https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zP6vw5_hWqc
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 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 much deeper than mere cognition or mere semantic and propositional content. Yeah, there’s a, 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 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 understanding a concept is not much. And then you have to express it 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 in general, like modern science, the concept of experiencing knowledge, personally experiencing a principle. So it’s always about describing the outer world. And even when we talk about ourselves, we’re describing it as if we’re looking at ourselves from 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 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 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’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 scientist, this is also relevant to something that you talk about in the book. You talk about, 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 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 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 were saying before about the practice of science, I think that’s how I view it now. What is similar to ancient cosmology in what we do today is the practice of science, not the result of what we find practicing science, but the practice itself is analogous to a traditional worldview. Like what you said, 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 own theory to make it even more 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 Tohu Vabohu, 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 meaningless, confusing facts, and then the attempt by the scientists to shine a light on that set of facts, and to thereby bring something into illumination 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 chaotic deep that God confronts, that horizon of potential in the biblical language is a strange amalgam of the psychological, because it’s confusing and off-putting, 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 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. If we just look at science as a process instead of what science comes up with as a model of the universe, then we see the same patterns as what’s described in the Bible. In fact, if anyone today that has more of a scientific mind wants to understand the story of Adam and Eve, you should read it as a scientist. So Adam is like a scientist 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’ve just created the man without the woman, right? But if you’re a scientist, you can easily understand that because the reason why he creates Eve is to counter what Adam is doing. And it’s pretty clear in the language, if you read it in the original Hebrew, there’s a lot of hints to that. So what happens when God creates Eve, he puts Adam to sleep, okay? What does that mean? It means it’s an attempt to renew Adam, okay? So he loses his consciousness. So sleep is like a little taste of death, basically. It’s like a cyclical thing where you lose your ability to control and to name and to command things. So that’s what happens when we fall asleep. Our mind loses the command of the body, right? So 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 the name of this phenomenon. 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 it says it’s not good that Adam is alone, basically. Because why? Because he needs a feedback mechanism for what he’s doing, for his naming. Because he can name phenomenon, 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 at himself. So what he needs is what’s called sometimes a foreign perspective, okay? So he needs, this is what Eve represents. So he falls asleep and then it says, 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 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 translated as help meet in the King James version is actually something like beneficial adversary. It’s because it says, God created a help against him. That’s literally what it says, a help against him. But obviously the purpose of God creating Eve is not to destroy Adam. This is a pretty obvious thing. But because if we look at the narrative and we give importance to each of the events, 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 really do, this would be associated with their association with the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well, 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 there’s some truth in it. So for example, on dating sites, women rate 80% of men as below average in attractiveness, whereas men rate 50% of women as below average as in attractiveness in relationship to potential short-term or long-term mating. And so 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 you’re also stating, and this must have something to do with the association between Eve and 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 matter how much order you establish, and 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. Yeah, yes, exactly. She represents the opposite of Adam, really. That’s exactly what is. It’s actually pretty, once you know these things, you can see it very clearly in this story. 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 interesting. People sometimes say, 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 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 giving 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 perspective of the earth or of nature. So it’s actually, this story is really, really deep. I mean, it represents basically the right wing and the left wing, if you look at it at a bigger scale, at a political scale. Adam is the traditional perspective. He represents, we have tradition, we have the past, we have 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. She represents, I’m going to listen to nature. And if it doesn’t agree with what Adam is doing, I’m gonna try to mediate that. So the ecological movement represents 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 the snake. You see what I’m saying? But it’s just a general symbol for 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 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 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 gonna 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 Christianity makes this, the Christian corpus of thought makes this quite clear. 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 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 before we became self-conscious, let’s say in the Garden of Eden. I 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 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 plenitude. That might be a good way of thinking about it.