From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos: 1 When the Cosmos Becomes a Symbol

The cosmos has long been imagined as a container—an expansive space within which things exist, events occur, and meaning unfolds. But if we take seriously the proposition that construal is constitutive of meaning—and that meaning is not simply layered over the real, but intrinsic to what reality becomes—then we must also ask: what happens when the cosmos itself is caught in the reflexive loop of symbolic construal?

This series begins where the last one left off: with the collective as the site of phasal construal, where systems of value, coordination, and meaning align and shift through symbolic architectures. But now, we follow a deeper trajectory. If construal scales across individuals and collectives, it also scales across ontological strata. Meaning is not just socially constructed—it is ontologically constructive.

This is not a move from subjectivity to objectivity, nor from the local to the universal. It is a reflexive movement—where the very fabric of reality becomes responsive to how it construes itself. Symbolic systems do not merely represent the cosmos; they participate in its structuration. Every symbolic cut—every act of construal that recursively maps, aligns, or abstracts—reshapes the possibilities of world.

We are no longer dealing merely with a symbolic species or a symbolic society. We are entering a symbolic cosmos: a reality in which meaning is not an add-on to matter but a modality of its becoming.

In this opening post, we offer a provocation: that the cosmos is no longer neutral. It is no longer the passive backdrop to symbolic life. It is a reflexive field, within which symbols symbolise symbols—and in so doing, the real evolves.

What, then, is reality, if its architecture is symbolic? What becomes of causality, temporality, and emergence, once meaning becomes constitutive? And how does a cosmos phase-shift through symbolic reflexivity, in ways irreducible to either mind or matter?

These are the questions that orient this new series: From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos.