Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, "You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.' " But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."Genesis 3.1-5
With the possibility that language opens up for projecting futures, things that are yet to be, comes the possibility of projecting alternative futures and of questioning interpretations and taxonomies in the present. It is these potentialities of language that are exploited here in the straight denial of God's projection and the offering of another.
But before that comes an exploitation of implication. Because languages are systems of signs and because they are ways of paying attention to and focusing attention on particular aspects or features of the world, they also necessarily involve implicatures or connotative meanings. Connotative meanings happen when members of a system such as words [which are members of a lexical/semantic system] tend to remind users of other words in the system by well-known relationships such as synonymy and antonymy or by associations from usage, for example. Implicatures are the logical connections driven by necessary meanings such as if something is called 'a tabby' it is likely to be also a domestic cat unless some kind of specialised or ad hoc meaning is being used.
So, "Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" uses such things to infer that God may not be generous, may in fact be out to deprive them of innocent pleasures. This rests, of course on the mechanism we noted in an earlier post where positive 'images' tend to be primary in thought and symbolisation/representation. So the later denial is given added plausibility by resting it on an affirmation evoked by the implication that God is a killjoy. And note too that the alternative is also, after the original negation, restated it terms of a positive conception of a future and one that in a sense postulates a continuity with current experience rather than asking Adam to conceive of a state of affairs that is unimaginable because unexperienced: death. The odd thing is that by negating death, a positive conception is evoked of continuing life. [A state of affairs we all share in ...]. The language system is used to manipulate imagination to make one outcome seem more plausible or at least imaginable than another. This plausibility is then leveraged to encourage disbelieving the divine scenario and believing an alternative and so channeling action towards disobedience.
In some ways this could at first sight be read as linguistic determinism by saying that until an alternative was presented, language constrained Adam in an Orwellian '1984' manner and that temptation was offering freedom; Adam could not conceive of disobeying God because there was no way to do so. Of course, a little reflection will show that not to be so. In fact I would say that were anyone to attempt something like 'Newspeak', it would be doomed to failure. The point about human language is that it is generative; it works well because it is capable of generating a potentially infinite number of utterances based on a finite set of components and rules. In a sense this means it is unstable, one bit of the system can rub up against another and create 'turbulence'. It also means that it can retool our thinking to deal with new situations. And in fact, as we see in the temptation story, it can be used to open out new conceptualisations. Language is in fact creative of necessity. We can be steered in our thinking by language, but not absolutely determined: the instabilities of language [beloved of poets] can suggest new avenues of conceptualisation; the newness of situations can evoke efforts to recraft language to convey things more accurately or elegantly or concisely. The way that Adam is shown of naming tells us that the ability to name is a freedom we have, even if, having once named the degree of freedom is constrained.
However, let's note that the freedom is still there, albeit hedged about with the prior history of selection of vocabulary and ways of reference. Nevertheless, those constraints can themselved become the subject of further creativity, a creativity which could not exist without the communal consensual artefact that is language. Language becomes a medium of artistry and of knowledge expansion/creation.
What the story of the serpents' temptation tells us is that the creative possibilities of language can be used for ill as well as for good. Language is a means not of information only, or even principally, but of persuasion and of sharing affective and emotional responses and viewpoints. In this we have the seed of theological appraisal of the media and the arts.
So, the 'fall' is not a fall into freedom, but a use of freedom in ways that do not serve longer-term human welfare within the love of God. I note, in passing, that it is not presented as a question of obeying God but of what is good for people [dying or not]. God's command pertains to human welfare.
I note also that the issue of negatives being harder to conceive because they involve first conceiving /representing the positive, is fundamentally the same issue as creation being good. The positive is more fundamental because it is as opposed to 'is not'. Goodness is more fundamental for the same reason, it just is, whereas as evil is defined only negatively in relation to it. CS Lewis made the same point in Mere Christianity, and it seems to me to relate too to Augustine of Hippo's idea about evil being a privation of the good. Now is it the same issue because we can only conceive it so, or because it is so and language partakes in reality to that degree? [The same question, at root about the maths of the universe].
Last posting in this series ...
Filed in: Genesis
God
linguistics
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