The reinvention of religion

In 1991 Richard Tarnas ended his The Passion of the Western Mind with an essentially hopeful assessment of the point that humanity had reached after an extraordinary wandering during three millennia of culture. In the Epilogue, he recalled how the three successive revolutions of Copernicus, Descartes and Kant had left us with the knowledge that “there are no perspective‐ independent facts” and that “the world beyond the mind ... cannot even be justifiably postulated.” Subsequent thought stemming from Schelling and Hegel had, however, brought to this dilemma the realisation that “the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory.” This was truly liberating: it meant that “from within its own depths the [human] imagination directly contacts the creative process within nature, realizes that process within itself, and brings nature's reality to conscious expression.” This participatory baton carried by Tarnas was then taken up in 2002 by Jorge Ferrer (Revisioning Transpersonal Theory) from the standpoint of the study of religion. Now in The Participatory Turn he is joined by 10 other authors to present a powerfully convincing picture of what may be the most significant philosophical turn since Kant.