PETERSON: Adam And Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, And Death

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

For whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories, so let’s investigate a couple more of them. We’ll start with the story of Adam and Eve.

You may remember that the Bible is a series of books — Bible actually means something akin to library — and these books were written by all sorts of different people and groups of people and groups of editors who edited over and over across very, very large periods of time. So, they’re authored by no one and many at the same time. There was a tradition for a long time that the earliest books were written by Moses, but that’s probably not technically correct, even though it might be dramatically correct in the way that a fairytale is correct. (And I’m not trying to put down fairy tales by saying that.) But there’s a number of authors, and the way the authors have been identified — tentatively — is by certain stylistic commonalities across the different stories: different uses of words (like the words for God), different poetic styles, different topics, and so forth. People have been working for probably 200 years (roughly that) to try to sort out who wrote what and how that was all cobbled together. But it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. What matters is that it’s an aggregation of collected narrative traditions, and maybe you could say it’s an aggregation of collected narrative wisdom. We don’t have to go that far, but we can at least say it’s aggregated narrative traditions. 

There was some reason that those traditions — and not others — were kept, and there were some reasons, complex though they may have been, why they [narrative traditions] were sequenced in the order that they were sequenced. One of the things that’s really remarkable about the Bible as a document is that it actually has a plot, and that’s really something. It’s sprawling, and it goes many places. But the fact that something’s been cobbled together over several thousand years — maybe 4,000 years, maybe longer than that if you include the oral traditions that preceded it, and God only knows how old those are — that’s part of the human collective imagination has cobbled together a library with a plot.

I see the Bible as an attempt, a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. I think those problems are, primarily, the problem of self-consciousness. The fact that not only are we mortal and that we die but that we know it. That’s the unique predicament of human beings, and it makes all the difference. I think that’s laid out in the story of Adam and Eve. I think the reason that makes us unique is laid out in that story. Interestingly — I really realized this only after I was doing the last three lectures — the Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift into the structure of being. That’s the right way to think about it, and that’s really giving cosmic significance. Now, you can dispense with that and say, “Well, nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance because we’re these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet that’s rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space and nothing that happens to us matters.” It’s fine. You can walk down that road if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s part of the reason I think that, for all intents and purposes, it’s untrue. It isn’t a road you can walk down and live well. In fact, I think if you really walk down that road and you really take it seriously, you end up not living at all. It’s certainly very reminiscent. I’ve talked to lots of people who were suicidal — and seriously suicidal. The kind of conclusions that they draw about the utility of life, prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the kind of conclusions you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough. 

If you’re interested in that you could read Tolstoy’s “A Confession.” It’s a very short book. It’s a killer; it’s a powerful book — very, very short. Tolstoy describes his obsession with suicide when he was at the height of his fame: most well-known author in the world, huge family, international fame, wealth beyond anyone’s imagining at that time, influential, admired. He

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