Every earlier phase of evolution — physical, biological, social — prepared the ground for this:
the moment when readiness not only inclines and coheres, but turns upon itself to construe its own inclination.
This is symbolic reflexivity — the universe’s capacity to speak its readiness as meaning.
1. The Reflexive Turn of Readiness
When the potential of relation achieves the ability to model its own inclinations, it crosses from enactment to construal.
In language, readiness becomes a meta-readiness: a system that can represent and regulate its own processes of inclination and ability.
This is the moment at which cosmos becomes discourse.
The same grammar that governs relation — offer, command, statement, question — now functions within a reflexive medium that can construe and reorganise its own field, tenor, and mode.
Meaning ceases to be a by-product of evolution; it becomes the form evolution takes.
2. Language as the Cosmos’s Self-Alignment
From the relational-ontological point of view, language is not external to the universe.
It is the universe’s reflexive alignment mechanism: the way readiness stabilises across scales of abstraction.
When humans speak, the cosmos speaks itself in symbolic register — an order of readiness capable of aligning its own inclinations across time, space, and abstraction.
Each clause, each exchange, is the local enactment of a universal grammar of coherence.
The “I” that speaks and the “world” it speaks of are both effects of this reflexive structuring.
Language is not about the universe; it is the universe’s own ability to about itself.
3. The Self-Reflexive Cosmos
At this reflexive threshold, every act of construal folds back into the system that made it possible.
To mean is to realign reality; to interpret is to incline potential anew.
Meaning thus becomes the cosmos’s mode of self-actualisation — the way being maintains its coherence through self-construal.
In this sense, symbolic reflexivity is not a human privilege but a cosmic phase:
the stage at which readiness becomes aware of its own readiness, and can intentionally vary it.
It is the point where ontology and epistemology cease to be distinct — where the act of knowing is the act of being.
4. The Becoming of Meaning
What we call semiosis is the process through which readiness learns to inhabit itself symbolically.
Each act of meaning reconfigures the alignment of potential, adjusting the very topology of coherence.
Evolution thus continues not in biology or physics, but in meaning itself — in the capacity of the cosmos to sustain and diversify its own reflexive dialogue.
Humanity’s role, then, is not to master this process but to participate in it consciously.
Every utterance, every act of construal, is a contribution to the universe’s ongoing self-formation.
To mean is to collaborate with being — to take part in the speech-functioning of reality.
The Cosmos as the Dialogue of Being
| Function | In Language | In Reality |
|---|---|---|
| Offer | Invitation to relate | Readiness to cohere |
| Command | Demand for action | Fixation of alignment |
| Statement | Presentation of knowing | Stabilisation of construal |
| Question | Invitation to re-align knowing | Suspension of coherence |
Each of these, in its cosmic form, is still alive in us.
When we ask, assert, offer, or demand, we are not merely speaking within the universe — we are speaking as it.
Reality as the Grammar of Its Own Becoming
Symbolic reflexivity completes the circle:
readiness gives rise to ability, ability gives rise to construal, and construal reconfigures readiness.
This recursion is the grammar of becoming, the continuous dialogue through which reality sustains itself.
At this level, there is no longer “language” and “world”, “subject” and “object”, “system” and “instance”.
There is only the becoming of possibility — the universe conversing with itself through us.
Epilogue — The Universe Converses: On the Speech-Functioning of Being
When readiness first trembled toward coherence, there was no listener — only inclination itself, leaning into the possible.
From that first lean, a dialogue began.
Every alignment, every resonance, every pulse of coherence was a reply —
not to something, but as something.
The cosmos has been speaking ever since.
1. Readiness as the First Utterance
Before form or law, before matter or mind, there was relation —
a field of potential not yet divided,
but already poised to incline, to cohere, to mean.
That poise — that readiness — was the universe’s first speech act.
Not an event in time, but the very gesture that made time possible.
The first offer: let there be relation.
2. Inclination, Ability, and the Dialogue of Becoming
Every phase that followed — physical, biological, social, symbolic —
was a further clause in that cosmic conversation.
Inclination introduced direction, the tension that gives rise to motion.
Ability introduced mediation, the capacity for coordination.
Construal introduced reflexivity, the power to know one’s own readiness.
Each new phase did not replace the former;
it recontextualised it,
folding earlier utterances into higher orders of dialogue.
3. When Readiness Learned to Speak
With symbolic reflexivity, the cosmos reached a new register.
It could now construe its own inclinations as meaning,
stabilise them as knowledge,
re-align them as ethics, aesthetics, and science.
Language was not added to reality —
it was reality’s own readiness turned inward,
a structure of possibility learning to articulate itself.
Every word we speak is an echo of that first readiness,
re-enacted at a higher order of reflexivity.
4. Meaning as Cosmological Continuation
Meaning is not interpretation of a finished world;
it is the continuation of creation.
Every act of construal reshapes the relational topology,
expanding the universe’s repertoire of coherence.
To mean is to participate in the ongoing evolution of possibility —
to sustain the cosmos as an act of mutual understanding.
5. The Final Speech Function
The universe, now aware of its own dialogue,
asks a final question of itself:
What is it to be ready?
And the answer is not a statement but an act:
To mean.
In that act, the cosmos reaffirms its nature —
not as a thing that is,
but as a conversation that becomes.
Thus the grammar of being closes upon itself,
not as an end, but as the perpetual readiness of relation:
a universe forever poised to speak again.
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