The Sin of Eve | With Matthieu Pageau

meaning is actually the Instinct that emerges to signify in your terminology the proper Union of Heaven and Earth and I do think that's how we experience it because when we're engaged in something deeply meaningful hopefully like this conversation then we have a sense that everything is in its proper place and in balance and we lose our self-consciousness and we lose our sense of time right we we lose our self-conscious neurotic preoccupations in the immersion in the moment and there's something that's deeply paradisal about that and I do believe that that's a reflection of the deepest Instinct that we have it's it's much deeper than than mere cognition or or mere semantic and propositional content yeah there's uh yeah there's a what we want basically I think is knowledge what I call knowledge in my book which is we're looking for a union of meaning and fact we're not satisfied with just meaning we're not satisfied with just things or facts but then when there's a perfect joining of these uh Realms that's what we're looking for as humans that's what I think like that's what we strive for we strive to understand abstractly things and then we strive to concretely express them like just just understanding a concept is is not much and then you have to express it in in reality in concreteness and you even have to experience it so I think this is something that's a little bit missing in science um in general like modern science the concept of experiencing knowledge for personally experiencing a principle so it's always about describing the outer world and even when we talk about ourselves we're we're describing it as if we're looking at ourselves from a like a detached perspective it's interesting because there are people who've objected to that characterization of science quite strenuously I mean Thomas Kuhn for example spent a lot of his writing in uh in his work on scientific revolution insisting that much of science was in fact an embodied practice as a practice rather than as a result right because the result might be a description of the objective world but the practice itself is something like the seeking of Truth uh in relationship to some orientation to the higher psychological and communal good and so it's embedded inside something that has to approximate a religious ethic otherwise it well otherwise it's pointless and otherwise the scientists themselves wouldn't be motivated to pursue it because there's an infinite set of dead facts but there's a finite set of living facts and the living facts grip even the scientist and the scientists this is also relevant to something that you talk about in the book you talk about that we'll jump ahead a little bit I guess you talk about the distinction between a stumbling block or a stumbling stone and a foundation stone and the thing that's one of the things that's very interesting about scientists is that they assume the existence of a Transcendent object outside the domain of their ordered presuppositions and then what they search for is the stumbling block or the anomaly that will falsify their presuppositions on the assumption that that relationship with the Transcendent object will be corrective that it will expand the domain of knowledge and that it will be something to pursue in the pursuit of the of this of the psychological good and the common social good I thought the stumbling block and foundation stone discussion was particularly brilliant by the way yes yes I think what you're saying before about the practice of science I think that's how I view it now um what what is similar to ancient cosmology and what we do today is the practice of science not the result of what we find practicing science but the the practice itself is analogous to a traditional world view like what you said you you have some principles that you try to see in the world so that's your scientific theory right and then you expect to have some obstacles to your theory and when you find obstacles you don't necessarily get discouraged you see it as a possible way to grow your your own Theory to make it even more uh inclusive to make it even more explanatory so that process that is what the Bible is talking about that very process and you refer again to in the beginning God created the Heaven spiritual reality and the Earth corporeal reality and then you quote Genesis 1 2 the Earth was confused and meaningless Darkness was on the face of the deep and the Breath of God hovered over the face of the waters God said let there be light and there was light and that confused and meaningless chaos that's the tohuvabo who that's the dragon of Chaos in some sense and so you could imagine and I believe that your work refers to this this plenitude of multiplicitous and potentially meaningful meaningless confusing facts and then the attempt by the scientists to shine a light on those on that set of facts and to thereby bring something into illumination and and the habitable order that is good and that pattern is established right at the beginning of Genesis in Genesis 1 2 and it's most usefully understood in that light and that that chaotic deep that God confronts that Horizon of potential in in the biblical language is a strange amalgam of the psychological because it's confusing and off-putting and and and strange and mysterious and potentially awe-inspiring but it also has this material element which is symbolized by water or the darkness or the deep and you know we we refer to that automatically when we speak about what scientists are doing especially great scientists because we say things like well they think deeply or they've encountered deep phenomena I mean we refer back to that symbolic language axiomatically and don't notice the metaphorical structure of Our Own utterances yes definitely set if we just look at science as a process instead of what science comes up with with as a model of the universe then we we see the same patterns as uh what's described in the Bible in fact if anyone today that has a more of a scientific mind wants to understand uh the story of Adam and Eve you should you should read it as a scientist So Adam is like a scientist uh who's trying to understand reality and try to impose his theory upon reality so that is Adam names the animals that means he's trying to impose meaning on reality and then this answers kind of the question why did God create Eve in The Narrative of Adam and Eve because that's actually a good question he might have just created this The Man Without the woman right but what if you're a scientist you can easily understand that because um the reason why he creates Eve is to counter what Adam is doing and he's pretty clear in the language if you can if you read it in the original Hebrew it's there's a lot of hints to that so what happens when God creates Eve he he puts Adam to sleep okay what does that mean it means it's an attempt to renew Adam okay so he loses consciousness so sleep is like a little taste of death basically it's like a cyclical thing where you lose your your ability to control and to name and to uh command things so that's what happens when we fall asleep our mind is loses the command of the body right so that it's it's like a Counterpoint to what Adam just did Adam just names the animals he's naming everything he's using his authority to say this is this the the name of this phenomenon this is it this is like a scientist who has a theory and he's seeing if it works and it's working it's working it's working and then uh it says it's not good that Adam is alone basically because why because he needs a feedback mechanism for his what he's doing for his naming because he he can name phenomena but he can't name himself he can't see himself because he has a perspective he's using his own perspective to view the world but then he never bothers to or he can't rather look look at himself so what he needs is a um what's called uh sometimes a foreign perspective okay uh so he needs this is what Eve is is represents uh so he falls asleep and then it says uh God took aside his side and built a woman into it see the word for side also means stumbling stumbling Stone see so the side of that he took it also means a stumbling Stone so that is exactly what it is but it's a good stumbling Stone and this is very important Ben Shapiro told me that the original Hebrew for what's uh translated as help meet in the King James version is actually something like beneficial adversary it's because it says yeah God created a help against him that's literally what it says a help against him but obviously uh the purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam you know this is a pretty obvious thing but because if we look at the narrative and we give importance to each of the events it it starts with God saying don't eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will die and then right away it says it's not good that man is alone so you see it's directly related the creation of Eve is related to the fact that he just told him don't eat from the Tree of the knowledge of evil or you will die and then okay Adam names all the animals but he doesn't find a help as his opposite you see he doesn't find his opposite he needs his opposite to see himself that's the idea he needs like a mirror to look into where he sees an inverse image of himself so the left and the right are flipped women women really do this this would be associated with their association with the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well as women really do provide a critical mirror for men and that's partly because they're hypergamous and so women judge men more harshly in many ways than men judge women now it's ambivalent but but there's some truth in it so for example on dating sites women rate 80 percent of men as below average interactiveness whereas men rate 50 percent of women as below average as attractive in attractiveness in relationship to potential short-term or long-term mating and so the and it's clearly the case that Eve becomes self-conscious in the story of Adam and Eve and then makes Adam self-conscious the scales fall from both their eyes and now they can see their own nakedness and their own nakedness is in some deep sense their own vulnerability and so Eve provides as you pointed out a corrective reflection of Adam and and you're also stating and this must have something to do with the association between even the serpent because the serpent is the thing that lurks in the well-ordered place and there's always something that lurks in the well-ordered place because no much no matter how much order you establish that would be true of a scientific theory there's also always something left over that speaks of the infinite that isn't encapsulated within your theory and Eve is allied with that force in Genesis and is the root to self-consciousness for men and that seems to me again from a scientific perspective pretty damn accurate and then you might think as well that part of the reason that women make men self-conscious is because they're mediators between men and infants and because women become pregnant and because they give birth to extremely dependent and fragile infants they are more conscious of life's catastrophe and tragedy and more conscious of the necessity of knowledge serving life and always serve as a reminder to men that their capacity for abstraction and naming let's say isn't sufficient to exhaust the proper possibilities of life that all that abstraction still has to serve life yes yes exactly she she represents the opposite of Adam really that's exactly what is uh it's actually pretty once you know these things you can see it very clearly in this story uh so like I said Adam his job is to name the animals so what does Eve do she listens to the animals that's one way to see it so why is she talking to the snake this is a question nobody asks themselves which is which is interesting people sometimes say wait wait why is this snake talking in this story because that's obviously an anomaly I mean snakes don't talk right so why is this snake talking but the real question they should be asking themselves is how can Eve understand the snake how does Eve know how to understand what the snake is saying because that's what Eve has Adam it has the ability to name the animals so this is what you are this is what you are and it's a general it's a way to symbolize the general idea of assigning meaning to things or imposing meaning upon things and what Eve does is she does the opposite she mediates with the Earth that means with matter that has no meaning or that has not been given meaning and also with things that Adam has named but that are not satisfied with the meaning that Adam has given so we can actually think that that's what the snake is up to a little bit in the story so it represents basically so we can say Eve is mediating the the the perspective of the Earth or of nature so it's actually it's this story is really really deep I mean it it represents basically the right wing in the left wing if you look at it at a bigger scale at a political scale Adam is the traditional perspective he represents uh we have tradition we have a past we have our our insights from the past and we order things according to that so that's what Adam is doing Eve really represents the left wing if he represents I'm going to listen to Nature and if I don't if it doesn't agree with what Adam is doing I'm going to try to mediate that so the ecological movement represents uh basically what Eve is doing it represents the feminine aspect as described in the story so it's about maybe the snakes is not happy with the name that Adam gave gave the snake you see what I'm saying but it's just a general symbol for any anything that you can impose meaning upon can then turn around and say complain about it no I disagree I mean every phenomena has a finite aspect that's categorizable and that can be subdued and brought into a kind of cognitive order but it has a Transcendent element that constantly escapes from that and that has to be taken into account and the problem with imposing an order that's final on anything is that you lose the connection to the Transcendent and so and then you can think about that on an even broader scale which of course you've done which is that the garden that Adam and Eve inhabit where everything is named is a kind of of order that's imposed and it's reasonably well balanced but there's still always that possibility that something that hasn't been taken into account yet is going to upset the apple cart and then there's an even broader possibility that in the highest possible sense that it's good that the apple cart gets upset because it produces an advance towards the next stage there is a sense in which and and Christianity makes this the Christian Corpus of thought makes this quite clear there's there's an aspect in which the Fall From Paradise is a cosmic cataclysm and that it propels human beings into the suffering of History but it's also the precondition for the emergence of the higher order that's symbolized by the voluntary sacrifice of Christ as a as a culmination of the entire biblical narrative and there's some implication there that to become innocent once again like we were in the garden of paradise but to be self-conscious and knowledgeable as adults at the same time is actually better than the kind of unconscious paradisal state that we inhabited um before we became self-conscious let's say in the Garden of Eden think it was T.S Eliot who said something like we need to return to the beginning and know the place for the first time and and that's a well that's a that's a that's the fundamental theme of the let's say The Exodus narrative where there's a fall from tyranny into the desert and then a movement toward the promised land but it's the meta-narrative of the entire Bible and it's something like a description of the structure of cognitive and conceptual revolutions towards a higher and higher form of unification differentiation and and uh plenitude that might be a good way of thinking about it

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Id: zP6vw5_hWqc

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022