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Archive or the psychology o Religion 29 (2007) 87-125
www.brill.nl/arp
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/008467207X188649
A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2-6.
Jordan B. Peterson
Department o Psychology University o oronto
Abstract
Individuals operating within the scientifc paradigm presume that the world is made o matter.Although the perspective engendered by this presupposition is very powerul, it excludes value andsubjective experience rom its undamental ontology. In addition, it provides very little guidance with regards to the undamentals o ethical action. Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out o what matters. From such a perspective, the phenom-enon o meaning is the primary reality. Tis meaning is revealed both subjectively and objectively,and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action.Te ancient stories o Genesis cannot be properly understood without viewing them rom withinthe religious paradigm. Genesis describes the primary categories o the world o meaning, as well asthe eternal interactions o those categories. Order arises out o Chaos, through the creative interme-diation o Logos, and man is maniested, in turn. Man, a constrained Logos, exists within a boundedstate o being, Eden. Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, fnd their optimalstate o balance. Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state o being—something is inevitably excluded. Unortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something orbidden and unknown. Man’s curiosity inevitably drives him toinvestigate what has been excluded. Te knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presup- positions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Tus, man is eternally allen. Teexistential pain generated by this endlessly allen state can undermine man’s belie in the moral justifability o being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God.
Keywords
Evil, Genesis, Cain, Abel, atrocity, Logos, chaos, order, adversary, exploration, serpent, Paradise,sacrifce, resentment, rustration, ear
Perception and Conception are Axiomatic by Necessity
In 1962, the philosopher Tomas Kuhn brought into public consciousnessan idea that has since proved very inuential. He claimed that scientifc datacould only be interpreted within a particular, bounded ramework, whichhe termed a paradigm. He also believed that such paradigms were sometimes
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J. B. Peterson / Archive or the psychology o Religion 29 (2007) 87-125
incommensurate (which meant that a person operating within one could notnecessarily understand or evaluate the claims o a person operating withinanother). In recent years, we have come to understand more clearly both why paradigms are necessary and why they can be incommensurate. It also seems pos-sible, now, to explain more ully why knowledge can genuinely progress, despiteits paradigmatic limitations. Te philosopher Daniel Dennett (1984) has taken pains over the last decade to ocus scholarly knowledge on a phenomenon origi-nating in the domain o artifcial intelligence, whose nature must be understoodbeore the ideas o paradigmatic necessity, incommensurability and progress canbe explored more deeply. Tis phenomenon has become known as the “rame problem” (Lormand, 1999; Peterson & Flanders, 2002). Te rame problememerged unexpectedly in the felds o artifcial intelligence and robotics as thebiggest obstacle to the development o machines capable o acting independently in real-world environments. Dennett believes that the rame problem is among the most signifcant and proound o those issues acing modern philosophers.Te sel-evidence o the external world and its objects appears axiomatically obvious to the casual human perceiver, and was held as axiomatically true by scientists working within the behavioral paradigm or much o the late twentiethcentury. Artifcial intelligence pioneers working on the development o indepen-dent machines, adapted to the real-world, originally took this sel-evidence orgranted, and presumed that the problem o intelligent behavior was one o plan-ning and action, not o perceiving the world. Unortunately, it turns out to be very dicult to perceive “objects” (or “stimuli”—the behaviorists’ equivalent),and their apparent sel-evidence is a consequence o exceedingly complex uncon-scious neural activity operating invisibly behind the scenes o conscious per-ception. Tus, creating a machine that could perceive objects in any reliablegeneral manner (a precondition, in theory, to acting upon them) proved impos-sibly dicult.It turns out to be dicult to divide the chaos o the world into the ordered,discrete and predictable parts that make up object perception. Medin and Agui-lar (1999) pointed out that even a small set o objects can be categorized in anear-infnite number o ways, and perception is an act o categorization, implicitthough it may be. Consider, or a moment, the potential number o “relevantgroupings o chessmen on a chessboard” during a game. Ten realize that a gameo chess is a very small and bounded world, compared to the real world o experi-ence. Te complexity o the world o experience exceeds the categorizationcapacity o artifcial intelligence systems. Tus, we have no real-world general- purpose robots, and are unlikely to have them in the oreseeable uture. Animalsand human beings, by contrast, can exist in the real world, or a time, in their
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