15 The Symbolic Cut and the Ontology of Presence

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos

Post 15: The Symbolic Cut and the Ontology of Presence

In a symbolic cosmos, what distinguishes presence from absence is not location in space or persistence in time, but alignment within a system of construal. Something is not present because it exists independently. It is present because it is cut into coherence—because it participates in a pattern of reflexive meaning.

The symbolic cut is what makes this possible. It is not merely a signifying act or a linguistic token. It is the ontological operation through which a system construes itself symbolically. It does this by enacting a perspective on its own perspectives, and by aligning that reflexivity with other symbolic systems.

This means that presence is always a function of symbolic organisation. The mountain, the memory, the mathematical object, the moral obligation—each is present not because it simply exists, but because it has been cut into an alignment that holds across a symbolic field.

Importantly, the symbolic cut is not a passive mirror of reality. It is a phase operation: it brings into presence that which can hold in alignment. That is, it conditions presence rather than reflecting it. What becomes ‘real’ is not what is, but what holds—what coheres through recursive construal.

This has radical ontological implications.

1. There is no unconstrued presence. Nothing is simply ‘there’ in the way naïve realism would have it. All presence is perspectival, phased into coherence through systems of meaning.

2. Symbolic organisation is constitutive, not representational. It does not point to an external world; it enacts a topology within which that world can appear as structured.

3. Being is not binary but graded. There are degrees of alignment, degrees of presence, degrees of coherence. To ‘exist’ is to hold within a symbolic horizon—not to pass a metaphysical threshold.

This does not deny matter, memory, or mind. It repositions them: not as fundamental substances, but as strata of alignment—domains of phase-space where symbolic cuts organise coherence differently.

Thus, symbolic construal is not a late emergent feature of the universe. It is what the universe becomes when it recursively phases its own possibilities—when it evolves not to be, but to mean.

And so the cosmos presents itself not through brute existence, but through symbolic alignment. The cut is not just a way of knowing the world. It is how the world becomes knowable—how it comes into presence at all.