Knowledge after the Fall condemns humans to endless labor and awareness of death

Evidence

The Fall, symbolized by the act of eating from the tree of knowledge, amounts to man’s attempt at seizing God’s knowledge. It is not a matter of ignorance. Yet the failing initiative causes rupture, for to eat of that tree is to discover the truth of the self, to know oneself. It is to know that one must die: “You shall die,” God announced, for “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” After the Fall, to bring out the good—an endless quest of man—is to be condemned to a commensurately endless need for labor. “Apart from God, knowledge of the good is only possible for a temporally conscious being: one who can look to the future and ask: ‘What should I do?’ This effort at self-government, however, inevitably results in knowledge of death. For when man looks to the future, he sees his own death.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 177

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the Fall as a rupture in knowledge rather than mere ignorance, framing mortal self-knowledge as inseparable from death.
• XREF: connects to: The Fall’s aggression was formal disassembly of rock, not mere force — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1161