Worlds Within Meaning: ecology

Showing posts with label ecology. Show all posts

30 September 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Value to Cosmos

1 Myth as Adaptive Semiotic Technology

Myth has too often been burdened with essentialist weight — universal archetypes, eternal patterns, psychic blueprints. What if we took another approach? Rather than searching for mythical constants across cultures, we might ask: what work does myth do?

Seen through a relational ontology, myth emerges as a technology of construal: a cultural means of bringing value-orientations into the domain of meaning. Following Gerald Edelman, we can distinguish value systems — biological regulators of adaptive behaviour — from semiotic systems, which create meanings and meanings-of-meanings. Myth stands precisely at this junction.

In ritual, trance, and altered states, perception is loosened, bypassed, suspended. These are not errors of the senses but different cuts into potential, where deep value-orientations surface unfiltered. Left unshaped, they remain fleeting intensities. But when narrated, dramatised, chanted, storied, they are semioticised — given symbolic form that can be shared, remembered, and transformed.

This is the adaptive work of myth: to take the orienting pull of value, and weave it into systems of meaning that align a collective. Myths are not eternal; they are provisional symbolic architectures, adaptive semiotic technologies that let communities survive, flourish, and re-align in shifting worlds.

Dreams offer a hint of this work. In Campbell’s famous aphorism, “dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.” Stripped of its archetypal undertones, we might hear this differently: dreams are private experiments in symbolic construal, while myths are collective architectures of the same process. Both cut into value-laden orientations beyond perception; both shape them into symbolic meaning.

In this way, myth can be seen not as universal story but as reflexive cultural adaptation — an ongoing negotiation between the values that orient life and the meanings that organise worlds.

2 Bypassing Perception: Altered States and Symbolic Access

In everyday life, perception construes the world for us. It is tuned to survival: selecting what is relevant, filtering what is not, delivering a stable horizon of meaning. Yet perception is also a narrowing. It keeps us oriented in the familiar, but it occludes other possibilities.

Mythic practice begins precisely where perception loosens. Across cultures, ritual, trance, dream, and vision have long been cultivated as technologies of altered state. These are not accidents or failures of cognition, but deliberate suspensions of the perceptual cut. They open onto potentials otherwise inaccessible.

In these states, value-orientations rise to the surface. The emotional intensities, the urgencies of desire, fear, and awe — the deep regulators of adaptive life — appear unmediated. Not yet tied to everyday construals, they pulse as raw orientations. But left alone, they vanish as soon as waking perception reasserts itself.

The genius of myth is to catch these intensities in symbolic nets. Through chant, dance, story, and image, altered-state experience is shaped into semiotic form. What was fleeting becomes narratable; what was ineffable becomes shareable; what was private becomes collective.

This is why myths so often bear the marks of altered states: their dreamlike illogic, their kaleidoscopic transformations, their refusal of ordinary causality. They are not faulty stories, but symbolic echoes of perception’s suspension. By bypassing perception, myth accesses orientations otherwise hidden; by symbolising them, it aligns a community around new meanings.

In this sense, altered states are not departures from reality but different relational cuts into it. They access potentials beyond ordinary construal. Myth is the cultural practice of bringing those potentials back into the semiotic weave of collective life.

3 From Value to Meaning-of-Meaning

To understand the unique work of myth, we need to distinguish between two very different systems: value systems and semiotic systems.

Value systems, as Gerald Edelman describes them, are biological regulators. They orient behaviour by amplifying what is adaptive and suppressing what is not. Hunger, fear, desire, attachment — these are not meanings, but biases in action, ensuring that life turns toward viability. They are adaptive, not interpretive.

Semiotic systems, by contrast, do not orient behaviour directly. They generate meanings, and even more crucially, meanings-of-meanings — symbolic architectures that reflect on, refract, and reorganise what construal can be. Semiotic systems make worlds, not just moves within them.

What myth does is to bridge these two strata. In altered states, value-orientations surface: intensities without symbolic form. Through story, chant, and ritual, they are semioticised — drawn up into symbolic patterns that can be shared and remembered. In this way, myth turns adaptive orientations into symbolic horizons.

This is why myths are not just stories about the world but stories about the meaning of the world. They do not merely map terrain; they map how terrain itself comes to matter. They are reflexive, second-order constructs: meanings-of-meanings that give value-laden orientations a symbolic architecture.

Consider how myths encode fear: not simply as a reaction, but as a cosmic order of danger and protection. Or how they encode desire: not as raw appetite, but as narratives of quest, union, or transformation. Myth transposes value into meaning, and then folds meaning back into the collective as an organising horizon.

This reflexive turn is the heart of myth. It does not universalise archetypes, nor reveal timeless essences. Instead, it functions as a cultural semiotic technology, transforming value into symbolic meaning-of-meaning, aligning collectives to new adaptive horizons.

4 Myth as Collective Alignment

If myth transforms value into meaning-of-meaning, then its real power lies in collective alignment.

A biological value is individual — hunger, fear, desire, attachment. Myth amplifies and transposes these orientations into shared symbolic patterns that organise not just personal behaviour but the very horizon of collective being.

Ritualised myth brings this into effect. Through chant, dance, story, or spectacle, individuals are not only exposed to symbolic construals — they are synchronised by them. Myth functions as a phase mechanism: it binds many bodies, many perspectives, into a shared symbolic rhythm. The telling is never private. Even when recounted alone, the myth orients the teller within a larger symbolic horizon that already belongs to the collective.

This is why myth is central to early social formations. It does not just explain the world, nor simply entertain. It aligns collectives by:

Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
Staging possibilities: myths articulate what can and cannot be done, who one may become, and how the world itself might unfold.

Seen this way, myth is not a “public dream” in Campbell’s sense — an archetypal structure projected into communal life. Rather, it is a symbolic architecture of alignment, continuously remade in performance, synchronising individual orientations into a shared horizon of possibility.

Myth thus phases the collective: it turns value into meaning-of-meaning, and then uses those meanings to hold together, orient, and project the social whole.

5 Myth as Reflexive Cosmos

When myth aligns a collective, it does more than coordinate social life. It projects an entire cosmos — a world reflexively structured through meaning-of-meaning.

A cosmos is not simply “the universe” as physical environment. It is the symbolically construed horizon within which beings, relations, and possibilities take shape. Myth generates such horizons. It binds together natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations into a single symbolic weave.

In this sense, myth is cosmogenetic. It does not merely describe the world but actively brings a world into being for a collective. Mountains and rivers become ancestors, stars become guides, animals become totems. Social orders are not grounded in brute force but in symbolic alignment with cosmic patterns. The cosmos is not external backdrop; it is a reflexive projection of collective construal.

What makes myth distinctive here is the reflexive turn:

Value-orientations surface in altered states.
These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
That alignment is then mirrored back as a cosmos — a world that seems always already there, but is in fact the projection of collective construal.

The cosmos of myth is thus a reflexive reality: it appears to precede the collective, but is continually constituted through its symbolic practices. The divine order, the ancestral lineage, the cycle of life and death — these are not discovered truths but symbolic architectures that organise existence.

This is why myth can endure across generations. It is not just a narrative but a cosmological infrastructure, sustaining reflexive reality itself. The cosmos of myth is the collective seeing itself, its values, and its possibilities, refracted and stabilised in symbolic form.

Coda: Myth without Archetype

What, then, remains of myth once we set aside archetypes, universal essences, and timeless psychic structures?

Not absence, but clarity.

Myth appears not as a coded expression of eternal forms but as a symbolic technology of life itself — a way of transposing value into meaning, synchronising collectives, and projecting worlds. Its power lies not in universal sameness but in situated resonance, each myth staging horizons of possibility unique to its collective.

We have traced three moves:

From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
From alignment to reflexive cosmos: myth projects those horizons outward, making a world appear as given — a cosmos reflexively constituted through symbolic practice.

In this light, Campbell’s claim that “myths are public dreams” can be reframed. Dreams are not private myths, and myths are not collective dreams. Dreams are idiosyncratic symbolic events of the sleeping body; myths are collective semiotic architectures that turn value into world. Their relation is not one of equivalence but of scale: both are reflexive construals, but only myth stabilises them into the symbolic infrastructure of a cosmos.

This is myth without archetype: not eternal, not universal, not psychic essence — but semiotic reflexivity. A cultural technology for making values into meanings, meanings into alignments, and alignments into worlds.

To study myth in this key is to study how collectives construe themselves into being, again and again, by telling the world into form.

Postscript: Beyond Campbell, Beyond Consciousness

One striking implication of this relational reading of myth is that consciousness — as introspective experience or psychic interiority — is not required to understand myth’s power. Myth operates through value-oriented intensities, semiotic transformation, and collective alignment, not through private reflection or archetypal recognition.

This moves myth studies into a new terrain:

Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
Toward an understanding of myth as a distributed, relational, adaptive practice: enacted, shared, and phasing across collective horizons.

In this light, myths are best seen as symbolic infrastructures, coordinating life and projecting worlds, regardless of whether any individual consciously apprehends their full import. Consciousness is neither a cause nor a necessary substrate; it is just one node among many in the network of relational construal that myth enacts.

This perspective opens a path for a more ecological, socially embedded, and adaptive study of myth, one attentive to how symbolic practices shape life itself, rather than how inner psychic patterns are mirrored in stories.

29 September 2025

Myth as Construal: Rereading Campbell through Relational Ontology

Preface: From Monomyth to Relational Worlds

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has long been celebrated for unveiling the “monomyth,” a universal narrative arc underlying global mythologies. Across cultures and eras, Campbell traced a single heroic itinerary: departure, initiation, and return. His work promised a unifying vision of myth as the manifestation of timeless psychic patterns.

Yet this universalising lens obscures a fundamental ontological distinction: the stories themselves are not instances of a preordained archetype, but situated, collective, and contingent acts of symbolic construal. Each myth phases its community into alignment, projects the collective into relational landscapes, and opens possibilities for action and imagination. The patterns Campbell detects are echoes — recurrent solutions to relational tensions — not proof of a singular, eternal monomyth.

This series, Myth as Construal, undertakes a relational rereading of Campbell. Its six posts trace a careful progression:

The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data – distinguishing Campbell’s universalising model from the plural, situated ontology of the myths themselves.
From Archetype to Reflexivity – reframing archetypes not as psychic essences but as effects of collective reflexive alignment.
From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures – dissolving the singular hero’s journey into heterogeneous construals of collective being.
Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process – exploring how each telling stages collective alignment through time.
Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes – showing how myths scaffold understanding across social, ecological, and symbolic horizons.
From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis – synthesising the series to foreground myth as the architecture of possibility, and Campbell’s monomyth as artefact.

The guiding move of this series is a relational cut: to treat myth not as a reflection of a timeless inner truth, but as an active, plural, and phasing construal of collective possibility. In doing so, it reframes Campbell’s project, highlighting the richness, heterogeneity, and creative dynamism of myth as it is actually enacted, rather than as it is universalised into theory.

By the end, the series invites readers to inhabit myth not as a static template of the psyche, but as a symbolic instrument, a field in which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their worlds. Campbell’s monomyth is a mirror; relational ontology invites us to step off the mirror and into the plurality of mythic life itself.

1 The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often celebrated for uncovering a universal pattern at the heart of mythology: the so-called “monomyth,” or hero’s journey. His comparative lens spans continents and centuries, stitching together myths from Greece to India, Polynesia to Sumer. What results is a grand synthesis, a single archetypal itinerary of separation, initiation, and return.

But this ambition conceals a crucial slippage: the ontology of Campbell’s model is not the ontology of his data.

The myths Campbell draws upon are symbolic construals, each situated within its own collective horizon. They are not “instances” of a timeless archetype; they are ways of aligning a community through shared symbolic potential. A Navajo emergence story, a Polynesian voyage tale, and a Greek heroic cycle each construe different relations of collective, individual, cosmos, and possibility. Their meanings are grounded in their social-symbolic contexts, not in an abstract, transcendent psyche.

Campbell’s model, by contrast, is not relational but archetypal. Anchored in Jungian psychology, it treats myth as an expression of timeless psychic structures. Similarities across myths are gathered into a universal narrative sequence, which is then taken as the truth of myth itself. In doing so, Campbell conflates the patterned potential of symbolic construal with the absolutised structure of a monomyth.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is the decisive cut: the data are plural, situated, and collective; the model is singular, universalising, and psychic. Campbell mistakes the resonances of symbolic construal across cultures for proof of an underlying universal form. The relational move is to resist this collapse, and to treat myth instead as a field of heterogeneous construals — each staging possibilities for being-together, none reducible to a single archetypal template.

In this series, we will reread Campbell through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than a monomyth of timeless individuation, myth will be approached as symbolic construal: the staging of ontological possibility, the phasing of collective alignment, the architecture of what a world can mean.

2 From Archetype to Reflexivity

At the core of Campbell’s model lies the concept of the archetype. Myths, in his account, are symbolic expressions of deep psychic patterns: timeless forms residing in the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not a cultural invention but a universal structure of the psyche, surfacing again and again in different guises.

This is where Campbell’s ontology reveals its essentialist foundations. Archetypes are conceived as givens — eternal forms that precede and determine symbolic expression. Myth, in this view, is not a situated act of meaning-making but a coded manifestation of an inner truth.

A relational ontology cuts this differently. It denies the existence of timeless, pre-given forms. Instead, it understands meaning as construal: the perspectival shaping of potential into symbolic actuality. From this vantage, what Campbell calls an “archetype” is not a psychic essence but an effect of reflexive alignment.

When a collective tells a myth, it symbolically projects itself into form. This projection aligns individual and collective experience within a shared horizon. The figure of the hero, for example, does not derive from an eternal archetype of individuation; it arises as a symbolic construal of how individuation can be oriented within a particular collective. The hero is not an archetype of the psyche but a reflexive articulation of possibility.

This shift matters. Archetype freezes myth into essence; reflexivity restores myth as event. Archetype says: the hero’s journey is eternal. Reflexivity says: this telling stages individuation against the collective whole here, now, within this symbolic horizon.

From a relational perspective, then, Campbell’s archetypes are not the source of myth but its retrospective abstraction. They are second-order readings of recurrent symbolic construals, elevated into timeless universals. Myths themselves do not reveal archetypes; they enact reflexivity.

In other words: myth does not express the unconscious. It constitutes the horizon of the possible.

3 From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures

Campbell’s “hero’s journey” presents a sweeping narrative: separation, initiation, return. Across cultures, he finds the same beats, the same archetypal itinerary. The monomyth promises universality: one path, one sequence, one story of individuation.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is precisely the move that flattens myth into abstraction. The monomyth treats similarity as essence, pattern as law, and recurrence as evidence of universality. It neglects the situated, collective, and contingent work that myths perform within their own horizons.

Relational ontology reframes this: there is no single journey, only plural mythic architectures. Each myth constructs a horizon of possibility for its collective, shaping alignment, scaling individuation, and orienting action. The apparent “recurrences” that Campbell notes are not proofs of a universal plot; they are resonances — structural echoes that arise whenever certain relational tensions are negotiated in symbolic form (life and death, self and collective, known and unknown).

In this view:

The hero’s journey is not a template but one construal among many. A Polynesian navigation epic, a Greek tragedy, and a Navajo emergence myth do not share a hidden “monomyth” but instead instantiate different solutions to recurring relational challenges.
Myth is an architecture, not a map. It scaffolds collective experience, guiding what a community can imagine, enact, and align toward, rather than reporting an eternal psychic itinerary.
Plurality is fundamental. Each telling opens a new trajectory of being-together; the multiplicity of myths is not noise against a universal signal but the terrain of possibility itself.

From the relational vantage, Campbell’s monomyth is a model imposed upon the richness of plural construals. By universalising, it abstracts away the reflexive, contingent, and collective dimension of mythic action. The monomyth dissolves; what remains are heterogeneous mythic architectures — patterned potentials, staged alignments, and symbolic spaces in which collectives orient themselves toward what they can become.

The move from monomyth to plural architectures is thus more than critique: it is a reorientation. Myth is no longer a map of the psyche; it is the scaffolding of collective possibility.

4 Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process

Campbell’s monomyth presents myth as a sequence — the hero departs, faces trials, and returns transformed. Time, in his model, is linear and universal: myths follow a preordained itinerary, regardless of context or culture. In this framing, the narrative is a template, and the story’s phasing is derivative, secondary to the archetype.

Relational ontology cuts differently. Myth is not a static pattern traced over time; it is a process of phasing — an enactment of collective alignment, unfolding within the temporality of the telling. Each telling of a myth does more than recount events: it coordinates the present, anticipates potential futures, and aligns participants to shared symbolic horizons.

Key insights from this perspective include:

Temporal Relativity of Myth: Myths do not exist outside the moment of their telling. The same narrative can be enacted differently across occasions, emphasising different relational tensions, guiding different alignments, and opening distinct trajectories of collective possibility. The “sequence” of events is not fixed but flexible, contingent upon the horizon it phases.
Phasing Social Formation: Each telling structures a collective’s experience, scaling individual action against the whole, synchronising symbolic projection, and orienting what the group perceives as possible. Myth thus functions as a temporal scaffold: a way to order experience, not to illustrate an eternal pattern.
Iterative Reflexivity: Mythical phasing is reflexive. As the collective engages with a story, it adapts and realigns its symbolic horizon, which in turn reshapes subsequent tellings. Myths evolve through practice, not by appealing to a timeless monomyth.
Staging Possibility: Every act of storytelling is a construal of what could be. Myth does not describe what must occur; it maps potential, showing how the collective might navigate uncertainty, tension, and relational challenge.

From this vantage, Campbell’s linear monomyth becomes a shadow of myth’s real function. It abstracts sequence into universality, freezing temporal phasing into archetypal necessity. Relational ontology restores myth as a dynamic, iterative, and contingent process — a temporal choreography of symbolic alignment that unfolds differently each time it is enacted.

In short: myths are not maps of the psyche or the universe. They are temporal instruments, phasing collectives into alignment with their symbolic and relational possibilities.

5 Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes

Beyond sequence and timing, myths operate across relational landscapes. They are not only temporal phasings but also symbolic architectures that structure how collectives inhabit, navigate, and understand their worlds. From a relational ontology perspective, every myth functions as a lens through which a community construes its environment, its relations, and its possibilities.

Myths as Spatial and Social Scaffolds:
Myths map symbolic relationships across social and natural landscapes. A hero’s journey through a forest, across seas, or into the underworld is not merely narrative decoration; it stages relations between the collective and its environment, between individual roles and collective expectations. Myth constructs an experiential geography where actions, values, and relational tensions are meaningfully aligned.
Reflexive Projection:
Each myth projects the collective into symbolic form, allowing it to see itself from multiple vantage points simultaneously: the individual’s perspective, the collective’s stance, and the horizon of potential futures. This reflexivity is not introspection of a universal psyche but the enactment of collective self-construal.
Alignment Across Horizons:
Through repeated tellings, myths synchronise understanding across dispersed or heterogeneous participants. They create shared symbolic coordinates, so that disparate members of a collective can navigate tensions consistently, orient their actions coherently, and inhabit the same symbolic horizon. Myth, in this sense, is an instrument of social coordination, not a mere recounting of archetypal patterns.
Dynamic, Heterogeneous Landscapes:
The landscapes of myth are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, ecological, and historical contingencies. A myth adapts to new circumstances, producing multiple, overlapping trajectories of meaning. Campbell’s universal model erases this heterogeneity; relational ontology foregrounds it, revealing myth as plural, adaptive, and contextually grounded.

In sum, myths are simultaneously temporal and spatial instruments. They phase collective alignment through time, scaffold understanding across relational space, and reflexively project the collective into the symbolic horizon it inhabits. They do not mirror a timeless archetype; they constitute the terrain of possibility, showing communities how to live, act, and align within the worlds they inhabit.

6 From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has captivated generations by offering a singular, universal path through the landscape of human imagination: the hero departs, undergoes trials, and returns transformed. Its appeal lies in simplicity, coherence, and the promise of timeless truth. Yet, from a relational ontology perspective, this very appeal masks a critical ontological distortion.

The Monomyth as Artefact
Campbell’s synthesis abstracts, universalises, and essentialises. It treats recurrence as law, similarity as essence, and pattern as proof of an underlying psychic reality. In doing so, it collapses the plural, situated, and contingent nature of mythic practice into a single, flattened narrative. The “hero’s journey” becomes less a reflection of lived symbolic activity than a projection of theoretical desire — a map imposed upon terrain that is, in reality, richly diverse and dynamic.

Relational Ontology Restores Plurality
In contrast, myth itself is heterogeneous, iterative, and phasing. Each telling:

Aligns collective and individual experience within a symbolic horizon.
Projects the collective into temporal, social, and ecological landscapes.
Scaffolds possibilities for being-together, coordinating action, meaning, and expectation.
Evolves reflexively with each retelling, producing layered, context-sensitive architectures of understanding.

From this vantage, myths are not templates for inner transformation but instruments of symbolic construction — shaping what a collective can imagine, orient toward, and enact. The “archetypes” and “monomyths” of Campbell are therefore second-order abstractions: reflective readings of recurring construals, elevated into universalist theory. They are artefacts of comparison, not inherent features of the data.

The Decisive Cut
Relational ontology draws the critical distinction: the ontology of Campbell’s model ≠ the ontology of the myths themselves. The former is singular, universalising, and psychic; the latter is plural, situated, and collective. By preserving this cut, we reclaim myth as an active, temporal, reflexive, and spatially rich phenomenon.

Concluding Insight
Myth is not a path laid out by the unconscious; it is the architecture of possibility. It stages collective alignment, phases experience across horizons, and opens trajectories for becoming. In short, myths are not timeless patterns to be discovered; they are the relational instruments by which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Campbell’s monomyth, while elegant, is a mirror of our desire for universals. Relational ontology invites us instead to inhabit the plural, contingent, and creative reality of myth as it actually functions — as construal, alignment, and possibility in action.

Coda: Dwelling in the Relational Horizon of Myth

As we conclude this series, it is worth pausing not to summarise, but to reflect on the implications of a relational reading of myth. If Campbell’s monomyth invites us to see a singular path — the hero’s journey of individuation — relational ontology invites us to inhabit plural horizons of possibility. Myths are not mirrors of a timeless psyche; they are instruments through which collectives enact, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Each telling is a temporary cut into the vast field of potential: it phases alignment, projects relational possibilities, and shapes the collective’s horizon. Across cultures and epochs, the diversity of mythic form is not deviation from a universal pattern, but the very texture of symbolic life. The hero departs, yes — but the paths, landscapes, tensions, and resolutions are as varied as the communities who tell them.

In dwelling with myths relationally, we recognise the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of symbolic activity. We see that alignment and reflexivity are not metaphors, but operative processes that structure possibility. Myths are not discoveries of hidden truth; they are enactments of what a collective can become.

This perspective does not diminish the power or beauty of myth; rather, it deepens it. By attending to plurality, contingency, and process, we honour the creative and collective work that myths perform. We are invited to read myth as an architecture, to inhabit it as a landscape, and to participate in it as a living field of relational possibility.

Campbell’s vision, compelling though it is, reflects our desire for universals. The relational lens reframes that desire, allowing us to dwell instead in the rich, contingent, and evolving horizon of myth itself — a horizon in which every telling is both a projection and a possibility, and in which the collective imagines, aligns, and becomes.

In the end, myth is not a path to truth; it is the space in which truth is construed, rehearsed, and renewed. To engage with myth relationally is to dwell in that space, attentive to the plurality, phasing, and reflexivity that make collective life meaningful.

"Step lightly into the tales.
Notice the paths, but do not follow them as lines of destiny.
Attend instead to the spaces they open,
the alignments they perform,
the possibilities they call into being.
Here, myth is not a map, but a horizon —
and you are invited to dwell within it."

26 September 2025

The Evolution of Possibility

1 Possibility Before Being

We have become accustomed to thinking of possibility as derivative — as something that arises once the real has already taken shape. A tree stands, and we imagine the other forms it could have taken. A person acts, and we imagine what else they might have done. In this framing, possibility is posterior: it trails behind actuality like an echo, like the shadow of what was.

But what if we invert the frame?

What if possibility comes first — not just logically, but ontologically? What if the real is not a given but a cut — an actualisation within a wider field of structured potential? In this view, to exist is not to be in the absolute sense, but to unfold from a system of possible construals.

This is the vision we pursue here. Not a metaphysics of substance, but a relational ontology of unfolding potential — in which meaning, far from being a by-product of biological evolution or cultural contingency, is the very condition for the differentiation of what-is. The symbolic animal — that peculiar creature who lives through language, ritual, system, and self-reflection — is not the climax of evolution but a phase in the evolution of possibility itself.

From the Real to the Possible

In classical metaphysics, Being is primary. The world exists, and our task is to understand it. Possibility appears only as a secondary operation: hypothetical, imaginative, subjunctive. But from the standpoint of relational ontology, this order is reversed. There is no 'thing' apart from the construal that brings it into view — no ‘given’ that precedes its relational actualisation.

This means possibility is not subordinate to the real. Rather, the real is a particular construal within the space of the possible.

The shift is subtle but radical. Where classical thought speaks of emergence — of mind from matter, language from brain, culture from organism — we speak instead of instantiation: a cut from system to instance, from possibility to perspective. In this model, evolution is not a ladder or a tree. It is not progress or contingency. It is the repatterning of potential — the evolving shape of what could be meant.

Not a Story of Origins

This is not a return to myth as the story of beginnings. We are not looking for the first gesture, the first word, the first meaning. Those are illusions, products of a linear imagination. What we seek instead is a way of understanding how meaning itself evolves — not as the product of external forces, but as the system through which unfolding becomes thinkable at all.

To think in terms of possibility before being is to think before time, before form, before separation. It is to imagine not a primal chaos, but a structured openness — a space not empty, but pregnant with relational tension. Not a void, but a system. Not a big bang, but a relational field waiting to be cut.

And from this cut, this construal — not imposed, but immanent — comes experience, perspective, history, world.

The Road Ahead

In this series, we will trace the evolution of possibility across multiple phases of construal. From pre-semiotic fields to the emergence of ritual and symbolic system. From gesture to grammar. From biologically-oriented coupling to the symbolic reflexivity of myth, ethics, and theory.

At each phase, we will ask: What kind of possibility becomes available here? And what is required for such possibility to be enacted, inhabited, constrained, or opened?

Ultimately, we will suggest that evolution is not about life adapting to a pre-given world — but about meaning systems evolving to construe a world that could not otherwise exist.

This is not a philosophy of life. It is a mythos of possibility.

And we begin not with what is, but with what might become.

2 The Pre-Semiotic Cut

Before meaning, before symbols, before even the semblance of communicative coordination — there is difference. Not the difference between things, for there are no things yet. But the differentiation of potential within a relational field: a tension that allows something to be distinguished from what it is not, even before it has any name.

We call this the pre-semiotic cut — the most primitive gesture of construal, where the possibility of meaning begins to take shape. It is not symbolic, not cognitive, not even sentient in any familiar sense. But it marks the first alignment of potential, the earliest tension between system and instance.

This is where the evolution of possibility begins.

Before Representation: Construal Without Symbol

Much of our intellectual heritage assumes that meaning begins with representation: a mark stands for a thing, a sound names an object, a gesture signifies an intent. But this view already presupposes a symbolic order. It assumes the existence of separable entities — sign and referent, form and content, self and world.

Relational ontology offers a different path. It does not begin with the symbol, but with construal: the perspectival cut that allows experience to be organised.

In the pre-semiotic field, there is no subject to experience and no object to be experienced. There is only the system of potential tensions, through which certain alignments become more likely than others. These are not yet meanings, but they are proto-meaningful: configurations of potential that, when constrained in particular ways, will become meaning.

In other words, possibility is already structured before the symbolic emerges.

Attunement Without Intentionality

To speak of this phase is necessarily paradoxical. We are describing what cannot yet be observed or expressed — a phase prior to expression itself. But we can gesture toward it.

We can imagine, for example, an organism whose coupling with its environment is not yet mediated by signs, but is nonetheless shaped by patterned responsiveness. A molecule “prefers” one bond over another. A cell “follows” a gradient. A nervous system “settles” into rhythms. These are not metaphors. They are actualisations of pre-semiotic potential.

What we see here is attunement without intentionality: coordination without symbolisation. No meaning is yet made, but the conditions for construal are evolving. The world is not yet known, but it is coming into knowability.

The Cut That Prepares the Cut

Why call this a "cut" at all, if nothing is being named, pointed to, or distinguished as such? Because even here, we find the incipient separation of a perspective. Not the perspective of a subject, but the differentiation of a system into zones of relative stability and flux. A proto-instance. A tension in the field. A directionality within potential.

This is the precondition for meaning. And it is already a form of evolution.

Not the evolution of life adapting to fixed conditions, but the evolution of possibility itself: a shifting in what can be enacted, aligned, inhabited. The symbolic animal will emerge much later, but its ground is already being laid in these pre-semiotic alignments — these cuts that do not yet know themselves as cuts.

Beyond Mechanism, Before Mind

This model asks us to think beyond both mechanism and mind. Not a mechanical system blindly following laws, nor a conscious subject navigating a world. But a field of potentialities gradually stratifying into systems and constraints, from which both mind and world will eventually emerge.

Before symbol, before syntax, before subject — there is a world in the making. Not a chaos waiting to be ordered, but a structured openness evolving toward reflexivity.

And that is where we turn next: to the first stirrings of systemic coordination — the phase in which difference becomes patterned, and possibility begins to take on semiotic form.

3 From Alignment to System

Meaning does not erupt fully formed into the world. It unfolds through phases — slow, recursive differentiations of what is possible. In the previous post, we explored the pre-semiotic cut, where construal begins not as representation but as attunement within a field of potential. Now we move to the next shift: from alignment to system.

Here, the world is not merely reacted to — it is patterned. Alignment becomes regularity. Tension becomes constraint. And through this stabilisation of coordination, a new kind of potential emerges: systemic possibility.

Patterning as a Precondition of Meaning

To say that meaning depends on pattern is not to reduce it to regularity, but to acknowledge the precondition for construal: without some degree of recurrence, no semiotic system can evolve. But this recurrence need not be rigid or mechanical. It is better seen as a tendency — a drift toward attractors in a field of interaction.

When these patterns constrain what can happen next, the field begins to articulate itself. A difference now makes a difference, not only because it happens, but because it conditions what may follow. This is the beginning of system — not as a fixed totality, but as a theory of its own instances.

And with it comes the first glimpse of meaning potential.

The Emergence of Systemic Constraints

Let us imagine a population of organisms — primitive, without symbolic communication, but embedded in patterned interaction with their environment and each other. Over time, certain couplings are reinforced, not by intention but by consequence. Certain sequences stabilise. Certain reactions feed back into their conditions of possibility.

This is not yet semiosis, but it is already systemic: the field is no longer a loose collection of alignments, but a dynamic ecology of constraints.

Such constraints do not suppress possibility; they generate it. They transform an undifferentiated field into a structured one — a topology of what can be enacted. System, in this view, is not a mechanism of control but a medium of meaning.

System as Evolving Theory

This brings us to a key insight of relational ontology: a system is a theory of the instance. It is not a collection of parts or rules, but a structured potential — an orientation toward what might be actualised.

The evolution of possibility thus entails the emergence of systems that constrain and enable what counts as a meaningful act. These systems are not static. They are themselves evolving theories, adapting as their instances feed back into the potential they instantiate.

In short: possibility evolves not by increasing variety alone, but by differentiating systems of potential — systems that make new construals possible.

The Semiotic Threshold Approaches

At this point in our story, we have not yet crossed the threshold into meaning. But we are approaching it. With the emergence of systemic constraints, the field is no longer merely reacting — it is beginning to construe itself.

Whereas pre-semiotic alignments were shaped by implicit tension, systemic patterns now shape the space of potential actions. This opens the door to symbolic abstraction: the power to construe construal itself.

That is where we turn next — to the emergence of the semiotic animal, and with it, the birth of symbolic meaning.

4 The Semiotic Threshold

We now arrive at a crucial inflection in our unfolding arc. If the earlier phases traced the emergence of possibility through pre-semiotic alignment and systemic constraint, this post turns to the next great transformation: the semiotic threshold.

Here, for the first time, a field of patterned interactions crosses a relational cut. The system begins to construe itself as system — not by reflex, but by symbolic abstraction. A new order of reality begins to unfold: the order of meaning.

What Is the Semiotic Threshold?

The semiotic threshold is not a boundary between life and language, nor a sharp division between instinct and culture. It is a perspectival shift within the evolution of potential: from acting within a system, to acting on the system as such.

This does not mean organisms become aware in a reflective sense. It means that acts become symbolic — not merely coordinated or conditioned, but interpretable within a system of construal.

What marks this threshold is not the appearance of a particular form (gesture, sound, mark), but the emergence of a relational function: the ability to mean — to construe experience as experience.

Symbolic Abstraction as Systemic Recursion

At the semiotic threshold, the system does something it has never done before: it begins to re-enter itself. Its patterns become interpretable within the system. Its instances are not only shaped by the system, but reshape the system through interpretation.

This is the core recursive move of symbolic abstraction:

To construe the construal.

This recursion is not infinite. It is layered, stratified, constrained. But it opens a new space: a metasystemic space in which meaning can evolve. This is not just the coordination of acts — it is the coordination of construals, the social evolution of symbolic systems.

The Symbolic Animal

What evolves at this threshold is not simply a new species — but a new order of being. The symbolic animal is not defined by biology, cognition, or culture in isolation. It is defined by its mode of possibility.

To live as a symbolic animal is to live within — and through — a system of construal. It is to experience reality not only as what is, but as what is meant. The environment becomes interpretable. Action becomes negotiable. Existence itself becomes semiotic.

This is not a higher rung on some evolutionary ladder. It is a cut across modes of potential — a shift from enacting the possible, to inhabiting possibility as such.

The Mythos of Meaning Begins

The semiotic threshold is the true beginning of what we might call a mythos of meaning — not in the sense of an ancient tale, but in the deep sense of a shared construal of what meaning is.

From here, evolution proceeds not only biologically, nor even culturally, but symbolically — through the expansion and differentiation of meaning potential. That is the path we now trace: from symbolic construal to semiotic system, from lived tension to reflexive mythos.

We are now fully within the domain of meaning.

And so in the next post, we turn to the dynamics of symbolic evolution — where construal becomes social, systems differentiate, and possibility itself becomes a medium of collective transformation.

5 The Symbolic Drift

Having crossed the semiotic threshold, the symbolic animal embarks on a remarkable journey: the continuous unfolding and differentiation of symbolic systems. This process is not random; it is guided by an emergent logic we call the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility.

The Drift as Systemic Differentiation

The symbolic drift is not a linear progression or steady climb but a complex differentiation within a semiotic ecology. Symbolic systems multiply, diverge, and recombine, opening new fields of possibility while constraining others.

This differentiation is systemic. It is not just the growth of vocabulary or grammar but the reconfiguration of the entire symbolic space — new genres, new norms, new modes of orientation. Each symbolic innovation alters the landscape of meaning, shifting what can be said, thought, and enacted.

Symbolic Evolution as Repatterning

The drift is also a repatterning. Patterns that were once stable may become unstable or obsolete, while novel configurations emerge. This process is driven by internal tensions, external pressures, and reflexive reorganisation.

Unlike biological evolution, symbolic evolution is not limited by physical inheritance. Instead, it evolves through social transmission, collective memory, and ritualised repetition — processes that enable symbolic systems to carry forward, transform, and reimagine possibility.

Symbolic Systems as Medium and Constraint

Symbolic systems simultaneously enable and constrain. They are the medium through which meaning is made and shared, but they also set the limits of what can be meaningfully said.

Understanding this dual role is essential. It accounts for why symbolic systems can foster both creativity and conservatism; both innovation and tradition; both freedom and constraint.

The Mythos Grows

As symbolic systems drift and differentiate, they generate what we call a mythos of meaning — a shared orientation toward the future, grounded in historical sedimentation but always open to reimagination.

This mythos is not a fixed story but a living constellation of symbolic commitments — a systemic ecology of possibility that grounds identity, community, and action.

Toward a New Symbolic Ethics

The symbolic drift invites an ethical stance. If symbolic life is always becoming, always transforming, then our participation in meaning is a form of responsibility.

We do not merely inherit symbolic systems; we inhabit and reshape them. To live symbolically is to orient oneself within an evolving field of possibility — and to act in ways that acknowledge the consequences of that orientation.

In our next and final post of this series, we explore the mythos of meaning itself — how it sustains, challenges, and invites us to live otherwise.

6 The Mythos of Meaning

We have journeyed from the pre-semiotic cut, through systemic emergence and the semiotic threshold, to the symbolic drift — the ongoing evolution of symbolic possibility. Now we arrive at the heart of our inquiry: the mythos of meaning.

Mythos Beyond Storytelling

“Mythos” here is not mere story or legend. It is the systemic symbolic commitment that grounds and orients a collective. It is the living architecture through which meaning takes shape, sustains identity, and generates futures.

A mythos is the dynamic horizon of possibility within which symbolic animals live. It is the shared web of construals that both enables and constrains what can be said, done, and imagined.

The Mythos as System of Possibility

The mythos is a patterned field of symbolic relations — a network of narratives, values, rituals, and semiotic resources that together shape a community’s orientation to the world and its own becoming.

It is not fixed or given, but always in motion: evolving, contested, renegotiated.

The mythos is the living ecology of meaning within which symbolic life unfolds.

Living Otherwise: Ethics and Transformation

To inhabit a mythos is to participate in a symbolic order. But because the mythos is always partial and provisional, it also invites transformation — the possibility of living otherwise.

This is the ethical horizon of symbolic life: not to be trapped by inherited construals, but to respond reflexively — to reshape the mythos through praxis, imagination, and critique.

The Evolution of Possibility Continues

The mythos is not an endpoint but a phase in the ongoing evolution of possibility. It opens space for new construals, new forms of life, new symbolic worlds.

In this sense, evolution is never finished. It is always a becoming.

Final Reflections

This series has sought to reframe evolution as the unfolding of possibility itself — not as the survival of the fittest or the march of progress, but as the evolving architecture of meaning.

We are symbolic animals living in symbolic worlds — worlds that we both inherit and invent.

Our task is not only to understand this condition but to inhabit it responsibly: to engage with the mythos of meaning not as passive recipients but as active participants and co-creators.