Humanity in the Becoming of Worlds: 5 Reflexive Placements

Reflexivity unsettles every prior cosmos of placement. Myth, theology, and science each offered scaffolds that positioned humanity within an ordered world — narrated, decreed, or discovered. Reflexivity reveals these placements not as truths but as construals: symbolic architectures that world possibility by cutting potential into actuality.

With reflexivity, the human is no longer merely positioned. The human becomes the one who can question the positioning itself. No longer sinner, subject, or observer alone — but interpreter of interpretation, constructor of construction. The cosmos ceases to be a given framework into which humanity fits, and becomes a field of perspectival cuts in which humanity participates.

This reflexive placement is deeply ambivalent. It empowers: human possibility is no longer bound by obedience to divine command or submission to natural law. It destabilises: no placement can now claim absoluteness, for each is disclosed as symbolic scaffolding. The risk of nihilism emerges alongside the promise of freedom.

Reflexivity thus does not abolish cosmos but multiplies it. Worlds proliferate, each one perspectivally actualised, each one subject to critique and revision. Human possibility expands into self-conscious co-individuation, where to act is also to construe the frame in which action matters.

In this placement, the cosmos of possibility is no longer received but negotiated. Humanity is not simply placed within order — it becomes a participant in the becoming of order itself.