Saturday, February 17, 2007

Knowledge & Innocence

"To him who has knowledge, man himself is "the animal with red cheeks." How did this come about?"
(Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part II, On the Pitying, F. Nietzsche)

Thus chased from the garden due to the accession of knowledge of good and evil it is man, the culpable animal in Zarathustra's view. Following the inspiration of Claudia Traut , I would compare this view of the role of knowledge to that we see in Melville's Billy Budd or Shakespeare's Othello. We have lost innocence, but is it a reasonable price to pay for the access to knowledge of this world? Perhaps it is a recognition that we have moved beyond a reliance on the supernatural. God is dead. Knowledge lives.

No comments: