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Interpreting Eden

By on January 15, 2008 3

Venus Cassandra quoted yesterday this passage from Bakunin’s God and the State:

Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

Mikhail Bakunin and Ayn Rand This reminded me of a passage from that other Russian radical, Ayn Rand:

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity for sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man. (Atlas Shrugged, III.7)

Gnostic manuscript Incidentally, many Gnostic sects had a very similar view of the matter. Noticing the contrast between the Bible’s first creation narrative (Genesis 1:1-2:2, in which a god named Elohim creates a perfect universe) and its second creation narrative (Genesis 2:3-3:24, in which a god named Yahweh creates, in somewhat difference chronological sequence, a rather more flawed universe), the Gnostics concluded that Elohim was the true God while Yahweh was the devil – in which case the serpent, bringing the knowledge of their true divine nature to Adam and Eve, was a Christlike emissary of the true God and a Prometheus-like benefactor of humankind. (See, for example, the Nag Hammadi texts Testimony of Truth and Hypostasis of the Archons.)

The move is less odd than it seems, because the parallelism between Christ and the serpent is already present in mainstream Christianity – except that in mainstream Christianity it’s a negative parallelism, with Christ reversing the story of the fall by offering in reality what the serpent offered only a fake version of. If we consider the serpent’s offer – “Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5) – the similarity to Christ’s offer is apparent:

Adam and Eve get the flaming boot But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God. (John 1:12)

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life. (John 6:54)

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)

We are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. (Romans 8:16-17)

When he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. (I John 3:2)

In short, Christ’s message is presented in the New Testament as similar to the serpent’s message except for being genuine. So in taking the connection one step further, the Gnostics weren’t wandering off as strangely as they might seem.

Within contemporary Christianity, the two most interesting takes on the Eden story seem to come from those two quintessentially American denominations, Christian Science and Mormonism. The Christian Science account of Eden strikes me as occupying a position halfway between the mainstream and Gnostic accounts. According to this view the Bible’s first creation narrative represents the “truth of the divine creation,” while the second creation narrative “contains a statement of this material view of God and the universe, a statement which is the exact opposite of scientific truth as before recorded.”

Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian ScienceBut by contrast with both the Gnostic account (which identifies Elohim with God and Yahweh with Satan) and the mainstream account (which takes Elohim and Yahweh to be unproblematically identical), the Christian Science account treats Yahweh as a false or limited conception of Elohim, a “physical sense of God as finite and corporeal” – but still a conception of Elohim. Rather than simply representing a different point of view by a different author (which is what most Bible scholars infer), this second narrative, according to the C.S. interpretation, represents an “allegory … to depict the falsity of error and the effects of error.” So the serpent still represents evil rather than good – an erroneous belief that “God was not omnipotent and that there was another power, named evil, which was as real and eternal as God”; and hence the “knowledge of good and evil” offered by the serpent represents not genuine knowledge but a confused belief that within the divine creation truth and error are equal in reality and power. In short, Jehovah represents a false conception of the divine reality as flawed, while the serpent, together with the spurious knowledge it offers, represents the conception of the flaw itself.

The Mormon view of Eden, by contrast, seems interestingly close to the Randian view, in which physicality, joy, and knowledge of good and evil are benefits that humankind would have lacked had it not been for the fall:

And in that day Adam blessed God and was filled, and began to prophesy concerning all the families of the earth, saying: Blessed be the name of God, for because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God.

And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. (Moses 5:10-11)

In this version, God apparently wants Adam and Eve to disobey him, and his instruction to them regarding the tree is thus curiously equivocal: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Which in turn reminds me irresistibly both of the proverb “God said: ‘Take what you want and pay for it’” (incidentally one of Rand’s favourite sayings) and of Kafka’s “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. And now, I am going to shut it.”

Aristotle the Egalitarian

By on January 11, 2008 3

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I see that my article “Aristotle’s Egalitarian Utopia” is now online at Google Books. (The notice says “Some pages are omitted from this book preview,” but that seems to refer to the entire anthology, not specifically to my article, which is complete.) This is the paper I delivered at a conference in Niels Bohr’s house in Copenhagen almost exactly four years ago. It offers a somewhat libertarian spin on some of Aristotle’s political ideas.

Alexandria – Birthplace of the Wheel!

By on December 31, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Just got back from Baltimore: great Molinari Society session, great visit to the National Aquarium, great seafood (don’t worry, not at the Aquarium).

The Rise and Fall of AlexandriaOn my return I find in my email inbox an ad for this book on the history of Alexandria.

Now while I haven’t read the book, I confess to being rather put off by the following blurb:

It was here mankind first discovered that the earth was not flat, originated atomic theory, invented geometry, systematized grammar, translated the Old Testament into Greek, built the steam engine, and passed their discoveries on to future generations via the written word.

Say what? Before Alexandria was even founded, Aristotle was teaching a round-earth cosmology, and Leucippus and Democritus were teaching an atomist physics. And Plato’s Academy, with its inscription over the door “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” must have been awfully empty as students and teachers milled about on its front steps, waiting for Alexander of Macedon to be born so he could found Alexandria so there could be a place where somebody could “invent geometry.” (So much for Thales and the Pythagoreans.)

And this is considering only the Greeks. Chinese geometry, Indian atomism, and Indian round-earth cosmology also predate Alexandria – as does Indian “systematized grammar.”

As for the quotation’s final conjunct, I’m not sure whether the author of this blurb literally meant that the Alexandrians were the first to pass any discoveries on to future generations via the written word, or just these particular discoveries, but if it’s the former (which is what the grammar implies), that’s even sillier than the rest of it.

Pyramid Scheme

By on December 20, 2007 4

Caral, Peruvian city of pyramids – older than Egypt’s pyramids, older than India’s Harappa, and “born in trade and not bloodshed,” its discoverer maintains. (Conical hat tip to LRC.) And see this article for similar claims about Harappa. I’m not qualified to evaluate these claims, but they’re interesting. 

Rage for the Machine

By on November 9, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Thanks to the Mises Institute, Isabel Paterson’s 1943 classic The God of the Machine is now online (as a honking big PDF file). The book’s central thesis is that there are systematic analogies between political structure and engineering structure, and that the freest and most prosperous societies historically have been those which adopted the appropriate structure. But such a bald description of its thesis falls short of conveying the brilliant, fascinating, witty, eloquent, insightful and sometimes frustrating character of this libertarian masterpiece.

Isabel Paterson and the glowing ovoid When I first read this book, probably around 1982, I thought it was one of the most exciting books I’d ever read, and it had an enormous influence on me – for better or worse! Paterson’s arguments were in fact one of the reasons it took me so long to convert to anarchism (not till 1991, from having first become a libertarian in 1979); she’d convinced me that a free society requires the right political structure. She was perfectly right, of course; her mistake, and mine, was thinking of political structure solely in terms of state structure, and so failing to see that an anarchy has political structure too. I have plenty of other beefs with the book (her analysis of the role of big business in American history, for instance, is sometimes too right-libertarian, albeit not consistently so), and I still don’t know quite what to make of her engineering analogies (which she denied were analogies!). For some of my skirmishes with Paterson’s ideas see here, here, and here. But the book still rocks.

Marx Atomic

By on November 3, 2007 2

Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation wasn’t on economics or history or political philosophy; it was on the Greek atomists. Specifically, it was a systematic comparison of the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus.

Marx-Atomic Perhaps ironically, given his later reputation as arch-determinist and arch-materialist, Marx takes the side of Epicurus, the anti-reductionist and proponent of spontaneously swerving atoms, over the necessitarian reductionist Democritus; Epicurus makes nature active, Marx tells us, while Democritus leaves nature passive and inert. (As Marx points out, this criticism of Democritus was first made by Aristotle, and Epicurus may have formulated the doctrine of the swerve in order to rescue atomism from this Aristotelean charge.) Many of the ideas that Marx would eventually become famous for in the sphere of social philosophy he tries out here for the first time in the field of natural philosophy; hence the dissertation is an important document for the study of Marx’s intellectual development, just as Nietzsche’s early writings on the Presocratics (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and The Pre-Platonic Philosophers) are important for understanding Nietzsche’s own thought.

But the illumination isn’t directed solely authorward. Like Nietzsche’s study of the Presocratics – and if anything even more so – Marx’s study of the atomists views the early Greek thinkers through the lens of 19th-century German philosophy, and anachronistically reads modern concerns back into the ancients. Yet, again like Nietzsche’s Marx’s discussion nevertheless sheds insightful light on the ancients and raises fascinating questions about them. Thus even if the Hegelian categories that Marx labours to impose on Epicurus won’t quite take, much of what he has to say about him is, I think, genuinely useful for classical scholars. (For example, I was intrigued by Marx’s suggestion that the atomic swerve is reproduced structurally throughout the Epicurean system, in the sage swerving away from public life, the gods swerving away from the kosmoi etc.; and I was forcefully struck by Marx’s enumeration of the respects in which the celestial bodies that Epicurus scorned mirror the properties of his beloved atoms.)

First Writings of Karl Marx So I’m pleased that the “first complete single-volume edition of Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation to appear in English” has been published. (Previously one had to dig through the 800-page first volume of Marx’s Collected Works.)

Logically this book should appeal both to readers with an interest in Marx and to readers with an interest in Greek philosophy. But the publishers seem to be marketing it solely to the first group – for the title they’ve given it is not Marx’s own title Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, nor yet the perhaps sexier Karl Marx on the Greek Atomists, but instead the topically opaque First Writings of Karl Marx – perhaps as a bait-and-switch for consumers who will buy a book on atomism only if they think it’s a book on politics. Unfortunately, this probably means that the book will fail to attract the notice of some readers who might otherwise be interested in it. (The author of the Introduction also seems to be interested in the book solely for the light it sheds on Marx and not at all for the light it might shed on the Greek atomists.)

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