A cosmos becomes symbolic when its horizon includes not just phenomena, but the possibility of construal itself. It becomes reflexive when its symbolic systems turn back on their own architectures, construing how they construe.
In such a cosmos, meaning is not a localised feature of life. It is a structural principle of reality. But this principle is not external or imposed—it is internal, emerging from the recursive alignment of construals across scales and systems.
What does it mean for the cosmos to construe itself?
It means that symbolic systems do not merely represent reality. They phase it. They do not describe what is already there; they shape what can count as there, and as real, and as meaningful. In so doing, they participate in the becoming of the cosmos.
This is not a metaphor. It is the ontological condition of reflexive alignment.
The cosmos, in this view, is not a container of things but a dynamic ordering of construals—a symbolic topology that evolves by reconfiguring its own conditions of possibility.
And this reconfiguration is not uniform. It is phasal. It occurs in differential pulses of alignment and disalignment, where symbolic systems stretch, rupture, reconstellate. What was once unimaginable becomes thinkable. What was once sacred becomes banal. What was once taken for granted becomes opaque.
These phase-shifts are not epistemic alone. They are ontological. They alter the fabric of lived reality—not by changing the objects in it, but by changing what counts as object, as relation, as cause, as value, as self.
In this way, a reflexive cosmos is not a static totality but a recursive opening. It is always already becoming other than itself, through the symbolic cuts that remake its horizon.
We live in such a cosmos now. But we do not yet know how to live with it—how to inhabit a symbolic architecture that can construe its own limits, without collapsing into nihilism or nostalgia.
That is the task ahead. Not to explain the cosmos, but to construe it reflexively—to craft symbolic systems that can align collective life with the openness of meaning itself.
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