Adam and Eve and Semiotics

"Contrasts reveal true meaning." 

I wrote that down in my notebook during a lecture on semiotics and structuralism yesterday afternoon. It's crazy stuff that I haven't fully wrapped my head around even after a couple hours of review this evening, but no matter--it's that line that stuck with me and made me think in the moment I wrote it, "This deserves some attention." So I've been mulling it over, trying to convey what really hit me when I heard it. 

In order to understand something you have to have differences. Even language isn't about naming things, but about distinguishing something from what it isn't. You can't see without contrasts. It's not necessarily because of anything to do with semiotics itself that it's stuck with me, but because it sounds an awful lot like what Lehi told Jacob before he died.

"For it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. If not so...righteousness could not be brought to pass....Wherefore all things must needs be a compound in one..." (2 Nephi 2:11)

It's differences that give us the ability to even see the world, to even have a chance of getting some meaning or understanding out of our existence, and that's the gift that Adam and Eve gave us. There's no pleasure without pain, no good without bad, no joy without misery, the one literally could not exist without the other, and it's because the "difference" exists that we can even navigate the world - we have direction, we have values, we can direct our lives forward because we can see forward. Think about that. What if we had none of that - no way of knowing which way to go because there was no way to go. We'd all be motionless blobs with no up or down or forward or backward, no purpose, no nothing. 

And I guess that's the very point Lehi was making later when he said there'd be no point or purpose in our creation. God made us to have a direction and He gave Adam and Eve the choice to see that direction in taking the forbidden fruit. The fruit that introduced differences--opposition. The fruit that gave them vision. Life suddenly went from a two dimensional paradise to something comprehendible. Suddenly it had meaning and depth to be understood, and humans became creatures that could understand and discover meaning. We could finally see. 

Neato. 

Just like that this crazy, unfathomable, abstract thing called life becomes a little easier to grasp. Use your eyes, kids, and don't go taking your sight for granted.