Borges as a Philosopher

Jorge Luís Borges is one of our favorite literary authors of all time—and one of the most philosophical. He wrote beautiful poems, mind-bending short stories, and whimsical essays, including “A New Refutation of Time,” where he seems to prove that none of us really exists.

How do you prove a thing like that? Well, Borges’s argument has three parts. First, if 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley is right, minds are the only things that actually exist. Nothing in the world around us is real; even your own body isn’t real—it’s all in your mind.

Second step: if everything is in your mind, who is this “you”? Here Borges quotes David Hume: our minds are just “a bundle of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity.” So even the self isn’t real; the only thing that’s real is thoughts progressing in time.

That brings us to the third and final step: even time isn’t real. Time, too, is an illusion. So everything we think we experience is just a bunch of perceptions that aren’t real inside a mind that isn’t real because of time which isn’t real.

It’s classic Borges, always pulling the rug out from under our assumptions; he really is a thinker who questions everything (…except maybe the short story). And the arguments he gives in “A New Refutation of Time” are pretty good ones, based on an encyclopedic knowledge of the philosophical tradition, from Berkeley to the Buddhists and beyond.

But here’s the thing: does Borges actually believe these arguments? When he gets to the end, Borges takes it all back: “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.”

So what’s going on here? Why does Borges spend 17 pages apparently proving something, only to change his mind at the last moment? Perhaps he’s offering us different options and letting us make up our own minds. After all, he said “I don’t think ideas are important” when it comes to artworks. (Elsewhere he said this: “Many writers from here tell me, ‘We would like to have your message.’ [But] we have no message at all.”) The point of ambitious literature, for Borges, is not to tell people what to think.

Or maybe something else is going on in this essay. That quote from the last page—about  “apparent desperations and secret consolations.—suggests something very interesting: Borges isn’t just interested in philosophical beliefs, but also in how they make us feel. Maybe this essay is less about the theory that everything is an illusion and more about why anyone would believe that theory in the first place. In other words, Borges is thinking about the psychological sources of our philosophical beliefs. What makes people buy into bizarre philosophical worldviews? What could possibly cause someone to think they don’t exist?

There’s plenty more to say about “A New Refutation of Time” and other writings by Borges, and we look forward to discussing many of them with our guest, Héctor Hóyos, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.