Para-Ontologicals: The Philosophy of Monsters

Imagine the set of all things known, spoken and thought about. Now imagine the subset of all things known, spoken and thought about that actually exist. In almost any culture the first group is much larger than the second. A !Kung hunter might have his spear and a second spear he wished he had but does not because he has not yet fashioned it. This hunter may, for all I know of the matter, have some sophisticated concept of potential things and where and how they exist. Yet for all that, such a mode of reality will not, in all likelihood, be the same as that of the spear in his hand except, perhaps, in some special ritualized context. There is still another distinction we can make between the two groups and that is between things which exist and things which simply do not exist; things that are not actual OR potential entities. A square circle is one of these by way of intrinsic impossibility. A methane breathing dog is another because of the atmosphere of the earth and the known evolutionary pathway of dogs: there is no way to fit such an entity into our system of the world. Then there are ‘currently accepted entities’. Such entities are houses, dogs, carbon, speedboats, moons, fossils and so on. These exist in a robust sense. We might call them full entities or entities with gravity and staying power. At the same time there are a host of para-entities which seem to have SOME marks of existing things but not enough of these to make them full entities. Here we might put cryptid animals like Bigfoot, aliens, sorcerers and witches, ghosts, fairies and the like. We might also include things like Planet X, the second shooter on the grassy knoll, King Arthur and so on. These are things that may have indicated their existence in various ways but not in enough diverse ways to become fully recognized entities. People have seen some them, for instance, but not enough of the right people have seen them regularly enough in the right contexts for them to be real. They are, if you like para-real: they have visibility and some other marks of reality but not enough of these to have ontological weight as entities .We tend to think that with enough evidence, hard evidence, they would have such weight. I’m actually not sure this is the case. I’m not sure the barrier to crossing over from a para-entity to an entity actually is evidential (except partially) nor am I sure that there is an impermeable, fixed boundary between the two groups that can be defined methodically or logically. Entities flicker about the edges of reality waiting to come in or pass out. They are waiting, some of them, to take on weight. Others are waiting to lose it.  

Take for example Bigfoot. I would not be surprised at all if more people have seen Bigfoot than have seen (or at least noticed seeing) me. This is how little SEEING has to do with it. Yet I have a paper trail, an official record that establishes my existence for the curious and a recognized social identity. This is why I exist even for the people who have never met me and that is the vast majority. This is why a Gnu exists. People have not simply seen it (but again how many people see Gnus in the course of a lifetime?) but it has been sampled and classified and documented and processed by the relevant bodies and social authorities. It has been constructed as an object, given weight and gravity by constant and consistent patterns of interaction. It has been placed in an evolutionary tree for instance and objects called Gnus can be seen regularly in zoos and not fitfully in forests (like Bigfoot). Gnus are objects that circulate within a social ecology not just a natural one and as such they have achieved the density of things. It is not enough for an entity to be natural; it must have a social identity as well. There can be pitfalls though. Objects labelled Gnus are taken to be Gnus though for years I was eating an object labelled wasabi which turned out to be a different thing entirely.  

Yet this can’t quite be the whole story. Many things with considerably less ontological gravity (on paper at least) have crossed the bar from para to real entities with ease. Footprints and tiny bone fragments have been sufficient to establish several dinosaurs as real though NOBODY has seen them and there are far more objects purporting to be Bigfoot prints, hair or scat (quantity of evidence, at least, is not the be all and end all). Some entities pass this bar with no direct evidence whatsoever such as dark matter or strings or the Q Gospel. I have spoken to Biblical scholars who seem to think they have literally read Q (they haven’t) yet these same people would scoff at things, like lake monsters, for which there is prima facie far more evidence.           

Of course, these entities pass the bar swiftly and easily because they help researchers solve problems such as basic conundrums in physics and cosmology or the textual development of the Gospels. Physicists and scholars have heft and prestige when it comes to conferring status on entities and ranchers from Wyoming who see a nine foot ape man do not. Indeed Bigfoot, if he existed, would be a bother for theorists who would have to radically revise their understanding of primates and their evolution and explain how such a large animal could leave so little trace of itself and be so hard to detect. Theorists will pass entities that make their lives easier and bar ones that do not and they are the ones with the status necessary to make an entity real. Thus, if one asks what amount of evidence is sufficient to make Bigfoot real the answer may be none UNTIL someone has some theoretical stake in the existence of such an entity; until Bigfoot makes some theorist’s life easier! Till then, no photos or films or plaster casts will suffice for all could, in principle, be fakes or even bears seen and photographed at awkward angles or in bad light. Determined skepticism might be a bar literally nothing can pass. A corpse might (or might not) work but barring that Bigfoot will not pass easily or readily into the circle of entities.  

A parallel case might be witches. Witches existed until it became clear that belief in witches was making life worse (because of the burden and annoyance of witch panics). Then they ceased to exist with astonishing rapidity. They went from entity to para-entity where they remain today. This has nothing to do with anything phenomenal. People now (I have checked) tell the same stories they always have about weird neighbors whose houses emit spooky noises and are festooned with pentagrams. Such stories, however, remain purely on the phenomenal level. This is because there are no social processes for investigating or charging and prosecuting witches. There is no process for validating the claim that your neighbor is a witch. Witches do not circulate as objects through our social institutions being examined, weighed, evaluated and judged. As such they do not attain the full gravity of objects which is grounded on such a process of circulation. Like Bigfoot, they exist as pure phenomena and any pure phenomenon can be given an ad hoc explanation.

Indeed, it is questionable whether any pure phenomenon can FORCE its way into the realm of real objects. Our Bigfoot corpse might well be a mangy, partly decayed bear and if a DNA test says otherwise, well, there is always the possibility of contamination or laboratory error. If multiple labs come up with the same result we STILL have the option of supposing a conspiracy, perhaps funded by people who think Bigfoot is good for tourism. Our tendency, if we are theorists for whom Bigfoot is a bother, will be to examine the practices of labs before admitting an inconvenient entity. There is, at the end of the day, nothing particularly wrong or unscientific about that because, in our world at least, it is the job of theorists to gate keep entities and too many disparate kinds of entities complicate the narrative. We probably need no more entities than those we can properly manage. The problem of course is that there are people, Indigenous North Americans are one example, who have a world system into which strange forest beings fit snugly and who gate keep entities on different principles. I find it hard not to conclude that their worlds contain different ‘real’ things. This raises a political question, of course, though one too large for this piece: who benefits from a given entity being real or not?