Albrecht Durer, Melancholia, 1514. Eugene Delacroix, The Lion Hunt, 1854.
Borges, Heraclitus, and the River of Time Shlomy Mualem · 3 | P a g e concludes, furthermore, with...
Transcript of Borges, Heraclitus, and the River of Time Shlomy Mualem · 3 | P a g e concludes, furthermore, with...
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Borges, Heraclitus, and the River of Time
Shlomy Mualem
ABSTRACT1
This paper examines Borges’ view of time—the most important metaphysical
problem in his opinion. Regarding it as indecipherable and indefinable like all the
major metaphysical questions, it is governed in his works by Heraclitus’ metaphor of
the flowing river or enigmatic dictum that “we cannot enter the same river twice.”
Heraclitus’ fundamental philosophical principles of constant flux and the identity of
opposites illuminate the way in which Borges perceives time as both the perpetual
tide on which human existence is carried and the ontological inconceivable
“mysterious material” of all reality. In order to fully illuminate the aesthetical,
existential and philosophical aspects of Borges' reaction to Heraclitus' view of time,
special attention is given here to three Borgesian stories: "Funes the Memorious"
(1942), "The Immortal" (1947), and "the Aleph" (1945).
1 This paper was published in: Shlomy Mualem, Mazes and Amazements: Borges and Western
Philosophy, Oxford: Peter Lang, series: Hispanic studies: Culture and Ideas 76, 2017, chapter 5.
https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/62327
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Time is an essential problem. I mean that we cannot do without time. Our
consciousness continually passes from one state to another and that is
time: succession. I believe Henry Bergson said that time was the principal
problem of metaphysics. If that problem had been resolved, all others
would have been resolved. Happily, I don’t think there is any danger that
it will be resolved. Time will always leave us confused and uncertain. Like
Saint Augustine, we shall always be able to ask: “What is time? If you don’t
ask me I know; if you ask me I don’t know.” (OC, 4:199)
The undecipherable essence is one of the most striking tensions within Borges’
thought. Rather than pervading it with a dogmatic scepticism, however, it
prompts a ceaseless philosophical inquiry in the spirit of Socrates—or in Borges’
own words, the preservation of the intellectual instinct.2 We may thus perhaps
say that indefinity marks time as an essential metaphysical problem. This stance
casts a shadow over all Borges’ theoretical attempts to cope with the issue of
time. One of his most elaborate systematic philosophical arguments in this
regard is found in his essay “A New Refutation of Time” (1946). Herein, adducing
Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s empiricism, he uncompromisingly denies the
existence of the concept of time.
In the same breath, however, he also undermines the logical strictness of his
own argument, pronouncing it to be merely “the feeble artifice of an Argentine
lost in the maze of metaphysics” (1964a, 217) and promptly pointing out that the
title embodies what logicians refer to as a contradictio in adjecto—namely,
asserting that a refutation of time is new subjects it to time itself.3 The essay
2 For the Socratic principle of indefinity in Borges’ oeuvre, see: Shlomy Mualem, Borges and Plato: A
Game with Shifting Mirrors, Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2012, pp. 51–84. 3 This contradiction, he explains, reflects the fact that human language is “so saturated and animated by
time that it is quite possible there is not one statement in these pages which in some way does not
demand or invoke the idea of time” (ibid).
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concludes, furthermore, with a baroque blend of Socratic irony and gentle
Pessoan melancholia:
Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical
universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations … 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. (ibid, 233, 234)
The story “Feeling in Death,” which forms part of the second section of the essay,
also subverts the alleged refutation from another direction, this time via a quasi-
biographical event. Here, Borges describes a personal experience that was
a trifle too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational
and sentimental to be called a thought. … The easy thought ‘I am in the
eighteen-nineties’ ceased to be a few approximate words and was deepened
into a reality. I felt dead, I felt as an abstract spectator of the world; an
indefinite fear imbued with science, which is the best clarity of metaphysics. I
did not think that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time;
rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the
inconceivable word eternity. (ibid, 226).
Here, too, however, he is quick to caution that despite its lucidity, this “evidence”
is merely an emotional anecdote, time being “easily refutable in sense
experience” but “not so in the intellectual, from whose essence the concept of
succession seems inseparable” (ibid, 227).
Time being as impossible to decipher as to deny, we are left in Saint
Augustine’s vicious cycle of uncertainty. Borges nonetheless refuses to give up.
Like Socrates stinging the citizens of Athens into action like a gadfly a horse
(Apology 30e), he repeatedly bothers the enigma of time. Following the aporia of
philosophical inquiry, he restlessly addresses it via a metaphor that captured his
imagination—namely, time as a river.4
4 Numerous studies have examined Borges’ conception of time, a detailed survey being provided by:
Chen Kleinman, Time and the Fantastic in the works of Borges and David Shahar, Ph.D. dissertation,
Bar Ilan University, 2013, chapter 1. In light of Borges’ own theoretical approach, the present paper
addresses this subject from a unique perspective, focusing on Heraclitus’ pre-Socratic philosophy.
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What philosophical significance does this metaphor bear in Borges’ writing?
Borges frequently addresses the theoretical function of the metaphor as a
literary representation. In his youth and under the influence of the ULTRA
literary movement, he believed it to be the beating heart of literary creativity, the
poet’s role being to coin new and novel metaphors like Adam in the Garden of
Eden. Subsequently abandoning this Romantic notion as naïve and
acknowledging that “the quantity of fables or metaphor of which man’s
imagination is capable is limited” (1964a, 7–8), he then adopted the Platonic
view that all metaphors derive from five archetypal images: eyes/stars,
woman/flower, death/sleep, life/dream, and time/river.5 From this perspective,
the river/time metaphor constitutes an archetypal meta-metaphor that governs
all human images.
Maintaining that it was first coined by Heraclitus in Fragment B91: “No man
ever steps in the same river twice,” Borges discusses the way in which this
metaphor has imprinted itself on human imagination:
We feel as though we are carried by time, in other words, we’re inclined to
believe that we pass from the future to the past or from the past to the future.
But no specific moment exists at which we can say to time: “Stop! You’re so
beautiful!,” as Goethe tried to do [at the end of Faust]. The present moment
cannot be stopped. We are completely incapable of imagining the pure
present; it would be fruitless to try. The present moment is also partly in the
past and partly in the future. This seems to be one of time’s necessary
features. In our daily experience, time is always the same as Heraclitus’ river,
so that we are continually bound to this ancient image. It’s as though nothing
goes on and nothing has changed for us for centuries, since Heraclitus first
uttered his dictum. We are always Heraclitus looking at himself in the
reflection of the river and thinking that the river is not the same river because
the water is different, and also thinking that he is not the same Heraclitus
because he has already become someone else since he first entered the river.
5 For Borges’ understanding of metaphor in relation to the Platonic archetypes, see Mualem 2102, 85–
124.
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What I wish to say is that we are simultaneously both permanent and
temporary. In an essential way, we are something mysterious. (OC, 4:205)
Here, Borges expands Heraclitus’ metaphor, contending that it not only pervades
our imagination but also imposes itself on human thought. The ancient parable of
Heraclitus’ river is inescapable and ever-present, archetypal in nature, because it
so clearly represents the fundamental questions relating to time. Firstly, that of
the pure present: we are incapable of thinking about the present moment in and
of itself because in order to do so we would have to “freeze time.” Human
thought cannot achieve such a task because the present moment in and of itself,
as Borges elucidates in the continuation, is an abstraction. The question of the
pure present thus constitutes the inconceivable heart of the problem of time, or
as Kant would say time as “the thing in itself (das Ding an sich).”
Not being able to move outside time to freeze the pure present, we must relate
to time as succession—something that flows. The river provides us with a perfect
image of this notion.6 In Heraclitus’ metaphor, we also enter the river time and
gain, Borges further remarking that we are reflected in its waters. Over and
again, the point of entry connects the flow of time with the enigma of human
existence. Hereby, the flow is doubled, we ourselves become a flowing river,
perpetually changing and altering as we are borne on its current, since, as Borges
frequently states, we are “formed of the mysterious material” of which time is
created.
This illustrates the metaphysical problem of time in Borges’ thought in its full
translucence. The question of time is the only metaphysical issue so intimately
and essentially associated with human existence: we are (like) the river,
constantly changing yet remaining the same. The paradox of the flow of the
river/time is also the “sacred horror” (OC, 4:199) of the anomaly of human
identity, time and human personality both being governed by the strange logic of
personal identity, at the same time different and the same. The metaphysical
question of time is thus bound up with the existential identity of the existing-in-
6 In line with this, Borges remarks in his essay on time and John Donne: “I do not intend to pretend that
I know what time is (if it is indeed anything), but I do believe that the flow of time and time itself are
one and the same rather than two enigmas” (No pretendo saber qué cosa es el tiempo (ni siquiera si es
una “cosa”) pero adivino que el curso del tiempo y el tiempo son un solo misterio y no dos).
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time human subject. The intertwining of the metaphysical and existential finds
expression in the perfect picture in which, in Borges’ development of Heraclitus’
metaphor of the river, a person looks at his or her reflection that looks back at
him or herself back in the flowing water of the river. Borges skillfully blends the
metaphysical and existential issues in the second part of his poem “Heraclitus,”
published in In Praise of Darkness in 1969. The correspondence with the
concluding paragraph of “A New Refutation of Time” cited above is striking:
What weave is this
of will be, is, and was?
What river
lies under the Ganges?
What river has no source?
What river
drags along mythologies and swords?
Sleeping is useless.
Through the dream, through the desert,
through the cellar,
the river carries me, and I am the river.
I was made of delicate substance, mysterious time.
Perhaps the source is within me.
Perhaps the days emerge,
fatal and illusory,
from my shadow.7
For Borges, the philosophical problem of time thus consists of two aspects, one
overt, one covert. The former relates to the question of the flow of time and
human existence that creates the paradoxical logic of same/different identity.
The latter pertains to the inconceivable problem of the “mysterious material” of
which time is composed—the unthinkable pure present. Following in Borges’
7 Http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-borges.html.
(¿Qué trama es ésta del será, del es y del fue? ¿Qué río es éste por el cual corre el Ganges? ¿Qué río es
éste cuya fuente es inconcebible? ¿Qué río es éste que arrastra mitologías y espadas? Es inútil que
duerma. Corre en el sueño, en el desierto, en un sótano. El río me arrebata y soy ese río. De una materia
deleznable fui hecho, de misterioso tiempo. Acaso el manantial está en mí. Acaso de mi sombra surgen,
fatales e ilusorios, los días.)
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footsteps, we shall now seek to elucidate the philosophical traits of the
river/time conundrum as exemplified in Heraclitus’ thought, focusing in
particular on his enigmatic assertion that ““No man ever steps in the same river
twice.”
Borges’ attachment to Heraclitus’ Fragments is unsurprising given the literary
rhetoric of which both are so fond. The later Borges attributes great importance
to allusion (alusión), a device that directs the reader to read between and
beyond the lines, the hidden overshadowing the overt in literary linguistic
representation. Already in antiquity, Heraclitus’ abstruse writing and
impenetrable thought had gained him the epithet “Heraclitus the Obscure.”
Diogenes Laertius, for example, cites an epigram about Heraclitus’ lost book,
whose existence is only known from Aristotle and others: “Do not be in too great
a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to
travel. Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate [epoptes] be
your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight” (Lives of Eminent
Philosophers 1.16). Some of the ancients believed that Heraclitus deliberately
wrote in an obscure fashion in order to demonstrate his aristocratic superiority
over the uneducated masses (whom he dismissed at every possible opportunity),
only the very few thus being capable of understanding him. Not only does he
appear to be referring to himself when he writes of Apollo—“The Lord whose
oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign” (B93)—but both
allusions and concealment are central to his thought. As he asserts, “An
unapparent connection [harmonia] is stronger than an apparent one” (B54)
because “Nature loves to hide” (B123).
Although very few fragments of Heraclitus’ work have been preserved and
despite his abstruse religious-oracular rhetoric and obscure language, his
thought has exerted a great influence on Western philosophy. Aristotle, for
example, claims that in his youth Plato was close to the circle of Heraclitus’
disciples (Metaphysics 1.6, 29a987). At the heart of his philosophy lies the
principle of what I call “dynamic antithetical unity,” which takes the form of
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lightning-flashes of truth and wild, multilayered aphorisms.8 This principle
blends three separate elements: unity—i.e., the fact that ultimately everything is
a monistic entity; antithesis, which divides nature into polarities; and dynamism,
which expresses the eternal conflict of perpetual formation, all things necessarily
coming into being through an ongoing tension (B80). The paradoxical principle
is symbolized in Heraclitus’ writings by fire—a ceaseless, shapeless force that
consumes the combustible material that sustains it.9 Rather than positing a
chaotic or nihilistic reality, however, Heraclitus argues that this dynamic
antithetical unity forms the cornerstone of the hidden harmonia of nature—a
harmony in which “What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from
things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife” (B8).
Polarity and tension are therefore the external aspect of reality, harmony its
internal aspect. An inclusive and synoptic perspective allows the metaphysical
nature of reality as a whole to be intuitively understood by the genuine
philosopher.
The principle of bipolar antithesis is not unique to Heraclitus, of course. Greek
philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Aristotle is characterised by a dichotomous
perception of the world and the division of reality into binary opposites, the
Ionian and Milesian philosophers being prominent proponents of this view.
Heraclitus distinguishes himself from this tradition by his radicality, however.
For instance, while Empedocles argues that nature consists of a periodic cosmic
antithesis between unity and multiplicity—a sort of endless, cyclical shift
between tension and rest in which, as Plato indicates, “Sometimes … the all is one
and friendly, under the influence of Aphrodite, and sometimes many and at
variance with itself by reason of some sort of strife” (Sophist 242e–243a)—
Heraclitus refuses to sever the easy division created by the cyclical structure,
propounding that antithesis, change, and harmony are all one, the perpetual
state of opposition being self-justificatory due to the relentless, stormy
8 According to Heraclitus, language is not an arbitrary system of agreed-upon signs but rather expresses
the cosmic order in its very structure. His rhetoric is thus founded upon the principles of unity,
antithesis, and dynamic conflict. He may therefore be referring to himself when he says: “The
thunderbolt that steers all things” (B67). Thunder is not only the material expression of cosmic fire but
also the symbol of Zeus. Cf. Heidegger’s Augenblick concept. 9 This tension also takes other, surprising forms in Heraclitus, such as “God is day and night, winter
and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger” (B67) or “The way up and the way down is one and
the same” (B60).
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immanence that lies within the “rest by changing” (B84a). In other words,
Heraclitan antithesis is a perpetual, simultaneous metaphysical principle that
structures the world as always-in-formation. Anticipating Stoic philosophy, he
thus asserts: “This world's order [kosmos], which is the same for all, no one of
gods or men has made. But it always was, is, and will be: an ever-living Fire, with
measures of it kindling, and measures going out” (B30).
Heraclitus’ distinctiveness can also be adduced via a comparison with
Aristotle’s concept of antithesis. In the first book of the Metaphysics (1.5),
Aristotle draws up a systematic table of opposites, elsewhere distinguishing
conceptually between four types: those that are correlatives (e.g., half and
double), those that are contraries (e.g., good vs. evil); those that are privatives to
positives (e.g., sight and blindness), and those that are affirmatives to negatives
(e.g., wise and not-wise) (Categories 10). All these are grounded on the well-
known metaphysical distinction between ousia and contingency—the permanent
and essential or variable and accidental. The metaphysical constituting the
ontological essence of things, it thus comprises the Platonic idea in its
immanence. As such, it serves as the stable bedrock that carries the attributes of
contingent antitheses. Socrates (the solid substratum) can thus bear the
antithetical qualities (contingencies) of being pale or tanned; an object can
exhibit opposite qualities without losing its essential identity, wherein it remains
identical to itself. The metaphysical essence thus enables both the contingency of
opposites and the ontological stability of the inner substance (this coming to be
known in medieval thought as essencia).
While all the aspects of the principle of “dynamic antithetical unity” appear to
be manifest here, the two philosophers differ widely from one another. The
Aristotelian essence is the external foundation of change and opposites, lying
beyond them in its self-perfection—this exteriority being precisely that which
enables the ontological stability of the object. Heraclitus, however, denies any
possibility of an exteriority lying beyond the exclusive cosmic principle of
“dynamic antithetical unity.” In sharp contrast to Aristotle, the tension within
this principle forms the sole, irreplaceable metaphysical constant, from which
nothing deviates. Rather than the ontological-metaphysical bedrock of the
Aristotelian ousia, Heraclitus champions the singular, pre-ontological, and
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eternal principle of “dynamic antithetical unity” he identifies as the logos.
Hereby, the logos establishes the kosmos (cosmic order), phusis (the natural
order), and nomos (human order): “Graspings: things whole and not whole, what
is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and the
discordant. The one [logos] is made up of all things, and all things issue from the
one” (B10).
The core of Heraclitus’ radicality thus lies in the metaphysical universality of
his thought. The logos comprising the sole principle of reality but not being a
rational principle, it can only be presented as a metaphor—in allusive examples
or symbols. As we noted above, the central symbol of this principle is fire.10
Another dominant symbol is that of the flowing river, Simplicius’ expression
panta rhei— “everything flows” (Barnes 1986, 65)—unsurprisingly being
erroneously attributed to Heraclitus.
What is the significance of the Heraclitan symbol or metaphor of the river?
The image of a body of water in a powerful, ceaseless flow clearly represents the
paradox of dynamic antithetical unity. The identical-with-itself river symbolises
the unitary, stable element; the flow depicts the dynamic aspect of perpetual
change and formation; and the blending of the two opposites reflects the
antithetical unity. To our great fortune, Heraclitus’ three formulations of the
river symbol have been preserved:
On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow. (B12)
We both step and do not step in the same rivers. (B49a)
No man ever steps in the same river twice. (B91)
Entering a flowing river embodies several complex philosophical concepts.
Firstly, it represents the distinction between “river” and “water”—the principle
of unitary stability and dynamic formation. Secondly, although the person’s
10 It is tempting to compare the Heraclitan logos with the superposition principle of modern quantum
mechanics. According to this, the photon (the fundamental particle of light) is simultaneously both
wave and particle, in a sort of meta-state that embodies opposition, namely, the compound wave-
particle essence. Only after physical experimentation does the “functional collapse” occur, the photon
turning into either a wave or a particle. However, while quantum superposition is a type of blending of
binary opposites—particle and wave existing together but only in potential, Heraclitus’ logos posits the
dynamic existence of antithetical unity in actual and perpetual practice, at every moment without
ceasing, precisely like the formless, perpetually-changing fire.
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standing in the water constitutes a reference point that highlights the river’s
perpetual motion and changing nature, the person who enters the river does not
form a condition or constitutive factor of the river's essence. Thirdly, the
speaker’s perspective as an observer of the person who steps into the flowing
river captures the river’s antithetical unitary nature—namely, it serves as an
(immediate and inclusive) intuitive view of the embodiment of the Heraclitan
logos in nature.
As we noted above, Borges tends to expand the meaning of the symbol of the
Heraclitan river. For him, the flowing river is reflected in the flow-of-existence of
the person who stands in it or looks at him or herself in its waters. Sharing the
same “mysterious material,” both are simultaneously the same and different.
Likewise, while in Heraclitus’ thought the river symbolises the metaphysical
logos, in Borges’ it represents above all the enigma of time. Significantly, Borges
associates time with the logos of Heraclitan philosophy despite the Greek
philosopher’s abolishment of the parameter of time. If we look at the flowing
river from a temporal perspective, its waters are clear at one point, cloudy at
another cloudy. the Heraclitan tension of antithetical unity loses its weight when
spread across two separate time periods, all its force arising from a lack of any
temporal dimension—namely, a perception of the river as an entity that is at one
and the same time both the same and different.
In other words, Borges’ alternative view reformulates Heraclitus’ philosophy.
For the latter, no one can enter a river twice because, from an inclusive,
atemporal viewpoint of two occasions, the river is different and exactly the same.
In striking contrast to Borges, therefore, the Heraclitan logos is atemporal,
concurrent, or meta-temporal. While for Borges human beings form part of the
principle of the flow, Heraclitus regards human existence simply as the means by
which the river’s movement may be observed. Similarly, while for Borges the
river symbolises time (we are tempted to say: the Borgesian river is the meta-
temporal symbol of time), Heraclitus’ logos is predicated on atemporality.11
11 A close analysis of Heraclitus’ Fragments reveals that he only addresses the concept of time on a
single occasion: “Time is a child at play, moving pieces in a board game; the kingly power is a child’s”
(B52). This sentence has been the object of widely-varying interpretations, the debate revolving
primarily around whether “time” relates to human life or the cosmic order, the “child’s play” is random
or governed by rules, and the meaning of “kingly power.”
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Borges thus dissociates the metaphor of the river from its original philosophical
context, focusing on the (preeminently-modern) existential aspects of human
existence as becoming-within-time.
The distinctive nature of Heraclitus’ obscure thought can be further elucidated
by comparing it with his peers. Here, the most relevant figure are his outstanding
disciples Cratylus and Parmenides, the latter being regarded as his key sparring
partner. Cratylus’ work is sparsely attested, only a very few direct citations
having been preserved. Aristotle maintains that Plato was close to Cratylus in his
youth (Metaphysics 1.978a). Elsewhere, he more significantly notes:
This view [that nothing can be said of that which is changing in every respect
and guise] blossomed into the most extreme of the aforementioned beliefs,
that of the professed Heracliteans and Cratylus, who in the end thought that
one should not say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized
Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for
he thought it was not possible to do so even once. (Metaphysics 5.1010a10–
15)12
Cratylus’ silence appears to convey his belief that an essential disparity exists
between the inconstant principle of the logos and language as a stable sign
system, physical gestures rather than determinative words thus constituting the
only way to represent the flow of existence. Here, the negation of language is a
radicalization of the Heraclitan principle of dynamism. Cratylus also takes
Heraclitus’ dictum ad absurdum in denying that a river cannot even be entered
once, the person standing in it already being aware that the river flowing on all
sides is not the same river. Contra the Heraclitan paradox of identity, in which
the river is the same and not the same at one at the same time according to the
principle of the logos, Cratylus argues that the flow signifies that the river has no
self-identity at all. In other words, the tension deriving from the dynamic
antithetical unity that lies so firmly as the basis of Heraclitus’ own radical
thought collapses with a huge bang in that of his ultra-radical disciple. Herein,
12 In the greatest of ironies, Plato calls the dialogue discussing language (or the “veracity of names”)
after Cratylus. True to his philosophy, Cratylus remains silent herein, his views being indirectly
represented by his opponents Hermogenes and Socrates.
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the concepts of identity, language, thought, and logical distinction disappear
completely.
Active in Elea ca. the sixth century B.C.E. and conventionally identified as the
forefather of Western logic, some scholars even contend that philosophy begins
with Parmenides (rather than Plato or Aristotle). While the question of whether
he preceded or came after Heraclitus, as well as whether he refers directly to the
latter without mentioning him by name, is the subject of much scholarly debate,
he clearly adopted a completely opposite philosophical view to that of Heraclitus.
The only philosophical ode he wrote—a hexametric didactic poem—opens with
a description of a mystical revelation of divine truth imbued with an ontological
logic governed by the “way of the truth”—differentiation of the truth from the
illusion in which ignorant human beings are mired. Right at the onset,
Parmenides thus presents the only two “roads of inquiry there are to conceive:
The [first] one, that it is and that is not possible for it not to be … The other
[second road] that it is not and it ought not be” (On Nature 2.4–5).13 He thus
adduces a double polarity—ontological (in the form of a sharp division between
existence and non-existence or being and nothingness), and logical (truth vs.
falsehood).
Despite the fuzzy distinction between logic and mysticism in the first section
of the poem, Parmenides clearly lays out the three fundamental laws of logic that
have constituted the unshakable bedrock of the Western logocentric tradition :
non-contradiction (contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same
sense at the same time), identity (A = A: each thing is the same with itself and
different from another), and the excluded middle (for any proposition, either
that proposition is true or its negation is true). These principles lead via strict
reasoning and consistent certainty to the necessary identification of the four
traits of absolute existence. It is a) eternal, not being created or vanishing
(existence vs. becoming); b) whole, without any parts; c) static, motionless and
or incapable of movement; and d) perfect, lacking nothing.
13 Http://www.presocratics.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/Parmenides,%20Plato,%20and%20Mortal%20Philosophy_Writing%20Sampl
e%202_Translation.pdf.
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The negative language here is, of course, no accidental. Language being
regarded as an illusory instrument that creates the figment of the multiplicity of
the “world of appearances or phenomena” and incapable of expressing the
necessary absolute perfection of existence, we may only speak by way of the
negative. Anticipating the via negativa of Western philosophy and theology,
Parmenides summarizes his argument in metaphorical language: “[what-is] is
perfect, everywhere like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, from its center
equally balanced everywhere” (8.42–44).14
The disparity between Parmenides and Heraclitus—to whom Borges refers in
“Keat’ s nightingale” as archetypical, eternal rivals—is striking, the strict laws of
logic contrasting sharply with the obscure paradoxes of the logos. The law of
non-contradiction is the precise antithesis of the ideal of the unity of opposites,
the staticism of existence and negation of all motion clashing head on with the
principle of the perpetual movement of the Heraclitan river. While not directly
levelled at Heraclitus, Parmenides’ criticism of mortals also clearly reflects his
divergent attitude: “Breasts guides their wandering thought, and they are
carried, deaf and blind equally, bewildered, undiscerning tribes, for whom to be
and not to be are thought the same and not the same, and the path of all is back-
turning” (On Nature 6.6–9).
We have now identified how Heraclitus’ philosophy differs from that of
Parmenides and Cratylus. In logical terms, Heraclitus alone posits an
intermediate principle that bridges the strict Parmenidean law of identity (A =
A) and Cratylus’ negation of identity (~A). In ontological terms, Heraclitus takes
the via media between the absolute sphere of reality, so terrifying in its
perfection, and Cratylus’ absolute, undivided flow—between dogmatism and
nihilism. In rhetorical terms, he stands midway between the refusal to speak and
the stringent negation of language as an arbitrary system of signs that leads
inescapably to illusion.
In light of this philosophical analysis we can fully clarify at this point Borges’
(almost obsessive) attraction to the Heraclitan river symbol or metaphor. While
14 Borges adduces the metaphor of the absolute sphere and its history in human thought in his essay
“The Fearful Sphere of Pascal” (1951), concluding with a characteristically-unforgettable remark:
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors” (1964a: 171).
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Heraclitus relates here neither to the flow of time (referring, on the contrary, to
its atemporal and synchronic nature) nor to the enigma of human existence,
focusing rather on the logos as an all-embracing metaphysical principle, Borges
employs his metaphor to depict the perplexity of the “mysterious material” of
time and human existence as “being-within-time” from both a rhetorical and
philosophical perspective. Rhetorically, the picture of the person observing him
or herself in the flowing river sharply illustrates human existence within the
relentless linear progression of time that quietly flows within and without
human life. Philosophically, the river metaphor clearly manifests the tension
embedded in Heraclitus’ paradoxical logic (out of which proceeds the synergistic
blend of the principles of unity, antithesis, and dynamism) that exemplifies the
great metaphysical conundrums of reality.
As we remarked above, the heart of the metaphor of the river lies in the image
of a person standing in it and gazing at his reflection in the flowing water. In
Borges, this becomes the projection of the metaphysical question of time upon
the enigma of the human logic of identity and existence: “We ourselves are the
river, we ourselves ceaselessly flow” (OC, 4:199). This Borgesian orientation,
which stresses the existential, human perspective of the metaphysical question
suggests the possibility of understanding the philosophies of Cratylus,
Parmenides, and Heraclitus as representing three models of human existence in
his writings. In Cratylus’ absolute formative flow of the universe, human
existence is symbolized by the tragic fate of Ireneo Funes in “Funes the
Memorious.” Parmenides’ monstrously-static eternal existence shapes the
implacable fate of the immortals in “The Immortal.” Heraclitus’ river offers the
possibility of a mysterious form of existence within the changing flow of time and
subject to the paradoxical logic of identity of “being the same and not-the-same
as oneself”—an existence exemplified par excellence in “The Other.” Let us
analyze these stories in more detail.
One of the most well-known and discussed of Borges’ works, “Funes the
Memorious” (1942) describes the miserable fate of Ireneo Funes, an Uruguayan
yokel who becomes a sort of “precursor of the supermen, ‘a vernacular and rustic
Zarathustra’” (1964a, 65). He is known in his village for several eccentricities,
including the ability to remember people’s names and, like clockwork, give the
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precise time when asked. This affinity with time and memory becomes a
monstrous affliction, however, when Funes receives a blow to the head after
being thrown from a horse and loses consciousness. When he awakes, he is
aware that while he is completely paralysed physically he has undergone a
striking mental metamorphosis:
He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue-gray horse threw
him, he had been what all humans are: blind, deaf, addlebrained, absent-
minded. … For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked
without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost
everything. When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the
present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most
distant and trivial memories. Somewhat later he learned that he was
paralyzed. The fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (he felt) that his
immobility was a minimum price to pay. Now his perception and his memory
were infallible. (ibid, 68)
Following the accident, Funes’ sensory perception becomes absolute, enabling
him to discern every object in its finest detail. While at one glance ordinary
people see three glasses on a table, he saw “all the leaves and tendrils and fruit
that make up a grape vine.” All these also remained in his mind, clear and sharp.
“Each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations,” a
sense of time, place, perspective, and the particular light shining at the time:
He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of
April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks
on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of
the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho
uprising. (ibid, 68–69)
This absorbent, retentive capacity was complemented by an ability to
indiscriminately assimilate all the details of every object in the present and
inscribe them on his vast, boundless memory. He could thus reconstruct whole
days in their entirety—an act that naturally took precisely the same amount of
time as the original day. This left him unable to distinguish between reality, his
sensory perception of it, and the impression of it imprinted on his memory,
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however. He thus drily remarks that he has had more memories than all
mankind put together, his sleep being like “people’s waking hours,” and his
memory like a “garbage heap” (ibid, 69). His awareness of reality being total,
endless, and remorseless, his memory was marked by the same qualities.
In this state, Funes engages in intellectual games that only such a mind can
play. He invents a non-decimal numbering system in which each number is
represented by a personal name. Thus, for example, 713 is “Máximo Pérez.” He
likewise “projected an analogous language” to that proposed by Locke, which
impossibly granted every individual item its own name. He soon discarded this
idea, however, “because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous” (ibid). The
same name cannot be given to a thing that appears in various periods, diverse
states, and different perspectives:
Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog
embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him
that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same
name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). (ibid, 70)
His consciousness is thus nothing other than a chaotic mass of details that grew
exponentially—a meaningless universe or Hegelian “negative infinity.”
Funes’ is a miserable existence, inseparable from the raging storm of endless,
absolute becoming that collects every detail in its experience and memory.
Immersed in time and absolute existence, Funes strikingly embodies Cratylus’
philosophy. Just as the Greek philosopher moved his finger in place of speaking,
so for Funes the (decimal and alphabetic) languages of signs collapse into a
chaotic mass of personal names. In both cases, language as an abstract set of
symbols breaks down. Just as Cratylus argues that a person cannot even enter
the river once, his identity vanishing in perpetual becoming, so Funes cannot
separate his feelings, memories, and terrifying reality. All filtering mechanisms
that allow for the creation of a fixed identity in the midst of the ceaseless flow
have disappeared.
In his lecture on time, Borges observes (under the influence of Schopenhauer)
that “The totality of reality is impossible for us as human beings. We thus receive
everything—fortunately for us, only gradually” (OC, 4:200). While we live
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courtesy of systems that allow us to filter, engage in abstraction, and forget,
Funes drowns in the implacable flow of Cratylus’ absolute becoming—in the
panta rhei in which all identities dissolve. From the perspective of time, this way
of life is one of cruel, ceaseless awareness of the “sound and fury” (in
Shakespeare’s phrase) of the perpetual flow of time.15 It is thus no surprise that
poor Funes sometimes imagined himself “at the bottom of the river, rocked and
annihilated by the current” (1964a, 71). Borges sums up his tragic fate thus:
He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and
lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise
world. … no one, in their populous towers or their urgent avenues, has felt the
heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night
converged upon the hapless Ireneo, in his poor South American suburb. (ibid,
70)
The fate of the figures in “The Immortal” (1947) is a mirror-image of Funes’
engulfment by the river. Members of the Troglodyte tribe who searched for and
found a lake whose waters possess the capacity to turn mortals into immortals,
they come to a horrible end. The first evidence of this arises when the
protagonist reaches their palace. This strangely-wrought edifice gave him the
impression of “enormous antiquity … that of the atrocious,” attesting to the
craftsmanship of its immortal builders. Initially imagining the palace to be a
“fabrication of the gods,” upon investigating its deserted room he decides that
they must have died. He finally fixes on the idea that they must have been mad,
their creation being nothing other than “complexly senseless”:
A labyrinth is a structure compounded to confuse men; its architecture, rich in
symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored,
the architecture lacked any such finality. It abounded in dead-end corridors,
high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit,
incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards.
(1974a, 105–106)
15 Borges not distinguishing—here or elsewhere—between the total flow of time and the total
becoming of absolute reality, he appears to regard ontology and time as one and the same.
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In contrast to the labyrinth, which serves Borges as an image of the complexity of
an indecipherable order—a hyper-structure that symbolizes the universe
(Mualem 2012, 72-74)—the palace and City of the Immortals are chaotic,
completely incongruous constructions, and thus monstrous: “‘This City’ (I
thought) ‘is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the
midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way
even jeopardizes the stars’” (ibid, 107).
The protagonist is subsequently stunned to discover the inhabitants’ way of
life, the tribe appearing to him at first glance to be a bestial race “infantile in their
barbarity,” running around naked on the beach, degenerately language-less, and
indifferent to their fate. At length, however, he realizes that the terrifying city is
the centre of their project, symbolizing their comprehension that no vain
enterprise survives. This understanding—and the lethal apathy that
accompanies it—derive, in fact, from their awareness that they are immortal:
They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men.
Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but
also of all perversity, because of his infamy in the past or future. Thus, just as
in games of chance the odd and even numbers tend toward equilibrium, so
also wit and stolidity cancel out and correct each other … Seen in this manner,
all our acts are just, but they are also indifferent. (ibid, 110)
In a meta-temporal existence, the world becomes a system of just rewards that
balance one another out—a perfect atrophy that strips all acts of meaning.
Immortal existence lacking all purpose and significance, removing oneself from
the flow of time threatens to devoid the immortal world of all sense:
Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the
perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every
thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible
beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a
vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of
indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously
precarious. (ibid, 111)
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The Immortals’ senseless fate thus symbolises human existence in light of
Parmenidean philosophy. In an absolute ontology lying outside time—
motionless, perfect, and utterly static—human existence comprises a
meaningless object in an eternal museum, reducing all human acts to futility. Just
as in Greece, Parmenidean ontology instituted Zeno's nihilist paradoxes and the
radical skepticism of the Sophists, so in Borges the meta-temporal universe
induces apathy and decay amongst the Immortals. Temporality thus takes centre
stage, human existence outside the flow of time dissolving meaning and
paralyzing all activity.
These two modes of existence are destructive of human life. Cratylus’
perpetually-becoming universe incapable of filtering time determines the
suffocating fate of Ireneo Funes, while Parmenides’ meta-temporal ontology
condemns the Immortals to lethal apathy. Just as human existence cannot
survive outside time or in the midst of becoming, so too it is unsustainable
outside the river or at its bottom. The only remaining possibility is a Heraclitan
via media—existence within the linear flow of time and, consequently, the
paradox of being simultaneously the same and different.16
“The Other” (1969) is perhaps one of the best illustrations of human life
within the Heraclitan river of time. The plot is set in Cambridge, MA, in February
1969—which the “real” Borges visited when invited to deliver the Norton
Lectures at Harvard. One evening, the protagonist, called “Borges” sits on a bench
overlooking the Charles River, chunks of ice floating past him on its grey waters:
“Inevitably, the river made me think of time … Heraclitus’ ancient image.”17 At
the other end of the bench sits a young man:
I turned to the man and spoke.
“Are you Uruguayan or Argentine?”
“Argentine, but I’ve been living in Geneva since ‘14,” came the reply.
There was a long silence. Then I asked a second question.
“At number seventeen Malagnou, across the street from the Russian Orthodox
Church?”
16 Formulated logically, Parmenides’ meta-time only allows for the principle of identity, Cratylus’
nihilism for difference, Heraclitus’ logos blending the same and the other in a simultaneous paradox. 17 mypage.siu.edu/lemminkc/materials/borges_the-other.doc.
21 | P a g e
He nodded.
“In that case,” I resolutely said to him, “your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I too
am Jorge Luis Borges. We are in 1969, in the city of Cambridge.”
“No,” he answered in my own, slightly distant, voice, “I am here in Geneva, on
a bench, a few steps from the Rhône.”
Then, after a moment, he went on:
“It is odd that we look so much alike, but you are much older that I, and you
have gray hair.”
Here we encounter the doppelgänger that appears so frequently in Borges’ work,
which also raises the question of subjective identity. Here, the encounter is the
result of what we may call a “wrinkle in time”—when a certain point in the past
(ca. 1915) interfaces with a specific point in the present of the plot (1969). In
narrative terms, this creates the story’s fantastical aspect—i.e., the meta-
temporal’s penetration of reality. Logically, it produces what Hofstadter (2007)
calls the “strange loop”—a move in which something perceived as linear
becomes circular, a point in the past being identified with one in the present.
Above all, the fantastical crease sharpens the problem of the flow of time. For the
older Borges, the event occurs in the present, his young version slipping into this
from past. For the young Borges, it takes place in the present in Geneva on the
banks of the Rhône, his older counterpart implanting himself from the future.
The flow of time is geminated and duplicated. Becoming bidirectional, it moves
from the present to the past and from the present into the future by means a
fantastical effect whereby both exist at the same time. In other words, the
fantastical wrinkle in time generates a state in which time flows in two opposite
directions simultaneously.18
The bidirectional flow of time exacerbates both the enigma of time and the
mystery of human existence within time wherein subjectivity consists both of
18 According to Borges, “There are two theories of time. One, which appears to me to be accepted by
everyone, perceives time as a river. Time flows from a point of origin, an unknown originating point,
and gets to us. We also have another theory, formulated in the metaphysics of the British philosopher
Bradley. Bradley posits that what happens is precisely the opposite: that time flows in the reverse
direction, from the future to the present. That this moment in which the future becomes the past is the
moment we call the ‘present’” (OC, 4:202).
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identity and otherness. Borges the younger and Borges the older are both the
same and different at one and the same time. As the latter notes:
I realized that we would not find common ground. We were too different, yet
too alike. We could not deceive one another, and that makes conversation
hard. Each of us was almost a caricature of the other. The situation was too
unnatural to last much longer. There was no point in giving advice, no point in
arguing, because the young man’s inevitable fate was to be the man that I am
now.
Despite the wrinkle in time, this is not a multiverse composed of parallel yet
separate universes. Although it preserves the structure of linear past-present-
future time, the flow becomes bidirectional. The “strange loop,” too, occurs in a
singular framework that becomes circular. Subjective identity exhibits similar
characteristics, identity neither collapsing nor doubling, the fantastical
encounter rather highlighting an essential state in which we are the same and
different from ourselves with the passing of time. Here, Borges and Heraclitus
stand shoulder to shoulder, both dimensions—time and subjective identity—
reflecting the logic of identity of the Heraclitan logos and the principle of
dynamic antithetical unity.
From an all-encompassing view, Ireneo Funes, the Immortals, and Borges the
older’s position clearly presents the relationship of human existence to time. At
its height, temporality suffocates Funes, meta-temporality stripping both human
existence and time of their meaning. The third option of “being-within-time”—
the passing of time that perpetually constitutes the paradox of identity and
otherness—enables human beings to exist in a wondrous, fragile, meaningful,
and mysterious way, symbolised by the Heraclitan metaphor in which they gaze
into their image reflected in the waters of the river.
In Borges’ works, the Heraclitan logos that forms the mysterious structure of
time shapes not only human identity but also language, the writing and reading
processes, and the essence of books—everything Borges considers important. As
he himself notes in his Norton Lectures, expressions in classical Greek, such as
Homer’s “the dark-wine sea,” have become the staple of modern language, the
23 | P a g e
passing of time giving them new meaning and significance.19 The development of
language within time is exemplified in Borges’ well-known story “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote” (1939). Menard, a twentieth-century French intellectual,
undertakes the task of rewriting—verbatim— Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a
masterpiece written in Spanish in the seventeenth century. Although he gets
through several paragraphs, he quickly realizes that the rewritten text, which
corresponds word-for-word to the original, differs from it in some essential
sense. While textually indistinguishable, the fact that they were not composed at
the same period bestows upon the words a totally different meaning: “The text of
Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost
infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is
richness.)” (1974a, 51). When Cervantes wrote in the seventeenth century the
words “the truth, whose mother is history,” for example, they were a rhetorical
paean in praise of history. In Menard’s twentieth century’s text, however, they
indicate that historical truth is not what happens but what we think happened. In
Borges, this perspective, from which language and writing operate according to
the Heraclitan logos, also pervades the (virtually sacred) acts of reading and re-
reading, as well as the book that stands at the center of our modern “cult of
books.”
Addressing this issue in his lecture “On the Book” (1978), Borges
unsurprisingly refers to Heraclitus:
To take a book and open it—this act entails the possibility of the occurrence of
an aesthetic event (el hecho estético). What, after all, are the words we find in
books? What are these dead symbols? In and of themselves, they are
insignificant. For what is a book if it isn’t opened? It’s nothing more than
sheets of paper divided into pages; but when we read these pages, something
inestimable takes place, because the book, so I believe, changes every time.
Heraclitus said (I’ve gone back to this several times) that no one enters a river
twice—because the waters change as it flows but also because of the awful
fact that we flow no less than they do. Every time we read a book, it’s already
19 This view might correspond theoretically to the late Wittgenstein’s concept of the “language game.”
While Wittgenstein focuses on linguistic usage and grammar, however, Borges relates to time as the
sole parameter of linguistic change.
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different, and the relationship between the words is different. In addition to
that, books accumulate the past within them and are filled with it … if we read
an ancient book, it’s as though we’ve read all the time that’s passed from the
day it was written to our own days. So it’s very important that we preserve
the cult of books. (OC, 4:171)
The self, language, writing, reading, and the book coexist in time, all being shaped
by the principle of dynamic antithetical unity Borges attributes to time itself. In
each, time flows, passing from the past to the present and onto the future—or
vice versa. As the quote from Borges with which this chapter opens indicates, we
have to relate to the flow of time because we cannot think about time in its
purity, its “abstraction” eluding definition and conceptualization. The
fundamental question of time in and of itself—what Kant calls "the thing-in-
itself"— or the issue of its ontological essence has thus yet to be asked. Although
Borges addresses it indirectly, in the secondary, conceivable form of its flow, we
are still left wondering about the nature of the “mysterious material” that
comprises time.
Ontological-metaphysical in nature, this type of question goes beyond the
Heraclitan logos, corresponding more closely to the Parmenidean-Aristotelian
philosophical tradition. What is time in and of itself? In his lecture on time,
Borges propounds that the key to this issue is the secret of the present moment
(el momento presente):
How strange to think that of the three times with the help of which we divide
time itself—the past, the present, and the future—the hardest to crack, the
most elusive, is the present. The present is as truly elusive as the
[geometrical] undefined point. This is because when we try to imagine the
present without the dimension of abstraction (extención)—it does not exist
for us. We have to imagine that the present moment is divided between the
past and the future. In other words, we always feel the movement of time.
When I speak here about the movement of time, I mean something of which
we are all aware. But if I speak about the present moment in itself, I’m relating
to something abstract. The present moment isn’t an intuitive concept
immediately accessible to our minds. We feel as though we are carried by
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time, in other words, we’re inclined to believe that we pass from the future to
the past, or from the past to the future. But no specific moment exists at which
we can say to time: “Stop! You’re so beautiful!” as Goethe tried to do [at the
end of Faust]. The present moment can’t be arrested. We are completely
incapable of imagining the pure present; it would be fruitless to try. (OC,
4:204–295)
The innermost secret of time, the present moment that is identical to the
“mysterious material” of which time is composed, cannot be conceptualized. Is
Borges responding here to Kant’s call to remain solely within the boundaries of
the question “What I can know”? To the extent that he directly addresses the
problem of time, which points to the limitations of the human mind, the answer
to this is yes. In only indirectly alluding to it as a thing-in-itself, however, he is
not. The principal way in which Borges engages this most intricate and supreme
metaphysical issue of time (only once in his whole oeuvre, in fact) is via the
fantastical symbol—which, as Scholem observes, expresses the inexpressible.
This symbols stands at the heart of “The Aleph” (1945).
At first glance, this story has nothing to do with time. The protagonist, who
bears the name Borges, devotes himself to the memory of his dead beloved by
becoming pathologically fixated on her in death. In his faithfulness to her, he
develops an attachment towards her pompous uncle Carlos Argentino Daneri,
using this as a pretext for visiting her house and gazing at her portrait. Daneri
reveals to him the existence of a wondrous object in his basement—the Aleph.
Amongst the kabbalists and in Cantor’s mathematics, this symbolises infinity.20
As he describes it, it is “one of the points in space that contains all other points”:
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere
of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I
realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it
bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all
space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us
20 For the Aleph as representing the kabbalistic Ein Sof, see: Mualem, Shlomy. “Borges and
Kabbalistic Infinity: Ein Sof and the Holy Book.” Borges and the Bible, edited by Richard Walsh
and Jay Twomey. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015, 81–98.
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say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the
universe.21
The Aleph is a fantastical object, the supernatural penetrating reality. Logically, it
is an impossibility, firstly because the whole is included in the part—the whole
universe lying on one point of it—and secondly because the universe retains its
original size. The Aleph is thus represented as a spatial phenomenon and a
logical contradiction of the laws of physics. It must therefore be deciphered in
terms of the theory of space, perhaps constituting the symbol of the infinite
greatness of space condensed into one place.
Borges, however, chooses to open the story with a citation from Hobbes’
Leviathan (4.46) that points to a divergent interpretive direction: “But they will
teach us that Eternity is the Standing Still of the present. Time, a Nunc-stance (as
the school calls it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than
they would a Hic-stance for an infinite greatness of space.” Although the Aleph
represents Hic-stance—the infinite greatness of a point in time—it is also
analogous to the Nunc-stance: infinity as the present moment frozen. Here,
Borges draws an intriguing parallel between time and space. For him, the
concept of time is much more significant than that of space because, as
Schopenhauer asserts, while we can think of the universe without adducing any
spatial dimension (a space comprised wholly of music, for example) we cannot
do so without introducing a temporal dimension (OC, 4:198). In this analogy,
time overrides space, allowing us to perceive the Aleph as a fantastical spatial
symbol (Hic-stance) in its overt dimension and a temporal fantastical symbol
(Nunc-stance) in its covert dimension.22 It being impossible to directly imagine
or symbolise the stopping of time—time in and of itself—we can only grasp the
spatial end of the analogy. Hereby, Borges creates for us a fantastical symbol in
which space as a whole is embodied in one point.
This is indeed the vision the Aleph presents: all the phenomena of space and all
the infinite states of matter within it are observed simultaneously and
synoptically in one gaze and from every perspective. In simplistic terms, this is a
view of the universe in its entirety—what Wittgenstein calls in his Tractatus the
21 http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/borgesaleph.pdf. 22 Hic = here, nunc = now.
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perception of the universe as a limited-whole, sub specie aeterni.23 More
profoundly, it reveals something much rarer. In effect, the Aleph reflects all the
phenomena in the universe from every perspective as they exist in the present
moment. Rather than revealing something from the past or future—as Borges
imagines, for example, in Solomon’s wondrous mirror or the mirror of ink—it
constitutes the simultaneous representation of all the phenomena of the
universe that belong to the present moment.24 In other words, it provides us
with an indirect experience of the present moment in itself by showing—
comprehensively and simultaneously—what happens in it: the stopping of time
at this specific moment (Nunc-stance). Or put differently again, observation of
the universe in its entirety at the present moment, condensed into one point in
space, is tantamount to experiencing time that stops moving at the ungraspable
abstract point: the freezing of the present moment.25 Hereby, the Aleph
constitutes an implicit fantastical symbol of time as a thing-in-itself, the
unimaginable present moment that stops moving, the “mysterious material” of
the universe.
23 “The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The
feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling” (6.45). 24 See “The Chamber of Statues” (OC, 1: 337) and “The Mirror of Ink” (OC, 1: 342). 25 As Borges explains in “The History of Eternity,” this is the nominalistic concept of eternity, which
“seeks to gather up all the details of the universe in a single second” (OC, 1: 364).