Can there be a real alternative to this antinomian picture? One which avoids the chaos of an unknowable Nature, or a lawless rebellion, or an unaccountable sovereign? Perhaps there can be such an alternative, but only if we get to the metaphysical root of the problem itself. What the Gaian, Promethean, and Olympian positions each share is a fundamental dualism between reason and its other, what we may call “the void.” Each formulation posits an outside to intelligibility. There is something we can never know. And in this void, we find monsters. Thus, we are left with the choice of embracing the monstrous in one way or another (Prometheus and/or Gaia), or else reaching an always provisional ceasefire with the encroaching chaos (Olympus).

But what if there were no outside to reason? What if, instead, Nature is a thoroughly intelligible substance? In that case, the laws which govern the intellect would also mirror the order-and-connections of material reality. This is certainly an unpopular position in contemporary philosophy, thoroughly infused as it is by postmodern, existentialist, and pragmatic assumptions. Still, truth is no popularity contest. And this rationalism has much to recommend it.

First, there is the oft-repeated Hegelian insight that “to posit a finite limit is to go beyond that limit.” All boundaries to knowledge are ultimately provisional and relative. In other words, even our local instances of ignorance are conditioned by the contours of a more broadly intelligible world. We have to ask why and under what conditions we fail to comprehend something. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible, in the first place, to identify our specific deficits of knowledge.

Lovecraftian monsters are the supreme rejection of this Hegelian insight. For Lovecraft, these beings are threatening precisely because they cannot be known. They strike the senses without being understood. But for the rationalist, we have a simple disjunctive syllogism at work: Either we do not comprehend the monster at all, in which case it is precisely of no consequence to us, or else, we do understand something of the beast, in which case it is merely a question of piecing together additional insights. Whichever is the case, the mysterium tremendum (and the humility of mystical thinking that goes with it) is overcome. In the rationalist's thoroughly demystified world, there are only cryptids which have yet to be classified; there are no monsters.