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.
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