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.