🕊 Love as Radical Construal of the Other

In a model where meaning is not extracted from a pre-existing world but actualised through the construal of experience, love is not just a feeling. It is not just a private sentiment or a passive state of affection.

Love is an ontological act.

An ethical event.

A radical construal of the Other.

In this frame, to love is to mean differently.

To reshape the very field in which the Other is made actual.

The Ethics of Construal

Every act of construal is an ethical gesture.

To name, to typify, to classify—these are not neutral acts. They are acts of power.

When we collapse a person into a role, a label, a function, we reduce the system of potential meanings they could instantiate.

We limit their field of becoming.

Love refuses this collapse.

To love someone is to treat them not as an object to be known, used, or categorised—but as a wellspring of potential.

Love does not impose meaning; it waits on it.

It creates the space in which meaning can unfold.

It allows the Other to become more than what they’ve already been.

To love is to say:

“You are not yet fully meant. Nor am I.

And we will meet here—not to complete each other,

but to co-construe a world that honours the sacred in us both.”

Irreducibility and the Sacred

In our model, the sacred is not an essence. It is not something possessed.

It is a stance of radical openness to potential.

To construe another as sacred is to acknowledge their irreducibility.

To hold them in the field of what cannot be finalised.

This is what love does.

It resists the urge to define.

It suspends the impulse to totalise.

It refuses to finalise the Other—even when doing so would be easier, safer, or more convenient.

Love is the ethical opposite of stereotype.

It sees not through the lens of what is most efficient, but through what is most possible.

The Ontological Act

To love is to change what is possible.

Not in a metaphorical way.

But in the deepest, most literal way we can mean it.

Love expands the system of potential meanings available to both Self and Other.

It opens new semiotic futures.

It bends the world toward possibility.

In this way, love is an ontological intervention.

It alters the field of actuality—not by force, but by refusing to constrain.

Love does not demand. It does not define.

It invites. It holds. It waits. It honours.

And in doing so, it makes a new world actual.