The Garden of Meaning: Individuation and the Fall into Construal

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…”

—Genesis 3:7

Genesis 1 is the myth of cosmic construal: the emergence of meaning from potential. Genesis 2 and 3 shift perspective — from the grand scale of world-making to the intimate moment of self-making. Here, the meaner is no longer a divine figure but a participant in the process: vulnerable, reflexive, and entangled in their own acts of meaning.

From World to Word

In Genesis 2, the myth slows down. Instead of fiat lux and cosmic speech acts, we find touch, breath, intimacy. The human is formed from adamah — the ground — and animated by the breath of life. In a relational cosmology, this is the actualisation of potential as individuated being: the meaner takes form as one who both construes and is construed.

Naming the animals is not zoological taxonomy — it’s the first human act of symbolic construal. Adam is not simply identifying pre-made entities; he is bringing them into meaning. The myth teaches that to be human is to make meaning of the world, to participate in the shaping of what-is by naming what could-be.

The Tree of Construal

The Garden is not a place in space; it is a field of potential. The two trees at its centre represent two poles of construal:

• The Tree of Life: the unfolding of meaning in harmony — a relational being-in-the-world.

• The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: the individuation of moral construal — the capacity to discern, to judge, to know as separate.

To eat of this latter tree is not to disobey a command but to cross a threshold — from immersion in potential to the self-reflexivity of construal. It is the moment when the meaner realises: “I am one who makes meaning. I am separate. I see myself seen.”

“Then the eyes of both were opened…”

Shame is not punishment but realisation: the construal of the self as object. The Fall is not a fall from grace, but a fall into meaning — the painful emergence of identity from potential. In Eden, all was immediate. After the tree, all is mediated: by language, by self-awareness, by the burden of choice.

Exile as Individuation

When Adam and Eve are “driven out” of the Garden, they are not expelled from paradise — they are actualised into the condition of meaning-makers. To till the ground, to give birth, to know death — these are not punishments, but dimensions of meaning that emerge only when potential is constrained.

The sword at the gate is not a threat; it is a threshold. It marks the irrevocable movement from potential to instance — from being construed by the cosmos, to constraining the cosmos as a meaner.

A Myth for a Relational Cosmos

In this light, Genesis 2–3 is the myth of individuation within a relational universe. It tells us not how the world began, but how we began — as selves who know, who name, who construe, who bear the weight of meaning. The snake does not lie; he reveals: construal will change you. You will see as gods see — and you will never unsee.

This is the mythic cost of consciousness in a relational cosmos. The gift and grief of the meaner is that we do not merely live in the universe. We bring it into meaning.