An especially characteristic and challenging intellectual position that has emerged out of modern and postmodern developments is one which, recognizing both an essential autonomy in the human being and a radical plasticity in the nature of reality, begins with the assertion that reality itself tends to unfold in response to the particular symbolic framework and set of assumptions that are employed by each individual and each society. The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. The human being must therefore choose among a multiplicity of potentially viable options, and whatever option is chosen will in turn affect both the nature of reality and the choosing subject. In this view, although there exist many defining structures in the world and in the mind that resist or compel human thought and activity in various ways, on a fundamental level the world tends to ratify, and open up according to, the character of the vision directed toward it. The world that the human being attempts to know and remake is in some sense projectively elicited by the frame of reference with which it is approached.

I just started Passion and you are right it is not light reading, despite the commentary in another thread that Tarnas sloughs over Plato. How could he do anything else and keep in in one volume. If you want detail, read Will and Ariel Durant's 11 volumes on Western Civilization.

But that is not the purpose of my post. I notice that brain chemistry often takes a beating. I constantly read that it is "only brain chemistry". Yet if our minds work on brain chemistry, why would it be "only brain chemistry". Hey that's how we work. Why knock it around, as though there is a far better way for our brains to work. I personally think brain chemistry is rather fabulous.

I was reading this chapter this morning and I think it gave me a surge of endorphins.-Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View p. 406

Tarnas presents here an idealist philosophy that draws from existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who held that ‘worldhood’ is constituted by care. By this he meant that a community of care, defined as people who agree to care about the same things, produces a theory of reality to define the nature of the world through a coherent narrative. This community narrative is self-validating, while it can resist external challenge. However, the projection of an ideal frame of reference on to the world brings the risks that our assumptions may be flawed, our narrative may be inconsistent, and our world may not be real. The ‘plasticity in the nature of reality’ cannot be so ‘radical’ as to deny established facts.