The Reflexive Field: Readiness and the Grammar of Becoming: 4 The Mood of the World: Readiness and the Interpersonal Metaphysics of Becoming

If readiness is the grammar of becoming, then mood is its interpersonal orientation. In linguistic terms, mood organises the exchange of meaning — configuring the clause as statement, question, command, or offer. Each mood is a posture of readiness toward another participant, a stance in the dialogue of meaning itself.

Ontologically, this suggests that readiness is never solitary. It is always relationally oriented: a way of being-with, a disposition toward co-actualisation. Every instance of readiness presupposes an interlocutor, explicit or implicit — an other to whom its openness is directed. The world, in this view, is not a set of self-contained entities awaiting external interaction; it is a web of mutually implicated readinesses, each defining itself through the anticipatory stance it takes toward the rest.

The metaphysics of readiness thus mirrors the interpersonal system of language. Probability, corresponding to propositions, encodes readiness to exchange understanding: to affirm or negotiate how the world is construed. Offer, by contrast, encodes readiness to exchange being: to extend the system’s own potential toward incorporation within another’s. The former organises epistemic openness; the latter organises ontic generosity.

What physicists call “laws of nature” are, from this vantage point, misread commands — an attempt to recast the world’s readiness as obedience. But readiness is not obedience; it is invitation. The cosmos does not follow rules, it offers alignments. The laws are statements retrospectively abstracted from the grammar of those offers — codified moods of the world’s ongoing dialogue with itself.

To speak of the “mood of the world,” then, is not poetic metaphor but ontological description. Reality is not a neutral substrate populated by reactive phenomena; it is an interpersonal field of readiness, continually adjusting its mood to sustain coherence across innumerable perspectives. Each act of actualisation is a clause in this dialogue — a turn in the conversation of becoming.

And so the grammar of potential is an interpersonal grammar. Readiness is the world’s way of keeping the dialogue going, ensuring that the conversation of being never collapses into monologue.