The Philosophical Worlds of Borges

Ray Briggs
Is the world an illusion?

Josh Landy
Has every possible book already been written?

Ray Briggs
How do you turn those questions into the greatest short stories in the world?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today’s episode is generously sponsored by the Division of literatures, cultures and languages at Stanford. We’re thinking about the philosophical worlds of Jorge Luis Borges.

Josh Landy
You know, Ray, Borges is one of my favorite authors of all time.

Ray Briggs
Mine too. I just love those beautiful poems and those whimsical essays and those mind bending short stories.

Josh Landy
They’re so great. Like that amazing essay, “A New Refutation of Time.”

Ray Briggs
Right, that’s the essay where Borges proves that we don’t exist?

Josh Landy
Yeah, exactly. So he starts from an idea by this philosopher, George Berkeley: only minds actually exist. That’s what Berkeley thought. Nothing in the world around us is real, even your own body isn’t real. It’s all in your mind.

Ray Briggs
Right, and then Borges moves to the next step. So let’s say everything is in your mind. Who exactly is the “you” in that sentence?

Josh Landy
So I guess it’s your mind?

Ray Briggs
Well, I don’t believe that the mind is one thing, and I don’t think Borges believes that either. He quotes David Hume, who says that our minds are just a bundle of different perceptions which succeed one another with inconceivable rapidity. So even the self isn’t real. The only thing that’s real is thoughts progressing in time.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And it gets even worse, Borges says even time isn’t real, time is an illusion, too.

Ray Briggs
Classic Borges—he’s always pulling the rug out from under all of our assumptions. He’s really a thinker who questions everything.

Josh Landy
…except the short story!

Ray Briggs
Ha, and the arguments he gives in “A New Refutation of Time” are pretty good ones. He’s drawing from a bunch of philosophical sources, from Berkeley to the Buddhists. He really knows his stuff.

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s true, but it’s just—does Borges actually believe these arguments? The essay is called “A New Refutation of Time.” If time isn’t real, how can there be a new refutation?

Ray Briggs
Yeah. Plus, when he gets to the end, he just takes it all back. He writes, “And yet—and yet, denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. The world unfortunately is real. I unfortunately, am Borges.”

Josh Landy
I love that so much, but it does raise a question, what’s going on? Why does Borges spend 17 pages apparently proving something only to change his mind at the last moment?

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe he’s offering us different options and letting us make up our own minds when it comes to art, he did say, I don’t think ideas are important, right?

Josh Landy
Or maybe something else is going on here. Remember that thing you quoted from the last page of a new reputation of time denying the world in itself, our apparent desperations but secret consolation. So maybe Borges isn’t just interested in philosophical beliefs, he’s interested in how they make us feel.

Ray Briggs
Ah, I love that. So the story is less about the theory that everything is an illusion, and more about why anyone would believe that theory in the first place, like what makes people buy into bizarre philosophical worldviews? Why would you think you don’t exist? Who hurt you exactly?

Josh Landy
So maybe that’s what’s going on in Borges. Maybe he’s thinking about the psychological sources of our philosophical beliefs.

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe our guest will have some insight into all this. It’s Hector oyos, Professor of Iberian and Latin American cultures at Stanford University.

Josh Landy
But first, some of Borges stories depict a world of infinite information at your fingertips. So did Borges invent the internet? We sent our roving philosophical reporter, Sheryl Kaskowitz, to find out. She files this report.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
We’re listening to a guitar trio by the avant garde composer John Zorn. It’s called “Circular Ruins” from his recent album “A Garden of Forking Paths.” The song and the album both get their titles and their inspiration from stories by Jorge Luis Borges. This is just one example of the way Borges mythical worlds have continued to resonate with musicians, writers, filmmakers and others. But in our 21st century, world ruled by technology, some of Borges’ allegories about infinite knowledge have come to seem more like reality than fiction. In 2008 a New York Times review noted that Borges “uniquely bizarrely prefigured the World Wide Web.” Books with titles like “Borges 2.0” and “Cy-Borges” positioned him as somehow foretelling our future entanglements with technology. Borges was born in 1899 when the invention of the linotype machine had just begun to revolutionize the spread of information. He lived until 1986 during the rise of the home computer, but at least a decade before the internet age, yet his imagination conjured worlds that can feel remarkably familiar to the modern reader.

Andrés Porras Chaves
Somehow, Borges was talking about certain motifs that belonged to myth or that belonged to philosophy at the time, and those things have become very real today.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s Andrsé Porras Chavez. He’s a professor of humanities at I.E. University in Spain, and he’s been thinking a lot about this connection between Borges writing from the 1940s and our 21st century reality. “The Library of Babel” is a classic example. It imagines an infinite library of books with no meaning. Instead, they contain every possible combination of letter and punctuation in the Latin alphabet.

Andrés Porras Chaves
What Borges conceived in the early 1940s as a philosophical short story about humanity’s impossible pursuit of knowledge now becomes a metaphor for the internet. We have a massive amount of content constantly expanding, and we are just as lost as the librarians of Babel were.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Or take another story called “The Aleph.”

Andrés Porras Chaves
is a tiny object that contains the entire universe and allows you to move around the world. Now we all have a smartphone in our pockets with which we can watch videos from all over the world, or we can travel using Street View, for example. And these are obviously trivial examples of greater ideas. But there is something very powerful in an author having explored all of these topics almost a century ago,

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Chaves points out that Borges also seems to have anticipated our current techno frontier beyond the infinity of the internet.

Funes
Funes the Memorious, a story by Jorge Luis Borges,.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Artificial intelligence.

Funes
I remember him (I have no right to utter this sacred verb).

Sheryl Kaskowitz
The story “Funes the Memorious” from 1944 imagined someone with a supernatural ability to remember everything. He has to invent his own language because his is not precise enough.

Speaker 1
I remember, I think, his angular, leather-braiding hands.

Andrés Porras Chaves
I found it very surprising that the way that Funes language worked is exactly the same way that algorithm based AI works.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Funes assigns every number its own word. AI that generates text follows the same idea, but going the other direction.

Andrés Porras Chaves
We are seeing words popping up on the screen, but what is actually happening behind the curtains is a very complicated sequence of numbers.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
I asked Chaves what he thinks Borges would have made of 21st century technology.

Andrés Porras Chaves
I think Borges would have probably been a techno skeptic. The stories that I have connected with AI and digital technologies, one thing they have in common is that their endings are typically tragic.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
The Librarians of Babel waste their lives looking for a book they’ll never find. Funes the Memorious is completely alone because no one can understand his language. The Aleph, the tiny sphere that contains the entire universe, is destroyed.

Andrés Porras Chaves
I think these stories point to a certain idea that human limitations, the human flaws, are somehow virtuous, that it’s a good thing that human beings are not capable of remembering everything, that in a certain way, it’s a good thing that we do not always have access to all of the information that we need, or to all of the texts that could possibly be written in history.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
In Borges ‘story, Funes admits…

Funes
My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap. A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
It’s almost as if Borges was anticipating some of our own ambivalence about today’s technology. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that lovely report. Cheryl, circular ruins, garden of forking paths, funest, some of my favorite Borges stories. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the philosophical worlds of Borges.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Hector Hoyos. He’s professor of Iberian and Latin American cultures at Stanford University, and author of “Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel.” Hector, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Héctor Hoyos
Thanks for having me, Ray and Josh.

Josh Landy
So Hector, you’ve been teaching and writing about Borges for many years now, but how does he figure in your everyday life?

Héctor Hoyos
Well, Josh, whenever I encounter an intractable problem, Borges reminds me that it is intractable, and at the same time gives me lots of consolation.

Ray Briggs
That’s great. So maybe you can give us some consolation or some kind of help. Earlier, Josh and I were trying to figure out what’s going on in Borges story, a new refutation of time. Does he believe he’s refuted time, or does he not believe that?

Héctor Hoyos
He believes until the last paragraph, and then he changes his mind out of desperation. So let me ask you, are you familiar with the experience going down the rabbit hole? I mean, is there a literary reference there?

Ray Briggs
Oh, it’s from Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

Héctor Hoyos
And Lewis Carroll would be a kindred soul to Jorge Luis Borges. And so I think that he makes going down the rabbit hole his personal ethos. That’s what moves him, and in this case, that would be philosophical rabbit holes. So you know, why stop there at an example? If you’re a philosopher and you provide an example, why stop at the example? Why not make it the cornerstone of a story and just run with it. I’m just changing idioms there to convey the kind of like endless recursiveness You’ll see in Borges, the risk taking the pleasure of just staying with the philosophical challenge as challenge, not as a solution. You don’t have to rush to the solution. That’s that’s not what he does.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, actually, I want to ask about the challenge that Borges is posing, because I think for his argument is progressing in stages. So I just wanted to ask about the first stage, where he argues that, like, the world outside of our mind doesn’t exist. Like, that doesn’t get us all the way to refuting time yet. But, like, why is that step compelling?

Héctor Hoyos
I think it’s compelling on two levels. One is we can think it, and therefore we should, right, if we can think it, let’s, let’s go with it. But then the other level is the beauty of it, the enjoying, the perplexity, the moment when you’re confronted with, there’s no evidence, truly, that you are not a brain in a vat as a you know, different tradition would put it, there’s just no evidence. And so that’s the starting point, but it’s not the end point, and it’s hard to pinpoint the moment. There are stages in refutations of time, but what takes you from one stage to the next? And when might we encounter what is known as a non sequitur, meaning that the argument does not follow, even though, narratively, you do follow, you do want to keep on reading, but you’re not sure if that step was kosher.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s interesting, because for the purposes of the show, I was trying to make it all lie flat, right? So I sort of was reading this essay as three stages, where, first we demonstrate that the world outside is an illusion created by the mind, then we show that the mind is, in fact, a kind of illusion, or at least the unitary mind is an illusion, because all we are is just a bundle of impressions, of hopes, desires, fears, beliefs and such like that are constantly changing, And they’re changing in time. So that brings us to stage three, which is time is illusion two. And so the whole thing just goes up in a puff of smoke. Am I misreading the essay and thinking that that’s kind of the logic

Héctor Hoyos
You are not, but you are reading it in English, I have to say, meaning that you’re translating this as in the mind. And as we know, you know, in English, we like that word a lot. In other traditions, we don’t use it as much. We use the I as in the pronoun I am, you are, right? And so when you think of it in terms of the I, just grammatically, it flows a lot better, right? That the I doesn’t exist. The eye is this entity? Perhaps it has all of these perceptions, but it’s not a mind. Mind. I mean, it’s easy to think of the mind and assimilate it with a brain, and so the argument becomes a little more structured that way. But you also miss out on the drift in Borges working with the eye rather than the mind.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Borges and philosophy with Hector oyos from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Have you ever thought about writing a book with all the information that’s out there? How do you find something original to say, and how do you locate the ideas that you’re looking for?

Josh Landy
The alphabet of the infinite—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues?

Elvis Costello
I’m giving you a longing look, everyday Iwrite the book.

Speaker 2
What if the book He writes every day has already been written? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Héctor Hoyos
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the philosophical worlds of Jorge Luis Borges with Hector Hoyos from Stanford University. Special thanks to the Stanford division of literatures, cultures and languages for sponsoring today’s episode..

Got questions about this mind-bending writer? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or comment on our website, and while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and bend your mind in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

So Hector, we’ve been talking about Borges essay “A New Refutation of Time,” and how he kind of takes everything back that he seemed to argue at the end. And so there’s a kind of beautiful quote from the end that I want to ask you about. He writes, time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river. It is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger. It is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. What do you make of that?

You know how when you know children don’t want to eat vegetables, sometimes vegetables get put into their lasagna. These are the vegetables. These are very nutritious vegetables and and this, friends, is a poem. It’s a it’s a prose poem, and it’s kind of like just hidden in between the philosophical argument. That’s the kind of thing that that Borges does, and I do think it’s really beautiful, also, because he has written about tigers, and he has thought about Tigers since he was 14 years old, we have a drawing of Borges of a little tiger, and then when he encountered Blake’s Tiger, he was elated. And so after we have this abstract, confusing, purposefully confusing rumination about time, we go into this lyrical mode, and it compounds with the previous more philosophical, more essayistic prose in the same text, which I’m not calling a short story, because it’s not a short story I hesitate even to call an essay. What is it? Right? It’s it’s quite special, and I wanted to bring a quote from a different short story. It’s called Plon oop, bar Orbis Tertius, that might be helpful for us to try and decide or elucidate what Borges is doing with philosophy. The quote reads as follows In English, the metaphysicians of Plon do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judged that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. So that what Boris is doing, I think, to a good extent, it is. I think he thinks that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. I mean, we shouldn’t ascribe to an author what one of their characters possibly say and so on. But what if? What if it were? But also note that the original where it says the metaphysicians, says los metaphysicals. And if you are metaphysical, that means that you are a scholar of metaphysics, or it means that you yourself are metaphysical, and that is an interesting thing, not real, exactly. La somdru and so that can be perplexity. It can also be all as in reverential fear. So there’s something borderline religious going on there, too.

Ray Briggs
That’s fascinating. I want to shift gears now to talk about yet another story of Borges, the Library of Babel.

Josh Landy
Well, I love that one so much. So that’s the story where Borges imagines a gigantic library filled with an astronomical number of books. I haven’t done the calculation, but there’s a lot, and every single possible book is in there, right? Every every permutation of the letters of the office. So Plato’s dialogs are in there. The Lincoln Douglas debates are in there. The Upanishads are in there. Everything’s in there.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, Josh, presumably my books are in there too, yeah. And the transcript of this conversation, I don’t know about you, but I actually find that kind of depressing. If my books already existed, what was the point of me spending years and years painstakingly composing them?

Josh Landy
I get that. But wouldn’t you also be a bit excited. Ray, I mean, you know, if everything’s in there, then there’s Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy, all the scrolls that burn in Alexandria, the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything, all you have to do is find it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, good luck with that. Josh, the number of books would be like 10 to the power 2 million, and a lot of them are just filled with unintelligible nonsense. You’re such a down array. Well, what do you think Hector is the Library of Babel great? Or is it kind of depressing?

Héctor Hoyos
It is definitely depressing, but that’s why we love it, right? I mean, we monsters read horrible things and then spend, you know, an eternity enjoying them. You know, this conversation makes me think about a website that wants to swallow the entire internet, and the name of this website is Wikipedia. How is Wikipedia ultimately different from the internet? Isn’t Wikipedia trying to contain everything that there is, and many people are contributing. So, you know, Borges encounters the beta version of Wikipedia, namely, the encyclopedia. This undertaking by many minds that wanted to have a book, series of volumes that contained the universe. And again, he goes down the rabbit hole and doesn’t stop there. So what happens if there is such a thing, not a website, not an encyclopedia, a library in this case, but again, it contains the universe, as the encyclopedists aspire to.

Ray Briggs
I have a distinction that I feel like is important, but I don’t know if Borges feels like it’s important, which is that Wikipedia kind of aims to tell the truth about things, and you need citations, and you get kind of people auditing each other. And encyclopedias are also trying to tell the truth, but the Library of Babel just has every possible thing you could write, whether it’s true or not. So I’m like, less disturbed by Wikipedia, because at least it’s trying to represent something outside itself.

Héctor Hoyos
But what happens if we let Wikipedia to its own devices for a while and come back and check in, say, 2000 years, what will have become of Wikipedia or in a different connection here, mental connection. This is the kind of thing that Borges does to you. We cannot really know how the weather is going to be like in three weeks. It’s just too chaotic. It’s too complex. They have a eyes working on it. But you know, weather, just like recombines by itself. I’m mentioning all this seemingly random connections because there’s something that happens when you add eternity and time to knowledge. Things happen. So for instance, we read in the Library of Babel. He showed his find to a wandering decoder, who told him the lines were written Portuguese. Others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established a samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani with classical Arabian inflections. I hope our listeners have time to laugh out loud at the possibility of a dialect of Guarani. Okay, that’s with Arabian inflections. But not only that, it’s also Lithuanian and samuetic. So you leave Wikipedia by itself, and like this very complex climate model, it’s unpredictable. Things happen, things recombine. And so your books Ray will be rewritten in another language. They will be combined in a different way if you just wait for, say, 3000 or 4000 years, let’s say.

Ray Briggs
This kind of reminds me of of the thing about New refutation of time, where you’re just trying to capture a feeling. And also this other story you mentioned tlan Akbar orpus tercius, which has a universe where, like, there’s not a world outside our perceptions that we’re trying to keep track of, just like the world modifies itself to fit our perceptions. I find that. Kind of upsetting as a kind of thing to really believe about the universe. And sometimes I wonder whether Borges believes it that he just is not interested in sort of accurately representing a thing outside of yourself. Am I wrong to find this kind of disturbing?

Héctor Hoyos
No, I find it disturbing too. It has to do with accuracy. How much can we trust accuracy, that accuracy is possible, attainable. Some readers of Borges the so called post moderns, right, people who are a little bit skeptical about the possibilities of reason, will cite Borges as a bit of a demonstration that when you try to say the truth, sometimes the opposite of the truth is also spoken alongside the truth, and you cannot get out of such conundrums or dialectics or paradoxes that there’s something paradoxical about knowledge writ large. I mean, that’s a bit of a maximalist reading of Borges. And Borges is read from many different traditions, but it does make you wonder, you know, how much can we rely on our senses? How much can we rely on our intellect?

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges with Hector Hoyos from Stanford University. So that’s a really interesting reading of Borges that more or less takes the claim seriously, right, the kind of skeptical or anti realist side of Borges. But what about the part? To go back to what you were saying earlier, about the metaphysics course, what about the part that is going down rabbit holes, trying things out and seeing how they feel? If we think back to the Library of Babel, there’s quite a lot of talk in there about feeling, about the way in which people respond to the existence of this insanely large library where everything’s already been written, where at first, people are very excited, right? Because they realized there was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist somewhere in the library, and the universe was justified, because there’s going to be a book that explains why everything is the way it is and even your own personal existence. There’s a book just about you explaining why you exist. But this is followed by depression. People realize they’ll never find their book because they’re too many. And even more demoralizing, the certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms, and the narrator himself gets all demoralized because he says, even this essay that I’m writing now has been written and so has its reputation. So can you talk a little bit more about Borges interest in reactions, moral reactions, emotional reactions to these philosophical ideas, what’s going on with that?

Héctor Hoyos
So let’s imagine a different text so where someone tells you you cannot understand what’s going on. You are small. Your intellect is imperfect. Your senses are not reliable. Trust in Me and I am a king or I am a God, trust in me, and everything is going to be okay. Now this other person is saying, try you’ll fail. Try again. You’ll fail better. That’s a connection to a different author of this house, right? And at the end of the day, you’re going to arrive to shrug in your shoulders. And this is an ethical gift. The ethical gift is you go through the same wilderness of not having a God, not making sense of the world, but you arrive at the moment of shrugging your shoulders and carrying on, and that is Borges ethical gift to us as readers. In my reading, I mean, that’s that there. I’m editorializing plenty.

Ray Briggs
So Hector, I want to ask about another Borges story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. So in that story, Borges imagines a 19th century French guy called Pierre Menard who decides to rewrite Don Quixote?

Josh Landy
Yeah, and he’s not copying the Quixote, and he’s not memorizing the Quixote, he’s somehow redoing it from first principles.

Ray Briggs
It’s kind of a hilarious premise, and it raises this question, how much do authors matter? Don Quixote was written by Cervantes, but it could have been written by Menard, who really cares?

Josh Landy
Yeah, exactly. And at the end of the story, the narrator says, how much fun we can have with works of fiction, as long as we don’t pay too much attention to whose name is on the cover. Read the Odyssey as though it were written by Virgil. Go nuts.

Ray Briggs
You can see why the post modernists love Borges. Death to the author!

Josh Landy
True. But yet again, this story has a sting in the tail. It tells us that Menard’s book is different from Cervantes’ book.

Ray Briggs
And if the author doesn’t matter, why does the narrator of the story spend so much time explaining minars intention?

Josh Landy
So wait, do authors matter after all? What’s the deal, Hector?

Héctor Hoyos
Right, the word author. Sounds a lot like authenticity. Are they, in a sense, the same word? So if, if they are the same word, maybe this has to do with identity more broadly. So seems like the author is a special case of the problem of identity, and that’s a big philosophical question for us in Philosophy Talk, right? Is something identical to itself? So imagine an apple by a window. There’s sun coming through the window. There’s an apple. Now imagine the apple in the car. You left it there in the gloves compartment. Question, is it the same apple? So short answer is, sure, you’re telling me it’s the same Apple. I’m telling you, no, I’ll tell you, there’s one by the window right. There’s another one right in the gloves compartment.

Ray Briggs
So, yeah, I actually have an argument that it can’t be the same Apple. Yes, great. Carry on. So nothing can have and not have a property at the same time. Like, if one thing has a property and another thing doesn’t have that property that proves that they’re different. So the apple that’s by the window is not in the glove compartment, but the apple that’s in the glove compartment is in the glove compartment. So they can’t be the same thing because they have different characteristics. But if it was the same thing, it would have to have the same characteristics.

Héctor Hoyos
So here are the characteristics, Ray. They weigh the same. They have the same color. If you were to bite them, they would taste exactly the same. If someone was selling them to you at a store, it would cost the same. Okay, so I’m citing this roundabout example because it depends how you think about identity. And to use a bit of a mouthful, you can talk about relational ontology, right? So is it always about the object? Is the object plucked from its context? Or is the context somehow important when thinking about whether something is identical to another or not? So when we think about an author, is it the same thing to invoke Cervantes in France in the 19th century as it is to invoke Cervantes in the present, right? So as a smaller case of the problem of identity, is an author identical to itself? Is an apple identical to itself? Why are we parceling out, you know, the apple from the context, or, again, the author from its surroundings?

Josh Landy
But you could, you could take the surroundings into consideration while still caring about authors. So the suggestion at the end of the story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is that we basically set the author aside and just sort of do with text whatever we want, right? So, you know, read Madame Bovary as though it was written by Toni Morrison or whatever. Anachronism is wonderful. Forget the author. But what I love about this story is that there’s so much in it that plays against that, for example, a mention of Pierre Minard being ironic in some of his texts, he deliberately says things he doesn’t mean, and he has this whole little joke with his friend Paul Valery, another writer, where he writes kind of ironic attack on Valerie, but they’re friends, and Valerie understands he’s not really being attacked. Well, look that. What that means is Valerie takes the author into consideration, right? He doesn’t just read the words and say, Oh, my God, I’m being attacked. He looks at the name on the cover and he says, Oh, that’s my friend who loves being ironic. And so it’s a really interesting game that Borges is playing, I think, in this story where he sort of pretends, or he has a character, he creates a narrator of the story who seems to be in favor of ditching authors, but that can’t be his actual belief.

Héctor Hoyos
You know, a cornerstone of Western philosophy is this idea that you have a third possibility being excluded, meaning something is either p or not p, but those are your two options, you are or you are not. And Borges, I’m afraid, does play with the third possibility, that you can have something that is P, not p, and whatever you know the alternative is so authors do matter. For Borges, also, authors, at some moment are relative, and you can have to somehow hold those two contradictory truths in your mind at the same time, there’s a build up. It’s about suspense, and part of what you are suspending is, you know that cornerstone of Western philosophy that things have to be one or the other.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the philosophical worlds of Jorge Luis Borges with Hector o from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Do you read short stories? Are they just for fun, or do they help you understand the world around you? Should they challenge your philosophical assumptions

Josh Landy
Infinity, eternity and identity—plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Monotones
I wonder, wonder, wonder who wrote the book of live.

Josh Landy
Does it matter who wrote the book of love, or any other book for that matter. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Hector oyos from Stanford University, and we’re thinking about Jorge Luis Borges for an episode generously sponsored by the Stanford division of literatures, cultures and languages.

Josh Landy
So Hector, we’ve got a question from one of our listeners on Facebook. It’s Brian, and Brian lists six things. He says it’d be great to discuss. One, infinity and eternity. Two, identity in the self. Three, time and temporality. Four, reality and illusion. Five, the infinite, regressive knowledge and six, labyrinths and paradoxes. Can you pick one thing from this list that you feel like we haven’t talked about yet and that we should?

Héctor Hoyos
Let’s go with labyrinths.

Josh Landy
Excellent.

Héctor Hoyos
Laberinto, no habra nunca. Una puerta estas a dentro here al casar a Barca el universo ino tiene ni amver So ni Reverso, ni external Muro ni secreto centro. I’m reading what it’s not really a stanza. It’s there’s no Stanfords in this poem. The poem is called Labyrinth. Here is the English rendition. There will never be a door you’re inside. And the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse, not reverse, nor circling wall, nor secret Center. This is a translation by Norma Thomas, Thomas di Giovanni, to answer our listeners question, what if the point of going into a labyrinth is not coming out of there, but getting lost. What if that is the point, and somehow it is both, right? I mean, we want to come out eventually, but there’s different ways of arriving from point A than point B, than to traverse a labyrinth. And that kind of paradox, it really becomes emblematic of Borges. You go into the labyrinth, both to come out on the other end, maybe a change person, but to get lost, and that’s maybe one answer.

Josh Landy
So Borges is telling us to get lost, quite literally,

Héctor Hoyos
And enjoy the process. Not only that, to get lost, but enjoy the process. And you know what this connects to an earlier moment in our conversation, how I encounter Borges in daily life and the bit about intractable problems. It is actually true. You know, if you need to sit with a problem, I would recommend going and read Borges. I don’t want to, you know, boil it down to self help, but there is an aspect to reading Borges that allows you to sit with contradiction. It’s therapeutic. It is therapeutic. I find it therapeutic. We rush into conclusions. We want certainty, and sometimes what we need is to dwell in uncertainty.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask about the kind of specifically like philosophical and argumentative parts of Borges. What do you think that that kind of like argumentation does for our ability to cope with paradoxical and confusing things, like he could have just, I don’t know, like written, evocative descriptions without bringing in, like the metaphysics of time at any point, what’s so powerful about like metaphysics and argumentation?

Héctor Hoyos
Okay so here’s an image. A painter has a palette. The palette has many colors. Now it’s a writer that has many resources to her disposal. Borges, in his palette, has a bunch of colors that come straight from philosophy, and he uses them. So that’s part of what makes him so special to read. You are engaging with Borges because of the beauty of His word choice, because of the rhythm in his syntax, but also because of the ideas that he’s communicating. And it’s hard to tell for where one begins and where one doesn’t. And so the result for us as readers, is sometimes genuine commotion. You know, you you think one thing at the same time that you’re feeling something that doesn’t match that thought. So the experience is very rich, very textured.

Josh Landy
It’s a textured experience, and you were saying earlier that it’s an experience that ultimately leads to a kind of productive shrug, which reminds me a little bit of the ancient skeptics. It reminds me a little bit of Buddhism. Is that kind of the place where we’re supposed to land at the end, a place of serenity, a place of detachment, a place of calm and peace of mind.

Héctor Hoyos
With a grain of salt and maybe a huge boulder of salt, because if you look at Borges life and his engagement with the actual world, he was a committed Anti Fascist, but he was also a committed anti communist, and towards the end of his life, that latter part prevailed when he was schmoozing with South American dictators. So there is a peril to that serenity. There is a peril to this questioning the world and in the end of the day finding you know that there’s no solutions when the times that you are living call for, I don’t know, advocating for human rights victims, which what his did very little and very late in his life, after allowing himself to be decorated by Augusto Pinochet shaking the hands of Videla, this has to be mentioned. You know, as much as I esteem Borges, and I don’t want to you know, bring bring dirt to his door, as it were, we also need to understand that there are consequences to this absconding from the from the world.

Ray Briggs
So do you have suggestions for how sort of philosophers might take the valuable parts of Borges, but maybe leave behind the lack of political conviction? Like, is it one in the same thing that makes him both a beautiful writer and a kind of less than ideal citizen of the world, or are those separate?

Héctor Hoyos
I think folks should engage with this as much as they’d like, in any way they like. Remember, it’s like a beautiful parlor game. I don’t think that Borges would disapprove of that, of me saying that, and then maybe use it as a jumping off point. So I like to say that every time the last name Borges is uttered, we should also say adult. And that is one of his contemporaries, Roberto arrold, who was some of an antagonist of Borges, where Borges was an esthete, and thinking about philosophy, arrold was greedy, and thinking with the people and their styles are very different, and art is a phenomenal author. So I am pleased when Borges becomes a door into a broader universe of literature from Argentina, Latin America, the Spanish speaking world, and not when Borges become something of a token of, you know, the one, along perhaps with Garcia Marquez, author that you would read from an entire world region, right? I’ll mention just one name, very dear friends in some ways, of Borges, anachronistically, at least, Cesar Ida, well translated into English, and definitely worth a read. A I R A.

Josh Landy
Thank you for that great suggestion. I want to come back to come back to something you were saying a moment ago about the moral implications of this kind of shrug that are potentially dangerous. And I’m really interested in the way that morality shows up in Borges stories, which it doesn’t always, but it does sometimes. And I’m thinking that, you know, there are two very different consequences for the kind of skeptical investigation that Bohr has conducted, one of which is what you were saying, which is, well, I guess sort of anything goes. And we see this, for example, in new refutation, or time where the speaker worries that if you actually believed this skepticism, then someone killing one person is no worse, no better than someone who kills, you know, who commits genocide, and that seems like a troubling moral consequence. On the other hand, you have stories like The Garden of forking paths, which imagines a quasi infinity of parallel universes, and in one universe, you know. Person A is killing Person B. You had another universe. Person B is killing Person A. And you see this quite a lot in Borges, right? That the same person is the the tiger and the person being mauled by the tiger. That implies a very different kind of morality. That sort of suggests, well, look, be nice to people, because somewhere in a parallel universe there’s someone about to do to you what you’re about to do to that person. So what do you think? Do you agree that Borges stories kind of lend themselves to these two very different moral consequences?

Héctor Hoyos
Yes, and to again allow us to dwell in contradiction. This time, moral contradiction, right? And so the work of morality is never over. I suspect that Borges is a little more on the side of the of the cynical of, you know, skepticism turned cynical. I worry about this. You know, as much as I like Borges and I reread him, that seems to be the bigger the lion’s share here, as it were, you do point out Josh the multiverse, and earlier we had said how perhaps work has invented the internet. He certainly invented the multiverse and and the ambition of these short stories is quite stunning. It’s not only about inventing world, a world in a short story, but several worlds in one single short story. There is a bit of a scandalous and very interesting short story called Deutsches rekim, which is arguably the first short story about the Holocaust. The very first is written months after Auschwitz is liberated, and you have a character there who is a concentration camp commandant, who is also an intellectual, and that’s where you go, like, Oh, my goodness, sure. Multiverse complex morality. In one universe, you are the victim. The other is the victimary. Can we put ourselves in the shoes of a morally horrendous person like this, if we can, should we? Is that a rabbit hole we want to go through? And there? Alas, I have to end with a note of a question rather than an answer, because there are limits right to moral exploration, and I don’t know where Borges exactly sits there. That’s there are many puzzles.

Josh Landy
Well, Hector, in every parallel universe, I’ve had a fantastic time talking with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Héctor Hoyos
Thank you both.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Hector Hoyos, Professor of Iberian Latin American cultures at Stanford University, and author of “Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’ve really enjoyed getting to read and think about and talk about Borges, and I’m so glad that Hector has offered us a couple of other recommendations, and I hope that he will follow up so that we can put suggestions for our listeners in the show notes if they’re interested in Latin American writers.

Josh Landy
we will definitely do that, and we’ll put links to everything else we’ve mentioned today. Else we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org if you go there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of over 600 episodes

Ray Briggs
Now: with his speedometer set to infinity, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Jorge Luis Borges was very much a 19th Century guy looking to drag it into the twentieth century kind of guy.  He thought of himself as a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world,  He toured Europe as a young man, and apparently read everything and even joined an avant garde movement in Madrid, the ultraist movement, brought it back home to Argentina, and immediately become a thought leader in the literary scene there.  He first gained fame as a poet, but it was his fiction that ultimately sealed the deal.  He wound up being the inspiration not only for Argentinian writers, but an entire generation of South American writers.  He subjected old school trad narratives, fables, mysteries, fantasies, to new school ironic distance.  He did not embrace realism, or the psychological in his fiction.  He liked adventure!  The fantastic.  His fame grew, and such was his genre-hopping, that his first American publication in the late 1940s was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.  Borges was a fan of Ellery Queen, and also G.K. Chesterton, several of his Father Brown mysteries, so it seems to me, could easily have been written by Borges.  Lose the priest detective, add a world weary narrator, presto!  His big thing, his trick, his trademark, was writing epic stories at one remove, that is, he would write a review of a story which didn’t exist, saving himself the trouble of writing it.  He was also known for recurring themes mirrors, masks, mazes. Or labyrinths, I suppose.   He was also famous for his blindness.  He struggled with it all his life, finally becoming completely blind at age 55, shortly after he was put in charge of the National Library of Argentina.   The irony of which did not escape him.  Or anybody who followed him.  His blindness became, as I suppose it must, a central part of his fame as a writer.  He also blamed his blindness for his relative silence regarding the rise and rule of Peron, which seems a tad disingenuous, but on the other hand, somebody’s got to mind the culture while your President is throwing dissidents out of airplanes.  Still, it must be said, he was enough of a thorn in Peron’s side, that Peron fired him and made him a poultry inspector, calling it a promotion. Much outrage ensued, because Borges had become a national treasure, and he was reinstated.  Blind can be a badge in the blues, but we must always remember blindness is not a gift, it’s damage.  For every Tiresias there’s an Oedipus.  Our literature is filled with the blind, many of them creators of it.  Milton, Homer, Ray Charles, Doc Watson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, who pretty much gave us the stirring beginnings of 20th Century blues as we know it, traveling blind all across Texas and the south, like a figure in a Borges story.  Borges’ writings show us his blindness too, if sometimes obliquely, worlds erased, gone forever, or a world that exists only as long as a sleeper dreams it.  He was fond of depicting catastrophes of consciousness.  A man who can’t forget.  A detective destroyed by his own solution.  His story, Tlon Uqbr Orbis Tertius, posits that an encyclopedia, begun by various Illuminati, more or less, and hidden from our sight for hundreds of years, described (encylopedically) a world called Tlon.  This massive work, once unearthed, sweeps the globe, in a kind of prototype of going viral, such that the world surrenders or succumbs to Tlon, in fact, BECOMES Tlon.  Everything we know, our past, our histories, our memories, will be forgotten, replaced, no longer seen.  The narrator, who seems to be Borges himself, or his literary double, does not react to this the way, for example, Kevin McCarthy does in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, in fear and panic, he’s more resigned than anything, like realizing the hula hoop craze is over, and he’s going to lose a bundle on his Wham-O stock.  The story concludes,”  a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.  Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at this hotel, a translation in the style of Quevedo (which I do not intend to publish) of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.”  To which one wonders, who’s Quevedo?  Who is this Sir Thomas Browne?  Oh my god, it’s already happened. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland, Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library, more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

After Words
The write Jorge Luis Borges likens libraries to paradise. For me, public libraries would be a perfect place, except for one thing: the public.