamental intellectual turning point of Western civilization was the Copernican revolution, understood in its largest sense. Nothing so effectively bestowed confidence in the supreme power of human reason. Nothing so emphatically and comprehensively affirmed the superiority of the modern Western mind over all others –all other world views, other eras, other cultures, other modes of cognition. Nothing emancipated the modern self from a cosmos of established pregiven meanings more profoundly or more dramatic­ally. It is impossible to think of the modern mind without the Copernican revolution.

Yet the luminosity of that great revolution has cast an extraordinary shadow. Not only the triumph of human rationality but the radical displacement of the Earth and humanity from an absolute cosmic center, the stunning transference of the apparent cosmic order from the observed to the observer, and the eventual pervasive disen­chantment of the material universe were all paradigmatic for the modern mind, and these have now come to epitomize humankind's underlying sense of disorientation and alienation. With the heavens no longer a transcendent divine realm and with the Earth no longer embedded in a circumscribed celestial order of planetary spheres and powers, humanity was simultaneously liberated from and thrust out of the ancient-medieval cosmic womb. The essential nature of reality under­went an immense shift for the Western mind, which now engaged a world possessed of entirely new dimensions, structure, and existential implica­tions.

For all the exalted numinosity of the Copernican birth, the new universe that eventually emerged into the light of common day was a spiritually empty vastness, impersonal, neutral, indifferent to human concerns, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. At a deep level human consciousness was thereby radically estranged and decentered. It no longer experienced itself as an essential expression and focus of an intrinsically meaningful universe. “Before the Copernican revolution,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “it was natural to suppose that God’s purposes were specially concerned with the earth, but now this has become an unplausible hypothesis”: mankind must instead be regarded as a “curious accident.” [ii] The Copernican revolution as it played itself out in the scientific and philosophical interpretations of successive generations was the modern mind’s prototypical act of deconstruction, bringing about both a birth and a death. It was the primordial cataclysm of the modern age, a stupendous event which destroyed an entire world and constituted a new one.

Not only the subsequent evolution of modern cosmology, from Newton and Laplace to Einstein and Hubble, but virtually the entire modern intellectual trajectory has sustained and magnified the primary Copernican insight in a certain powerful direction: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus. . . . From seventeenth-century rationalism and empiricism to twentieth-century existentialism and astrophysics, human consciousness has found itself progressively emancipated yet also progressively relativ­ized, unrooted, inwardly isolated from the spiritually opaque world it seeks to compre­hend. The soul knows no home in the modern cosmos. The status of the human being in its cosmic setting is fundamentally problematic—solitary, accidental, ephemeral, inexplicable. The proud uniqueness and autonomy of “Man” have come at a high price. He is an insignificant speck cast adrift in a vast purposeless cosmos, a stranger in a strange land. Self-reflective modern conscious­ness finds no foundation for itself in the empirical world. Inner and outer, psyche and cosmos, are radically discontinuous, mutually incoherent. As Steven Weinberg famously summarized modern cosmology, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” [iii] With the encompassing cosmos indifferent to human meaning, with all significance deriving ultimately from the decentered and accidental human subject, a meaningful world can never be more than a courageous human projection. Thus did the evolving scientific and philosophical interpretation of the Copernican revolution establish the essential matrix for the modern world view in all its disenchanting ramifications. The most celebrated of human intellectual achievements, it remains the watershed of human alienation, the epochal symbol of humanity’s cosmic estrangement.

Here we face the crux of our present intellectual predicament. For it is this post-Copernican cosmological context that continues to frame the current effort to forge a new paradigm of reality, yet that context, utterly at variance with the deep transforma­tions now being urged, thereby confounds them. Although many of the post-Copernican ramifications (Cartesian, Kantian, Darwinian, Freudian) have been grappled with, criticized, and reconceived to one extent or another, the great starting point for the whole trajectory of modern conscious­ness remains untouched. The cosmological metastructure that implicitly contained and precipitated all the rest is still so solidly established as to be beyond discussion. The physical sciences of the past hundred years have flung open wide the nature of reality, dissolving all the old absolutes, but the Earth still moves –along with, now, everything else, in a postmodern explosion of centerless, free-floating flux. Newton has been transcended but not Copernicus, who has seemingly been extended in every dimension.

For all the notable strides made in deconstructing the modern mind and moving towards a new vision, whether in science, philoso­phy, or religion, nothing has come close to questioning the larger Copernican revolution itself, the modern mind's first principle and foundation. The very idea is as inconceiv­able now as was the idea of a moving Earth before 1500. That most fundamental modern revolu­tion, and specifically its mainstream scientific and philosophical interpretation with all its existential consequences, still prevails, subtly yet globally determining the character of the contemporary mind. The continuing implacable reality of a purposeless cosmos places an effective glass ceiling on all attempts to reconstruct or soften the various alienating post-Copernican ramifications, from Descartes’s subject-object dualism to Darwin’s blind evolution. A straight line of disenchantment extends from astronomy and biology to philosophy and religion, as in Jacques Monod’s well-known synopsis of the human condition in the later twentieth century: “The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.” [iv]

From the cosmological perspective, the various movements now pressing for the creation of a more humanly meaningful and spiritually resonant world have been taking place in an atomistic void. In the absence of some unprecedented develop­ment beyond the existential framework defined by the larger Copernican revolution as currently understood, these less primordial intellectual changes can never be more than brave interpretive exercises in an alien cosmic environment. No amount of revisioning philosophy or psychology, science or religion, can forge a new world view without a radical shift at the cosmological level. As it now stands, our cosmic context does not support the attempted transformation of human vision. No genuine synthesis seems possible. This enormous contradiction which invisibly encompasses the emerging paradigm is precisely what is preventing that paradigm from constituting a coherent and effective world view.

As a long line of thinkers from Pascal to Nietzsche have recognized, the cosmic spaces of meaning­less vastness that seem to surround the human world silently oppose and subvert the meaning of the human world itself. In such a context, all human imagination, all religious experience, all moral and spiritual values, can only too readily be seen as idiosyncratic human constructs. Despite the many profound and indispensable changes that have taken place in the contemporary Western mind, the larger cosmologi­cal situation continues to sustain and enforce the basic double bind of modern consciousness: Our deepest spiritual and psycho­logical aspirations are fundamentally incoherent with the very nature of the cosmos as revealed by the modern mind. “Not only are we not at the center of the cosmos,” wrote Primo Levi, “but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The universe is strange to us, we are strange in the universe.” [v]

The distinctive pathos and paradox of our cosmological situation reflects a deep historical schism within modern culture and the modern sensibility. For the modern experience of a radical division between inner and outer –of a subjective, personal, and purposeful consciousness that is incongruously embedded in and evolved from an objective universe that is unconscious, impersonal, and purposeless– is precisely represented in the cultural polarity and tension in our history between Romanticism and the Enlightenment. On the one side of this divide, our interior selves hold precious our spiritual intuitions, our moral and aesthetic sensibilities, our devotion to love and beauty, the power of the creative imagination, our music and poetry, our metaphysical reflections and religious experiences, our visionary journeys, our glimpses of an ensouled nature, our inward conviction that the deepest truths can be found within. This interior impulse has been carried in modern culture by Romanticism, understood in its broadest sense –from Rousseau and Goethe, Wordsworth and Emerson all the way through to its spirited renascence, democratized and globalized, in the post-Sixties counterculture. In the Romantic impulse and tradition, the modern soul found profound psychological and spiritual expression.

On the other side of the schism, that soul has dwelled within a universe whose essential nature was determined and defined by the Scientific Revolution and radical Enlightenment as these gradually brought into focus a disenchanted universe. In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism. Together these have constituted the modern world view and the complex modern sensibility. One could say that the modern soul's sustaining allegiance has been to Romanticism, whereas the modern mind's loyalty has been to the Enlightenment. Both live within us, fully yet antithetically. An impossible tension of opposites thereby resides deep in the modern sensibility. Hence the underlying pathos of the contemporary situation. The biography of the modern soul has taken place completely within an objectified Enlightenment cosmos, thereby contextualizing and rendering the entire life and striving of the modern soul as “merely subjective.” Our spiritual being, our psychology, is contradicted by our cosmology. Our Romanticism is contradicted by our Enlightenment, our inner by our outer.

Behind the Enlightenment/Romanticism division in high culture,, mirrored in the academic world by the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities, looms the deeper and more ancient cultural schism between science and religion. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, many spiritually sensitive individuals have found resources to help them cope with the human condition in the modern cosmological context in ways that, to one extent or another, answer their spiritual longings and existential needs. Paradoxically, it seems to be this very context, with its absolute erasure of all inherited orders of pregiven cosmic meaning, that has helped make possible in our time an unprecedented freedom, diversity, and authenticity of spiritual and religious responses to the human condition. These have taken a multitude of forms: the pursuit of the individual spiritual journey drawing on many sources, the personal leap of faith, the life of ethical service and humanitarian compassion, the inward turn (meditation, prayer, monastic withdrawal), involvement with the great mystical traditions and initiatory practices from Asia (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi) and from diverse indigenous and shamanic cultures (Native North American, Central and South American, African, Australian, Polynesian, Old European), recovery of various gnostic and esoteric perspectives and practices, the pursuit of psychedelic or entheogenic exploration, devotion to creative artistic expression as a spiritual path, or renewed engage­ment with revitalized forms of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, beliefs, and practices.

Yet all these engagements have taken place in a cosmos whose basic parameters have been defined by the determinedly nonspiritual epistemology and ontology of modern science. Because of science’s sovereignty over the external aspect of the modern world view, these noble spiritual journeys are pursued in a universe whose essential nature is recognized –whether consciously or subconsciously– to be supremely indifferent to those very quests. These many spiritual paths can and do provide profound meaning, solace, and support, but they have not resolved the fundamental schism of the modern world view. They cannot heal the deep division latent in every modern psyche. The very nature of the objective universe turns any spiritual faith and ideals into courageous acts of subjectivity, constantly vulnerable to intellectual negation.

Only by strenuously avoiding the reality of this contradiction, and thus engaging in what is in essence a form of psychological compartmentalization and denial, can the modern self find any semblance of wholeness. In such circum­stan­ces, an integrated world view, the natural aspiration of every psyche, is unattain­able. An inchoate awareness of this underlies the rigid reaction of religious fundamentalists to modernity, their refusal to join the seemingly impossible spiritual adventure of the modern age. But for the more deeply reflective and embracing contemporary sensibility, with its multiple commitments and alertness to the larger dialectic of realities in our time, the conflict cannot be dismissed so readily.

The problem with this dissociative condition is not merely cognitive dissonance or internal distress. Nor is it only the “privatization of spirituality” that has become so characteristic of our time. Since the encompassing cosmological context in which all human activity takes place has eliminated any enduring ground of transcendent values –spiritual, moral, aesthetic –the resulting vacuum has empowered the reductive values of the market and the mass media to colonize the collective human imagination and drain it of all depth. If the cosmology is disenchanted, the world is logically seen in predominantly utilitarian ways, and the utilitarian mind-set begins to shape all human motivation at the collective level. What might be considered means to larger ends ineluctably become ends in themselves. The drive to achieve ever-greater financial profit, political power, and technological prowess becomes the dominant impulse moving individuals and societies, until these values, despite ritualistic claims to the contrary, supersede all other aspirations.

The disenchanted cosmos impoverishes the collective psyche in the most global way, vitiating its spiritual and moral imagination –“vitiate” not only in the sense of diminish and impair but also in the sense of deform and debase. In such a context, everything can be appropriated as instrumental means toward narrow ends. Nothing is immune. Majestic vistas of nature, great works of art, revered music, eloquent language, the beauty of the human body, distant lands and cultures, extraordinary moments of history, the arousal of deep human emotion: all become advertising tools to manipulate consumer response. For quite literally, in a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred. The soul of the world has been extinguished: Ancient trees and forests can then be seen as nothing but potential lumber; mountains nothing but mineral deposits; seashores and deserts are oil reserves; lakes and rivers, engineering tools. Animals are perceived as harvestable commodi­ties, indigenous tribes as obstructing relics of an outmoded past, children’s minds as marketing targets. At the all-important cosmological level, the spiritual dimension of the empirical universe has been entirely negated, and with it, any publicly affirm­able encompassing ground for moral wisdom and restraint. The short term and the bottom line rule all. Whether in politics, business, or the media, the lowest common denominator of the culture increasingly governs discourse and prescribes the values of the whole. Myopically obsessed with narrow goals and narrow identities, the powerful blind themselves to the larger suffering and crisis of the global community.

In a world where the subject is experienced as living in –and above and against– a world of objects, other peoples and cultures are more readily perceived as simply other objects, inferior in value to oneself, to ignore or exploit for one’s own purposes, as are other forms of life, biosystems, the Earth itself. Moreover, the underlying anxiety and disorienta­tion that pervade modern societies in the face of a meaningless cosmos create both a collective psychic numbness and a desperate spiritual hunger, leading to an addictive, insatiable craving for ever more material goods to fill the inner emptiness and producing a manic techno-consumerism that cannibalizes the planet. Highly practical consequences ensue from the disenchanted modern world view.

One might say that the ambition to emancipate ourselves as autonomous subjects by objectifying the world has come full circle, returned to haunt us, by turning the human self into an object as well –an ephemeral side effect of a random universe, an isolated atom in mass society, a statistic, a commodity, passive prey to the demands of the market, prisoner of the self-constructed modern “iron cage.” Thus Weber’s famous prophecy:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mech­anized petrification, embel­lished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” [vi]

Defined in the end by its disenchanted context, the human self too is inevitably disenchanted. Ultimately it becomes, like everything else, a mere object of material forces and efficient causes: a sociobiological pawn, a selfish gene, a meme machine, a biotechnological artifact, an unwitting tool of its own tools. For the cosmol­ogy of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation, and self-understanding that take place within its parameters. It is the container for everything else.

Thus arises what has become perhaps the most encompassing question of our time: What is the ultimate impact of cosmological disenchantment on a civilization? What does it do to the human self, year after year, century after century, to experience existence as a conscious purposeful being in an unconscious purposeless universe? What is the price of a collective belief in absolute cosmic indifference? What are the consequences of this unprecedented cosmological context for the human experiment, indeed, for the entire planet?

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who seems to have recognized most intensely the full implications of the modern development, and experienced in his own being the inescapable plight of the modern sensibility: the Romantic soul at once liberated, displaced, and entrapped within the vast cosmic void of the scientific universe. Using hyper-Copernican imagery to depict the dizzying annihilation of the metaphysical world and death of God wrought by the modern mind, and reflecting that peculiarly tragic nexus of self-determining will and inexorable fate, Nietzsche captured the pathos of the late modern existential and spiritual crisis:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? [vii]

If we take into account the full effect of the post-Copernican, post-Nietzschean situation, we see the extremity of the late-modern human’s differentiation and alienation in the cosmos. The source of all meaning and purpose in the universe has become at once infinitesi­mally small and utterly peripher­al. The lonely island of human meaning is now so incongruent, so accidental, so ephemeral, so fundamentally estranged from its vast surrounding matrix, as to have become, in many senses, insupport­able.

Yet it is perhaps the very starkness and self-contradictory absurdity of this situation that suggests the possibility of another perspective. The modern mind has long prided itself on its repeated success in overcoming anthropo­morphic distortions in its understanding of reality. It has con­stantly sought to purify its world view from any naïve anthropocen­trism and self-fulfilling projections. Each revolution in modern thought from Copernicus onward, each great insight associated with a canonical name in the grand procession –from Bacon and Descartes, Hume and Kant to Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Woolf, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Kuhn, Fanon, Foucault, and the entire postmodern turn– has brought forth in its own manner another essential revelation of an unconscious bias that had until then blinded the human mind in its attempts to understand the world. The gist and consequence of this long, incomparably intricate modern and post­modern epistemological development has been to compel us with ever-increasing acuity to recognize how our most fundamental assumptions and principles, so long taken for granted as to fully escape our notice, imperceptibly bring into being the very world we consider indisputably objective. As the post-Kuhnian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend recognized:

A change of universal principles brings about a change of the entire world. Speaking in this manner we no longer assume an objective world that remains unaffected by our epistemic activities, except when moving within the confines of a particular point of view. We concede that our epistemic activities may have a decisive influence even upon the most solid piece of cosmological furniture –they may make gods disappear and replace them by heaps of atoms in empty space. [viii]

Let us, then, take our strategy of critical self-reflection one crucial and perhaps inevitable step further. Let us apply it to the fundamen­tal governing assumption and starting point of the modern world view –a pervasive assumption that subtly continues to influence the postmodern turn as well– that any meaning and purpose the human mind perceives in the universe does not exist intrinsically in the universe but is constructed and projected onto it by the human mind. Might not this be the final, most global anthropocentric delusion of all? For is it not an extraordi­nary act of human hubris –a hubris of cosmic proportions– to assume that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is ultimately centered in the human mind, which is therefore absolutely unique and special and in this sense superior to the entire cosmos? To presume that the universe utterly lacks what we human beings, the offspring and expression of that universe, conspicuously possess? To assume that the part somehow radically differs from and transcends the whole? To base our entire world view on the a priori principle that whenever human beings perceive any patterns of psycho­logical or spiritual significance in the nonhuman world, any signs of interiority and mind, any suggestion of purposefully coherent order and intelligible meaning, these must be understood as no more than human constructions and projections, as ulti­mately rooted in the human mind and never in the world?

Perhaps this complete voiding of the cosmos, this absolute privileging of the human, is the ultimate act of anthropocentric projection, the most subtle yet prodigious form of human self-aggrandizement. Perhaps the modern mind has been unconsciously projecting soullessness and mindlessness on a cosmic scale, systematically filtering and eliciting all data according to its self-elevating assumptions at the very moment we believed we were “cleansing” our minds of “distortions.” Have we been living in a self-produced bubble of cosmic isolation? Perhaps the very attempt to de-anthropomorphize reality in such an absolute and simplistic manner is itself a supremely anthropocentric act.

I believe that this criticism of the hidden anthropocentrism permeating the modern world view cannot be successfully countered. Only the blinders of our paradigm, as is always the case, have prevented us from recognizing the profound implausibil­ity of its most basic underlying assump­tion. For as we gaze out now at the immense starry heavens surrounding our precious planet, and as we contemplate the long and richly diverse history of human thinking about the world, must we not consider that in our strangely unique modern commitment to restrict all meaning and purposive intelligence to ourselves, and refusing these to the great cosmos within which we have emerged, we might in fact be drastically underestimat­ing and misperceiving that cosmos –and thus misperceiving, at once overestimating and underestimating, ourselves as well? Perhaps the greater Copernican revolution is in a sense still incomplete, still unfolding. Perhaps a long-hidden form of anthropo­centric bias, increasingly destructive in its consequences, can now at last be recognized, thus opening up the possibility of a richer, more complex, more authentic relationship between the human being and the cosmos.

Questions and issues like these compel us to direct our attention with new eyes both outward and inward. Not only inward, as we habitually do in our search for meaning, but also outward, as we seldom do in that search because our cosmos has long been regarded as empty of spiritual significance and unable to respond to such a quest. Yet our gaze outward must be different from before. It must be transformed by a new awareness of the interior: The questions and issues we have confronted here require us to explore yet more deeply the nature of the self that seeks to comprehend the world. They press us to discern yet more clearly how our subjectivity, that tiny peripheral island of meaning in the cosmic vastness, subtly participates in configuring and constellat­ing the entire universe we perceive and know. They compel us to examine that mysterious place where subject and object so intricately and consequentially intersect: the crucial meeting point of cosmology, epistemology, and psychology.

This essay is adapted from the author’s Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), pp. 26-36.

Notes:

[i] Robert Bellah, “Between Religion and Social Science” (1969), in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970; Berkeley: University of California, 1991), p. 246.

[ii] Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (1935), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 23, 222.

[iii] Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977), 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 154.

[iv] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (1970), (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 180.

[v] Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, “The New Sky” (1985), trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1989), p. 22.

[vi] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), trans­. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 182.

[vii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 181.

[viii] Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (1978), (London: Verso, 1982), p. 70.

Copyright © Richard Tarnas, 2021

Richard Tarnas is a professor of philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He received his A.B. from Harvard University (1972) and his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute (1976). Formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute, he is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern widely used in universities, and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network.