For Paradise Lost seems to me precisely that – a profound self-exploration of the divided human brain: the relationship between two unequal powers, one of which grounds the being of the other, and indeed needs the other for its fulfilment, and which therefore has to make itself vulnerable to that other; who, through blindness and vanity, rejects the union that would have brought about the Aufhebung of both, and prefers instead a state of war without end. The fallout from this war is that man and woman, Adam and Eve and their offspring, are turned out of paradise.
