| Sumario: | In this article I argue that our innate prejudice for processing information in hierarchical terms can be traced back to the originary scene. Hierarchical thinking is anthropologically rather than cognitively grounded insofar as it is contained within the structure of deferral present in representation and symbolic thinking. I examine the formation of hierarchical organization and demonstrate that it emerges in response to two heterogeneous exigencies, glossed by Martin Heidegger as two incompatible understandings of transcendence, which can be translated into the Generative Anthropology notion of the pragmatic paradox. Hierarchical order originates in and is a temporal unfoldment of our reaching for the closure of both of these transcendent gaps at the same time. I show that this unfoldment corresponds to the logic of linguistic parsing, scientific explanation, and narrative closure - all already contained in the concept of deferral, a recursive concept that contains future deferrals within itself. Another important connection that this paper makes is between the Artificial Intelligence algorithm of backtracking and the execution of a complex chain of deferrals, which, similarly to backtracking, involves a cognitively opaque process of "thinking from the end." Following Gaston Bachelard, I call this process consolidation. Thus one way of representing the pragmatic paradox of Generative Anthropology is as a disjunction between forward projective thinking and backward consolidation.
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