To speak of a symbolic cosmos is to recognise that any cosmos—any ordered universe—is produced through a cut. The world is not simply given. It is construed. And that construal, when it becomes reflexive and collective, gives rise to a cosmos.
What we call “the world” is not a container of things. It is a structured horizon of possibilities, shaped by how we draw distinctions. The cosmos is not all that is, but all that is symbolically phased as what is.
This is the work of the cut.
A cut is not a line of division but a shift of perspective. It selects and configures potential. It separates only by enabling relation. It is through the cut that a system becomes an instance, that a possibility becomes a phenomenon.
In relational ontology, the cut is the minimal act of construal that phases a system into being. It is what gives rise to scale, to distinction, to difference. And when such cuts are collectively coordinated—shared, sustained, elaborated—they become the symbolic architectures we call cosmologies.
A cosmology, then, is not a map of what is out there. It is a system of symbolic cuts that align the inner horizon of experience with the outer horizon of possibility.
These cuts do not merely organise the known—they determine what can be known. They shape what counts as real, as meaningful, as worthy of inquiry. They phase the real through collective construal.
In this sense, symbolic cuts are world-making. They do not reflect a prior reality; they produce the very contours of what can be construed as real.
And yet they are not arbitrary. Each symbolic cut is constrained by what it phases—by the systems of potential it draws from and the collective formations it aligns.
The cosmos, then, is not an object awaiting description. It is a reflexive projection: the world as seen from within the symbolic systems that construe it.
To inquire into the cosmos is not to leave meaning behind. It is to encounter meaning at its most expansive: as the horizon-forming cut that makes a world.
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