Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  The doctrine I have just expounded has been interpreted in perverse ways. Herbert Spencer thought he had refuted it (Principles of Psychology, VIII, 6), reasoning that if there is nothing outside consciousness, consciousness must be infinite in time and space. The first is certain if we understand that all time is time perceived by someone, but erroneous if we infer that this time must necessarily embrace an infinite number of centuries; the second is illicit, since Berkeley (Principles of Human Knowledge,116; Siris, 266) repeatedly denied the existence of an absolute space. Even more indecipherable is the error into which Schopenhauer falls (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, i) when he shows that for the idealists the world is a phenomenon of the brain; Berkeley, however, had written(Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, II): “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 this primary idea or brain itself?” The brain, in fact, is no less a part of the external world than is the constellation of the Centaur.

  Berkeley denied that there was an object behind our sense impressions; David Hume, that there was a subject behind the perception of changes. The former had denied the existence of matter, the latter denied the existence of spirit; the former had not wanted us to add to the succession of impressions the metaphysical notion of matter, the latter did not want us to add to the succession of mental states the metaphysical notion of self. So logical is this extension of Berkeley’s arguments that Berkeley himself had already foreseen it, as Alexander Campbell Fraser notes, and even tried to reject it by means of the Cartesian ergo sum. ”If your principles are valid, you your self are nothing more than a system of fluctuating ideas, unsustained by any substance, since it is as absurd to speak of a spiritual substance as it is of a material substance,” reasons Hylas, anticipating David Hume in the third and last of the Dialogues. Hume corroborates (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 6): “We are a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity. . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. . . The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.”

  Once the idealist argument is admitted, I see that it is possible ― perhaps inevitable ― to go further. For Berkeley, time is “the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings”(Principles of Human Knowledge, 98); for Hume, “a succession of indivisible moments” (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 2, 2). However, once matter and spirit ― which are continuities ― are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside each present moment. Let us take a moment of maximum simplicity: for example, that of Chuang Tzu’s dream (Herbert Allen Giles: Chuang Tzu, 1889). Chuang Tzu, some twenty-four centuries ago, dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he awoke, if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt he was a man. Let us not consider the awakening; let us consider the moment of the dream itself, or one of its moments. “I dreamt I was a butterfly flying through the air and knowing nothing of Chuang Tzu,” reads the ancient text. We shall never know if Chuang Tzu saw a garden over which he seemed to fly or a moving yellow triangle which no doubt was he, but we do know that the image was subjective, though furnished by his memory. The doctrine of psycho-physical parallelism would judge that the image must have been accompanied by some change in the dreamer’s nervous system; according to Berkeley, the body of Chuang Tzu did not exist at that moment, save as a perception in the mind of God. Hume simplifies even more what happened. According to him, the spirit of Chuang Tzu did not exist at that moment; only the colors of the dream and the certainty of being a butterfly existed. They existed as a momentary term in the “bundle or collection of perceptions” which, some four centuries before Christ, was the mind of Chuang Tzu; they existed as a term n in an infinite temporal series, between n-1 and n+1. There is no other reality, for idealism, than that of mental processes; adding an objective butterfly to the butterfly which is perceived seems a vain duplication; adding a self to these processes seems no less exorbitant. Idealism judges that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer or even a dream; it judges that speaking of objects and subjects is pure mythology. Now if each psychic state is self-sufficient, if linking it to a circumstance or to a self is an illicit and idle addition, with what right shall we then ascribe to it a place in time? Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly and during that dream he was not Chuang Tzu, but a butterfly. How, with space and self abolished, shall we link those moments to his waking moments and to the feudal period of Chinese history? This does not mean that we shall never know, even in an approximate fashion, the date of that dream; it means that the chronological fixing of an event, of an event in the universe, is alien and external to it. In China the dream of Chuang Tzu is proverbial; let us imagine that of its almost infinite readers, one dreams that he is a butterfly and then dreams that he is Chuang Tzu. Let us imagine that, by a not impossible stroke of chance, this dream reproduces point for point the master’s. Once this identity is postulated, it is fitting to ask: Are not these moments which coincide one and the same? Is not one repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the history of the world, to denounce that there is no such history?

  The denial of time involves two negations: the negation of the succession of the terms of a series, negation of the synchronism of the terms in two different series. In fact, if each term is absolute, its relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist. A state precedes another if it is known to be prior; a state of G is contemporary to a state of H if it is known to be contemporary. Contrary to what was declared by Schopenhauer59 in his table of fundamental truths (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, 4), each fraction of time does not simultaneously fill the whole of space; time is not ubiquitous. (Of course, at this stage in the argument, space no longer exists.)

  Meinong, in his theory of apprehension, admits the apprehension of imaginary objects: the fourth dimension, let us say, or the sensitive statue of Condillac or the hypothetical animal of Lotze or the square root of minus one. If the reasons I have indicated are valid, then matter, self, the external world, world history and our lives also belong to this same nebulous orb.

  Besides, the phrase “negation of time” is ambiguous. It can mean the eternity of Plato or Boethius and also the dilemmas of Sextus Empiricus. The latter (Adversus mathematicos, XI, 197) denies the existence of the past, that which already was, and the future, that which is not yet, and argues that the present is divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in such a case it would have no beginning to link it to the past nor end to link it to the future, nor even a middle, since what has no beginning or end can have no middle; neither is it divisible, for in such a case it would consist of a part that was and another that is not. Ergo, it does not exist, but since the past and the future do not exist either, time does not exist. F. H. Bradley rediscovers and improves this perplexity. He observes (Appearance and Reality, IV) that if the present is divisible in other presents, it is no less complicated than time itself, and if it is indivisible, time is a mere relation between intemporal things. Such reasoning, as can be seen, negates the parts in order then to negate the whole; I reject the whole in order to exalt each of the parts. Via the dialectics of Berkeley and Hume I have arrived at Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The form of the phenomenon of will . . . is really only t
he present, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. . . We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be the past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the top, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present. As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable” (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 54). A Buddhist treatise of the fifth century, the Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: “Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought” (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world annihilates itself and reappears six thousand five hundred million times a day and that all men are an illusion, vertiginously produced by a series of momentaneous and solitary men. “The being of a past moment of thought ― the Road to Purity tells us ― has lived, but does not live nor will it live. The being of a future moment will live, but has not lived nor does it live. The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived nor will it live” (op. cit., I, 407), a dictum which we may compare with the following of Plutarch (De E apud Delphos, 18): “The man of yesterday has died in that of today, that of today dies in that of tomorrow.”

  And yet, and yet. . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

  FOOTNOTE TO THE PROLOGUE

  There is no exposition of Buddhism that does not mention the Milinda Panha, an apologetic work of the second century, which relates a debate whose interlocutors are the king of Bactriana, Menander, and the monk Nagasena. The latter reasons that just as the king’s carriage is neither its wheels nor its body nor its axle nor its pole nor its yoke, neither is man his matter, form, impressions, ideas, instincts or consciousness. He is not the combination of these parts nor does he exist outside of them. . . After a controversy of many days, Menander (Milinda) is converted to the Buddhist faith.

  The Milinda Panha has been translated into English by Rhys Davids (Oxford, 1890-1894).

  —Translated by James E. Irby

  Epilogue

  As I corrected the proofs of this volume, I discovered two tendencies in these miscellaneous essays.

  The first tendency is to evaluate religious or philosophical ideas on the basis of their aesthetic worth and even for what is singular and marvelous about them. Perhaps this is an indication of a basic skepticism. The other tendency is to presuppose (and to verify) that the number of fables or metaphors of which men’s imagination is capable is limited, but that these few inventions can be all things for all men, like the Apostle.

  I should also like to take this opportunity to correct an error. In one essay I attributed to Bacon the thought that God composed two books: the world and the Sacred Scripture. Bacon was only repeating a scholastic commonplace; in St. Bonaventure’s Breviloquium — a thirteenth-century work—we read: creatura mundi est quasi quidam liber in quo legitur Trinitas. See Etienne Gilson: La philosophic au moyen age, pages 442, 464.

  J. L. B.

  Buenos Aires, June 25,1952

  Bonus Tracks

  The Simurgh and the Eagle

  Literarily speaking, what might be derived from the notion of a being composed of other beings, a bird, say, made up of birds?60 Thus formulated, the problem appears to allow for merely trivial, if not actively unpleasant, solutions. One might suppose its possibilities to have been exhausted by the multiply feathered, eyed, tongued, and eared “monstrum horrendum ingens” [vast, horrible monster] that personifies Fame (or Scandal or Rumor) in Book IV of the Aeneid, or that strange king made of men who occupies the frontispiece of the Leviathan, armed with sword and staff. Francis Bacon (Essays, 1625) praised the first of these images; Chaucer and Shakespeare imitated it; no one, today, considers it any better than the “beast Acheron” who, according to the fifty-odd manuscripts of the Visio Tundali, stores sinners in the roundness of its belly, where they are tormented by dogs, bears, lions, wolves, and vipers.

  In the abstract, the concept of a being composed of other beings does not appear promising: yet, in incredible fashion, one of the most memorable figures of Western literature, and another of Eastern literature, correspond to it. The purpose of this brief note is to describe these marvelous fictions, one conceived in Italy, the other in Nishapur.

  The first is in Canto XVIII of the Paradiso. In his journey through the concentric heavens, Dante observes a greater happiness in Beatrice’s eyes and greater power in her beauty, and realizes that they have ascended from the ruddy heaven of Mars to the heaven of Jupiter. In the broader arc of this sphere, where the light is white, celestial creatures sing and fly, successively forming the letters of the phrase diligite iustitiam and the shape of an eagle’s head, not copied from earthly eagles, of course, but directly manufactured by the Spirit. Then the whole of the eagle shines forth: it is composed of thousands of just kings. An unmistakable symbol of Empire, it speaks with a single voice, and says “I” rather than “we” (Paradiso XIX, 11). An ancient problem vexed Dante’s conscience: Is it not unjust of God to damn, for lack of faith, a man of exemplary life who was born on the bank of the Indus and could know nothing of Jesus? The Eagle answers with the obscurity appropriate to a divine revelation: it censures such foolhardy questioning, repeats that faith in the Redeemer is indispensable, and suggests that God may have instilled this faith in certain virtuous pagans. It avers that among the blessed are the Emperor Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan, the former having lived just after and the latter before the Cross.61 (Though resplendent in the fourteenth century, the Eagle’s appearance is less effective in the twentieth, which generally reserves glowing eagles and tall, fiery letters for commercial propaganda. Cf. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 1922.)

  That anyone has ever been able to surpass one of the great figures of the Commedia seems incredible, and rightly so: nevertheless, the feat has occurred. A century after Dante imagined the emblem of the Eagle, Farid al-Oin Attar, a Persian of the Sufi sect, conceived of the strange Simurgh (Thirty Birds), which implicitly encompasses and improves upon it. Farid al-Oin Attar was born in Nishapur,62 land of turquoises and swords. In Persian, Attar means “he who traffics in drugs.” In the Lives of the Poets, we read that such indeed was his trade. One afternoon, a dervish entered the apothecary’s shop, looked over its many jars and pillboxes, and began to weep. Attar, astonished and disturbed, begged him to leave. The dervish answered: “It costs me nothing to go, since I carry nothing with me. As for you, it will cost you greatly to say good-bye to the treasures I see here.” Attar’s heart went as cold as camphor. The dervish left, but the next morning, Attar abandoned his shop and the labors of this world.

  A pilgrim to Mecca, he crossed Egypt, Syria, Turkestan, and the north of India; on his return, he gave himself over to literary composition and the fervent contemplation of God. It is a fact of
some renown that he left behind twenty thousand distichs: his works are entitled The Book of the Nightingale, The Book of Adversity, The Book of Instruction, The Book of Mysteries, The Book of Divine Knowledge, The Lives of the Saints, The King and the Rose, A Declaration of Wonders, and the extraordinary Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr). In the last years of his life, which is said to have reached a span of one hundred and ten years, he renounced all worldly pleasures, including those of versification. He was put to death by the soldiers of Tule, son of Genghis Khan. The vast image I have alluded to is the basis oft he Mantiq al-Tayr, the plot of which is as follows: