3 The Assumption of “Symbolic Universality”

Physics, mathematics, and social theory alike often invoke universality: principles, patterns, or narratives said to hold across all contexts. In mythology, language, or mathematics, universality is taken as evidence of fundamental order — the same forms, meanings, or laws recurring everywhere.

Yet universality is never observed as inherent. It emerges from repeated construal, from the stabilisation of relational patterns across contexts and perspectives. A myth appears “universal” not because it exists independently of interpretation, but because it is enacted, recognised, and transmitted in ways that preserve relational alignment across social and symbolic space. A mathematical structure is “universal” because it codifies patterns that can be actualised in diverse contexts, not because it resides pre-formed in the cosmos.

By naturalising universality as absolute, we project modulation onto what is modal. Recurrent patterns are misread as necessities, and their stability is interpreted as intrinsic rather than perspectival. Universality is a reflection of constrained potential actualised repeatedly through relational cuts, not a property of the symbolic objects themselves.

Recognising symbolic universality as relational preserves its explanatory power while clarifying its origin. Patterns recur, regularities persist, and coherence emerges — yet all through acts of construal, alignment, and perspective. To see the frame is to understand that universality is enacted, not decreed; a landscape of relational possibility stabilised by interpretation rather than a fixed, pre-existing order.