Richard Tarnas

The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas is an engaging book that discusses Western philosophy in a intricate manner. The reading we were assigned in class (1-47) examined the lives of Plato, Socrates and other Greek philosophers. I am not a big fan of this style of writing because I feel as thought the author is using overly complex wording to convey his meaning, when a much simpler method would have sufficed. That being said, I still enjoyed learning about the way the ancient Greeks thought. Once I concentrated on the reading, I realized that I agreed with many of Plato’s dialogues and the messages that they convey.

Through Plato’s writing, we are able to learn quite a lot about Socrates, who is considered the father of western philosophy. Socrates never recorded any of his own ideas so we must always see him through the eyes of Plato. In the book, we learn that

His most famous was the allegory of the cave. The main idea of the allegory is that some people are trapped in a cave and can only see the shadows of objects cast upon the wall from a fire. When one of the people escapes, he experiences the real world and discovers that the shadows were only a ghost of the true objects. After becoming utterly amazed, he returns to the cave and tell the cave dwellers about the amazing world above. I took two different lessons from this allegory. I learned that people who have ideas that conflict with the laws that you base your world around will seems crazy and will commonly become alienated until their discovery is accepted. I also learned that we cannot accept what we see as true. The cave people believed that shadows were truly objects the same way that we believe that real objects are “real.” Who is to say that what we see isn’t just a phantom of what the object really is. I think this final point is the most important take away from the reading and I look forward to discussing it in