IV. The Missing Listener

The Senior Common Room was quiet except for the ticking of the clock.

Mr Blottisham broke the silence.

“I have been thinking about the speaking.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“That sounds dangerous.”

“God speaks, and creation happens.”

“Yes.”

“But if speaking is a social process, there ought to be someone listening.”

Miss Stray looked interested.

“Indeed.”

Blottisham smiled.

“Ha.”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“Who?”

“That is precisely the problem.”

“God doesn't need an audience.”

“Then why speak?”

“To create.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it is true.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“If I say something to an empty room, I am still speaking. But I am not really communicating.”

“An excellent observation,” said Quillibrace.

“Thank you.”

“Though not quite relevant.”

Blottisham frowned.

“It is entirely relevant.”

“No. It tells us something about ordinary human speech. Genesis is doing something rather more interesting.”

Miss Stray intervened.

“Perhaps the absence of a listener is the interesting part.”

Blottisham looked at her.

“How can an absent listener be interesting?”

“Because the story gives us a Sayer without an interlocutor.”

“Exactly,” said Quillibrace.

“So?”

“So where is the other participant?”

Blottisham glanced around the room.

“There isn't one.”

“Precisely.”

“The world?”

“Not yet.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“You're suggesting the world is the listener.”

“Not literally.”

“Good.”

“But symbolically, perhaps the world represents what is being addressed by the saying.”

Miss Stray nodded.

“Experience before it has become differentiated as meaning.”

Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“So God says something to experience.”

“Not quite.”

“Then what?”

Quillibrace sighed.

“We are looking at the myth, not a transcript of divine conversation.”

“Thank goodness.”

“The point is that the story places saying at the boundary between an undifferentiated world and a differentiated one.”

“God says, ‘Let there be light.’”

“And there is light.”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“So the saying doesn't merely describe the light.”

“No.”

“It brings it into the story.”

“Exactly.”

Miss Stray said, “The thing that will eventually hear the saying has not yet appeared.”

Blottisham paused.

“You mean humanity.”

“Eventually.”

“But humanity is part of the creation.”

“Yes.”

“So the listener is created by the saying.”

Quillibrace looked at him.

“Now you're getting somewhere.”

Blottisham sat back, pleased.

“Then God is talking to someone who hasn't been created yet.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps.”

“And eventually that someone will understand what God has been saying.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“Or spend several thousand years arguing about it.”

Blottisham looked offended.

“That cannot possibly be the theological point.”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

A pause.

“But it is an observable consequence.”

III. The World That Was Said

The Senior Common Room had reached the point in the afternoon at which nobody was supposed to be doing anything productive.

Mr Blottisham was reading Genesis.

“Here,” he said triumphantly. “This settles it.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“What does?”

“God creates the world.”

“Yes.”

“By speaking.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore the point is that God has the power to speak things into existence.”

Quillibrace regarded him.

“That is one way of putting it.”

“It is the obvious way.”

“Is it?”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ There was light. What more do you want?”

“I want to know why creation is represented as saying.”

“Because God speaks.”

“Why does God speak?”

“To create.”

“Why not simply create?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“Because—”

He looked at the text again.

“Because He wants us to know He created it.”

Miss Stray looked up.

“But the story doesn't say, ‘God created the light and then told us about it.’”

“No.”

“It says He said, and the light appeared.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Yes, but that's only a manner of telling the story.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Perhaps.”

“That sounded suspiciously like agreement.”

“I am agreeing that it is a manner of telling the story.”

“Good.”

“I am asking what that manner makes possible.”

Blottisham sighed.

“More linguistics.”

“Unavoidably.”

Quillibrace pointed to the page.

“The material world is repeatedly represented as the outcome of a verbal process.”

“God speaks, things happen.”

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“So the narrative gives us a world that is said.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“A world that is said.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds like you're claiming the world is language.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“The world is represented as emerging through language.”

Miss Stray added, “And that is rather different.”

Blottisham thought about this.

“But surely there was a world before anyone said anything about it.”

“Certainly.”

“Then language doesn't create the world.”

“No.”

Quillibrace paused.

“It creates a world for cognition.”

Blottisham looked unconvinced.

Miss Stray said, “Not an inventory of things. A differentiated, related, ordered, significant world.”

“A construed world,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham pointed at him.

“But you're smuggling human cognition into Genesis.”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

“We are reading it.”

Blottisham opened his mouth, then closed it.

Miss Stray smiled.

“The interesting question isn't what the authors secretly knew about language.”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “It is what the surviving text permits us to construe.”

Blottisham looked back at Genesis.

“So you think the story is really about us.”

“No.”

“God?”

“No.”

“Creation?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“The possibility of a world becoming sayable.”

Blottisham stared at him.

Miss Stray looked at the page.

And for once, nobody spoke.

After a moment Blottisham said:

“I don't think that silence was accidental.”

Quillibrace turned a page.

“I'm relieved to hear it.”

II. When Meaning Means Again

The Senior Common Room was occupied by the usual three.

Mr Blottisham was explaining something to Miss Stray.

“Metaphor,” he said, “is simply a more colourful way of saying something.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up from his newspaper.

“No.”

Blottisham paused.

“It is.”

“No.”

“It is what metaphor is.”

“It is one thing metaphor can do.”

Blottisham looked irritated.

“What else can it do?”

“It can make a meaning the source of another meaning.”

Blottisham waited.

“That sounds unnecessarily complicated.”

“It is not complicated.”

“It sounds complicated.”

Miss Stray intervened.

“Suppose I say that life is a journey.”

“Yes.”

“The journey is already meaningful. So I use that meaning to construe something else.”

“My life.”

“Precisely.”

Blottisham nodded.

“So you are comparing your life to a journey.”

“Not quite. The journey provides a meaning through which the experience of life can be reconstrued.”

Blottisham frowned.

“What's the difference?”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“The difference is that metaphor doesn't merely decorate an existing thought. It changes what can be meant.”

Blottisham considered this.

“But life isn't literally a journey.”

“Correct.”

“So it's not true.”

“Not literally.”

“Then what use is it?”

“An extraordinary one.”

Miss Stray said, “The point is that the journey meaning remains available. It isn't discarded. It is recruited.”

“A journey has destinations,” said Quillibrace. “Obstacles. Departures. Arrivals. Detours. Progress. Perhaps even getting lost.”

Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“My life has some of those.”

“Most lives do.”

“So metaphor allows us to talk about things that aren't literally journeys as though they had properties of journeys.”

“Now you're beginning to understand.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“But surely that means metaphor can also mislead us.”

Quillibrace paused.

“Yes.”

Miss Stray looked at him.

“That may be rather important.”

“Very.”

Blottisham brightened.

“Then metaphor isn't necessarily reliable.”

“No.”

“Excellent.”

“It is productive.”

Blottisham's expression fell.

“Productive?”

“It generates possibilities of meaning.”

“But some of those possibilities may be false.”

“Certainly.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps that is why metaphor becomes so important culturally. Once a metaphor is established, people can build further meanings upon it.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Meaning becomes the source of meaning.”

Blottisham stared at them.

“Meaning meaning meaning.”

“Yes.”

“That's absurd.”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “It's civilisation.”

There was a silence.

Blottisham looked again at his book.

“So when Genesis calls God a rock—”

“Don't,” said Quillibrace.

“I was only going to ask.”

“That's how these things begin.”

Miss Stray laughed.

Blottisham closed the book.

“I suddenly feel that metaphor should have been regulated.”

I. When Myth Begins to Think

The Senior Common Room was unusually quiet.

Mr Blottisham was reading Genesis.

“Really,” he said, “I don't see the difficulty. God created the world, and Genesis tells us how.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“How?”

“By creating it.”

“That wasn't my question.”

Blottisham frowned. “You asked how.”

“I asked how Genesis represents creation.”

Miss Stray put down her tea.

“That is slightly different.”

“Different?” said Blottisham. “Surely the world was created whether Genesis represented it or not.”

“Certainly,” said Quillibrace. “But Genesis repeatedly represents creation as something that happens through saying.”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

“Precisely.”

“He spoke. The light appeared.”

“According to the narrative.”

Blottisham looked suspiciously at him.

“You're not suggesting God didn't actually speak?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I am suggesting that the interesting question is why creation is represented as speaking.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps the text is doing more than describing an event.”

“Everything describes an event,” said Blottisham.

“Language does rather more than that,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham sighed. “Here we go.”

Quillibrace ignored him.

“We usually imagine language as something we use after we have thought. Experience comes first, thought follows, and language communicates the result.”

“Yes.”

“But language also provides the resources through which experience becomes construable as meaning.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“So language helps us think.”

“More than that. It participates in the organisation of thought.”

Miss Stray added, “And language can therefore construe the very activity by which we construe the world.”

Blottisham looked from one to the other.

“You mean Genesis is a theory of language?”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“Good.”

“It is a mythology in which the world is represented as emerging through language.”

Blottisham considered this.

“But God is speaking.”

“Yes.”

“So the point is that God created the world.”

“Perhaps. But notice what the narrative makes creation look like.”

Blottisham looked again at the page.

“Speaking.”

“Exactly.”

There was a pause.

Miss Stray said quietly, “Perhaps Genesis is mythologising something humans had already discovered without formulating it theoretically: that experience becomes a world for us through language.”

Blottisham looked appalled.

“You are saying that God is a metaphor for grammar.”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“Good.”

“Although that is an impressively rapid misunderstanding.”

Miss Stray turned away to hide a smile.

Blottisham closed the book.

“I think I preferred it when God was simply creating things.”

“So did Genesis,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham relaxed.

“For the moment.”

He reopened the book.

Miss Stray noticed that Quillibrace was smiling.

When Myth Thinks: VIII. When Myth Thinks

We began with a simple question:

Can mythology be philosophy?

The question becomes different once we stop assuming that philosophy must take the form of explicit propositions.

A philosophical proposition says that something is the case.

A myth can do something else.

It can construct a world in which a possibility of thought becomes visible.

Genesis does not tell us, in philosophical language, that existence is differentiated through relation. It gives us a world in which differentiation occurs.

It does not define the relation between possibility and actuality. It gives us a world in which what is said becomes what is.

It does not formulate a theory of meaning. It gives us a world organised through naming, ordering, evaluation and signification.

And it does not ask what happens when the meaning-making being becomes part of the world it construes.

It creates a humanity within that world.

This is why the myth can be philosophical without being philosophy in the modern disciplinary sense.

Its thought is distributed through its symbolic organisation.

The individual elements matter, but so do the relations among them. God speaks. The world appears. Differences emerge. Things acquire names. The world becomes ordered and valuable. Humanity enters the order. The being capable of meaning is itself given a meaning within the world.

The mythology therefore does not merely communicate a set of ideas.

It performs a construal.

And that construal can disclose possibilities of thought that need not have been explicitly formulated by whoever composed or transmitted the text. We need not decide what its authors intended or what they knew. The meanings available in the surviving text are sufficient to ask what kinds of thought its organisation makes possible.

This returns us to language.

Language gives human beings the extraordinary capacity to transform experience into meaning, and meaning into wording. Metaphor then allows meaning itself to become material for further meaning-making. Mythology can organise those meanings into symbolic worlds.

Once this happens, the world can become an object of reflection without first becoming an abstract concept.

The world can be imagined.

And through imagining it, we can begin to think with it.

This may be one reason mythology has been so persistent across human cultures. Its power does not depend upon every element being literally believed. A myth can continue to matter because the relations it constructs remain available for thought.

The myth thinks through its symbols.

The story thinks through its structure.

The world it constructs becomes a space in which questions can emerge.

What is existence?

What makes a world a world?

How does difference become relation?

What is the place of humanity within the whole?

What happens when the being that construes the world becomes capable of construing itself?

These questions do not have to be answered inside the myth for the myth to be philosophical.

Indeed, perhaps the opposite is true.

The myth's achievement is to make the questions inhabitable.

This also changes how we might understand the relation between mythology and philosophy. Philosophy need not begin when myth ends. Nor does myth have to be treated as failed philosophy awaiting replacement by rational argument.

They can be understood as different semiotic modes of making thought possible.

Philosophy abstracts and argues.

Myth symbolises and configures.

One can state a relation.

The other can give us a world in which the relation can be experienced imaginatively.

And once language has made meaning itself available as material for further meaning-making, there is no reason to expect thought to have only one form.

Genesis may therefore be read as something more interesting than an ancient cosmology.

It is a myth about a world brought into meaning through speech, a humanity brought into that world, and a language-using species that can eventually turn the whole construction back upon itself.

The myth does not stand outside the human capacity for meaning-making and describe it from a distance.

It is an instance of that capacity.

The mythology is doing what it represents.

It is making a world through meaning.

And then, within that world, it makes meaning of the beings who make meanings.

At that point myth does not merely contain thought.

Myth thinks.

When Myth Thinks: VII. The Mythic World

We can now step back from Genesis.

What kind of world is a mythic world?

It is not simply a world described in stories.

A mythic world is a world in which meanings have become part of the structure of reality as experienced.

This is possible because language can construe more than immediate experience. Through metaphor, meanings can become the source of further meanings. A tree can remain a tree while also becoming a symbol. A journey can remain a journey while becoming a way of construing life. Light can remain a physical phenomenon while becoming a way of construing knowledge, order or revelation.

The original meaning is not necessarily displaced.

It becomes available for further meaning-making.

Mythology is a cultural elaboration of this capacity.

Its symbols do not merely stand for something else. They organise relations among meanings. A mythic world therefore does not consist of a collection of symbols with fixed interpretations attached to them. It is a semantic world in which things, events, beings and relations acquire significance through their place within a larger configuration.

This helps explain why myth can perform several functions at once.

Joseph Campbell famously distinguished mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical dimensions of myth. Whatever one makes of his broader comparative claims, the distinction points to something important: a myth can situate human beings simultaneously in relation to existence, the cosmos, society and their own lives.

Genesis illustrates this particularly clearly.

It gives an account of the cosmos, but the cosmos it gives us is not merely an inventory of things. It is differentiated, relational, productive, ordered, evaluated and meaningful.

It gives humanity a place within that order.

And it gives the human being a relation to the world that is neither simple separation from it nor simple identity with it.

The mythic world is therefore not a second world behind the ordinary one.

It is the ordinary world as differently construed.

This distinction matters.

If mythology were simply an alternative explanation of how the physical universe works, its significance would depend upon whether its explanations happened to be scientifically correct. But its philosophical interest can lie elsewhere. Myth can make visible relationships that are difficult to state propositionally because the relationships themselves are what organise the world being imagined.

Genesis does not give us a philosophical treatise on existence, differentiation, relation, meaning or value.

It gives us a world in which these things happen.

That is what makes myth philosophically interesting.

A myth can think without necessarily presenting itself as thought.

It can embody distinctions rather than define them.

It can place concepts into relations rather than state propositions about those relations.

And because those relations are embedded in a narrative world, they can be inhabited imaginatively rather than merely understood intellectually.

This also explains why mythology is so closely connected with metaphor.

Metaphor allows meaning to become the material for further meaning-making.

Mythology allows those meanings to become culturally organised into worlds.

The result is neither literal description nor arbitrary invention.

It is a mode of construal.

The mythic world is a world made intelligible through a network of meanings that can be entered, inhabited, remembered and transformed.

Genesis is therefore not interesting merely because it tells us what an ancient culture believed about the beginning of the universe.

It is interesting because it shows what happens when a language-using species turns its meaning-making capacity upon the question of the world itself.

The result is a world that can be spoken.

A world that can be symbolised.

A world in which humanity can find itself.

And, eventually, a world in which humanity can begin to think about what it means to be human.

Perhaps this is the distinctive philosophical power of myth.

It does not merely tell us what to think.

It gives us a world in which thinking can occur.

When Myth Thinks: VI. Humanity as a Meaning

The creation of humanity changes the perspective of Genesis.

Until this point, the world has been progressively differentiated, organised, named and evaluated. Then, within this already constituted world, humanity appears.

But humanity is not simply another item added to the inventory.

Humanity is itself a meaning.

This becomes especially clear in the creation of Adam and Eve. The human is not introduced outside the semantic world that Genesis has constructed. Humanity is given a place within it, a relation to the other creatures, a relation to the earth, and a particular mode of participation in the order already established.

The language-user has become one of the things that language can construe.

That is the remarkable recursion.

Language enables human beings to construe experience as meaning. But once that capacity exists, human beings can use language to construe themselves. They can become objects of their own meaning-making.

We do not merely speak about trees, animals, stars and rivers.

We speak about ourselves.

And in doing so, we do not step outside language in order to discover what we really are. We construe ourselves through the same semiotic resources with which we construe everything else.

Genesis makes this recursive condition mythically visible.

The God who speaks the world into being subsequently speaks humanity into the world. Humanity is therefore both the eventual user of the semiotic system and one of its products.

This need not mean that language literally caused the biological emergence of human beings. The claim is about construal. The human being who can use language is also a being that language can construe.

There is therefore no simple opposition between the human and the world.

The human is in the world, but the human is also a meaning within the world.

This helps illuminate the distinction between God and humanity that we considered in the previous post. God occupies the symbolic position of the source of the collective construal; humanity occupies the position of the individual participant within it. The distinction is perspectival rather than a division between two kinds of substance.

The individual inherits a world already meaningful.

But the individual can also add to it.

Every language-user enters a semantic world that precedes them. Words, categories, metaphors, stories and values are already there. Yet each speaker can recombine them, extend them and construe new meanings from them.

The collective and the individual therefore stand in a continual relation.

What the collective makes available, the individual can inhabit.

What the individual construes, the collective can inherit.

Genesis represents this relation through creation itself. Humanity emerges within a meaningful world, but becomes capable of participating in the further making of meaning.

The myth has therefore arrived at something remarkably close to a theory of its own condition.

A language-using species creates myths.

Those myths construe the species that creates them.

And the species then encounters itself through the meanings it has made.

Humanity is not merely the author of the myth.

Humanity is one of the meanings within it.

Perhaps this is why the creation of humanity belongs so naturally near the end of the Genesis sequence. The world has first been made available as a differentiated and meaningful order. Only then does the being appear that can recognise itself as part of that order.

The world has become meaningful.

And now meaning has acquired a human inhabitant.

When Myth Thinks: V. The God Who Speaks

In Genesis, God does not first appear as an object within the world.

God appears as the one who speaks.

The distinction matters.

The opening of Genesis repeatedly presents creation through a simple pattern: God says, and something comes to be. “Let there be light”: and there is light. The world is progressively differentiated through what is said. Before humanity appears, there is already a Sayer whose speech organises the world that humanity will eventually inhabit.

Read as theology, this is a claim about God.

Read as mythology, however, it can also be a symbolic construal of something else: the position from which a world becomes available as meaning.

God is the Sayer.

And the Sayer is not simply another thing in the world.

This makes the position of God in Genesis rather unusual. God speaks the world into being, but is not himself introduced as one of the things created. The distinction can therefore be read symbolically as a distinction between the source of linguistic construal and the world that is construed through it.

This does not mean that God simply “stands for humanity.” That would be too crude. The human being has not yet appeared. What is represented here is something more fundamental: the capacity through which experience can be organised as meaning.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully constituted for us. It provides the resources through which differences, relations, processes, identities, values and possibilities can become articulable. The language-user occupies the position from which such a world can be construed.

Genesis gives that position a name.

God.

There is also something strikingly recursive about what follows. The God who speaks eventually creates human beings, and those human beings are themselves capable of speaking. Humanity therefore appears within a world already constituted through the activity that humanity will itself participate in.

The creature who can construe the world is itself construed within that world.

This gives the creation of humanity a significance beyond the question of where humans came from. Humanity is not merely added to an already completed inventory of things. The human is introduced as part of the semantic order that the preceding creation narrative has established.

The distinction between God and human can therefore be read, cautiously, as a distinction of perspective rather than substance.

God occupies the position of the source of the collective construal.

The human occupies the position of an individual participant within that construal.

The distinction is not absolute. The human will itself speak, name, distinguish, evaluate and construe. What appears at first as a distinction between creator and creature can thus become a relation between the collective meaning-making capacity of a language community and the individual participant who inherits and extends it.

The mythology has produced a remarkable image.

The source of the world is a speaker.

And the human being, when finally created, is a being created within the world that speaking has made available.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that the speaker does not disappear when the human appears.

The speaker becomes us.

Not God as a theological doctrine.

Not humanity as a biological species.

But the position from which a world can become meaningful.

Genesis may therefore be doing something more subtle than telling us that God created the world.

It may be symbolising the discovery that a world becomes a world for a language-using species because it can be said.

When Myth Thinks: IV. The Absent Addressee

Genesis represents creation as speech.

God says, and the world comes to be.

But speech is inherently interpersonal. To say something is, in its nature, to say it to someone. Yet in the opening of Genesis there is no human interlocutor. There is a Sayer, but the addressee is absent.

This absence is curious.

It reminds us that language is not a solitary possession of an individual mind. Language is social through and through. Meaning is made within relations between people, and the linguistic construal of experience belongs to a shared meaning potential rather than to an isolated consciousness.

But the absent addressee can also invite another symbolic reading.

If God represents the language-user as the source of linguistic construal, then what is being addressed by the saying?

There is not yet a human listener. There is only the undifferentiated world that is to become a world of meaning.

The addressee can therefore be construed symbolically as experience itself: that which is not yet meaning, but which can become meaning through its linguistic construal.

This is not to say that experience is literally an addressee. The grammatical relation and the symbolic interpretation are different things. The point is that the myth gives us a dialogue in which the other participant has not yet appeared.

The world is there, but it has not yet been construed.

God says:

“Let there be light.”

And there is light.

The saying thus stands at the boundary between what is not yet meaningfully differentiated and what can become so.

This gives the creation scene a double significance.

On one side, it symbolises the social nature of language: meaning arises within an interpersonal semiotic system.

On the other, it symbolises the construal of experience: what is given becomes available as meaning.

The absent addressee therefore marks something that language always encounters but never simply becomes: the experience that is to be construed.

Genesis represents this relationship mythically.

A Sayer speaks before there is anyone to hear, and the world appears as the content of the saying.

The dialogue has begun before the interlocutor has arrived.

Perhaps that is because the human interlocutor is still being created.

And perhaps, in the deepest irony of the story, the one who will eventually hear the saying will also be a meaning created by it.

When Myth Thinks: III. The World That Is Said

Genesis begins with creation, but its most striking feature is not simply what is created. It is how creation is construed.

The natural way to represent the creation of a world is through material processes: something makes something else, something comes into existence, something changes.

Genesis could have done this.

Instead, its creation repeatedly takes the form of speech:

God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

The material order is presented as the projection of a verbal process. God says; what is said becomes actual.

This is more than a stylistic feature of the narrative. It gives creation a particular symbolic structure.

The world is represented as emerging from saying.

The distinction matters because saying is not itself a material process. It is a semiotic process. Something is first construed as meaning and expressed as wording; the material world then appears as the outcome of that projection.

Genesis therefore presents the order of the world as if it were the content of a linguistic act.

We need not suppose that its authors intended a theory of language, or that they understood cognition in anything like modern linguistic terms. The question is what the text makes possible for us to construe. Its cultural history is evidence of what has survived and continued to generate meaning, not evidence of what its authors consciously knew.

Read in this way, the creation narrative can symbolise something more fundamental than the origin of physical things.

It can symbolise the emergence of a linguistically construed world.

The world we experience is not simply an inventory of things. It is differentiated, related, ordered, named, evaluated and made significant. Language makes such construal possible.

Genesis gives this process a mythic form by placing the Sayer at the beginning.

God does not first construct the world and then describe it.

The world is said into being.

And this makes the creation story unexpectedly close to a theory of human cognition.

Halliday's claim is that language created the specifically human mode of cognition by establishing a relation between meaning and wording. Genesis can be read, symbolically, as representing the corresponding transformation in another direction: the world itself is presented as the projection of saying.

The myth does not tell us that language describes a world.

It gives us a world that is said.

Perhaps that is why its creation narrative begins not with a thing, but with a voice.

And perhaps the deeper question is not simply how the world came to exist, but:

How does experience become a world that can be said?

When Myth Thinks: II. When Meaning Becomes the Source of Meaning

If language transforms experience into meaning and meaning into wording, then something remarkable becomes possible.

Meaning itself can become the source of further meaning-making.

This is the significance of metaphor.

Metaphor is often understood as a decorative feature of language: a vivid way of saying one thing in terms of another. But in systemic functional linguistics it has a more fundamental significance. Metaphor is a reconstrual of meaning.

A meaning that has already been construed from experience becomes the source for another construal.

The distinction is subtle but profound.

In ordinary semantic construal, experience is the source:

experience → meaning

In metaphorical construal, meaning becomes the source:

meaning → reconstrual of meaning

Language can therefore operate not only upon experience, but upon its own meanings.

This is one of the great consequences of stratification. Because meaning and wording are differentiated strata, meanings can be reconstrued through different linguistic resources. Lexical metaphor makes this especially visible, while grammatical metaphor allows the resources of grammar itself to participate in the reconstrual.

The result is an enormous expansion of the semantic potential of language.

A process can be construed as a thing. A relation can become something that can itself be talked about. An experience can acquire a new meaning by being construed through another meaning. And that new meaning can in turn become the source of further construal.

Meaning can therefore become recursive.

This matters for human cognition because it means that we are not restricted to construing what is immediately before us. We can construe our previous construals. We can make meanings of meanings.

Eventually, whole networks of metaphorical meanings can become culturally established and transmitted. The human semantic environment becomes progressively richer than the immediate experience from which it originated.

This is the condition of possibility for symbolism.

A tree can remain a tree while becoming something through which another meaning is construed. A journey can remain a journey while becoming a way of construing a transformation. Light can remain light while becoming a way of construing knowledge, revelation or distinction.

The metaphor does not erase the original meaning. It recruits it.

And this is why metaphor is more than ornament. It is one of the mechanisms by which language continually expands what can be meant.

Once meaning itself can become the source of meaning-making, human beings can inhabit not only a world of experience, but a world of meanings generated from previous meanings.

Mythology will eventually become one of the most powerful cultural forms of this possibility.

But before we turn to myth, there is a more fundamental question:

What happens when a species whose cognition is constituted through language begins to use metaphor to construe the world itself?

When Myth Thinks: I. When Language Creates a World

We usually think of language as something human beings use. We have experiences, form thoughts about them, and then use language to communicate what we have already thought. From this perspective, language is an instrument of cognition.

Systemic Functional Linguistics reverses that perspective.

As Halliday puts it, language is used to make sense of experience and to enact our interactions with other people. Its grammar therefore has to interface with both experience and social processes. But it must also organise their construal as meaning and transform that meaning into wording. Human language does this through the stratification of its content plane: semantics and lexicogrammar are distinct strata, related so that meaning can be realised as wording.

This distinction is fundamental. Other semiotic systems have meaning, but language has wording: a lexicogrammatical stratum systematically related to a semantic stratum. The relation between the two enormously expands the possibilities of meaning-making.

Halliday goes so far as to say that this development was of immense significance in human evolution: it “created the modern human brain.”

The claim is not that other organisms lack cognition. It is that language created a specifically human mode of cognition: experience could become meaning, and meaning could become wording. Once meaning could be expressed in wording, it could also be preserved, shared, compared, elaborated and reconstrued.

This gives us a different way of thinking about human thought.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully available to cognition. It provides resources through which a world can become construable as meaning.

And this has a remarkable consequence.

If language creates a distinctive human capacity to construe experience as meaning, then language can also construe the conditions of that very capacity. Human beings can use language to construe themselves, their world, their relations with one another, and the activity of meaning-making itself.

Mythology becomes especially interesting at this point.

A myth is not simply an explanation of a world that exists independently of language. It is a linguistic construal of a world. Its figures, events and relations are meanings organised through language and transmitted through a culture.

Genesis offers an especially striking example. Its creation narrative does not simply represent a sequence of material events. Again and again, creation is represented as something spoken:

God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

The material world is thus represented as the projection of a verbal process.

We should not infer that the authors possessed a theory of language, cognition or semiotics resembling Halliday's. We are concerned here with what the surviving text makes possible as a construal, not with reconstructing the authors' intentions or knowledge.

The question, then, is not whether Genesis secretly contains modern linguistics.

It is more interesting than that:

What might it mean for a mythology to represent the world itself as emerging through saying?

Perhaps the answer begins with a simple possibility:

Genesis may be mythologising the human discovery that experience becomes a world for us through language.

The Possibilities of a World: VIII. What Kind of World Is This?

We began with a question.

Not: What does Genesis 1 secretly mean?

Not: What philosophical doctrine can we extract from it?

But a simpler question:

What kind of world does Genesis 1 make possible?

The answer has gradually become more difficult.

It is not simply a world in which things exist.

It is a world in which existence becomes differentiated, difference becomes relational, relation becomes productive, productivity carries becoming forward, things can begin to mean, human beings are constituted through relations, and the whole can be evaluated.

The world has acquired depth.

A World That Becomes

The first thing to notice is that this is not a finished world.

It becomes.

Light appears.

Darkness is distinguished from it.

Waters are divided and gathered.

Land appears.

Vegetation emerges.

Living creatures appear and multiply.

Human beings enter into an already structured world.

The world is therefore not presented as a completed inventory of things.

It is a history of becoming.

But neither is becoming simply the replacement of one thing by another.

What exists becomes the condition for what comes next.

The present carries possibilities into the future.

The world continues by transforming what it already is.

A World of Relations

Nor is this becoming merely a sequence of isolated events.

Everything increasingly acquires its place through relations.

Light and darkness.

Day and night.

Earth and seas.

Living things and their domains.

Plants and their capacity to yield.

Creatures and their capacity to multiply.

Humans and the living world.

The world becomes intelligible not merely through its parts, but through the relations among them.

This gives us a conception of reality that is fundamentally different from an inventory of independent objects.

Things do not cease to exist as things.

But what they are is increasingly inseparable from how they stand in relation to other things.

A World That Can Continue Itself

The world also becomes productive.

The earth brings forth.

The waters bring forth.

Plants yield seed.

Creatures multiply.

The created world therefore acquires capacities through which it can participate in its own continuation.

This is perhaps one of the most remarkable features of the account.

Creation does not produce a static result.

It produces a world capable of further becoming.

The future is not simply imposed upon the world from outside.

It is partly carried within the possibilities of what the world has already become.

The world contains the conditions of its own continuation.

A World That Can Mean

Then the world acquires another dimension.

The lights are appointed “for signs.”

This small phrase changes the philosophical landscape.

Something can now be more than what it materially is.

The world can signify.

And once it can signify, it can be interpreted.

But meaning does not replace material existence.

It arises within it.

The lights still illuminate.

The earth still brings forth.

Plants still yield.

Creatures still live.

Meaning is not a second world hovering above the first.

It is a possibility within the world itself.

The world has become capable not only of mattering materially, but of meaning semiotically.

A World That Constitutes the Human

The human then appears.

But humanity does not arrive as an isolated substance dropped into an otherwise complete universe.

The human is constituted through relations.

Through image and likeness.

Through relation to other humans.

Through relation to the earth.

Through relation to other living things.

Through receiving and providing.

Through transforming and organising.

The human therefore belongs to the relational structure of the world.

Whatever else human distinctiveness may involve, it does not require us to imagine that human beings stand outside the world that constitutes them.

The human is a participant in the world before being an interpreter of it.

And perhaps this is why the earlier emergence of signification matters so much.

The human enters a world that is already capable of meaning.

Human meaning therefore does not begin from nothing.

It develops within an already meaningful possibility.

A World That Can Be Valued

Finally, the world is evaluated.

Again and again, it is seen to be good.

And at the end, the whole is very good.

This gives the world another dimension that cannot be reduced to existence, relation, productivity, or meaning.

The world can be valued.

It is not simply there.

It matters.

This does not yet give us an ethics.

It does not tell us what human beings ought to do, what evil is, or how conflicting values should be resolved.

But it establishes something prior to all of those questions:

the world is the kind of reality about which evaluation is possible.

There can be a difference between what is and what is good.

And that difference will eventually make questions of obligation, failure, responsibility, and evil possible.

So What Kind of World Is This?

Perhaps we can now answer our original question without pretending that we have solved it.

Genesis 1 gives us a world that is:

existent, but not static;

differentiated, but not fragmented;

relational, but not reducible to its relations;

productive, but not merely mechanical;

alive, and capable of continuing itself;

meaningful, without ceasing to be material;

humanly inhabitable, without being constituted by humanity;

and evaluable, without yet becoming an ethical system.

Most importantly, these are not separate properties pasted onto an otherwise completed world.

They emerge in a sequence of possibilities.

Existence makes distinction possible.

Distinction makes relation possible.

Relation makes productivity possible.

Productivity makes continuity possible.

Continuity makes a world capable of carrying its future.

Signification makes the present capable of pointing beyond itself.

Relationality makes the human possible.

Evaluation makes the world capable of mattering as a whole.

The sequence is not a rigid ladder.

It is a deepening of what a world can be.

The World Is More Than What Is There

Perhaps this is the deepest philosophical possibility opened by the text.

A world is not simply everything that exists.

It is what exists together, in relations, processes, possibilities, continuities, significances, and values.

The world is not merely a container in which things happen.

It is a configuration in which what exists can become different, enter into relation, produce further becoming, signify, matter, and be evaluated.

And this means that the question “What is real?” may itself be too narrow.

We may also need to ask:

What can become real?

What relations make it possible?

What can it mean?

What can it make possible?

What can matter?

These questions are not answers hidden inside Genesis 1.

They are questions that the world constructed by Genesis 1 makes possible.

A Grammar of a World

This brings us back to where the whole project began.

Our first series was called A Grammar of a World.

That title turned out to be more exact than we initially realised.

The grammar did not secretly contain a philosophical system waiting to be extracted.

It did something more interesting.

It progressively made a world available for construal.

Existence.

Difference.

Relation.

Becoming.

Productivity.

Life.

Signification.

Human relationality.

Evaluation.

The grammar gave us the world.

The second series has asked what philosophical possibilities become visible within that world.

And perhaps that is the proper limit of what we can claim.

We have not discovered the philosophy of Genesis.

We have discovered a world from which philosophy can begin.

A world in which being is not exhausted by existence.

A world in which difference need not mean separation.

A world in which relations can become productive.

A world in which the present can carry the future.

A world in which things can mean without ceasing to matter.

A world in which the human is constituted through relations rather than standing outside them.

And a world that can finally be seen, not merely as something that exists,

but as very good.

Perhaps the most interesting question is therefore not what kind of world Genesis 1 gives us.

It is what kinds of thought become possible once such a world has been given.

The Possibilities of a World: VII. A World That Can Be Evaluated

The world of Genesis 1 is not merely a world in which things happen.

It is a world in which what happens can be evaluated.

Again and again, after something has emerged or been differentiated, the narrative pauses:

“And God saw that it was good.”

The repetition is easy to overlook.

But by the end of the chapter, something remarkable has happened.

The world has not only come into existence.

It has become a world that can be judged as good.

Existence Is Not Evaluation

There is a fundamental distinction here.

Something can exist without being evaluated.

A stone exists.

A star exists.

A process occurs.

None of these facts, by themselves, tell us whether what exists is good, bad, desirable, harmful, beautiful, or worthwhile.

Evaluation introduces another dimension.

It asks not simply:

What is there?

but:

What is it like that it is there?

Or more precisely:

How is what is there to be valued?

Genesis does not leave this dimension implicit.

It repeatedly makes evaluation explicit.

The light is good.

The ordered world is good.

The living world is good.

And at the end, the whole configuration is described as very good.

The world is therefore not value-neutral within the narrative.

Evaluation Follows Construal

There is also an important sequence here.

God does not evaluate an undifferentiated blank.

Evaluation follows the emergence of distinctions, relations, processes, life, and structure.

Something has first become available to be seen.

Then it is evaluated.

This suggests that evaluation depends upon a world that has become sufficiently articulated for something to count as something.

There must be distinctions before there can be judgments about those distinctions.

There must be relations before those relations can be valued.

There must be a configuration before the configuration can be judged.

Evaluation therefore does not float above the world.

It is responsive to the world as it has become organised.

The World Becomes Significant

This is where the earlier distinction between meaning and mattering becomes important.

The world has already acquired the possibility of meaning.

Things can function as signs.

But evaluation introduces another possibility.

What exists can now matter.

The distinction is worth preserving.

A sign can signify without being good or bad.

A process can occur without being valued.

Something can mean something without necessarily being desirable.

Evaluation adds a different dimension to significance.

It tells us that the world is not merely interpretable.

It is worth something.

This is perhaps the quietest but most profound transformation in the whole account.

A world capable of being evaluated is a world in which existence is not exhausted by description.

Goodness Is Relational

There is another feature of the repeated evaluations.

The text does not begin by presenting “goodness” as an abstract property detached from everything else.

The evaluation occurs in relation to what has actually emerged.

Light is good in the configuration that has been established.

The differentiated world is good.

The living world is good.

The completed configuration is very good.

Goodness therefore appears as a judgment upon a world of relations and processes, not as an isolated substance.

This matters philosophically.

If value belongs to configurations, then the goodness of a thing cannot always be separated from the relations in which that thing exists.

A creature may be evaluated within an environment.

A process may be evaluated by what it sustains.

A relation may be evaluated by what it makes possible.

The good is therefore not necessarily a property sitting inside an object.

It may belong to the way things are together.

From “Good” to “Very Good”

The final evaluation is striking because it changes scale.

Earlier, individual stages are judged good.

At the end, “every thing” that has been made is gathered into a single field of apprehension.

The evaluation is no longer directed toward one newly differentiated feature.

It encompasses the whole configuration.

And the judgment intensifies:

very good.

The narrative has moved from local evaluation to comprehensive evaluation.

This is not simply “more goodness” added to the previous goodness.

It is a different kind of judgment.

The world as a whole has become available as something that can be apprehended and evaluated together.

The parts have become sufficiently integrated that they can be seen as a whole.

The Whole Is More Than the Inventory

This gives us another reason not to think of Genesis 1 as merely an inventory of created things.

At the end, the narrative does not say that each individual thing is good and leave the matter there.

It gathers the entire configuration into one evaluative field.

The world is good not merely because its components are good separately, but because of how they constitute a world together.

This is an important philosophical possibility.

A whole can possess significance that cannot be reduced to a list of its parts.

Relations matter.

Processes matter.

Contexts matter.

The organisation of the whole matters.

The world has become something that can be evaluated as a world.

Evaluation Makes a Difference

Once evaluation enters the picture, the world acquires another kind of possibility.

If something can be good, it can also become possible to ask whether it might be otherwise.

Evaluation opens a space between what is and what ought to be.

Genesis 1 does not yet develop that distinction.

There is no ethical system here.

No theory of obligation.

No account of evil.

Those questions belong elsewhere.

But the conceptual possibility has appeared.

A world that can be evaluated is already a world in which its configurations can, in principle, be compared with values.

Something can be affirmed.

Something can matter.

Something can be judged worth preserving or changing.

The evaluative dimension therefore creates the possibility of normativity without yet giving us a theory of it.

A World Worth Living In

We can now see how far the narrative has travelled.

At the beginning there is existence.

Then differentiation.

Then relation.

Then becoming.

Then productivity.

Then life.

Then signification.

Then the relational constitution of the human.

And now evaluation.

The world is no longer merely a world that is.

It is a world that can mean, matter, and be valued.

The final “very good” is therefore not simply a decorative conclusion.

It completes a movement in which existence has become increasingly available for significance.

The world has become intelligible.

It has become productive.

It has become meaningful.

It has become relational.

And it has become good.

That leaves us with the question the series has been approaching from the beginning.

Not simply:

What happens in Genesis 1?

Nor even:

What does Genesis 1 say about the world?

But something more difficult:

What kind of world have we been given?

The Possibilities of a World: VI. The Relational Constitution of the Human

By the time human beings appear in Genesis 1, the world is already there.

It is differentiated.

It is relational.

It is productive.

It sustains life.

It contains signs.

The human does not enter an empty universe and give it structure.

The human enters a world that is already structured.

This makes the account of humanity more interesting than a simple story about the arrival of a special kind of creature.

The human is introduced as a relational being.

The Human Appears Within an Already Relational World

The creation of humanity comes late in the narrative, but lateness should not automatically be mistaken for superiority.

By this point the world already contains an elaborate configuration of differences and relations.

There are domains and boundaries.

There are cycles and seasons.

There are living things that inhabit particular environments.

There are processes of reproduction and continuation.

There are signs.

Human beings therefore arrive not as the first participants in a world of relations, but as participants in a world that has already become relationally organised.

This changes the question we should ask.

Instead of asking, “What special substance makes a human being human?”, we can ask:

What relations constitute the human as the kind of being described here?

Image Is a Relation

Genesis gives an immediate answer, although not a simple one.

Human beings are created “in our image” and “after our likeness.”

Whatever else these expressions may mean, they do not describe the human as an isolated entity whose defining properties can be listed independently of everything else.

The human is described through a relation.

To be human, in this account, is partly to be in something: in an image, after a likeness.

The phrase does not merely tell us what human beings possess.

It tells us something about how they are constituted.

The human appears through a relation between human existence and something beyond it.

This is important because the world has already been moving in this direction.

Things have acquired their significance through relations.

Functions arise from relations.

Signs arise within relations.

Now the human itself is introduced relationally.

The principle that has structured the world becomes part of the account of the human.

The Human Is Given a World

The human is also introduced into relations with everything that has come before.

The fish of the sea.

The birds of the air.

The cattle.

The earth.

Every living thing that moves upon it.

The human is not simply placed alongside these things.

A set of relations is established between them.

Human beings are to have dominion over the living world and over the earth.

Whatever we ultimately make of the word “dominion,” its grammatical and conceptual position is revealing.

It is a relation.

The human is being defined partly by how it stands in relation to what is not human.

This is another reason not to treat the human as an isolated substance.

The human exists within a field of relations that precedes it and continues beyond it.

The Human Receives Before It Acts

There is another feature of the account that is easy to overlook.

The human is given something.

The plants bearing seed and the trees bearing fruit are given as food.

The human therefore enters the world not only as one who acts upon it, but as one who receives from it.

This matters.

The later commands to multiply, replenish, subdue, and exercise dominion might easily lead us toward a picture of the human as pure active power.

But the narrative does not begin there.

The human first receives a world already capable of sustaining life.

Human activity is therefore embedded within prior relations of provision.

Before the human transforms the world, the world has already become capable of providing for the human.

To Be Human Is to Participate

This gives us a different way of understanding the distinctive position of humanity.

The human is not distinguished simply by standing outside nature and looking in.

Nor is the human simply another organism among organisms.

The human occupies a particular position within the network of relations already established by the narrative.

Human beings receive.

They reproduce.

They inhabit.

They transform.

They exercise dominion.

They stand in relations to other living things.

And they do all this within a world that already possesses structure, productivity, and signs.

The human is therefore constituted through participation.

What the human is cannot be separated from the relations in which the human exists.

The Human and the Semiotic World

This becomes especially interesting because the human appears after the world has already acquired signs.

The human is therefore not the first being to inhabit a meaningful world.

The human inherits one.

That does not make human meaning unimportant. Quite the contrary.

It suggests that human meaning is possible because the human enters a world in which significance is already part of the structure of things.

The human can interpret because there is something to interpret.

The human can name because there are already differences to be named.

The human can organise because there are already relations to organise.

The human can evaluate because the world has already been construed as capable of being evaluated.

Human semiotic activity therefore does not create the possibility of meaning from nothing.

It develops within a world in which that possibility has already emerged.

A Relational Rather Than Substantial Human

We can now see why the human occupies such an interesting position in Genesis 1.

The narrative does not require us to imagine a mysterious human essence inserted into an otherwise nonhuman world.

Instead, it presents a being whose existence is saturated with relations.

The human is related to its source through image and likeness.

Related to other humans through the distinction of male and female.

Related to the living world through dominion.

Related to the earth through inhabitation and transformation.

Related to the world through provision.

And, implicitly, related to a world already capable of signification.

The human is therefore not merely in a relational world.

The human is constituted by relations within that world.

This is perhaps the most important philosophical possibility opened by the account of humanity.

To ask what a human being is may be inseparable from asking what relations make a human being possible.

And this changes the significance of everything that has come before.

Existence became difference.

Difference became relation.

Relation became productivity.

Productivity became continuity.

The world became capable of meaning.

And now a being appears whose existence is itself relationally articulated.

But there is still one question.

If the world is relationally constituted, productive, meaningful, and capable of sustaining life, what kind of world is it to be living in?

Genesis 1 has one final answer.

It is a world that can be evaluated.

The Possibilities of a World: V. When Things Begin to Mean

So far, the world of Genesis 1 has become increasingly structured.

Things exist.

They become differentiated.

Differences enter into relations.

Relations become productive.

The world acquires continuity through processes that carry becoming forward.

And then something new happens.

Some things begin to mean.

The change appears almost casually.

The lights in the heavens are appointed not only to give light and divide day from night, but also “for signs.”

The world has acquired a new possibility.

Something can now function as something other than itself.

From What Things Do to What They Mean

A productive world can already be extraordinarily complex.

Things can interact. They can transform one another. They can reproduce. They can sustain processes across time.

But none of this, by itself, requires meaning.

A seed can produce a plant without meaning anything.

An animal can move without that movement functioning as a sign.

Day can follow night without either one signifying anything.

Meaning introduces a different kind of relation.

A thing can now participate in a configuration in which its significance is not exhausted by its immediate material existence or practical function.

The lights are lights.

But they are also for signs.

This is not simply another function added to an already existing object.

It marks a new possibility in the world.

A World That Can Be Read

Once something can function as a sign, the world becomes capable of being interpreted.

This does not yet require language.

Nor does Genesis 1 tell us that the signs have been assigned meanings by human beings.

The point is more basic.

The material world can participate in a distinction between what something is and what it indicates.

A light can be a source of illumination and also a sign.

A configuration can be materially present while pointing beyond that immediate presence.

The world therefore acquires a new dimension.

It can now be encountered not only as something that exists and does things, but as something from which something can be understood.

This is a profound transformation.

The world becomes, in principle, interpretable.

Meaning Depends on Difference

There is also a connection here with everything that has come before.

A sign can only function as a sign within a system of differences and relations.

The lights divide day from night.

The seasons are distinguished.

Days and years are differentiated.

The sign therefore does not float free of the world.

It depends upon the structure the world has already acquired.

Meaning emerges from an organised field of differences.

This is why the earlier stages of Genesis 1 matter.

Meaning has not been added to an otherwise meaningless world as though a separate substance had suddenly appeared.

The world has gradually acquired the conditions under which meaning becomes possible.

Existence made distinction possible.

Distinction made relation possible.

Relation made organised function possible.

Productivity made continuity possible.

And now organised differences can become significant.

Meaning Does Not Replace Mattering

There is another important consequence.

Once things can mean, they do not cease to matter materially.

The lights still illuminate.

The earth still produces.

Plants still yield seed.

Creatures still move and multiply.

Meaning does not float above material reality.

It is another way in which material reality can participate in relations.

This matters because it prevents us from treating meaning as though it belonged to an entirely different universe.

The world has not divided into matter on one side and meaning on the other.

Rather, the world has become capable of meaning through the relations already present within it.

The semiotic is not a second world added to the first.

It is a new possibility within the world that has already emerged.

Meaning Extends the World Beyond Itself

A sign has a peculiar property.

It allows something present to make something else available.

The sign is here.

What it signifies need not be.

This means that the world can now exceed its immediate circumstances.

A present configuration can point toward another time, another relation, another possibility.

The lights can mark seasons, days, and years.

The present can therefore become informative about a larger temporal order.

The world acquires a way of carrying distinctions beyond the moment in which they occur.

This is a new kind of continuity.

Earlier, productivity allowed the present to carry the future materially through seed and multiplication.

Now signification allows the present to carry something beyond itself semiotically.

The world can begin to preserve and communicate distinctions.

From Meaning to a Meaningful World

There is an important difference between saying that something means something and saying that the world itself is meaningful.

Genesis 1 does not require us to make the second claim.

It gives us the first.

Certain things are assigned a signifying function within an already structured world.

But once that possibility exists, the character of the whole world changes.

A world containing signs is no longer merely a world of things, processes, and relations.

It is a world in which things can become available for interpretation.

That possibility will become increasingly important as the narrative approaches the human.

Human beings will inhabit this world not merely as organisms among organisms, but within a world already structured by distinctions, functions, signs, and relations.

Meaning therefore does not suddenly arrive with humanity.

Something more modest, and perhaps more interesting, has happened.

The world has become capable of meaning before the human appears within it.

And once meaning is possible, a new question follows.

What kind of being can participate in a world where things do not merely exist, interact, and reproduce, but can also stand for something?

Genesis 1 will soon give us its answer.

Not an isolated individual, but a being constituted through relations.

The next question, therefore, is not simply what the human is.

It is what kind of relation makes the human possible at all.