A Conversation in the Senior Common Room (Where Mr Blottisham Attempts to Treat Existence as a Thing One Might Misplace, and the Room Gently Objects)
Mr Blottisham is holding a fountain pen as though it might fail to exist if not properly attended to. Professor Quillibrace is looking at him with the expression of someone who has seen ontology mistaken for stationery before. Miss Elowen Stray is not looking at either of them; she is attending to the grammatical conditions under which “either of them” becomes available.
Mr Blottisham: This one is quite straightforward, surely. Things exist. Some things exist, some do not. So existence must be something things have—like colour, or weight, or… pens.
Professor Quillibrace: I admire the confidence. It is doing a great deal of work in place of analysis.
Mr Blottisham: Well, what else could it be? If something exists, it must have existence.
Miss Elowen Stray: That is already the first displacement.
Mr Blottisham: I don’t see how. It’s just grammar.
Professor Quillibrace: Yes. And grammar is precisely where ontology is currently being smuggled in.
1. The innocent appearance of the question
Mr Blottisham: So the question is simple: is existence something that things possess?
Professor Quillibrace: It only feels simple because the structure has already done half the thinking for you.
Miss Elowen Stray: It treats “exists” as if it names a detachable feature—something that can be attached to or removed from objects like a label.
Mr Blottisham: But that seems reasonable. We can describe something without saying it exists.
Professor Quillibrace: You are confusing a grammatical manoeuvre with an ontological one.
2. The hidden commitments
Professor Quillibrace: For your question to make sense, you must assume at least the following: that existence behaves like a predicate, that entities can be specified independently of being, and that “having” is applicable even to being itself.
Mr Blottisham: That sounds like what I said, yes.
Miss Elowen Stray: Which is exactly why it feels obvious.
3. The misstep beneath the obvious
Professor Quillibrace: The central error is treating existence as if it were an item that could be added to an already specified object.
Mr Blottisham: Isn’t that what “exists” means? To be real rather than imagined?
Miss Elowen Stray: That contrast already assumes too much. It assumes “being real” is a property separable from what is real.
Professor Quillibrace: And that separation is precisely what collapses under scrutiny.
4. Relational re-description (without giving existence a cupboard of its own)
Miss Elowen Stray: Consider this instead. Systems instantiate structured relations under constraint. Within such systems, configurations become stable enough to be identified, referred to, and differentiated.
Mr Blottisham: So existence is… stability?
Professor Quillibrace: Not quite. That would still be too object-like.
Miss Elowen Stray: Existence is not a feature added to a configuration. It is the condition under which a configuration is actualised such that it can be distinguished at all within a relational field.
Mr Blottisham: That sounds like existence has been demoted from a property to a process.
Professor Quillibrace: Worse for your grammar, better for reality.
5. Dissolving the possession fantasy
Mr Blottisham: But then what has existence?
Professor Quillibrace: That question is precisely what has to be unlearned.
Miss Elowen Stray: Nothing has existence, because “having” already presupposes the separation you are trying to explain.
Mr Blottisham: So everything just… is?
Professor Quillibrace: Careful. That “just” is doing metaphysical work again.
6. Why it still feels compelling
Miss Elowen Stray: It feels compelling because language lets us say “X exists” as though existence were being attributed.
Mr Blottisham: And because some things don’t exist—like unicorns.
Professor Quillibrace: Or so we say. But what is really happening is a difference in relational actualisation, not a missing metaphysical property.
Miss Elowen Stray: The grammar makes existence look like a switch: on or off. Reality is not that kind of switch.
Closing remark
Professor Quillibrace: “Is existence something that things possess?” appears to ask whether being is a property of objects.
Mr Blottisham: And the answer is no?
Professor Quillibrace: The answer is that the question has misplaced its own target.
Miss Elowen Stray: Under relational analysis, it reveals something more precise: a reification of ontological grammar into possession, combined with a flattening of being into predication.
Mr Blottisham: So existence isn’t something things have at all?
Professor Quillibrace: No.
Miss Elowen Stray: It is what it means for a configuration to be relationally actualised within a field of constraint.
Mr Blottisham: I feel as though I’ve lost ownership of existence.
Professor Quillibrace: Good. That is usually a sign the analysis has begun to work.
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