What does it mean to be a "Western intellectual tradition?"  Is it simply the geographic location of the formation of an idea that judges it to be "Western," or is it similarities to other ideas that have been deemed "Western?"  What does the word "Western" even mean?  Clearly, it refers to being west of something, but eventually, if one continues going west, they end up in the east.  Traditionally, ideas that have been identified as "Western" have been exclusively associated with Europe and, for the last 200+ years, the United States, along with other nations that have been heavily influenced by the old powers of Europe.   In more recent centuries, elements of the modern "Western" tradition has expanded to become a global tradition, either from cultural exchange or by war.  In today's globalized world, political borders and the distance between two major cities no longer hamper the spread of ideas. Ideas like democracy, capitalism, religion, scientific methods, medicine, and pop culture now wrap around the globe.   Coca Cola advertisements can be see in New York, Shanghai, and Paris.  Democracy is present in Australia as well as North America and Europe.   This unrestrained flow of information and principles is an important thing to remember when talking about a Western intellectual tradition.

         When I think of a "Western" idea, I think European, whether it is art, music, economics, politics, religion, or science.  I think of the Magna Carta, the Sistine Chapel, Machiavelli, the Latin Language, huge libraries, and Isaac Newton.   I see the universities of Paris, Florence, Rome, London, and Madrid.  The roots of this civilization come from Ancient Rome and Greece.  When reading what Tarnas has to say about the Greeks and their intellectual tradition, what struck me was how they view the universe, almost to a point of contradiction.  On one hand, the universe was orderly and rational, while on the other it was chaotic and murky.  They mixed the metaphysical with the empirical, the divine with the worldly.  This got me thinking about how we are not so different today.  Many families still send their child to school where they learn about science, while still attending church every Sunday morning.   Politicians still fund science initiatives like NASA, while reminding the masses of their unwavering faith in God.  We still mix and match ideas to fit our own custom belief system, individually as human beings, just as the Greeks stated when speaking about human comprehension of the world and universe.
 

•  Notebook entry # 2: The Duality of the G(r)eek Mind.  Response to Tarnas, 69-72 (perhaps to be built upon and refined as we continue our readings.) 

         I found reading about the "Duality" of the Greek mind to be very interesting.  I had never realized how much they juxtaposed the idea of empirical observation and the concept of transcendent ideas.  To them, the scientific was just a result of the transcendent forces of the universe, the outcome of a fluid dance between the tangible and the abstract, a unique entanglement between order and chaos. 

         The word "transcendent" here does not have to be synonymous with the word "divine."  It is more a glue that binds the universe together, so to speak.   In fact, the third point in the second set of principles states "the causes of natural phenomena are impersonal and physical, and should be sought within the realm of observable nature. All mythological and supernatural elements should be excluded from causal explanations as anthropomorphic projections."   What I took from that is the Greek gods were not a bunch of deities on the peak of Mt. Olympus tweaking the human realm to their heart's content, but rather the anthropomorphic symbols of the Greek's concept of the transcendence, or the higher order of the universe.  Therefore, they do not have anything to do with day-to-day occurrences in nature or in human life, which is left to the scientific and concrete portion of nature. 

         This idea of what the author calls a "deeper reality" is plainly evident in the minds of Ancient Greece's most famous philosophers.  The most notable of this group would have to be Plato, whom the author mentions numerous times within these pages.  After his "Allegory of the Cave" makes a clear reference to a "higher truth," one that overarches the entire human experience of the physical world.   That truth does not have that much of an active effect on our world except for creating the shadows of which it is made of, but it still exists. 
 

•   Notebook entry # 3: The Rebirth of Classical Humanism.  Summary of Tarnas, 209-213

         As I have taken a class on the Renaissance and Reformation before, it is easy for me to recognize the certain changes in thought that allows for Francesco Petrarch to be the "first man of the Renaissance."  His transition from the Scholastically-filtered philosophies of Aristotle and the reverence for the writings of Aquinas to the individualized and humanistic search for Plato sent the dominoes toppling towards an era of the rediscovery of the ancient Greek language and original manuscripts, which in turn affected the art and literature of the Renaissance, giving those elements of the Renaissance a more classical flavor to its decidedly Christian character.  

         In my mind, it was a vital step towards the development of the Reformation and the era of the Enlightenment of Europe.  In essence, Petrarch represented a shift from the rigid and "stodgy" school of Scholasticism that had dominated the universities of Europe for the better part of the Middle Ages to a more fluid and imaginative way of thinking that was grounded in the Platonic tradition of philosophy.  Instead of being abstract or entirely empirical, it was subjective and focused on a central vision of beauty, allowing for a great deal of creative thinking and expression.  This break from rigid tradition enabled Petrarch's intellectual successors to build on his foundation in order to question the state of the world they lived in.  Obviously, some of these men who came later figured they had come up with a better idea than that of the status quo, such as in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, where in some cases, presenting the wrong idea could get someone killed by the forces of the status quo. 

         The ideas of Classical Humanism also promote the idea of man's own worth in this life, as opposed to the ideas of the Church who preached that this life was a prelude to either heaven or hell, and the while everything that happened in life was "God's will," a single man was relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  Class and rank were everything in the Middle Ages and where someone was born is where they would most likely die.  The author gives an example of the philosopher Ficino as the typical Humanist thinker.  Ficino believed that the individual man was in fact very important to the universe as a whole, saying that man was a "noble microcosm of the divine macrocosm."  The rise of Classical Humanism along with the introduction of a brand new wealthy merchant class in Europe made for a potent combination.  A powerful merchant family or group of families controlled all the major cities on the Italian peninsula, the only exception being Rome and the surrounding Papal States.  The Medici family of bankers is a great example.  They were the ruling family of Florence for decades, a family that produced three popes.  With a family like the Medici, the concept of Classical Humanism fit nicely into their needs and aspirations.  The idea of a man's worth being more than that of the role he was born into brought the humble bankers up to be the de facto rulers of Florence.  No longer was the church or the monarchy the sole guardians of wealth and knowledge.  
 

• Notebook entry # 4:  Combine "The Renaissance" (Tarnas, 220-32) with Mysteries of the Renaissance:  The Artist (DVD).  What points of connection and contact can you find?

         Between the readings on the Renaissance and the DVD we watched in class, it is easy to see that the Renaissance was defined and remembered by the art the era produced.  The paintings, statues, literature, music, monuments, etc. are all pieces of a giant cultural puzzle called the Renaissance.  Also attached to that era were the creative minds who produced all the well-known masterpieces that tourists from around the world flock to see. Men like da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Van Eyck, and Caravaggio, who were lucky enough to be born in a time after the black plague wiped out a third of Europe, a time when individualism and the promotion of personal worth were on the rise and a certain stylistic freedom of art had just come out of its medieval, and artistically anonymous, nascent stages. 

         It was the art that the DVD mainly focused on.  In it, they talked about the great masters, like Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, who build grand masterpieces that could nowadays been seen as equals to those great monuments of antiquity.  The DVD also spoke of the rise of the artist from supplicant to master, from anonymous to renown.   One example that was given was Isabella d'Este's request for a painting from Leonardo da Vinci.  In medieval times, that sort of patron/artist relationship was unheard of.  The experimentation of style in art was touched on briefly.  While the DVD mainly stuck to its subject of the artistic elements of the Renaissance, Tarnas' book has is more of a broad summary of the era as a whole, a highlight reel full of important instances of an extremely complex cultural movement.  The book touches on everything from the more abstract ideas of individualism to the more concrete effects of the changing religion and politics of Europe. 

         One of my favorite quotes from the book was about the role the widespread dissemination of printed materials and growing overall literacy had on the break from the collective attribute of medieval Europe.  "the spread of the printed word and growing literacy contributed to a new cultural ethos marked by increasingly individual and private, non-communal forms of communication and experience, thereby encouraging the growth of individualism.  Silent reading and solitary reflection helped free the individual from traditional ways of thinking, and from collective control of thinking, with individual readers now having private access to an multiplicity of other perspectives and forms of experience."   To me, this revolutionary way of private and individual thought is what really defines the Renaissance, a mass introspective shift that was expressed through extroversion (art, clothing, wealth, war, etc.)  The challenge of authority and tradition, however faint at first, is central to the idea of the "rebirth" Europe.  Renaissance art, while being crucial in helping us understand the time, just acts as a mirror to that cultural change, a mirror that remains quite subjective to the audience's tastes and predispositions. 
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  SAMPLE # 2

• Entry # 1 -- A Conception of the Western Movement

What comprises the Western tradition?  To define a thing, I think, one should have a sense of its significant constituent parts; thus perhaps this question is too broad.  Instead, I ask:  What divides the Western tradition?  Even to this question there are many answers, but the amount, we may find, is manageable.  I will select one such answer arbitrarily, and begin from there.

….Or, perhaps, not so arbitrarily.  As what one thinks first of their self often is what others have said to and about that one, the method of distinction of the Western intellectual tradition which comes most clearly and immediately to mind is that of the familiar epochs:  beginning with pre-classical Greece, progressing through the Hellenistic Age and the Renaissance, culminating in the modern "quantum age" and the concurrent – and somewhat absurdly titled – postmodern age.

These distinctions, though, seem too arbitrary, creating boundaries where perhaps there are none.  So maybe a better distinction would be reached by focusing on the great figures of our history:  The philosophers, the artists, the scientists and politicians.  The names of Socrates, Bacon, Locke, Nietzsche, Planck, and Picasso sing of a temporal mural more evocative than the epochal names could ever be.  This method, however, runs the risk of losing the forest—or any other topographical feature for that matter—for the many trees.

            Ultimately, I feel that the best method of definition of the Western tradition may be that which is the most instinctive, that of the cumulatively sensible sweep and ebb of knowledge against superstition, and the forms each of those have taken.  Viewed in this way, I see the Western tradition as a Grecian thrust to intellectual and scientific enlightenment, followed by centuries of Roman stagnation brought about through military obsession at the expense of all else, broken in turn by a thousand wasted years of war, death, and "scholarly" debate focused on disagreement between selfish men on the properties of mythical creatures, torn apart finally by centuries of violent political revolution which lead us to reach, for the first time in nearly two millennia, for knowledge, both for its own sake and as an aid, to be potentially generated from, and eventually supplied to, all of humanity, as Plato predicted so long ago in his exhortation to leave the cave for the sunlight of day.

We are still reaching for that day.

Entry # 2 -- On Plato and the Digital Devil Saga

Plato's world ablaze outside the cave, shining with Forms and linked inextricably to—and perhaps only sensible through—the cartwheeling Spheres of the Cosmos, has become, and perhaps always would have been, one of the Western soul's most conceptually vivid and emotively compelling visual archetypes of the change and light of man, company to Caesar's legions in the wild, Jesus sweating upon the mount, Newton in his storied chamber at Cambridge.

"Perhaps always would have been", for it seems to me that such imagery—of longing for what one intuitively knows must underlay the hope for more—such melancholy is locked within us at birth, to be, as Plato claimed, remembered, should only the necessary tale pass our ears, to which occasion we might reply, "Oh—yes, I remember it now, as though I was there."  This I say as an atheist and, further, a scientist, of the empirical, rational, and mathematical mind.

Though there is some deep culture steeped in these climaxes of Western development, a proper understanding of them cannot be left to historical review alone, nor to linguistic expression and evolution.  There is a sense and spirit of the necessity of story at play here, born within homo sapiens and accompanying all of its temporal voyages.  Newton felt no apple fall upon his head, though one did fall nearby; yet, we expect that such a momentous occasion must have suffered a similarly monumental sign in the physical world.

We expect this not only because of ancient superstitions and a longing for gods, but because we expect a good story, and have an innate sense of what a good story is, though we might not be able to explain such a sense coherently.  We feel that such stories, when they are so grand, are likewise obvious, and must be told—if not through an author's pen, then through history itself.  Thus do we feel that history had a story to tell, and if Newton was near enough to the events that we feel must have occurred, we can say that Newton, or any other character, did, in fact, know them to occur.

So with Plato, and the words he left in an ancient language to convey his own sense of longing, guised in the greatest rationality he could format between the world he saw and the world he knew.  To know Plato's mind, as he knew the cave within it, would, I'm sure, have subjected even the most unmovable of hearts to feelings of sadness, wonder, and time.  And, so, reading the most modern of translations of his work, I feel not what the translator has written, but what I feel Plato to have known, in that deepest of senses which even the mastery of one's language can never do more than approximate, feebly, as a shadow on the wall of a cave.

This system, this knowledge of intuitive archetypes applied to history, is not unique to the Western mind alone—nor, even, is the particular natures of those archetypes.  I turn now to the latter half of the title of this paper, to that particular masterpiece of Japanese storytelling, the duology called ‘Digital Devil Saga', a work of fiction which, though so modern as to be extant only in an intrinsically electronic medium, expresses the very archetype of Plato's Sun and his Forms as strongly as does any modern translation of that philosopher's works.

The first act of this Japanese story drenches its protagonists in an endless torrent of rain amidst a broken and brittle city, their entire world ensconced beneath a perpetually dark sky under which definition arises more by the darkness of the shadows upon things than through any detail provided by light.  The second act thrusts them immediately into the real world, a world drenched endlessly not by rain, but by a blazing sun which almost no living thing can withstand, for it—in a sense—reveals the true form of all creatures, and in doing so, kills any that have not already made themselves into something irrevocably far more than a human hiding in the shadows.

Upon my first encounter with this story, many years ago, I'd read no Plato.  I felt, however, that I knew the story, and that others would, too, even had they never experienced it in this particular iteration.  It wasn't until much later that I read the Republic, and knew that Plato's allegory of the cave was one with the work of fiction I'd experienced before.  Even without Plato, it might always have been—but because of Plato, it is, and so our culture steeps itself in a thing which our souls already know. 

Entry # 3 -- Summation of the Dual Legacy

Tarnas speculates that the Greeks entertained such diverse and often prescient ideas of the nature of the cosmos because of their society's occurrence before the dawn of most, such that our stagnant tranches of social category had not yet formalized into stifling stuffiness.  This thought is further developed through Tarnas' subsequent channeling of Finley, in which it is postulated that perhaps the very capacity of rational human cognition of one's own surroundings was itself so new, such a curious thing, that it could not be muted.

I find both of these positions agreeable and, in fact, have already made them somewhat my own, through first the reading, then the interpretation, and finally the internal systematization of Tarnas' and Finley's conclusions into a synthesis of my own.  There has always seemed to me a sense of fresh invention to Greek thought, one which remains still preserved in a sort of historical snowglobe, to become lost within when the modern world seems too ugly to look at—almost in the manner of a tale of fantasy.  That this state of inventiveness actually occurred is, to me, but a source of yet more wonder.

Likely, this freshness stemmed necessarily from the presence of fewer prides to be maintained at the dawn of human civilization than is the case now, and, too, from fewer religions—and finally from the fact that what religions existed were always willing to incorporate more matter and knowledge of all scopes into themselves.

Now, we may look to that Grecian inventiveness and wonder as an escape, but an even greater inventiveness, of philosophy and science, exists in our own time.  If only we could reverse the hubristic slide into proud ignorance which we seem to love so dearly, as we repeatedly hurl ourselves into the fantastic black abyssal of religiously sanctioned intolerance and the simultaneous promotion of instant gratification and base, mean, selfish desires over the collective consideration of the great!  Until we realize that we can cast those things aside from ourselves, we will continue to make the Greeks the objet melancholia of our lazy wish.  They were inspiring—they were not supermen.  We, rather, have lapsed into some lesser form of human, content to ignore the heritage, as always, which has been so painstakingly wrought for us, and we despair that we do not form an entirely new and differentiated heritage for ourselves and our descendants, as though it would injure our pride to use another's starting point for our collective own, regardless of its merit.

We have largely and as a whole discarded the precarious balance of wonder and method bequeathed to us by Plato, that sense of sense matched to beauty enshrined ultimately in Einstein; we have forgotten the empirical mind matched to the teleological good left us by Aristotle, refined later by great thinkers such as Descartes; and we have dismissed entirely the necessary tension which lay between.  Too many now are scientifically and mathematically illiterate, imaginatively stifled, communicatively impotent and withdrawn, terrified at what they presume to be the path either to the sterility or the deviation of the soul.  Conversely, some, as they reject the assault on human intellect, morality, and right that is religious dogma, throw out with it all sense of excitement at the unknown, wonder at the future, and sensation of the aesthetics of time, confusing the product of one for the seed of the other.

Humankind needs to engage, as Plato did, in the search for the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.  We must do this as Aristotle taught us to, through careful observation of the pragmatic consequences of all which men do and have done to.  We need to do this by rejecting the anthropomorphic myths of our baser pasts, as those two did, without succumbing to the wasted stupor of the anarchist, the postmodernist, and the extreme relativist positions of ontological meaninglessness, even nonexistence, which those two never entertained.  For, indeed, no part of life lacks meaning, and we have within us each the tools to change that the meaning of which is harmful, toward the good of all.

Once this is done, the dual legacy of Plato and Aristotle will be no longer a fantastical solace from a storm, to be clung to from fear and darkness, but simply a marking on the tapestry of our past, to which we can respond appreciatively, without fear:  Finally, we have learned from that; let us leave a better legacy in turn. 

Entry # 4 -- On the Rebirth of Classical Humanism

Petrarch proved a glimpse of intelligence in an intellectually repressed and enslaved era; he grasped the long human braid binding our histories and futures where so many had failed to find it, sifting through dirt and decay, and brought enough of its length to the surface of that dismal temporal swamp he rightly called the Dark Ages that others became emboldened in the search for and preservation of what rest of the thread they might find.  The western world groaned, and began finally to wake from its long, nightmare-ridden nap.

For that braid which Petrarch found is a crucial aspect of any society's livened existence.  Without the honest and accurate, intellectual and emotional knowledge of their forebears and their travails, a people loses focus.  Dogmas which had catalyzed the initial distrust of autonomous human existence became the very word of the state and master, adherence to which was the only proof of ones' life's worth in the eyes of their narrow-minded, selfish, and nearly always evil betters.

Indeed, Petrarch revealed the braid's very constituent thread in his demand for and command of the elocutions and eloquences of language in all of its many states and forms:  As means of cultural transmission; as historical curiosity; as aesthetic end; as the deepest of brain-teasers; as the very essence of the record and transmission of one's own human soul.

By examining that long-lost thread, which traced its existence to an age of stories that lived nearly a thousand years before the hijacking, simultaneously, of both the writings of a single philosopher and the secular accomplishments of all of Rome by the cult of a single murdered man brought the Western world, and all of its minds for generations to come, its knees, Petrarch showed the human mind again what it was to weave its own intellectual and spiritual destiny, and, in doing so, weaved the first threads of the Renaissance itself.

Through the study and emulation of his long-lost Greek and Roman intellectual forebears, Petrarch catalyzed a future, and from these reflections of the dim past, bounced from solitary scribe to solitary scribe and between scattered minds throughout the dark centuries, emerged the first glimmers of the shape of things to come.

Entry # 5 -- The Renaissance

Silent reading is as normal, as essential to the modern Western person's intellectual and social completeness and sanity as is silent writing, yet it was not until Gutenberg's invention of the printing press during the early Renaissance that it became a common phenomenon.  The sudden and new mass production of literature both placed books in the hands, and words in the heads, of thousands of erstwhile illiterate people, while simultaneously personalizing and de-mystifying an act that for centuries had been performed only out loud, as entertainment or for the purpose of judicial or religious decree, by a learned few, each exalted behind the pulpit.

This new development in Mediaeval Europe deeply paralleled—and perhaps remains the most intuitive reflection of—the newfound autonomy which was springing forth in all walks of life, among rich and poor, merchant and artist, nobility and priest alike.  Among this spring of new thought and activity were the resurgence and advancement of forms and styles of sculpture, painting, and craftsmanship long thought lost to antiquity.

Albrecht Durer—whose book of scripture, illustrated by woodcuts, entitled Apocalypse, signaled the first entirely self-designed work of literature in the new Western age of industrialized media—embodied and enshrined the author's practice of punctuation of serious output—deeply worked, contemplative works produced for self-reflection, catharsis, and understanding—by massive torrents of cheaply produced moneymaking art-like product.  This practice would continue through the era of the penny dreadfuls of the 19^th century and into the scripts of modern 21^st century Hollywood, which in an ironic twist of fate are now transmitted torrentially in more sense than one.

Concurrent with these new modes of zeitgeist was a renewed focus on the humanism first postulated, however embryonically, by the ancient Hellenistic and Classical Greek philosophers, wherein the fullness of mankind's existence and experience arose not from adherence to any one set of rigid tenets, but from an absorption of, and engagement in, all of the potent activities of life—from the aesthetic and intellectual, to the physical, the sensuous, and even the divine.

Perhaps none incorporated this all-encompassing and intensively genitive form of polythought better than Leonardo da Vinci, whose efforts in the exploration, expansion, and synthesis of the multiplicity of Good human traits—appreciation of and striving for beauty, anatomical and scientific knowledge, the furthering of the soul through art and consideration of being—places him even today among the most numinous exemplars of the vitality and versatility of the productive human spirit.

Inextricably tied to this view of the fullness of man's endeavor were the dual emerging notions of decompartmentalization and objectivity.  The former stressed that no one mode or map of inquiry could be separated from any other—that, rather, true understanding of one topic could be achieved only with the simultaneous understanding of all others—while the latter instilled a sense that, indeed, at the center of all these interrelated things there ultimately existed a single, unique truth, to which investigation of all other things would eventually, inevitably, lead.

This concept, of an ultimately knowable truth governing all relationships, items, and properties of the universe—invoking as it did the sense of a single ruling power on which the dominant institution of the time, the Catholic Church, thrived—itself soared to intellectual prominence under the, at first, indulgent, and eventually only mildly suspicious auspices of that very ruling institution to whose downfall it would eventually contribute, in an ironically inverted retelling of the parasitic initial growth of the Christian faith itself.

This mainstream dominion of the objective mind would continue for centuries essentially unabated, only reinforced and refined over time by the empirical quests of Bacon and Locke, the penetrating mathematics of Spinoza and Descartes, even the subatomic probings of Oppenheimer and Feynman, mutating eventually into the current quixotic thrust for the discovery of a physical, material, and above all rational Theory of Everything.

A particularly interesting consequence of these now-interlinked modes of thought was the embrace of a scientifically formulated tripartite structure of history, in which a first age of knowledge and divinity had given way to a second, darker age of suffering, fear, and fall, only to in turn be overthrown by this, the coming of the third age, that in which man began to discard the mental, physical, social, and political shackles of a millennium of individual suppression and mass conformity, induced through fear of death both immediate and eternal, and began, finally, to strive once more for the clarity of vision and purity of mental and physical being which he believed had been held, long ago, by his distant forebears.

Thus did the Renaissance surge toward reformation of the human soul and the enlightenment of its mind, with a sensation of vigor and endless capacity which would warp the shape and structure of Western society in the pursuit of the better, the more real, the unique and powerful human influence upon the now.  In spite of the physical horrors of the time—and, in light of its new scientific spirit, somewhat ironically—the Western mind began to think of itself, more than ever, as something neither wretched, nor subject entirely to the boundless caprice of divine whim, but rather as a being nearly godlike in both essence and potential, full of the sense of possibility and accomplishment now seemingly open to itself which it beheld, stretched out in all directions, afforded by the thoughts and works of man alone, no longer as the maneuverings of puppets on a stage of gods and kings, but as the movements of a new entity in a new age, full of a feeling of infinite ability and a shining sense of purpose which would drive the growth of Western society for centuries to come.