Worth reading .... ( perhaps including "Cosmos and Psyche", his last book,
Mr. R Tarnas. http://www.cosmosandpsyche.com/ExploreTheBook.php)
The Epilogue would do as the "introduction" of his synthesis,
From the latter...
.......
"Either inner or outer realities tend to be distorted: inner feelings are
repressed and denied, as in apathy and psychic numbing, or they are
inflated in compensation, as in narcissism and egocentrism; or the outer
world is slavishly submitted to as the only reality, or it is
aggressively objectified and exploited. There is also the strategy of
flight, through various forms of escapism: compulsive economic consumption,
absorption in the mass media, faddism, cults, ideologies,
nationalistic fervor, alcoholism, drug addiction. When avoidance
mechanisms cannot be sustained, there is anxiety, paranoia, chronic
hostility, a feeling of helpless victimization, a tendency to suspect all meanings,
an impulse toward self-negation, a sense of purposelessness and absurdity,
a feeling of irresolvable inner contradiction, a fragmenting of consciousness.
And at the extreme, there are the full-blown psychopathological reactions
of the schizophrenic: self-destructive violence, delusional states, massive
amnesia, catatonia, automatism, mania, nihilism. The modern world knows
each of these reactions in various combinations and compromise formations,
and its social and political life is notoriously so determined.
Nor should it be surprising that twentieth-century philosophy finds itself
in the condition we now see. Of course modern philosophy has brought
forth some courageous intellectual responses to the post-
Copernican situation, but by and large the philosophy that has dominated
our century and our universities resembles nothing so much as a severe
obsessive-compulsive sitting on his bed repeatedly tying and
untying his shoes because he never quite gets it right--while in the meantime
Socrates and Hegel and Aquinas are already high up the mountain on their
hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.
Epilogue from "The Passion of the Western Mind…"
The quintessence:
"The human mind is ultimately the organ of the world's own process of
self-revelation"....multi-dimensional and not dual!
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