Save Me from the Horn of the Unicorn

 

Mandy (I can’t remember her last name) was a bright, perfectly pleasant young woman who insisted that unicorns existed and that her belief in unicorns was neither symbolic nor allegorical but literally factual. I suppose one might say this was a basic abandonment of intellectual responsibility for a person who was, after all, a grad student being trained for a future as an academic. This is true in terms of the socialization of academics. As an academic Mandy is responsible for investigating the assertions she makes. This would involve reading up on the history of unicorns and finding that it was an animal only ever talked about and never actually seen. In the middle ages it was an animal used largely as an allegorical entity to symbolize the Christian mysteries. Of course, for a medieval person the unicorn existed in a kind of dream state or demi-world between the symbolic and literal and depending on context could land on either side. A medieval person did not really need to make a choice in the matter. Of course in the modern world the symbolic and material worlds become more differentiated and the question of whether the unicorn was real or not suddenly had to be settled. In early modernity one had to make a choice rather than sliding benignly between fiction and fact. This is why the Royal Society took it upon itself to investigate the ontological status of the unicorn. It did so by testing the efficacy of unicorn powder. According to lore the powder of the unicorn horn had the property of repelling poisonous spiders. The Royal Society, in a spasm of literalism, acquired both unicorn powder and a spider and found this idea had no merit by performing the appropriate experiments.  Of course, the experiment was an entirely symbolic gesture as there was not then and is not now any process for authenticating unicorn powder. The symbolic does not go away in modernity but shifts its disguise. At any rate this was clearly a symbolic banishment of a symbolic entity: after this we could be sure that ANY single horned animals we found would have no magic properties and bear no freight of mythic or spiritual significance. Any unicorn we found now would be a small horse with a horn and nothing else.

Of course we may cherish beliefs as people that we would not defend as academics. In academia we employ certain prescribed modes of justification such as the collecting of data. Unlike in the Renaissance, this data cannot come from books. It is not enough to cite the authority of Pliny the Elder or Apollonius of Tyana the Neo-Pythagorean. It is not enough to claim that the world of text, especially ancient text, is greater and truer than dull empirical reality. We need to find unicorns in the world rather than in authors. We need, alas, to capture, kill and dissect one before we discuss them any further. Of course, no one needs to take this requirement home with them: in the privacy of my thoughts I can believe what the spirit moves me to believe. One could tax Mandy with inconsistency if she, in her practical affairs, also accepted basic principles of biology but, if she were willing to alter these and adopt an intellectual attitude and way of life coherent with her belief in unicorns, I suppose I would have nothing to say. We would then have to switch to another topic of conversation. As a last resort, though, I might point out that a consistent set of beliefs and practices that included unicorns would exclude too many other things of interest and value: in other words, it would be threadbare in content. Removing all the ideas, theories, observations and practices inconsistent with the existence of unicorns might leave a world sadly diminished in most other respects.  Of course, this boils down to the question of how much consistency we should demand of people.  This objection would, though, challenge Mandy to show that unicorns are a pearl of great price for which the rest of the world can happily be sold.