inkriminator

I remember very few things from High School, but my 12th grade teacher's theory on the Garden of Eden was one thing that I think will stick with me for the rest of my life. I'd like to hear what you all think about it.

Essentially he was talking about hte concept of original sin, and how popular conception places the blame entirely on Eve. My teacher was making the argument that both Adam and Eve made the singular mistake of not realizing what their relationships were to one another. Abstractly speaking, neither knew how they should treat their ego (in the freudian sense) with respect to the other.

What he meant was this. adam should have enlarged his "ego" his self, his conscience large enough to encompass Eve, such that for Eve to do something bad, "eat the apple" would have been as unconscionable as Adam eating the apple. Eve's problem was that she was too headstrong to allow herself to be wrapped inside Adam's ego.

Now, the reason that I love this concept is how applicable i find it to the large decisions I have to make in my life. for example, when deciding what to do in college, what to major in, i had to choose between what I enjoyed...and what i thought would allow me to make money. My first inclination was to do what made me happy, b/c what a horribly relative scale money is to measure's one's happiness by. But later when I got to thinking, I realized that what my ego as of then would be made happy by, would change later on.


this is to say, as I got a wife and kids, my ego, my self, would be unsatisfied with making just myself happy. I would only be happy through the happiness of my family, b/c in essence they had become me.


the crux of the issue is clearly this, is woman subservient to man in some fundamental way. And the best explanation that I could come to that is clearly yes. My reasoning:
There is no totality of information regarding the proper relationship between man and woman
The one clear relationship we have is the physical one, with man protecting the woman
We should use the 1 element of knowledge we have, in order to make further judgements

Thus....man is...in some way, responsible for woman.

Later on, when i was trying to explain this to a friend, I realized how this is paradoxically predicted by Nietzsche, but I really don't want to go into that right b/c I think this post has really been traveling.

In case anyone was wondering, Yes, I was extremely high when i came to these epiphanies connecting all these thoughts, but the individual thoughts had all occured to me in sobriety.