Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

Tarnas refers to those “contradictions, disjunctions, and
paradoxes,” that “certain irreducible irrationality,” written
upon the face of the universe itself as the “uncertainty
principle.” And the effects of that “uncertainty principle”
extended far beyond science laboratories and lecture halls, far
beyond talk of atoms and space, and altered humanity’s very
perceptions of “reality” and, thereby, “truth”:
Modern man was being forced to question his inherited
classical Greek faith that the world was ordered in a
manner clearly accessible to the human intelligence.
[…] Thus incoherence, unintelligibility, and an
insecure relativism compounded the earlier modern
predicament of human alienation in an impersonal
cosmos. (358-9)
If those “truths” of Western science fall away – “truths” that
were put forth and embraced as, again, “supreme” and “absolute,”
in utter accord with the always and forever Reason of the
universe itself and, thus, tantamount to a flawless translation
of the Word of God into equations and formulae - what of the
other “truths” that Western culture and society, possibly the
whole of human culture and society, hold dear and sacred and
use, consciously or unconsciously, to paint a portrait of
“reality,” their world and their place, and purpose, within it?
Upon this same question, Tarnas concludes: “In the combined
wake of eighteenth-century philosophy and twentieth-century
science, the modern mind was left free of absolutes, but also
disconcertingly free of any solid ground” (359). “Free.”
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