The biography of Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris contains an admirable letter by the former, from which I copy the following words: “I understand everything and everyone and I am nothing and no one.” From this nothingness (so comparable to that of God before creating the world, so comparable to that primordial divinity which another Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena, called Nihil), Bernard Shaw educed almost innumerable persons or dramatis personae: the most ephemeral of these is, I suspect, that G. B. S. who represented him in public and who lavished in the newspaper columns so many facile witticisms.
Shaw’s fundamental themes are philosophy and ethics: it is natural and inevitable that he should not be valued in this country, or that he be so only in terms of a few epigrams. The Argentine feels that the universe is nothing but a manifestation of chance, the fortuitous concourse of Democritus’ atoms; philosophy does not interest him. Nor does ethics: the social realm, for him, is reduced to a conflict of individuals or classes or nations, in which everything is licit, save being ridiculed or defeated.
Man’s character and its variations are the essential theme of the novel of our time; lyric poetry is the complacent magnification of amorous fortunes or misfortunes; the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers make each of us the interesting interlocutor in a secret and continuous dialogue with nothingness or the divinity; these disciplines, which in the formal sense can be admirable, foment that illusion of the ego which the Vedanta censures as a capital error. They usually make a game of desperation and anguish, but at bottom they flatter our vanity; they are, in this sense, immoral. The work of Shaw, however, leaves one with a flavor of liberation. The flavor of the stoic doctrines and the flavor of the sagas.
—Translated by James E. Irby
The Modesty of History
On the twentieth of September, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar to Paris on a military excursion) saw the finest army in Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militia, and he told his disconcerted friends: At this place and on this day a new epoch in the history of the world begins, and we shall be able to say that we were present at its beginnings. Ever since that day there has been a plethora of historical dates and days, and one of the tasks of modern governments (most notably in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate or counterfeit them, with the help of previously accumulated propaganda and of persistent publicity. Such “historic” dates, in which the influence of Cecil B. DeMille may be noted, bear less relation to history than to journalism. I have long suspected that history, true history, is far more modest, and that its essential dates may well be, for a long time, secret as well. A Chinese writer of prose has observed that the unicorn, for the very reason that it is so anomalous, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to see. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, though his book records the event.
I was led to these reflections by a chance phrase which caught my eye as I leafed through a history of Greek literature and which interested me because of its slightly enigmatic nature. Here is the phrase: He brought in a second actor. I paused, verified the fact that Aeschylus was the subject of this mysterious action, and that, as is stated in the Fourth Chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics, he “raised the number of actors from one to two.” As we know, the drama was born of the Dionysiac religion; originally, a single actor, the hypocrite, made taller by the thick-soled buskin, the cothurnus, dressed in black or purple, his face made larger by a mask, shared the stage with the twelve members of the chorus. The drama was one of the ceremonies of the cult, and, as in all ritual, it ran the risk of some day being invariable. This could have happened, but that one day, five hundred years before the Christian era, the Athenians marveled to see, or were scandalized to see (Victor Hugo surmised the latter), the unannounced appearance of a second actor. On that day in some remote spring, in that honey-colored theater, what did those Athenians think, what did they feel? Perhaps neither stupor nor consternation; perhaps only the beginnings of surprise. From Cicero’s Tusctdanae Disputationes we know that Aeschylus entered the Pythagorean order, but we shall never know whether or not he foresaw, even though only imperfectly, the significance of the progressive passage from one to two, from unity to plurality, and thus on to infinity. Along with the second actor came dialogue and the indefinite possibilities of the reaction of some characters upon others. A prophetic spectator would have seen that multitudes of future apparitions accompanied the second actor: Hamlet and Faust and Sigismundo and Macbeth and Peer Gynt, and others whom our eyes can not yet discern.
In the course of my reading I discovered another historical date. It happened in Iceland, in the thirteenth century of our era: in 1225, let us say. The historian and polygraph Snorri Sturlason, at his country house in Borgarfjord, wrote down, for the enlightenment of future generations, the details of the last exploit of the famous king Harald Sigurdarson, called the Implacable (Hardrada), who had previously fought in Byzantium, Italy, and Africa. Now Tostig, brother to the Saxon king of England, Harold Son of Godwin (Harold II), coveted power and had gained the support of Harald Sigurdarson. They landed at the head of a Norwegian army on the east coast of England and reduced the fortress of Jorvik (York). South of Jorvik, they were met by the Saxon army. After relating this sequence of events, Snorri continues.
Twenty horsemen approached the ranks of the invader. The men, and also the horses, were dressed in mail. One of the horsemen shouted:
“Is Earl Tostig there?”
“I don’t deny being here,” said the Earl.
“If you really are Tostig,” said the horseman, “I’ve come to tell you that your brother offers you his pardon and a third part of the kingdom.”
“If I accept,” said Tostig, “what will the King give Harald Sigurdarson?”
“He has not forgotten him,” answered the horseman. “He’ll give him six feet of English earth and, since he is so tall, an extra foot besides.”
“In that case,” said Tostig, “tell your king that we will fight to the death.”
The horsemen rode away. Pensively Harald Sigurdarson asked:
“Who was that gentleman who spoke so well?”
“Harold Son of Godwin.”
Other chapters recount how before the sun set that day, the Norwegian army was defeated. Harald Sigurdarson died in battle, and so did the Earl (Heimskringla, X, 92).
There is a certain flavor, a savor which our time (weary, perhaps, with the artless imitations by the professionals of patriotism) does not perceive without some suspicion: the elementary savor of heroism. I am assured that the Poem of the Cid has this savor; I have tasted it, unmistakably, in some verses of the Aeneid (“Son, from me learn courage and true constancy; from others, success.”), in the Anglo-Saxon ballad of Maldon (“My people will pay the tribute with lances and old swords.”), in the Chanson de Roland, in Victor Hugo, in Whitman, and in Faulkner (“lavender, stronger than the odor of horses and of courage”), in the Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries of Housman, and in the “six feet of English earth” of the Heimskringla. Behind the apparently simple statement of the historian lies a delicate psychical play. Harold pretends not to recognize his brother, so that the latter in his turn may realize that he should not recognize him either; Tostig does not betray him, but neither will he betray his ally; Harold, prepared to pardon his brother, but not to tolerate the interference of the King of Norway, proceeds in a very understandable manner. I say nothing of the verbal adroitness of his reply: the gift of one third of the kingdom, the gift of six feet of earth.55
There is only one thing more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: the fact that it was an Icelander, a man of the blood of the defeated, who perpetuated it. It is as if a Carthaginian had bequeathed us the memory of Regulus and his defiance. With good reason Saxo Grammaticus writes in his Gesta Danorum: “The men of Thule (Iceland) take pleasure in learning and recording the history of all peoples and they consider it just as glor
ious to proclaim alien merits as to publish their own.”
It was not so much the day on which the Saxon spoke his words, but rather the day on which an enemy perpetuated them that constitutes a historic date. It was a prophetic date, as well, prophetic of something that lies in the future: the overlooking of blood and nationality, the solidarity of the human race. Harold’s offer owes its merit to the concept of fatherland; Snorri, by virtue of his recording it, surpasses and transcends it.
I recall another tribute to an enemy in the final chapters of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence praises the courage of a German detachment, and writes these words: “Then, for the first time in that campaign, I was proud of the men who had killed my brothers.” And he adds: “They were glorious.”
— Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
A New Refutation of Time
Vor mir war keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine seyn,
Mit mir gebiert sie sich, mit mir geht sie auch ein.
Daniel von Czepko:
Sexcenta monodisticha sapientum, III, II (1655)
PROLOGUE
Had this refutation (or even the title) been published in the middle of the eighteenth century, it would survive in Hume’s bibliographies or might even have merited a line by Huxley or Kemp Smith. But published in 1947—post-Bergson—it is an anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentinian gone astray in the maze of metaphysics. Both conjectures are credible and perhaps even true: I can not promise, so as to emend them, a startling resolution in exchange for my rudimentary dialectic. The thesis which I shall expound is as old as Zeno’s arrow or the chariot of the Greek king in the Milinda Panha; its novelty, if any, consists in applying to my ends the classic instrument of Berkeley. Both he and his continuer, David Hume, abound in paragraphs which contradict or exclude my thesis; nevertheless, I believe I have deduced the inevitable consequence of their doctrine.
The first article (A) was written in 1944 and appeared in Number 115 of the Argentine magazine Sur; the second, dating from 1946, is a revision of the first piece. I deliberately refrained from making the two into one, in the belief that the reading of two analogous texts could facilitate the comprehension of intractable matter.
A word on the title : I am not oblivious of the fact that it is an example of the monster the logicians call contradictio in adjecto, for to say that a refutation of time is new (or old, for that matter) is to attribute to it a temporal predicate, thus restoring at once the very notion the subject strives to destroy. Still and all I shall let it stand, so that its ever-so-slight mockery give proof that I do not overrate the importance of this play on words. And then, too, our language is so thoroughly saturated and animated with the notion of time that quite possibly not a single sentence in all these pages fails to require or invoke it.
I dedicate these exercises to my ancestor Juan Crisostomo Lafinur (1797-1824), who left a memorable hendecasyllable or two to Argentine letters and who strove to reform the teaching of philosophy by purifying it of theological shadows and explaining the theories of Locke and Condillac in his courses. He died in exile: it was his lot, as it is the lot of all men, to live in bad times.
A
I.
In the course of a life dedicated to belles-lettres and, occasionally, to the perplexities of metaphysics, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, one in which I myself do not believe, but which tends to visit me at night and in the hours of weary twilight, with the illusory force of an axiom. This refutation is to be found, in one form or another, in all of my books: it is prefigured in the poems “Inscripcion en cualquier sepulcro” and “El truco” from my Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923); it is openly stated in two articles in my Inquisiciones (1925), on page 46 of the 1930 edition of Evaristo Carriego, in the story “Sentirse en muerte” from my Historia de la eternidad (1936), on page 46 of the 1942 edition of my book El jardin de senderos que se bijurcan. None of these texts satisfies me, not even the penultimate one in the list, which is less demonstrative and reasoned than divinatory and inclined toward pathos, I will attempt, by the present writing, to establish a basis for all of them.
Two arguments led me to this refutation: the idealism of Berkeley and Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles. Berkeley (Principles of Human Knowledge, 3) observed: “That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. . . The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. . . For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”
In paragraph twenty-three he added, forestalling objections: “But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. . .”
In another paragraph, number six, he had already declared: “Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in any mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit. . .”
Such is, in the words of its inventor, the idealist doctrine. To understand it is easy; the difficulty lies in thinking within its limitations. Schopenhauer himself, in expounding it, is guilty of some culpable negligence. In the first lines of his book Welt als Wille und Vorstellung—dating from the year of 1819—he formulates the following declaration, which makes him makes him a creditor as regards the sum total of imperishable human perplexity: “The world is my representation. The man who confesses this truth clearly understands that he does not know a sun nor an earth, but only some eyes which see a sun and a hand which feels an earth.” That is, for the idealist Schopenhauer a man’s eyes and hands are less illusory or unreal than the earth or the sun. In 1844, he publishes a complementary volume. In the very first chapter he rediscovers and aggravates the previous error: he defines the universe as a cerebral phenomenon, and he distinguishes between the “word in the head” and the “world outside the head.” Berkeley, nevertheless, will have made his Philonous say, in 1713: “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to suppose, that one idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, pray how do you account for the origin of that primary idea or brain itself?” To Schopenhauer’s dualism, or cerebralism, Spiller’s monism may legitimately be counterposed. Spiller (in The Mind of Man, Ch. VIII, 1902) argues that the retina and the cutaneous surface invoked to explain visual and tactile phenomena are, in turn, two tactile and visual systems,
and that the room we see (the “objective” one) is no greater than the imagined (“cerebral”) one, and that the former does not contain the latter, since there are two independent visual systems involved. Berkeley (in Principles of Human Knowledge, 10 and 116) likewise denied primary qualities—the solidity and extension of things—or the existence of absolute space.
Berkeley affirmed the continuous existence of objects, inasmuch as when no individual perceives them, God does. Hume, with greater logic, denies this existence (in Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 2). Berkeley affirmed personal identity, “for I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives” (Dialogues, 3). Hume, the skeptic, refutes this belief, and makes each man “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” (op. cit., I, 4,6). Both men affirmed the existence of time: for Berkeley it is “the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated in by all beings” (Principles of Human Knowledge, 98). For Hume, it is “a succession of indivisible moments” (op. cit., I, 2,2).
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 Page 22