Cosmos and Psyche
Cosmos and Psyche
Intimations of a New World View
RICHARD TARNAS
VIKING
VIKING
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First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Richard Tarnas, 2006
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ISBN: 978-1-1012-1347-6
Set in Fairfield LH Light
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To my family and friends,
who waited patiently so long
Evening star, you bring all things which the bright dawn has scattered…
Sappho
Contents
Preface
I The Transformation of the Cosmos
The Birth of the Modern Self
The Dawn of a New Universe
Two Paradigms of History
Forging the Self, Disenchanting the World
The Cosmological Situation Today
II In Search of a Deeper Order
Two Suitors: A Parable
The Interior Quest
Synchronicity and Its Implications
The Archetypal Cosmos
III Through the Archetypal Telescope
The Evolving Tradition
Archetypal Principles
The Planets
Forms of Correspondence
Personal Transit Cycles
Archetypal Coherence and Concrete Diversity
Assessing Patterns of Correlation
IV Epochs of Revolution
From the French Revolution to the 1960s
Synchronic and Diachronic Patterns in History
Scientific and Technological Revolutions
Awakenings of the Dionysian
The Liberation of Nature
Religious Rebellion and Erotic Emancipation
Filling in the Cyclical Sequence
The Individual and the Collective
A Larger View of the Sixties
V Cycles of Crisis and Contraction
World Wars, Cold War, and September 11
Historical Contrasts and Tensions
Conservative Empowerment
Splitting, Evil, and Terror
Moby Dick and Nature’s Depths
Historical Determinism, Realpolitik, and Apocalypse
Moral Courage, Facing the Shadow, and the Tension of Opposites
Paradigmatic Works of Art
Forging Deep Structures
VI Cycles of Creativity and Expansion
Opening New Horizons
Convergences of Scientific Breakthroughs
Social and Political Rebellions and Awakenings
Quantum Leaps and Peak Experiences
From Copernicus to Darwin
Music and Literature
Iconic Moments and Cultural Milestones
Great Heights and Shadows
Hidden Births
VII Awakenings of Spirit and Soul
Epochal Shifts of Cultural Vision
Spiritual Epiphanies and the Emergence of New Religions
Utopian Social Visions
Romanticism, Imaginative Genius, and Cosmic Epiphany
Revelations of the Numinous
The Great Awakening of the Axial Age
The Late Twentieth Century and the Turn of the Millennium
VIII Towards a New Heaven and a New Earth
Understanding the Past, Creating the Future
Observations on Future Planetary Alignments
Opening to the Cosmos
Sources of the World Order
Epilogue
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, Santayana declared, and the metaphor is apt. The mind that seeks the deepest intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea. Yet what is sometimes forgotten is the larger purpose of such a virtue. For in the end, chastity is something one preserves not for its own sake, which would be barren, but rather so that one may be fully ready for the moment of surrender to the beloved, the suitor whose aim is true. Whether in knowledge or in love, the capacity to recognize and embrace that moment when it finally arrives, perhaps in quite unexpected circumstances, is essential to the virtue. Only with that discernment and inward opening can the full participatory engagement unfold that brings forth new realities and new knowledge. Without this capacity, at once active and receptive, the long discipline would be fruitless. The carefully cultivated skeptical posture would become finally an empty prison, an armored state of unfulfillment, a permanently confining end in itself rather than the rigorous means to a sublime result.
It is just this tension and interplay—between critical rigor and the potential discovery of larger truths—that has always informed and advanced the drama of our intellectual history. Yet in our own time, at the start of a new millennium, that drama seems to have reached a moment of climactic urgency. We find ourselves at an extraordinary threshold. One need not be graced with prophetic insight to recognize that we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical antiquity or the beginning of the modern era, that bring forth, through great stress and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view. Amidst the multitude of debates and controversies that fill the intellectual arena, our basic understanding of reality is in contention: the role of the human being in nature and the cosmos, the status of human knowledge, the basis of moral values, the dilemmas of pluralism, relativism, objectivity, the spiritual dimension of life, the direction and meaning—if any—of history and evolution. The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization’s history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying, and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth.
No recital is necessary here of the many formidable and pressing problems—global and local, social, political, economic, ecologic
al—facing the world today. They are visible in every headline in our daily news, monthly journals, and annual state of the world reports. The great enigma of our situation is that we have unprecedented resources for dealing with those problems, yet it is as if some larger or deeper context, some invisible constraint, were negating our capacity and resolve. What is that larger context? Something essential seems to be missing in our understanding, some potent but intangible factor or set of factors. Can we discern the more fundamental conditions in which our many concrete problems might ultimately be rooted? What are the most important underlying issues that confront the human mind and spirit in our era? Focusing particularly on the “Western” situation, centered in Europe and North America though now variously and acutely affecting the entire human community, we can observe three especially fundamental factors:
First, the profound metaphysical disorientation and groundlessness that pervades contemporary human experience: the widely felt absence of an adequate, publicly accessible larger order of purpose and significance, a guiding metanarrative that transcends separate cultures and subcultures, an encompassing pattern of meaning that could give to collective human existence a nourishing coherence and intelligibility.
Second, the deep sense of alienation that affects the modern self: here I refer to not only the personal isolation of the individual in modern mass society but also the spiritual estrangement of the modern psyche in a disenchanted universe, as well as, at the species level, the subjective schism separating the modern human being from the rest of nature and the cosmos.
And third, the critical need, on the part of both individuals and societies, for a deeper insight into those unconscious forces and tendencies, creative and destructive, that play such a powerful role in shaping human lives, history, and the life of the planet.
These conditions, all intricately interconnected and interpenetrating, surround and permeate our contemporary consciousness like the atmosphere in which we live and breathe. From a longer historical perspective, they represent the distillate of many centuries of extraordinary intellectual and psychological development. The compelling paradox of this long development is that these problematic conditions seem to have emerged from, and be subtly interwoven with, the very qualities and achievements of our civilization that have been most progressive, liberating, and admired.
It was this complex historical drama that I explored in my first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought that followed the major shifts of our civilization’s world view from the time of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews to the postmodern era. In that book, published in 1991, I examined and attempted to understand the great philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas and movements that, over the centuries, gradually brought forth the world and world view we inhabit and strive within today. As with many such works that seem to take hold of their authors until they are completed, I was moved to write that book for more reasons than I fully grasped when I began the ten-year task. But my principal motive from the start was to provide, for both my readers and myself, a preparatory foundation for the present work. For while The Passion of the Western Mind examined the history that led to our current situation, Cosmos and Psyche addresses more precisely the crisis of the modern self and modern world view, and then introduces a body of evidence, a method of inquiry, and an emerging cosmological perspective that I believe could help us creatively engage that crisis, and our history itself, within a new horizon of possibility. I hope this book will point towards an enlarged understanding of our evolving universe, and of our own still-unfolding role within it.
R.T.
Cosmos and Psyche
I
The Transformation of the Cosmos
In each age of the world distinguished by high activity, there will be found at its culmination, and among the agencies leading to that culmination, some profound cosmological outlook, implicitly accepted, impressing its own type on the current springs of action.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Adventures of Ideas
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
—C. G. Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The Birth of the Modern Self
The modern self began to emerge, with astonishing force and speed, just over five hundred years ago. There is scarcely a major figure or idea in the preceding cultural and intellectual history of the West that did not contribute to the formation of the modern self, nor has there been any aspect of our existence subsequently untouched by its unique character and potency. One can date the period of its emergence in many ways, but it is illuminating to see that historical epoch as framed by two definitive, symbolically resonant events, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man in 1486 and Descartes’s Discourse on Method in 1637—that is, the extraordinary century and a half that extends from Leonardo, Columbus, Luther, and Copernicus to Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, and Galileo—climaxing, in a sense, in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” We could extend this crucial window, this threshold of transformation, by precisely another fifty years to encompass the 1687 publication of Newton’s Principia, by which time the full foundation had been laid for the modern world and the sovereign confidence of the modern mind. Not just a revolution had occurred but a new Genesis. Thus Alexander Pope’s telling epigram for the Enlightenment:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.
But the dawn had already begun to break in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration, the Renaissance manifesto for the new human self. Composed for the opening of a great gathering of philosophers invited to Rome by Pico himself, the Oration described the Creation in a characteristically Renaissance synthesis of ancient Greek and Judaeo-Christian sources, combining the biblical Genesis and Plato’s Timaeus for its mythic narrative. But Pico then went further, in prophetic anticipation of the new form of the human self about to be born: 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. But as the Creator had no archetype remaining with which to make this last creation, no assigned status for it within the already completed work, he said to this final being:
Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
Thus the brilliant Pico, twenty-three years old, gave the prophecy. A new form of human being announces itself: dynamic, creative, multidimensional, protean, unfinished, self-defining and self-creating, infinitely aspiring, set apart from the whole, overseeing the rest of the world with unique sovereignty, centrally poised in the last moments of the old cosmology to bring forth and enter into the new. In the decades that followed, the prodigious generation that emerged immediately after this prophetic declaration brought forth the decisive moment that in childbirth is called “crowning”—t
hat dramatic stage when the head of the new child begins to appear. 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.
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