Borges' philosophers

PalmIn his poems, Jorge Luis Borges reflects on time and its effects through the lens of Heraclitus, the Obscure. As the Ephesian philosopher said, we are like water flowing continuously in a river, water that is never the same, because the passage of time changes us and leads us toward our ultimate destiny, which is death. He also cites other pre-Socratic philosophers: Thales of Miletus, the Eleatics Parmenides and Zeno, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, and Democritus. Borges delves into the relationship between time and space through Parmenides and especially Zeno and the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. According to the Eleatics, time is made up of infinite, separable instants that translate into an equally infinite space. He is interested in Anaxagoras because he allows him to speak rationally about natural phenomena, such as day and night, and about night temporally following day. It refers to Thales' cosmogony, to the secret origin of the Earth that nourishes and the fire that devours all, and to water as the origin of all things. It specifically refers to Pythagoras, with metaphysical but also cosmogonic and legendary annotations. On the one hand, it highlights the Samos philosopher's vision of reality and his attunement to the universe filled with atoms that unite and divide in the void in a cyclical succession. It also echoes the custom attributed to Pythagoras of writing with his blood, as a sign of his personal commitment to the teachings he imparted. It thinks like an Eleatic when it writes that he "is not afraid, not even afraid of being afraid, nor afraid of being afraid of being afraid of infinity." It recalls the legend that attributes to Democritus the act of gouging out his eyes in order to think more clearly, to meditate, and not be led astray by the deception of the senses or the external world, and which symbolizes the Abderan philosopher's commitment to true knowledge.

He is obsessed with Socrates and his tragic death by drinking hemlock, because it reminds him of death itself and the serene way in which it was faced, to the point of dreaming of the taste of hemlock on the philosopher's tongue. He is struck by Socrates' acceptance of death and would give anything to have heard him examine the problem of immortality in the Platonic manner, with myths and reason.

Sum of abstraction and images

He interprets his poetry as the sum of abstraction and imagery, as intellectual poetry that closely resembles Plato's dialogues and the philosophies of Emerson and Unamuno. He recalls Platonic ideas as perfect models. He mentions Aristotle only in passing and without delving into any of his philosophy.

Of the Socratic schools, he prefers the Stoics, and among them Seneca, the Cordoban author of the Moral letters to LuciliHe attributes to Seneca the confirmation of the saying that "everything belongs to the worm." He praises Seneca's ability to recount events and evoke aesthetic emotions through language. He seems to share the Stoic conception of the cyclical nature of time.

He quotes the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus and his work, the Enneadswhere he combines Platonic philosophy with religious and metaphysical elements, developing the doctrine of archetypes, understood as eternal ideas or models that exist in the divine mind and that are one of the steps on the ladder of existence. He also mentions a later philosopher, Boethius, considered the last of the classical philosophers and the first of the medieval philosophers, and his work, the Consolation of Philosophyas an exemplary work of formal synthesis of prose and verse.

Medieval philosophy is present in his poems through the figures of Francis of Assisi and Saint Augustine, but he prefers philosophers of Protestant origin because they are more attentive to ethical and moral questions, although he accepts from Saint Augustine the idea that memory is frightening because it contains so much. He is familiar with William of Ockham's conception of time, one of the philosophers who marks the end of medieval philosophy with his nominalism and rejection of the universal ideas of the Scholastics, such as the subjective idea of time, entirely dependent on the subjects who perceive it. Naturally, he cites Occam's razor, a methodological principle that the philosopher formulated as follows: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily," meaning that when faced with different explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one should always be chosen and investigated first.

He quotes the modern philosophers Emerson and Montaigne, Bacon, De Quincy, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot, Heine, Hume, Hölderlin, Locke, Lafinur, Carlyle, and Berkeley. He enjoys reading Montaigne and Emerson. From Montaigne, he learns the need to defend oneself against one's own errors and prejudices; while he has a nightmare related to Emerson, about one of his books disappearing from the library and being lost in a dream, but above all, he enjoys his wisdom expressed through walks, and credits him with having invented intimate writing. As for Bacon, he recalls the distinction between the idols of the tribe, the marketplace, the cave, and the theater. He remembers the Naive He cites Voltaire and his final decision to abandon public life and seek happiness in private life and gardening, a practical activity equivalent to philosophy. He mentions Spinoza's pantheistic God and the infinite conception of substance and its attributes. From Diderot, he quotes the phrase, "You were already there before you entered, and when you leave, you won't know you've stayed," a parable that expresses a reflection on presence and time, suggesting that there is an existence prior to entering and an exit from which one doesn't recognize having left anything behind. He mentions David Hume to reinforce his conception of the circularity of time, but in reality, the Edinburgh philosopher doesn't establish any necessary link between the past and the future, since the future is entirely uncertain and unpredictable; it may resemble the past or not. He refers to Heine as "the fool, the fiery one, and the sad one" who contemplates the human and Jewish condition, as well as the nature and melody of implacable time. He speaks briefly of Carlyle and his belief that personal commitment to the execution of human works is paramount, since they are transient, ephemeral, and often flawed, but, conversely, the active attitude that makes them possible has great moral value.

Confusion between eve and dream

The poet feels the Cartesian confusion between eve and dream and the reading of two of the works: Discourse on Method and the Metaphysical MeditationsThis confusion of an eve, which is another dream, has poetic and vital effects; it does not leave him unscathed, but rather provokes an existential disquiet, since he sees in the dream the proximity of death, a death that occurs every night and that "is called sleep."

Borges argues that the essence of poetry is not found in the verses, but in the modification that readers bring about through multiple readings, an idea that brings him closer to Berkeley and his metaphysics, according to which material reality exists because it is perceived and has as its guarantee God himself who observes it.

Contemporary philosophers also have their place in the poems. Thus, he mentions Schopenhauer, Whitehead, and Russell. He thanks Schopenhauer for having contributed to clarifying the universe. Another philosopher he cites is Whitehead, known for stating that "Philosophy after Plato is footnotes." He finally remembers Russell's set theory linked to the barber paradox, which challenges the classical conception of sets and demonstrates that a set of all sets cannot exist.