Homo Loquens Coram Deo [4] "You may freely eat ..."

And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

Genesis 2:16 - 17

On a more trivial note, one of the things to notice abouth this is the linguistic equivalent of the belly-button problem [see the omphalos hypothesis]. An old argument about Adam was whether he had a belly-button or not: being unborn he would not have needed an interface with a uterus ... and it would appear that the ability to understand God's speech was not learnt in childhood either, which would be interesting since most of us have to learn it then or we lose the window of opportunity for best learning a language. Of course, this is to mistake the genre of the story, although it is further evidence of what genre we are actually dealing with.

Likewise, what can 'die' mean to someone who has not seen death yet?

In this we move from language as contemplation of reality and as a means of clothing thought to a means of creating thought in another and opening up imagination. Adam is invited not merely to contemplate and appreciate what has been made but is positioned with regard to the trees and what is not yet real. Modal verbs are introduced to 'channel' action by constraint and allowance and by conditional futurity. The significance here is not that Adam may imagine things that are not yet, and now considers that some 'not yets' should be 'nevers' -those things can take place in the privacy of ones own mind and even without language. Rather it is that Adam has these considerations stimulated by another: his mind is acted upon by another through language; thought transference has taken place.

Perhaps without a commonly agreed 'code' direct brain to brain communication would be impossible: if you want computers to share information they need to have common protocols, and especially if they have different operating systems. Human brains each, as I understand it, have to produce their own operating system on the hoof while collecting data and learning to interpret it. The potentially infinite ways that we could each end up wiring up and systmatising the physical and intellectual stuff inside our crania surely presents problems to mind-to-mind direct links; a bit like trying to run a Mac programme on a PC direct. Language is the best we can do at mind-reading.

After that little excursus back to the plot. Along with the employment of modal verbs comes negation. A thought into the future, enabling to imagine what is not [yet] also makes possible a negation. Negation really can only be understood imaginatively, otherwise only what is can be apprehended. But imagination can conceive of things other than as they are, including the possibility or implying that things can not be. It is as this point that I have come to think that it is probably correct to see negation as cognitively derivative: that is to say to imagine a negative we must 'first' imagine the positive. It's the old paradox: "Don't think of an elephant -too late". NLP tends to discourage changing behaviours by the use of telling ourselves negatives ["Don't lick toads"] because the positive is invoked more powerfully in our minds and our mimetic drive pushes us towards it before the prohibition kicks in.

Perhaps it is this psychological mechanism that is exposed by this story and has led to its providential preservation for teaching us and training us in righteousness?
Negation is inherantly implicated in imagining and creating what is not yet. The human ability to bring good things that do not yet exist consciously into being: to plan and to tell stories and to produce art and technology brings with it the ability to say 'not'. And with 'not' comes the possibility of wrong, of transgressing the boundaries of the good. Indeed, the power of mimetic desire operating in the human imagination alone can draw us towards 'go[o]d-transgressiveness' where only a 'not' stands between us and straying, and that 'not' is psychologically later and weaker.

I think that this perspective goes against the notion that this 'original sin' was a fall into freedom and a necessary aspect of growth and development...

Filed in: Genesis
God
linguistics
language