Saturday, September 1, 2018

Fig-Leaves and Will to Power

What in the popular imagination is 'a fig leaf', is, as it actually appears in Genesis 3, "they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves girdles".  So, aside from the questions of how Adam and Eve managed to perform an act of sewing, and why they previously needed no protection from the elements, their first action after eating the fruit of a tree that could "make one wise", is making a girdle out of fig-leaves, thereby strongly suggesting, on a literal reading of the passage, that such an action exemplifies the attaining of such 'wisdom'.  It also thus suggests that that attainment is what gets them banished from Eden, rather than a sex-act, as the standard interpretation has it.  Now, that wisdom is classified as Techne in the Philosophical tradition, and it also exemplifies the exercise of Will to Power, understood as the Will to Create, as has been previously discussed, i. e. because it involves imposing Form on the fig-leaves.  So, aside from the well-known exoteric challenges to the dominant Theological tradition that are articulated by Nietzsche, the Will to Power essentially constitutes an inversion of the Value-system implicit in, though rarely discerned therein, the passage that grounds it, i. e. by affirming the ability that is proscribed for humans in Eden.

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