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Last year, teaching a writing-intensive world literature class, I gave students an excerpt from Hesiod's Theogony recounting Prometheus's gift of fire to man. I coupled it with chapters 1-3 of Genesis and Aristophanes's speech from The Symposium. I hoped to set up their first essay with a variety of in-class readings and discussion provoking critical thought about knowledge.
Students voiced their dismay at the severity of Titan's punishment—especially after viewing Peter Paul Ruben's depiction of the event, and more vociferously so after viewing Caravaggio's depiction of Vulcan dramatically placing the punished Titan in chains. “Damn!” one of them exclaimed. “I guess that's where the expression ‘Don't play with fire’ comes from.”
They were thinking of getting punished rather than burned. Fire had become a metaphor; knowledge had become dangerous, tied mythically and symbolically to enjoyment.
I quote one of my most engaged students' responses—the one whose reflective, genuine, and unpretentious questions inspired others. Not having any expertise at “college” or at having the “right answer,” he felt free in the class and even delighted in the opportunity to think aloud.
In these two stories you gave us, someone has the knowledge and then someone else takes it away—so knowledge gets set up from the get-go with a kind of “no-no” about it, related to an all-powerful figure who controls it and to someone less powerful who does something wrong to get it. It's funny because we usually think of knowledge as not doing something wrong, at least that's how I think of it.
Discussion ensued. Students said that in both Hesiod's myth and the Bible story, man was less powerful than God and there was some wrongdoing in acquiring knowledge, suggesting that knowledge was linked to transgression. At the end of the class, I wrote students' questions on the board:
Does knowledge have to be stolen to be knowledge?
Is there knowledge without stealing?
Where is knowledge nowadays in a world without