What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”
Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):
“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it. In other words, no identity can do without otherness. The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness. The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.” (20-21)
(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)
Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other. Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary. But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.
Here is where the tree comes in. The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one). “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance. That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.
This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.
But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism. Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise. The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect. The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall. So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified. The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance. The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie. It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates. We cannot even imagine this truth. We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.