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.

A Grammar of a World: VI. Life Learns to Continue Itself

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

Something has changed again.

The world is no longer merely productive.

It is now alive.

But the grammar gives us an interesting way of arriving there.

God does not simply say:

Let there be living creatures.

Instead:

Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life.

The waters are the Actor of a material process:

the waters → bring forth → the moving creature

Once again, becoming is mediated through a domain that has already been constituted.

The waters, differentiated earlier from the waters above the firmament, now become a source of further becoming.

And the same pattern occurs again on land:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind...

The Earth, already named and already productive, becomes the Actor in another material process.

The narrative is therefore developing a remarkable symmetry:

waters bring forth → aquatic and flying life

earth brings forth → terrestrial life

The created world is becoming generative through its own differentiated domains.

This is not quite the same as the direct existential proposal of verse 3:

Let there be light.

There, the proposed state of affairs simply comes to be.

Here, the proposal is mediated:

Let the waters bring forth...

Let the earth bring forth...

The grammar construes existing configurations as participants in further becoming.

That distinction is important.

Creation is becoming recursive.

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

And the new participants are characterised in several ways.

The creature:

hath life

The bird:

may fly

Life is therefore not introduced merely as a label. It is associated with activity and capacity.

The creature moves.

The bird can fly.

And the verb may introduces an interesting modal dimension: the bird is construed not simply as flying, but as possessing the capacity for flight.

We should not make too much of this single modal verb. But it is another indication that the story is beginning to construe creatures not only in terms of what they are, but in terms of what they can do.

That continues the development we have already seen.

Things exist.

They become differentiated.

They are identified.

They acquire functions.

They become productive.

Now living participants possess capacities through which further activity can occur.

Verse 21 then gives us an especially revealing combination:

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind...

Notice the two construals.

First:

God created

Then, within the relative clause:

the waters brought forth abundantly

The same creatures are therefore available to two perspectives.

They are created by God.

They are brought forth by the waters.

The grammar does not require us to choose between these accounts.

As we saw with vegetation, created gives a general construal of the event, while brought forth gives a more specific construal of its material becoming.

The distinction is not between two rival explanations.

It is between two ways of construing the same emergence.

And this becomes even more interesting because the creatures that are brought forth are then blessed:

And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas...

The grammar now moves beyond emergence.

The creatures are not merely produced.

They are instructed to produce more of themselves.

Be fruitful.

Multiply.

Fill the waters.

The direction of agency has changed.

Earlier:

waters → bring forth → creatures

Now:

creatures → multiply → populate the waters

The created participants have become agents in the continuation of becoming.

This is one of the most remarkable recursive structures in the chapter.

The world brings forth living things.

The living things are then construed as capable of bringing forth further life.

Creation has generated participants that can participate in further creation.

We should again resist importing modern evolutionary theory into the passage. The text is not offering a biological mechanism of reproduction or evolution.

But grammatically, something unmistakable has happened:

becoming has acquired continuity through the capacities of what has become.

The seed in the vegetation narrative anticipated this.

Now multiplication makes the pattern explicit.

The world is no longer simply a sequence of divine acts.

It has become a configuration in which agency is distributed among its participants.

God speaks.

Waters bring forth.

Earth brings forth.

Creatures move.

Birds fly.

Living things multiply.

And the domains themselves become populated through the activities of their inhabitants.

This also changes the meaning of creation.

At the beginning, creation could be construed as bringing something into actuality.

Now creation has produced a world capable of continuing its own becoming.

That may be the deepest transition yet.

The world has acquired not merely things, but processes that reproduce the conditions for further processes.

And the grammar keeps returning to the same evaluative pattern:

and God saw that it was good.

Life, movement, differentiation and multiplication are taken up into perception and assessment.

The living world is not merely happening.

It is being apprehended as a coherent configuration.

By the end of the fifth day, the narrative has therefore moved a long way from:

“Let there be...”

The world now contains participants that can, in their own turn, do things.

They can move.

They can fly.

They can multiply.

They can fill the spaces that have been constituted for them.

The created world has become generative.

And the next day will introduce a participant whose relation to this already productive world is different again.

The human will not simply be brought forth by the Earth.

The human will be made in a particular guise, given a particular relational position, and addressed with a particular set of projected possibilities.

The grammar is about to become explicitly relational in a new way.

A Grammar of a World: V. When Things Begin to Mean

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.

Something new appears in Genesis 1:14.

Not a new object.

Not even a new process.

A new function.

The lights are to be:

“for signs”

This is the first explicit indication in the story that something in the material world can function as a sign.

Until now, the world has been differentiated, identified, organised and made productive. Now a material phenomenon is being assigned a semiotic function.

The grammar is worth following carefully.

First:

Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven

Then:

to divide the day from the night

And then:

let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years

The lights therefore have several functions.

They divide.

They mark.

They organise recurrence.

And among these functions is signification.

This is important because light has changed its grammatical status since the beginning of the story.

In verse 3:

Let there be light.

Light is a phenomenon whose existence is projected and actualised.

By verse 14:

Let there be lights.

The phenomenon has become individuated.

There are now lights rather than simply light.

The subsequent verses make the differentiation still more explicit:

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Light has become participants with differentiated properties, locations and functions.

The lights do not simply exist.

They do things.

They divide day from night.

They rule over them.

They give light upon the earth.

And they serve as signs.

The material and the semiotic are therefore not presented as separate worlds.

A material phenomenon can acquire a semiotic function within the relations of the world already constructed.

That is a significant development.

We should nevertheless resist the temptation to explain exactly what kind of sign the text has in mind. Nothing here requires us to import a complete theory of semiotics.

The grammar tells us something simpler, and perhaps more interesting:

something material can function as something other than itself.

A light is still a light.

But it can also function for signs.

Its significance is therefore relational. It does not cease to be material in order to become semiotic.

This is consistent with what has happened throughout the chapter.

The world has repeatedly acquired new dimensions without losing the earlier ones.

Light was created.

Light was seen.

Light was evaluated.

Light was divided from darkness.

Light and darkness were named Day and Night.

Now lights are positioned within the firmament and assigned functions in relation to Day, Night, seasons, days and years.

Each new construal takes up what earlier construals have made available.

The same is true of time.

The story has already established Day and Night as identified categories. The lights now participate in the organisation of those categories.

And they also organise larger temporal recurrences:

seasons, days, and years.

Time is becoming not merely a sequence through which events occur, but something that can itself be marked, differentiated and recognised.

The world is acquiring recurrence that can be construed.

This helps explain why the lights are placed where they are:

in the firmament of the heaven

Their location is not incidental. The lights are positioned within an already differentiated relational structure so that they can perform their functions.

Again, the pattern is familiar:

constituted relation → material participant → function within the relation

But now the function includes signification.

This is perhaps the point at which the story crosses a subtle threshold.

A world can contain things without those things meaning anything.

It can contain differences without those differences being signs.

But once something functions for a sign, the material configuration has entered into a semiotic relation.

The story has moved from:

what is there

to:

what it does

and now to:

what it signifies.

That does not mean that the earlier world was meaningless. It means only that explicit signification has now entered the grammar of the story.

And that distinction is worth preserving.

The lights are not signs because we, as readers, decide that they symbolise something.

They are signs because the narrative explicitly gives them that function.

This is our first secure foothold for talking about meaning.

And it arrives rather late.

That may itself be significant.

The story does not begin with symbols.

It begins with existence.

Then come distinction, identification, relation, becoming, life and function.

Only then do things become explicitly signifying.

Perhaps meaning does not float above the material world as something added to it.

Perhaps, in this story at least, meaning emerges when material things enter into particular kinds of relations.

A light can be light.

It can illuminate.

It can divide.

It can regulate.

And it can signify.

One phenomenon, multiple construals.

The world is becoming increasingly complex not because new kinds of substance are continually appearing, but because existing phenomena are entering into new kinds of relations and functions.

That is a pattern we will want to keep watching.

For the next stage is even more remarkable.

The world will no longer merely contain things that signify.

It will contain living things capable of continuing the processes by which the world comes to be.

The world is about to become not only meaningful, but alive.

A Grammar of a World: IV. When the World Begins to Do Things

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

Something new has happened.

Until now, the world has been progressively differentiated and identified. Light has been divided from darkness. The firmament has separated waters from waters. Dry land has appeared and been called Earth.

Now the Earth itself does something.

God does not say:

Let there be grass.

Instead:

Let the earth bring forth grass.

The grammatical difference is important.

The Earth is Actor in a material process:

the earth → bring forth → grass

The world that has been constituted through earlier acts of differentiation is now itself being construed as productive.

This is not creation beginning again from nothing. It is creation becoming mediated through an already constituted participant.

The distinction is reinforced when the proposal is actualised:

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.

The projected material process becomes an actual material process.

But the things brought forth are themselves productive.

The herb is:

yielding seed

The tree is:

yielding fruit

and the fruit has:

seed ... in itself

The world is therefore not merely producing things. It is producing things capable of further production.

This introduces a new temporal dimension.

A seed belongs to what is produced now, but it also belongs to what may be produced later.

Becoming is beginning to contain the conditions of further becoming.

And the phrase:

after his kind

adds another dimension.

We should not import modern biological concepts into this phrase. The grammar itself gives us enough to notice something simpler: production is being differentiated according to kinds.

The world does not merely bring forth.

It brings forth this kind of thing rather than that kind of thing.

So the earlier movement from undifferentiated existence to distinction is now operating within material becoming itself.

The sequence is becoming recursive:

differentiate → identify → bring forth → differentiate what is brought forth

The world that has been articulated is now capable of articulating itself further.

This is perhaps the most important conceptual transition in the first half of Genesis 1.

Creation is no longer represented solely as something God does to the world.

God speaks.

The Earth brings forth.

The vegetation yields.

The seed carries forward the possibility of further yielding.

Agency is beginning to be distributed through the configuration that has already been created.

And the same distinction between general creation and particular manner of becoming that we noticed at the beginning now becomes especially clear.

The narrative can say:

God created

while also saying:

the Earth brought forth.

These are not necessarily competing accounts.

Created provides a general construal of the event.

Brought forth specifies a manner of actualisation.

The grammar allows both perspectives to coexist.

Indeed, verse 21 will make this juxtaposition explicit:

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly...

The creatures can be construed as created by God and as brought forth by the waters.

Creation and material becoming are therefore not mutually exclusive descriptions.

They are different construals of the same emerging configuration.

This matters because it prevents us from treating the story as though every process must have one exclusive causal explanation.

The grammar is more supple than that.

A participant can be construed as coming to be through one process while the larger configuration is construed through another.

The Earth brings forth because the Earth has already been constituted as a particular relational domain.

The seed can be in itself because the plant has been constituted as a productive participant.

The fruit can yield because the tree has been constituted as something that yields fruit.

The relations established earlier are therefore becoming conditions for subsequent processes.

This gives us a tentative new pattern:

relational being → material becoming → further relational being → further material becoming

The world is beginning to do things to itself.

And perhaps that is the point at which “creation” starts to become something more than the appearance of entities.

It becomes a generative order.

What exists can act.

What acts can produce.

What is produced can contain the conditions for producing again.

The created world is acquiring a history.

And at the end of the third day, the narrative simply says:

And the evening and the morning were the third day.

The temporal frame closes around this new development.

The world has not merely been populated.

It has become productive.

And once the world can produce, something else becomes possible:

recurrence.

That will be important when the lights appear in the heavens.

A Grammar of a World: III. Naming the World

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

The light has appeared. It has been seen, assessed, and divided from the darkness.

Now something different happens.

It is called.

This may seem like the simplest operation in the story so far. The light receives a name: Day. The darkness receives a name: Night.

But grammatically, something rather more interesting is happening.

The clauses are identifying relational clauses. They establish a relation between something and what it is called:

the light — Day

the darkness — Night

The world has not merely been differentiated. Its differences have become linguistically identifiable.

This is an important transition.

Division establishes a distinction. Naming makes that distinction available within a semantic system.

And the distinction is not arbitrary. Day and Night are not simply sounds attached to two objects. The names construe the differentiated phenomena as elements of a relationship that can subsequently be referred to, contrasted, and organised.

The importance of this becomes clearer in the next verse:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

The new proposal presupposes distinctions already made.

There are waters.

They can be divided.

The firmament is proposed as a structure through which that division will be established.

The story is therefore not beginning again from nothing. Each new operation takes up what earlier operations have made available.

This is becoming a recurring feature of the grammar:

one construal creates the conditions for another.

The firmament is then made:

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

The waters are not simply replaced by different things. They are relationally organised: some are above the firmament, some below it.

And then:

And God called the firmament Heaven.

Again, a differentiated configuration is identified.

The firmament has been made and positioned as part of a relation among the waters. Now it is called Heaven.

The sequence is becoming:

make → differentiate → identify

But there is another grammatical resource at work here.

In verse 10, the text says:

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.

The second thing called is not a simple object.

It is:

the gathering together of the waters

A process or configuration has been packaged as a nominal participant and then identified as Seas.

That is a small grammatical detail with large consequences.

Language can take something that happens — the gathering together of the waters — and construe it as something that can itself be talked about.

A process becomes a participant.

Once it has been packaged in this way, it can enter into further relations of identification and evaluation.

This is one of the remarkable powers of grammar: it does not merely describe an already segmented reality. It provides resources for turning processes, relations and configurations into things that can themselves be construed.

And Genesis immediately does precisely this:

and God saw that it was good.

The it gathers up the preceding configuration and makes it the Phenomenon of the mental process saw.

What has been differentiated and identified can now be apprehended as a whole and evaluated.

We can therefore extend the sequence from the previous post:

actualise → perceive → assess → differentiate → identify → evaluate

But perhaps identify deserves special emphasis.

Naming does not create the light in verse 5. It does not create the firmament in verse 8. It does not create the dry land in verse 10.

Something is already there.

What naming does is establish a semantic identity for what has already been differentiated.

That distinction will become important throughout the story.

Creation and naming are not the same operation.

To create is to bring something into actuality.

To differentiate is to establish a distinction.

To call is to establish an identifying relation.

The three operations are related, but the grammar does not collapse them into one.

And this gives us a tentative picture of what is happening to the world of the story.

At first there is existence without determinate form.

Then there is differentiation.

Then there is identification.

The world is becoming not merely something that is, but something that can be construed as something.

This is where we need to resist an easy temptation.

We should not say that naming simply puts words onto a pre-existing world. Nor should we leap to the opposite conclusion and say that language creates the physical world.

The grammar supports neither extreme.

What it shows us is more subtle:

language provides a resource through which differentiated experience can become semantically organised.

The light can be Day.

The darkness can be Night.

The firmament can be Heaven.

The dry land can be Earth.

The gathering of waters can be Seas.

And once these distinctions have been named, they can participate in further grammatical and semantic relations.

The world is acquiring a vocabulary.

But more than that, it is acquiring a structure of identities.

And perhaps this is why the narrative's repeated acts of naming matter so much.

The story is not simply telling us what God calls things.

It is showing us a world becoming sayable.

And once a world is sayable, it can become the object of further construal.

The next stage will not merely name the world.

It will make the world productive.