Book: The passion of the Western Mind

I read a great book recently. It's called "The passion of the Western mind," by Richard Tarnas. I haven't studied philosophy much at all - the sum total of my prior education being reading "Sophie's World" a few years ago. I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in this kind of thing - it was very easy to read.

The book starts with the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), and basically goes to the present (it was written in 1991). The thing that totally amazed me when reading about the Greek philosophers, was just how bloody smart they were. (I'm sure this will sound stupid to people familiar with it), but they were bloody geniuses. Except, they were really, REALLY, ignorant. They knew nothing about the world or themselves (or damned close to it), and had to work out everything from scratch. And that's exactly what they did - they systematically tried to reason out the various whats hows and whys that surrounded them. In the space of several generations they'd invented mathematics and science - roughly as we know it today. I still can't believe they pulled it off (even to the point of thinking crazy thoughts like aliens must've taught them).

Anyway, one of the first things that the book says, is that the history of knowledge has been a process of discarding old ideas and replacing them with new ones. Tarnas puts it really well: "unless we are able to perceive and articulate, on their own terms and without condesencion, certain powerful beliefs that we no longer consider valid or defensible..." ie. Believing that the world is flat and at the centre of the universe seems ridiculous to us today, but there were good reasons for believing it.
Firstly, people believed that the Gods (this was pre-Christian) created humanity and the earth, and that the universe revolved around it. Heard of the Music of the Spheres? That was the sound that the planets, sun and stars made as they revolved around the Earth - each in successively further spheres.
The change from believing that the Earth was the centre to believing that the sun was the centre was huge, and didn't happen until Copernicus and Gallelio in the 16th century. Gallelio was placed under house arrest for life, for not recanting his public beliefs that the sun (not the Earth) was at the centre of the universe. But eventually (with the help of telescopes) the evidence was incontrevertable, and opinion slowly changed. It took a long time though - just look at the theory of evolution, there are people who still (in the face of similarly conclusive evidence) stick to the old belief in Genesis.
The point of this is to show that we, now, have beliefs about the world that are totally and fundamentally wrong. Beliefs that in the future will be discredited. I can imagine someone in 200 years saying "I can't believe that people used to think that..." If only we could know what they were!

The whole course of the history of knowledge has been that of moving our perception of ourselves away from the centre of the universe and to a greater understanding of the relativity of all things. ie:
Socrates/Plato/Aristotle: The Earth is flat, people are the centre of the universe
Copernicus/Galeillo: Actually, the sun is the centre of the universe, not the earth.
Charles Darwin: Hmm, people weren't made specifically by God, we have arisen from other animals in a natural process.
Sigmund Freud: The human subconscious is run by animal instincts (evolutionary history) that we cannot know or control, that govern our behavior in fundamental ways. We are not rational creatures.
Hume: We have sense perception of the world, but it is totally distorted by our mind. Although we can make sense of the world as we see it, that's not the real world - we can never know or understand the real world. This even cut up fundamental concepts like causality, labeling it as an assumption because of the way our mind models the world.
Kant: similar to Hume, but more optimistic. Yes, science only explains the world in our mind, but it does so well. Also, Kant realised that the world we see is actually _created_ by our minds, and the way we interpret our senses.
Albert Einstein: Everything is relative to the observer - not just our perception, but the actual physical universe - including space and time.

What I found particularly cool, was what Tarnas described as "the dual legacy" to the Western mind from the Greeks. He says that there is a tension between the idealist (romantic) and the rational (scientific). Tarnas thinks that the changes in our beliefs about our place in the universe (rationality) has meant that we no longer believe there is a "reason for it all" (idealist) which is why we have some of the social problems that we do. He also underlines some of the limitations of the cult of science (science can tell us the hows but not the whys) and he believes we have become too rationalistic and should bring back more of the romantic.

Tarnas finishes with an awesome (and very moving) paragraph, which I'll quote here:

"Our moment in history is indeed a pregnant one. As a civilization and as a species we have come to a moment of truth, with the future of the human spirit, and the future of the planet hanging in the balance. If ever boldness, depth, and clarity of vision were called for, from many, it is now. Yet perhaps it is this very necessity that could summon forth from us the courage and imagination we now require. Let us give the last words of this unfinished epic to Nietzshe's Zarathustra: ...and how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and ... a way to new dawns."