Dramatis Personae
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Professor Quillibrace — dry, precise, quietly devastating
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Mr Blottisham — confident, impatient, incurious, fond of “surely”
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Miss Elowen Stray — attentive, thoughtful, notices what disappears
Blottisham (with satisfaction):
Surely, Professor, all this talk of cuts and perspectives is very clever — but there is still the world. Everything exists somewhere, after all.
Quillibrace (without looking up):
No, Mr Blottisham. Things exist. Systems exist. Phenomena exist.
The world does not.
Blottisham (laughs):
That’s just wordplay. Of course the world exists. That’s what physics studies.
Quillibrace:
Physics studies phenomena under specified constraints.
You have just replaced that sentence with a noun.
Blottisham:
You can’t seriously deny that there is a total reality — everything that is.
Quillibrace:
I deny only that “everything” names something.
Blottisham:
But surely there is a whole!
Quillibrace:
A whole of what, precisely?
(Pause.)
Blottisham:
Well — of everything.
Quillibrace:
Ah. The definition returns wearing its own coat.
Elowen Stray (gently):
Professor — is the problem that “the world” sounds like an object?
Quillibrace:
Exactly, Miss Stray.
“The world” behaves grammatically like a thing, and ontologically like a mistake.
Blottisham:
This is absurd. Are you saying there isn’t a reality out there?
Quillibrace:
No. I am saying there is no view from which all of it is given at once.
Blottisham:
But surely reality exists independently of us!
Quillibrace:
Independently of which cut?
Blottisham:
The… complete one?
Quillibrace:
You see the difficulty.
Blottisham (irritated):
Physics aims to describe the world as it really is.
Quillibrace:
Physics aims to produce stable symbolic systems that organise phenomena.
You keep adding a metaphysical flourish at the end.
Blottisham:
So there’s no final description?
Quillibrace:
Descriptions are always of something, under conditions, for purposes.
Finality is not a scientific achievement — it is a failure of restraint.
Elowen Stray:
Is this why you say totality isn’t false, but category-mistaken?
Quillibrace:
Yes.
Totality is what happens when abstraction forgets the cut that made it possible.
Blottisham:
But if there’s no world, what are we in?
Quillibrace (finally looks up):
You are in a sentence, Mr Blottisham.
You are mistaking its grammar for ontology.
(A long silence.)
Blottisham:
So you’re saying “the world” is just… a convenience?
Quillibrace:
A convenience with delusions of grandeur.
Elowen Stray (thoughtfully):
And every time we say “the world”, we erase the perspective that let us say it.
Quillibrace:
Precisely.
The world is what remains after all cuts are denied — which is to say, nothing that can be encountered.
Blottisham (muttering):
This seems… unsatisfactory.
Quillibrace:
Completion often does.
Elowen Stray:
So ontology doesn’t describe the world?
Quillibrace:
No.
Ontology disciplines what we are allowed to say instead of pretending we have it all.
(Blottisham stares into his tea, which stubbornly refuses to become Totality.)
Curtain.