The symbolic cosmos is not just spatially articulated—it is temporally phased. To understand how construal participates in the making of time, we must distinguish between temporal flow, temporal construal, and symbolic temporality.
Flow is not time. The world unfolds in manifold ways—chemical, biological, atmospheric—but none of this is temporal in the symbolic sense. It is only when construal cuts across the flux that temporality begins.
Time, in this view, is not a substrate. It is a symbolic effect: a product of construal tracking difference across phases. Symbolic temporality is the organisation of before and after, of persistence and change, not as sheer succession but as meaningful distinction.
This temporal construal is already active in perception and action. Living systems coordinate themselves through rhythm, sequence, recurrence. But symbolic systems—language especially—enable a meta-temporality: a system for construing the construal of time.
Grammar, for example, does not merely locate events in time. It enacts temporal alignment between speaker, listener, and construed phenomena. Tense is not a reference to when something happened—it is a symbolic relation between perspectival phases of meaning.
And just as symbolic systems stratify space into social and semiotic architectures, so too they stratify time. Cultural chronotopes, historical narratives, cosmologies of origin and destiny—these are not representations of time, but temporal infrastructures that pattern symbolic reflexivity itself.
Within these infrastructures, past and future are not coordinates. They are construed positions: alignments within a field of symbolic relations. The past becomes a mythic ground, the future a projectable horizon, each shaped by the present act of construal.
Importantly, symbolic temporality is recursive. Narratives nest within narratives, rituals rehearse origins, futures are simulated in planning. This reflexive temporality is what allows a symbolic cosmos to persist and evolve—to not only remember and anticipate, but to construe the very form of memory and anticipation.
Thus, symbolic time is not a linear flow. It is a topology of reflexive cuts: temporal alignments produced through the construal of construal across collective scales.
To live in time, then, is to dwell in a symbolic field whose very unfolding is shaped by how it symbolically phases itself.
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