Jordan Peterson: Paradise Lost and the Human Condition

the earth wind so there's two real creation stories at the beginning the newer one which is the first one and the older one which is the second one and the older one begins in chapter 2 and that's the story that we're going to that we are getting into now Adam and Eve are in that Cain and Abel knoweth the Tower of Babel in the yah West strand Exodus numbers along and there's some of the priestly version in there too as well as the Ten Commandments well there's some lovely representations of of paradise this is uh Garden of Earthly Delights what's his name say the boss yes Hieronymous Bosch he has a crazy I mean if you how he didn't get burnt at the stake is absolutely beyond me I mean you know some of you know about salvador deli i suppose most of you do i mean delis a compared to Hieronymous Bosch man you could spend because there's three pieces of this particular painting you could spend a very bizarre and surreal month looking at that painting I don't know what it was with Bosch but he was some sort of creature that only popped up once and probably for the best and so there's been very many representations of Paradise I mean god only knows what that is it's like I could probably guess but I won't and then look I mean that's that's that's the lion lying down with the lamb right so that's this idea that's it's maybe projected back in time that there was a time or maybe will be a time when when that then the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist right and the horrors of life are of course that everything eats everything else and that everything dies and that everything's born and that the whole bloody place is a charnel-house and it's it's a catastrophe from beginning to end and this is this is the vision of it being other than that and you know there's a strong idea this was also in implicit in the alchemical ideas and I think it's also implicit in the Scientific Revolution that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated and so that we can move somewhat or to a state that might be characterized Oh that's obviously imagistic but it might be characterized by something like that where we have the benefits of actual existence without all of the catastrophe that seems to go along with it and Carl Jung when he wrote about the emergence of alchemy or the emergence of science from alchemy he thought of science as being motivated by a dream because for you dream was the dream was the manifestation of the instincts it was the boundary between the instincts and thinking said well science is nested inside a dream and the dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth that we could then learn enough about material reality to alleviate suffering right to produce the Philosopher's Stone to make everybody wealthy to make everybody healthy to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live for perhaps forever that that's the goal to alleviate the catastrophe of existence and that that idea the idea that mysteries the solution to the mysteries of life that might enable us to develop such a substance or let's say a multitude of substances provided the motive force for the development of science and young trace that the development of that mode of force really over a thousand years and if you're interested in reading his books on alchemy which are extraordinarily difficult and that's really saying something about young because all of his books are difficult and then the books on alchemy they kind of take a quantum leap that's actually a very small leap so I shouldn't say that they take a massive leap into a whole different dimension of complexity but that's what he was trying to get at he went back into the alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream on which science was founded Newton was an alchemist by the way I mean young artists are certainly well supported by the historical fact science did emerge out of alchemy the question is what were the alchemists up to and they were trying to produce the Philosopher's Stone and that was the universal medicaments for mankind's pathology Jung felt that what had happened was that you know Christianity had promised that the cessation of suffering promised it for a thousand years and yet suffering went on unabated and at the same time Christianity had attempted to really put emphasis on spiritual development let's say at the expense of material development right thinking of material development as something akin to a sin trying to get a control of impulsivity and and all things that went along with a to embodied existence there was a reason for it but that by about a thousand AD the European mind somewhat educated by that point someone able to concentrate on a single point perhaps because of a very long history of intense religious training turned its dream to the unexplored material world and thought well you know the spiritual Redemption that we've been seeking didn't appear to produce the result that was promised or intended and so maybe there's another place that we should look and that was in the damned material world right which which which was supposed to be at least according to some elements of classic thinking nothing about the creation of the devil so but the point I'm making is that you know it's very difficult to underestimate the amount of human motivation that's embedded in the attempt to alleviate suffering to eradicate disease to help people live a healthy a healthy life and well that's the disease obviously but to live a long life as well and to make things as peaceful as possible I mean you can be cynical about people and you too can talk about them as motivated by power and being corrupt and all of those things and all of those things are true but you shouldn't throw away the baby with the bathwater because we have been striving for a very long time to set things right and we've done actually not too bad a job of it for half starving crazy insect ridden chimpanzees with life spans of 50 to 70 years so you know we could deserve a bit of sympathy for our position as far as I'm concerned so [Applause] some other representations this one I like the one on the left that's para de perak dice has a walled garden and that's what paradise means it's paradise I was which is I don't remember the language it's a it's a it's a it's associated with Persian Paradiso means walled garden and why a walled garden well it goes back to the chaos order idea so this is where God puts man and woman after the creation in a walled garden well the wall is culture and order in the garden is nature and the idea is the proper human habitat is nature and culture in balance and swell we like Gardens well why because well they're not completely covered with weeds and mosquitoes and black flies right so they're civilized a little bit but still within that civilization nature in its more benevolent guys is encouraged to flourish and people find that rejuvenating and so the idea that paradise the proper habitat of a human being is a walled garden is a good one and it's walled because well you want to keep things out right I mean raccoons for example if you want to keep those things out man even though it's impossible and you know you don't you don't want well there's all sorts of things you don't want your garden like snakes walls don't seem to be much use against them but the idea that paradise is a walled garden is is a an echo back to the chaos order idea walls culture right garden nature so the proper human habitat is a properly tended garden now the radical left-leaning anti theist environmentalists tend to make the case that the predations of the Western capitalist system are a consequence of the injunction that was delivered in Genesis by God to man to go out and dominate the earth David Suzuki has talked a lot about this by the way they believe that that statement has given rise to our inappropriate assumption that we have the right to exert control over the world and that that's what's turned us into these terrible predatory monsters sometimes described as cancers on the face of the earth or viruses that have inhabited the entire ecosystem who are doing nothing but one wandering everywhere and wreaking havoc as rapidly as we possibly can which is another perspective on the essential element of humankind that I find absolutely deplorable I mean if you look at the historical record for example even casually you'll find out that as early as as late as the late 1800s 1895 thereabouts Thomas Huxley who was Aldous Huxley's grandfather and a great defender of Darwin prepared a report for the British government on oceans sustainability and his conclusion was huh fish away guys man there's so many fish out there the oceans are so inexhaustible that no matter how hard humanity tried for for any number of years the probability that we could do more than put a dent in what was out there was zero now Huxley turned out to be wrong he didn't realize that our population was going to spike so dramatically partly because we got a little bit rich and our children stopped dying at the rate of like 60 percent before they were 1 years old and you know we actually managed to populate the U earth with a few people but wasn't really until 1960 or so that we woke up to the fact that there were so many of us that we actually hard to start paying attention to what we were doing to the planet and that's like what 50 years ago well we've just started to develop the technology or the wherewithal to understand that the whole world might be well considered a garden and we need to live inside the proper balance between culture and order or culture and and and chaos before that we were spending all of our time just trying not to die and we usually very unsuccessfully so so I don't agree with that interpretation of the opening sections of Genesis I don't believe that it's given human being it's the right to act as super predators on the planet I think that instead the proper environment for human beings is presented quite properly as a garden and that the role of people and that's explicitly stated in in the second story in Adam and Eve was to tend the garden and that means to make the proper decisions and to make the sure that everything thrives and flourishes and and so that it's good for the things that are living there that aren't just people but also good for the people too so fine I think we can we could least note that that's a slightly different take on the story than than the ultimately cynical interpretation that's so commonly put forward today

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 10,627

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Adam, eve, caine and abel, exodus, creation, story, bible, paradise, tragedy, life, existence, carl jung, science, Christianity, sin, religion, religious, exploration, nature, culture, belief, believing, faith, garden, chaos, order, left, dominate earth, capitalism, environmentalism, population, planet, environment, survive

Id: HhuRN4lIw1M

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019