The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View is a 1991 book by the cultural historian Richard Tarnas.

Tarnas argues that the movement from the Greek and Christian world views, through modernity and to postmodernism can be seen as a natural and dialectical unfolding of a collective mind or psyche.

With the Scientific Revolution, and subsequent secularization of Europe, the overwhelming success of science and technology eroded belief in the existence of the transcendent God.

The paper discussed the idea that contemporary science appears to have started overcoming the duality which separates humans from nature.What can man do in a deterministic universe in which he is a stranger?

I believe this is true, and that our period is indeed one of reunification, of a quest for unity—witness the deep interest in nature shown by so many young people today, and man's growing sense of solidarity with all living beings.

[14]In his 2000 book Wandering God: A Study of Nomadic Spirituality, cultural critic Morris Berman called The Passion of the Western Mind: "a fairly decent summary of European intellectual history, written in a lucid and accessible style".

[22][23] (Maslow has been a favorite whipping boy of boomeritis theorists—e.g., Richard Tarnas, Jorge Ferrer—but he is, by any balanced assessment, one of the three or four greatest psychologists America has ever produced.

Fritjof Capra, Stan Grof, Duane Elgin, Richard Tarnas, Charlene Spretnak--the list is virtually endless--would say that a new holistic or ecological theory should replace the old atomistic, Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, and that would be a new paradigm.

Paradigm is an almost exact equivalent of techno-economic base, social practice, behavioral injunction, or exemplar.In other words, the denial of hierarchical stages is itself an invalid metanarrative.

From Ferrer to Tarnas to Hickman to Delores to Beliot, you can see these invalid and inauthentic metanarratives parading as sensitive, caring, empathic resonances, whereas they are hermeneutic violence by any other name.shambhala.com