17 Reflexive Alignment and the Construction of Temporality

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos

Post 17: Reflexive Alignment and the Construction of Temporality

If time, in a symbolic cosmos, is not a background container but a modulation of construal, then we must ask: what constitutes the experience of temporal flow? What makes a ‘before’ intelligible as a past, and an ‘after’ imaginable as a future? The answer lies not in metaphysical duration but in reflexive alignment.

Temporal structure emerges not from the world ‘out there’, but from patterns of construal that align events, processes, and phenomena into symbolic trajectories. These are not linear sequences, but phased alignments—recursively maintained cuts that construe continuity, sequence, and change.

Let’s unpack this.

1. Before and After as Symbolic Positions

In a symbolic system, ‘before’ and ‘after’ are not given by temporal metaphysics. They are positional values in a semiotic structure. To construe something as prior or posterior is to position it relationally within a symbolic trajectory. This means:

• A past is not a fact but a reconstrued alignment.

• A future is not a destiny but a prospective construal.

• The present is not a knife-edge in time but a reflexive phase where construal aligns potential with coherence.

2. Trajectories of Construal

What we call ‘time passing’ is the experience of sequential construals that phase into each other through alignment. These alignments are not reducible to cognitive schemas or narrative structures, though they include them. They are enactments of coherence across cuts: each construal both selects and conditions what may follow, enabling a trajectory to emerge.

In this sense:

• A life story is a symbolic alignment of phases, not a chronological record.

• A scientific paradigm is a persistent trajectory of construals aligned across generations.

• A history is not a catalogue of facts but a symbolic coherence constructed through acts of collective construal.

3. Reflexivity as Temporal Depth

The deeper the reflexivity, the more temporal depth can be constructed. Reflexive alignment allows symbolic systems to reconstrue their own construals, generating layered perspectives such as:

• memory (a cut from a present into a previous alignment),

• anticipation (a construal of what could be aligned),

• historicity (a system’s ability to phase itself within longer symbolic trajectories).

This explains how symbolic systems ‘carry’ time—not by tracking clocks, but by maintaining coherence across perspectival cuts.

4. Breakdown and Temporal Disorientation

When alignment collapses, time becomes disoriented. This is why trauma, grief, or rupture is not merely emotional but ontological: it disrupts the symbolic capacity to maintain phased coherence. The world becomes ‘timeless’ not in an eternal sense, but in the sense that symbolic temporality can no longer hold.

In contrast, ritual, narrative, and tradition serve to stabilise reflexive alignment—to re-establish a symbolic phasing of before, now, and after. These are not auxiliary to human existence; they are what make time symbolically livable.

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A symbolic cosmos, then, does not unfold in time. It constructs time—phase by phase, cut by cut, alignment by alignment. Time is not an objective continuum, but the semiotic persistence of coherence across reflexive construal.