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.

The Possibilities of a World: IV. The World Becomes Productive

A world can contain things without producing anything.

It can contain differences without generating new configurations. It can contain relations without those relations leading anywhere.

Genesis 1 gradually constructs a world in which this is no longer the case.

The world becomes productive.

This is not simply because living things appear. Productivity begins earlier, when the earth and the waters themselves become capable of bringing forth what they contain the conditions for.

The earth brings forth vegetation.

The vegetation yields seed.

The waters bring forth living creatures.

The creatures multiply.

The world has begun to produce from within itself.

From Relation to Productivity

This follows naturally from the development we have traced.

Existence becomes differentiated.

Difference becomes relation.

And relations create conditions under which something can happen.

The earth is not merely distinguished from the waters. It becomes a domain within which vegetation can emerge.

The waters are not merely separated into different domains. They become the setting from which living creatures emerge.

The world has therefore acquired more than structure.

It has acquired productive relations.

Something can now happen because of the way things are related.

This is a significant philosophical transition.

A world that merely contains things is a world of presence.

A world in which relations can generate further states of affairs is a world of potential.

Productivity Is Not Manufacture

There is an important distinction here.

Productivity does not necessarily mean that something manufactures something else.

The earth does not appear as a factory producing vegetation.

The waters do not appear as machines producing animals.

The language of Genesis is stranger and more interesting than that.

The world is portrayed as bringing forth.

What emerges belongs to the domain from which it emerges. The productive capacity is not imposed upon an otherwise inert reality from outside. It belongs to the configuration itself.

This gives productivity a relational character.

The earth can bring forth because of what the earth has become.

The waters can bring forth because of what the waters have become.

The world produces because its relations have acquired possibilities that were not available in the undifferentiated beginning.

Productivity is therefore not an additional ingredient.

It is a consequence of organisation.

The World Begins to Carry Its Future

Vegetation introduces an especially important development.

The plant does not merely emerge.

It yields seed.

That means that what comes into being now can participate in bringing about what comes into being later.

The present begins to carry its own continuation.

The same pattern appears in living creatures when they are commanded to be fruitful and multiply.

Life is not simply added to the world.

It becomes capable of continuing itself within the world.

This changes the temporal structure we encountered in the previous post.

Becoming no longer means merely that one state follows another.

It becomes recursive.

What has become can become the condition for further becoming.

The world begins to contain processes that sustain and extend processes.

Productivity Creates Continuity

This may be the deepest significance of the productive world.

Without productivity, each new state would have to be introduced independently.

With productivity, the world acquires continuity.

What exists now can make a difference to what exists later.

A seed connects generations.

Multiplication connects living beings across time.

The capacities of one stage become conditions for another.

The world therefore begins to acquire something resembling a history that is not merely imposed upon it by an observer.

Its present configurations participate in producing its future configurations.

This is a very different conception of reality from a world understood as a collection of finished objects.

A productive world is a world in which the future is partly carried by the present.

Productivity Changes the Meaning of Creation

This also gives us a richer understanding of creation itself.

Creation is no longer simply the arrival of things.

The narrative does not stop once the things have arrived.

The created world becomes capable of further becoming.

Vegetation yields.

Creatures multiply.

Domains become populated.

Relations become sustained through activity.

The world that has been created is therefore not a completed product.

It is a world with productive possibilities.

Creation, in this sense, establishes conditions under which further becoming can occur.

That is why the distinction between creation and productivity matters.

Creation establishes a world.

Productivity gives that world the capacity to continue.

When the World Begins to Act on Itself

There is an even more radical implication.

Once the world becomes productive, what happens within it is no longer exhausted by what happens to it.

The earth brings forth.

The waters bring forth.

Plants yield.

Creatures multiply.

The world has become a participant in its own continuation.

This does not require us to attribute consciousness, intention, or agency to the earth or the waters.

The philosophical point is simpler.

The world has acquired internal sources of becoming.

Its future is no longer determined solely by events introduced from outside its existing configurations.

Something has begun to happen within the world that changes what the world can become.

And this prepares the way for the next transformation.

For productivity alone does not yet give us meaning.

A world can generate endlessly without anything functioning as a sign.

But Genesis 1 eventually introduces something new.

The lights in the heavens are not merely productive.

They are for signs.

At that moment, the world acquires a new possibility:

not merely to produce differences,

but to signify them.

The Possibilities of a World: III. When Difference Becomes Relation

Difference is not yet a world of relations.

To distinguish one thing from another is already to have moved beyond an undifferentiated existence. But difference alone can leave us with little more than a collection of separate entities.

A world becomes more interesting when differences begin to matter to one another.

Genesis 1 repeatedly moves in this direction.

Light is divided from darkness. Waters are divided from waters. Day is distinguished from night. The earth is distinguished from the seas. The greater light and the lesser light are given different functions. Living creatures occupy different domains. Plants and animals become differentiated according to their kinds.

The world is not merely becoming more populated.

It is becoming structured by relations.

Difference Creates the Possibility of Relation

A relation requires some difference between what is related.

There would be no distinction between day and night if there were not something by which they could be distinguished. There would be no relation between the earth and the waters if they remained an undifferentiated whole.

But difference by itself does not create relation.

Two things can be different without entering into any significant relation at all.

What Genesis 1 progressively constructs is something more subtle: differences become organised into patterns.

Light does not merely differ from darkness. It is divided from it.

Day does not merely differ from night. The two become part of an ordered temporal cycle.

The waters are not simply separated. They are gathered, located, and given domains.

Difference becomes something that the world can do things with.

Relation Gives Difference a Structure

Once differences enter into relations, neither side can be understood entirely in isolation.

Day is understood in relation to night.

The seas are understood in relation to the dry land.

The lights are understood through the functions they perform within the temporal order.

Living creatures are understood partly through the domains they inhabit and the processes in which they participate.

The significance of a thing therefore cannot always be found in the thing considered alone.

It may lie in the relation through which it becomes what it is.

This is a small but consequential shift.

We began with existence.

Existence became differentiated.

Now differentiation itself becomes relational.

The world is no longer simply a collection of what is.

It is becoming a configuration of what stands in relation to what.

Relation Makes Function Possible

This becomes especially clear when the lights are introduced.

The lights are not simply added to the inventory of existing things. They are given functions within an already differentiated world: they divide day from night, mark seasons, and organise days and years.

Their significance lies partly in what they do within a system of relations.

The same principle appears in the living world.

Vegetation does not merely exist. It yields seed.

Living creatures do not merely exist. They move, multiply, and fill their domains.

Later, human beings will not merely exist either. They will stand in relations of provision, reproduction, transformation, and dominion.

The world is becoming functional without becoming mechanical.

A thing can have a role because it occupies a particular place within a configuration of relations.

This suggests a more general philosophical possibility:

what something is cannot always be separated from what it is in relation to.

Relation Also Changes the Meaning of Boundary

A boundary can be understood in two very different ways.

It can be what separates one thing from another.

Or it can be what makes a relation between them possible.

Genesis repeatedly gives us boundaries of the second kind.

The division between light and darkness makes the alternation of day and night possible.

The separation of waters creates distinct domains.

The distinction between earth and sea creates different environments within the same world.

Difference therefore does not necessarily fragment the world.

It can articulate it.

A boundary can be a condition of connection rather than merely an obstacle to it.

This is important because it changes how we think about unity.

Unity need not mean the absence of difference.

A more complex unity may consist precisely in the relations that hold differentiated things together.

From Things to a World

At this point the world of Genesis 1 has acquired a new character.

There are things.

There are differences between them.

But there are also relations through which those differences become organised, functional, and consequential.

The world is therefore no longer adequately described as an inventory.

It is a relational configuration.

And once relations become constitutive of the world, another possibility opens.

Relations can themselves become productive.

The earth can bring forth.

The waters can bring forth.

Plants can yield.

Living creatures can multiply.

What was initially a differentiation of the world now becomes a way in which the world continues to generate itself.

Difference has become relation.

Relation will become productivity.

And with that transition, the world of Genesis 1 is about to acquire something still more remarkable:

the capacity not merely to contain processes, but to sustain them.

The Possibilities of a World: II. From Being to Becoming

If the first post asked what kind of world Genesis 1 makes possible, the next question is unavoidable: what kind of existence does such a world contain?

It is tempting to imagine a world as a collection of things that simply are. Once they exist, they remain what they are, and change happens to them from outside.

Genesis 1 offers something rather different.

Its world is not static. Things do not merely appear and then occupy a finished reality. They become differentiated, enter into relations, produce further forms of life, and acquire capacities that extend beyond the moment of their emergence.

The earth is already there before it becomes differentiated. The waters are already there before they are divided and gathered. The dry land appears, vegetation springs forth, plants yield seed, and living creatures multiply.

Existence therefore does not mark the end of the story.

It is the beginning of one.

Being Is Not the Opposite of Becoming

We often treat being and becoming as opposites.

Something either is, or it is becoming.

But Genesis 1 suggests that this distinction is too simple. What is can become. What becomes does not thereby cease to be. Becoming is not a transition from non-being to being in every case. Much of the narrative concerns things that already exist entering new configurations.

The earth exists before it becomes productive.

The waters exist before they become differentiated into distinct domains.

The land exists before it brings forth vegetation.

Vegetation exists before it becomes the source of further vegetation.

The world is therefore not constituted by a succession of things replacing one another. It is constituted by transformations of what already exists.

This gives becoming a different philosophical status.

Becoming is not merely what happens after being.

It is one of the ways being continues.

Becoming Becomes Generative

Something even more striking happens as the narrative proceeds.

What comes to be can itself become a source of further becoming.

The earth brings forth vegetation, but the vegetation bears seed. The waters bring forth living creatures, but the creatures multiply. The world does not merely accumulate its contents. Its contents begin to participate in the production of what comes next.

A new possibility has therefore entered the world: generativity.

Something can now produce, sustain, or give rise to something beyond its immediate existence.

This changes the character of the world profoundly.

A world containing only things that exist would be a world of presence.

A world in which things can generate further things is a world of continuity.

And continuity introduces time in a deeper sense than simply the succession of days.

The seed matters because what exists now carries something of what may exist later. Multiplication matters because the present becomes connected to a future that is not yet present. The world begins to contain trajectories.

Becoming is no longer simply change.

It becomes the continuation of possibility through what already exists.

The Future Enters the World

This is also why the repeated projections in Genesis 1 matter.

Before some things occur, they are spoken as possibilities: let there be light; let the waters bring forth; let the earth bring forth.

The narrative therefore gives us an intriguing sequence:

possibility → becoming → actuality.

The possibility is not yet the thing itself. But neither is it nothing.

Something can be projected before it is actualised.

This opens a philosophical question that will become increasingly important: what kind of being can a possibility have before it becomes actual?

Genesis does not answer the question philosophically. It simply gives the question a place within the structure of the world.

And that is precisely what makes it interesting.

The world contains not only what is, but orientations toward what may be.

Becoming Through What Is

There is therefore no need to choose between a world of being and a world of becoming.

The more interesting possibility is a world in which being makes becoming possible, and becoming transforms what being can be.

The earth that brings forth vegetation is not the same earth, conceptually, as the undifferentiated earth of the beginning. The waters that bring forth living creatures occupy a different place in the structure of the world from the waters before their differentiation.

What exists acquires new possibilities through its relations and activities.

And those new possibilities, once actualised, become part of the conditions for what can happen next.

The world thus acquires a kind of historical depth.

Each stage does not simply replace the previous one. It leaves behind conditions from which further becoming can proceed.

The result is not a ladder from lower to higher being. It is something more interesting:

a world capable of carrying its own becoming forward.

That may be one of the most important philosophical possibilities opened by Genesis 1.

Creation, on this reading, does not end becoming.

Creation creates the capacity for further creation.

And once difference has become productive, the next question is no longer simply what things become.

It is how what becomes enters into relation with what is already there.

The Possibilities of a World: I. When a World Becomes a World

We have just finished reading Genesis 1 grammatically.

The result was not quite what we expected.

We began wanting to uncover the philosophical ideas hidden in the chapter. Instead, we found ourselves following its grammar: processes, participants, relations, projections, identifications, textual Themes and evaluations.

What emerged was not a philosophy in any straightforward sense.

It was a world.

That distinction matters.

In A Grammar of a World, we followed the text from its opening:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

through differentiation, naming, becoming, life, signification, human relationality and evaluation.

We can now ask a different question.

What kind of world has that grammar made available to us?

The question is not what Genesis 1 really means.

Nor is it whether the world described in the chapter corresponds to some independently established philosophical ontology.

It is a question about conceptual possibility.

What becomes thinkable once this particular world has been construed?

The first thing we noticed was that existence and differentiation are not the same thing.

In the opening verses, the earth is already there:

And the earth was without form, and void.

Something can exist without yet being differentiated into the structures through which it can be construed.

Light then appears.

Light is seen.

Light is distinguished from darkness.

The waters are divided.

Dry land appears.

The land and waters are named.

What was initially a relatively undifferentiated field becomes progressively articulated.

This suggests that a world is more than an inventory of existing things.

A world requires differences.

But even that is not enough.

The differences have to enter into relations.

The waters are not merely two quantities of water. They become waters above and below the firmament.

The dry land is not merely something that exists. It stands in relation to the waters.

The lights are not merely objects in the heavens. They divide day from night, mark seasons and years, give light upon the earth and function as signs.

The human is not merely another participant. The human is constituted in relation to the other living things, to the earth, and to the divine speaker.

So perhaps we can make a first distinction:

Existence gives us things.

Differentiation gives us distinctions.

Relation gives us a world.

But even this is not quite enough.

The world of Genesis 1 is not static.

The earth brings forth.

The waters bring forth.

Plants yield seed.

Living creatures multiply.

The world becomes productive.

What has come to be can participate in bringing something else to be.

This means that a world is not merely a configuration of relations at one moment.

It has trajectories.

It contains possibilities for further becoming.

A seed is particularly revealing.

The plant is not simply what is presently there. It carries within the narrative a relation to what may come next.

The creature that multiplies is not merely an individual entity. It participates in the continuation of a population.

The world therefore contains not only actualities, but affordances for further actualisation.

And this is where the distinction between a world and an inventory becomes sharper.

An inventory tells us what exists.

A world gives us a field in which things can become, relate, act and be acted upon.

There is another development.

Things begin to function as signs.

The lights are explicitly said to be:

for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.

A material phenomenon can therefore function as something other than itself.

The world is not exhausted by its material constitution.

It has acquired a semiotic dimension.

And then the human appears within this already constituted world.

The human is made materially, but in a particular guise:

in our image, after our likeness.

The human is differentiated as male and female.

The human is addressed.

The human receives projected possibilities for action.

The human is positioned in relation to the other living things.

The human therefore does not arrive as an isolated substance and only afterwards enter into relations.

The human arrives already related.

Finally, the world becomes something that can itself be apprehended and evaluated:

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

The entire sequence of becoming can now be taken as one Phenomenon.

The world has become available not merely to existence, but to apprehension and evaluation.

We can now see the progression more clearly:

existence

→ distinction

→ relation

→ becoming

→ productivity

→ life

→ signification

→ relational agency

→ evaluation

We should be careful about treating this as a rigid hierarchy.

The text does not say that these are nine metaphysical layers of reality.

They are better understood as successive conceptual affordances.

Once existence is differentiated, distinction becomes possible.

Once distinctions are related, a world can be construed.

Once a world is productive, further becoming becomes possible.

Once living participants emerge, continuity and multiplication become possible.

Once things function as signs, significance becomes possible.

Once participants are relationally constituted, agency can be understood within a network of relations.

And once the whole configuration can be apprehended and evaluated, value enters the picture.

This gives us a rather different way of thinking about what a world is.

A world may not be something that simply exists before it is construed.

Nor need construal be understood as inventing a world that otherwise would not exist.

Perhaps a world emerges at the intersection of existence and the relations through which existence becomes articulable.

Genesis 1 gives us one striking construal of that emergence.

It begins with something that exists without form.

It ends with a differentiated, productive, living, signifying and evaluable configuration.

The philosophical question is therefore not simply:

What exists?

It is:

What must be the case for what exists to become a world?

That is a different question.

And it may be the question that Genesis 1 has been quietly preparing us to ask all along.

A Grammar of a World: VIII. A World That Is Very Good

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

By the end of Genesis 1, the world is no longer merely a collection of things that have come into existence.

It has become a world of relations.

Vegetation has been construed as something that bears seed and yields fruit. Living creatures have been brought forth, multiplied and distributed through their domains. Lights divide day from night, mark seasons and years, and function as signs. The human has been made in a particular guise, differentiated as male and female, addressed by speech, and positioned in relation to the rest of creation.

Now something else happens.

Things are given.

I have given you every herb bearing seed... and every tree...

The process is material, but its significance is relational.

God is Actor.

The human recipients are the Recipients.

The herbs and trees are the Goal of the giving.

And the things given are described not simply as objects, but by what they do:

bearing seed

yielding seed

The productive capacities introduced earlier have not disappeared.

They have become part of the relations through which the world is inhabited.

Then comes the small phrase that deserves more attention than it usually receives:

to you it shall be for meat.

The phrase is naturally read as a statement of purpose, but grammatically it can be understood more precisely as Role: Guise.

The question is something like:

What is it as, for you?

The answer is:

as meat.

This is not merely a statement about what the plants are intrinsically.

It is a statement about what they are in a particular relation.

The same entity can therefore participate in different construals without becoming a different entity.

The plant bears seed.

It yields fruit.

It is given.

And, for the human, it is construed as meat.

This is another development in the grammar of the world.

Something can be what it is, do what it does, and also be something as something else within a relation.

Verse 30 extends the same pattern to the other living creatures:

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat...

Again, I have given is a material process of transfer.

The recipients are now the differentiated living creatures.

The green herb is given for meat — again, naturally understood as Role: Guise.

And the phrase:

wherein there is life

quietly does something else.

Life has become a criterion for construal.

The narrative can now gather together beasts, fowl and creeping things under a common description because they share a characteristic:

there is life

The world has acquired categories that allow its participants to be grouped, differentiated and related.

Then comes the final movement.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

This is not simply another instance of God saw that it was good.

Something larger is now being seen.

The clause:

God saw every thing that he had made

is mental.

God is Senser.

Saw is the Mental Process.

And:

every thing that he had made

is the Phenomenon.

But notice what the grammar has done to the whole preceding narrative.

The relative clause:

that he had made

is itself material:

he — Actor

had made — Material Process

every thing — Goal.

An extended history of becoming has been packaged into a single nominal participant:

every thing that he had made

The world can now be taken as one thing to be seen.

What began as a sequence of events has become an object of apprehension.

And the assessment is comprehensive:

it was very good.

The it retrospectively packages the whole configuration.

The light and darkness.

The heavens and the earth.

The waters and dry land.

Vegetation.

Living creatures.

The lights that mark and signify.

The human.

The relations among them.

The capacities they possess.

The purposes and guises they acquire.

The world that has become productive, populated, differentiated and relationally organised.

All of this can now be construed together.

And the evaluation intensifies.

Earlier, God repeatedly saw that things were good.

Now:

very good.

The narrative has reached its first comprehensive evaluation.

And then, almost quietly:

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

The temporal system closes over the whole sequence.

There is a first day.

A second.

A third.

A fourth.

A fifth.

And now a sixth.

Time itself has become something that can be differentiated, named, counted and ordered.

We can now look back at the movement of the grammar.

It began with:

created

Then:

said

was

saw

divided

called

made

gathered

appeared

brought forth

yielded

multiplied

blessed

gave

ruled

signified

No single process explains the world.

The general construal of creation is repeatedly differentiated into particular manners of becoming and particular relations among what has become.

Something comes to be.

It becomes distinguishable.

It can be seen.

It can be named.

It can enter into relations.

It can produce.

It can continue itself.

It can function as a sign.

It can be given.

It can be construed in a particular guise.

It can be addressed.

It can act.

And finally, the whole configuration can itself become the Phenomenon of a mental process.

The grammar has progressively made a world available for construal.

That may be the most striking thing we have found in Genesis 1.

We began with a world that was not yet differentiated.

We have arrived at a world that can be seen, distinguished, named, located, brought forth, populated, signified, related to, addressed, given, received and evaluated.

And the final evaluation is not merely that each thing is good.

The whole configuration is:

very good.

Whatever else Genesis 1 may mean — cosmologically, theologically, mythologically or historically — its grammar has given us something quite precise.

It has given us a world that is not merely there.

It is a world available to construe.

And perhaps that is where the story should end.

Not with an answer to what the world ultimately is.

But with the world itself having become something that can be asked about.

A Grammar of a World: VII. The Relational Constitution of the Human

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

By the sixth day, the world has become a remarkably complex configuration.

There is light and darkness, Day and Night, Heaven and Earth, Seas and dry land. There is vegetation, seed, living creatures, movement, multiplication, temporal recurrence and even signification.

Then the narrative turns to the human.

And the grammar changes again.

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

The process is material:

make

with us as Actor and man as Goal.

But the phrase:

in our image, after our likeness

does something more than simply describe the making.

It can be understood as Role: Guise — the role or form in which the participant is constituted.

The question is not merely:

How is man made?

but something closer to:

Made as what?

The answer begins:

in our image, after our likeness.

The human is therefore introduced through a material process whose outcome is simultaneously construed in relational terms.

And the next clause makes the relational character even clearer:

and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea...

Have dominion is relational rather than material. It does not describe an object being produced. It establishes a relation between the newly constituted participant and the already existing world.

The list is striking.

Fish.

Fowl.

Cattle.

The earth.

Every creeping thing.

These are not new entities. They are entities already introduced into the narrative.

The human is therefore being positioned within a world that has already been differentiated and organised.

Then verse 27 repeats the creation in a particularly interesting textual form:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

All three clauses can be construed as material clauses.

In each case:

• God / he is Actor;

• created is the Material Process;

• man / him / them is Goal;

• in his own image / in the image of God / male and female can be understood as Role: Guise.

What changes is not the process type.

It is the textual organisation.

In the first clause:

God created man in his own image.

The Actor is the Theme. The Guise follows.

But then the narrative changes the order:

In the image of God created he him.

And again:

Male and female created he them.

The Role: Guise has now been brought to the front of the clause and made Theme.

The effect is subtle but important.

The text keeps the material process constant while progressively foregrounding what the human is made as.

We can see the textual movement:

God → image → male and female

The first clause establishes the event.

The second foregrounds the image.

The third foregrounds the differentiation.

The grammar therefore does not need to change from material to relational process in order to give these elements conceptual prominence.

The textual organisation does the work.

This also makes the movement from:

man → him → them

especially interesting.

The singular man is taken up as him, and then as them, with the final Theme:

male and female

making an explicit differentiation.

The text is progressively directing attention towards the relational guise and internal differentiation of the human while retaining the same material construal of creation.

This is a useful reminder of something we have already been learning from Genesis 1.

Meaning is not carried by process type alone.

Textual organisation matters too.

What comes first in a clause is not necessarily what is most important in every possible sense, but it is what the clause chooses as its point of departure.

Here, that point of departure shifts.

And once again, the human is not introduced simply by a list of intrinsic properties.

The human is construed through relations:

in the image of God

male and female

with dominion over the other living things

The relational dimension continues in verse 28:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion...

We have encountered this grammatical pattern before.

God blessed them.

Blessed can be understood as a targeting verbal process:

God → blessed → them

The following:

God said unto them

makes the verbal nature explicit and projects a series of proposals:

Be fruitful.

Multiply.

Replenish the earth.

Subdue it.

Have dominion.

There is continuity with the blessing of the living creatures:

Be fruitful.

Multiply.

But the human proposals extend further.

The human is to:

replenish the earth

and:

subdue it

and:

have dominion

The direction of relation has therefore become reciprocal.

Earlier:

the earth brought forth the living creature.

Now:

the living creature replenishes the earth.

The world brings forth the human; the human is instructed to act upon the world.

The relational configuration has become capable of reciprocal agency.

And notice again that the commands invoke participants already present:

fish

fowl

cattle

every living thing

The human is not constituted outside the world.

The human is constituted through relations within it.

This may be the most important point so far.

The grammar does not introduce the human primarily as a self-contained object possessing a collection of properties.

It introduces the human through a network of relations:

as image

as male and female

as recipient of blessing

as one addressed by speech

as fruitful and multiplying

as replenishing

as subduing

as having dominion

The human is therefore grammatically constituted not merely as something that is, but as something situated within relations.

And this brings us back to the path we have been following since the beginning.

The world first comes to be.

Then it is differentiated.

Then it is identified.

Then it becomes productive.

Then it becomes alive.

Then things begin to function as signs.

And now a participant appears whose constitution is expressed through relations of identity, address, agency and organisation.

The grammar has not suddenly abandoned the material world for an abstract one.

Rather, material and relational construals have become increasingly intertwined.

The human is made materially.

The human is construed in a particular guise.

The human is differentiated as male and female.

The human is addressed verbally.

The human is assigned relational roles.

And the human is given projected possibilities for action.

The story has reached a point where what something is cannot easily be separated from the relations in which it is construed.

And now the narrative turns to what is given.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed...

The human has been constituted in relation to the world.

Now the world itself will be construed, for the human, as something given.

The grammar of creation is acquiring another dimension:

not only what things are, but what they are as.