The Fall of Man

I have been reading John MacQuarrie's excellent introduction to existentialism. I quote from his book, Existentialism, Page 136: "To be aware of the comprehensive or encompassing is to be delivered from a narrowly objectifying relation to our environment, to transcend the subject-object gulf by participation. N. Berdyaev seemed to think of 'objectification' as not far removed from the fall of man. Following the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl he holds that man's earliest thinking did not objectify but remained in union with that which it knew in accordance with loi de participation. But this participation was broken. The awakening and development of the conscious mind was accompanied by division and alienation. Man had to pass through a stage in which he subjected his thought and reason to a critique. To pass through is the fate of the spirit of the world. But he thinks we now to return to a new mode of participation. Existential philosophy marks a new transition 'from the interpretation of knowledge as objectification to understanding it as participation, union with subject matter, and entering into cooperation with it." What MacQuarrie is talking about here is that aristotelian, traditonal and modern epistemology of Western philosophers is large of objective perspective, with the thinking subject separated from others, the world and objects out there in the world. This rational perspective is the most accurate and productive way to grow knowledge and find the truth. Of course, the exisentialists have a corrective view to add, that closing the gap between subject and object as the subject participates with others, objects and the world itself at close quarters, in the world, not aloof from the world. MacQuarrie quotes N. Berdyaev opinion that once human thinking became "objectified", that led to the fall from grace, the fall of man that thus became self-conscious, learned to sin, suffer from original sin, and were in rebellion against Jehovah. My take is that epistemological objectification did not lead to a fall from grace, but actually it was a granting of grace to Adam and Eve from Jehovah. God instilled in the first humans free will, and the tree of knowledge, with its forbidden fruit, was a temptation for them to sin and be worldly, a chance for them to come alive and be conscious of suffering, reality and mortality. The eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve is symbolic free agency, the right to sin and the right to do good, with divine consequences. As the first couple sinned, they lost their dream-like state of innocence and pure goodness and naivety, a bit like good robots, not alive, not contrary, not competing with God. Once they sinned, and knew good and evil, with the concomitant divine rewards and punishment in this world and the next, then they lost their simple innocence, and became awake, and then they realized that they must choose to be good to regain a mature, wise innocence that grows out of suffeirng, learning, growing, love, experience and living right to be able to go with God. The Fall is more a blessing than a curse. They were aware of their nakedness and were ashamed. Jordan Peterson ascribes this sense of shame to human anxiety about their discovered vulnerability. Jordan feels that evil is the awareness that if one is personally vulnerable, then that is how we know that we can hurt our neighbors. Now, I am an epistemological moderate, more absolutistic and aristotelian, for objective truth, with some admixture of existentialist epistemology with removing the gulf between subject and object so that the subject participates intimately and up close with objective reality and all its being and objects out there. Subjective truth is the watchword. On the subjective side, the extreme of not knowing would be nescience, but that is not in play hrere.