Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation

Silvia G. Dapía

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317394822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Literaturkritik

Making an important contribution to studies in Literature and Philosophy, this book reads Jorge Luis Borges philosophically, particularly in reference to his use of representation and reality. Rather than attempting to subordinate Borges to a set of philosophical constructs, to reduce Borges' texts to mere exemplifications or illustrations of philosophical theories, the book uses Borges's short stories to demonstrate how philosophical questions related to representation develop out of literature and actually serve as precursors to the various strains of post-analytic philosophy that later developed in the United States. The volume discusses American post-analytic philosophers Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto, as well as a wide-ranging set of philosophical ideas including reflections on Keynes, Hayek, Schopenhauer and many others. Chapters offer detailed readings of Borges' texts extending from 1939 to 1983, locating where he thematizes issues of representation, and pursuing the logic of Borges's text toward its philosophical implications without neglecting their literary value. The book argues that Borges' exploration of the relationship between representation and reality places him unmistakably in the position of a precursor to the post-analytic philosophers. Illuminating the role that language plays in the creation of reality and representation, this volume makes significant contributions not only to Borges scholarship but also post-structuralism, post-analytic studies of language, semiotics, comparative literature, and Latin American literature.

1 Borges and Richard Rorty

To help us clarify Borges’s understanding of the relationship between representation and reality, in this chapter I shall discuss Borges’s “Blue Tigers,” “Emma Zunz,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Funes the Memorious.” Some of the questions that I shall pose here are as follows: Do our theories, systems, and narratives, including our sciences, faithfully represent “true” connections of events or construct them? Is it possible to discover, encounter, or confront a phenomenon “out there” that defies our concepts and modes of representation? Or is everything we discover already shaped into a representation or concept so that a “true” discovery is missed? In other words, is there any way to engage the outside without reducing it to a priori representations? What causes us to break with old representations and create “new” ones? Is it possible to talk about anything that might challenge a representation? Our discussion begins with a mathematical experience as portrayed in “Blue Tigers” that defies the protagonist’s powers of representation.

“BLUE TIGERS”: IS THREE AND ONE REALLY FOUR?

“Blue Tigers” revolves around the accidental discovery of something portentous that a Scottish professor of Western and Oriental logic experiences in India. Our Scottish professor’s name is Alexander Craigie, and he is teaching at the University of Lahore. Since his childhood, Craigie has felt a particular attraction to tigers. In 1904, still in his country, he learns that a blue variety of the species has been found in the delta of the Ganges, so he makes up his mind and leaves for India. Craigie tells us about his first reaction when he reads about the tiger of his dreams in the newspaper:

My old love stirred once more. Nevertheless, I suspected some error, since the names of colors are notoriously imprecise. I remembered having once read that in Icelandic, Ethiopia was “Blaland,” Blue Land or the Land of Black Men. The blue tiger might well be a black panther. Nothing was mentioned of stripes; the picture published by the London press, showing a blue tiger with silver stripes, was patently apocryphal. Similarly, the blue of the illustration looked more like that of heraldry than reality. (Collected 494–95)

Once in India, a further mention of the extraordinary animal calls Craigie’s attention. This time it is a colleague at the university who tells Craigie that in a certain Hindu village very distant from the Ganges he has heard talk of blue tigers. Although this information surprises Craigie, who knows that tigers are pretty rare in that region, he decides to take advantage of his vacation and embarks on a trip to the village in question. Once in the village, Craigie tries to be polite with its inhabitants, praising the people’s “dubious” food and dwellings, and even claiming that “the fame of that region had reached Lahore” (Collected 495). As Craigie utters this last compliment, the people’s faces change, and our protagonist immediately feels that they possess a secret they will not share with a stranger. Yet after he informs them about his intention of seizing the wild beast with the strange hide, he perceives a kind of relief in them. From that moment onward, Craigie starts receiving false information about locations where the tiger has presumably been caught sight of, and, systematically, every time Craigie arrives at those places, the tiger is already gone.

One day, Craigie proposes to the people that they climb the hill at whose foot the village is located. They reject his idea. The eldest one claims that the peak is sacred and forbidden to man. Despite this warning, Craigie climbs the hill. Looking for a tiger’s tracks, he finds in the sandy ground of a garden plot some disk-like stones whose color corresponds exactly to the blue of the tiger of his dream. He puts a handful in his pocket and goes back to the village. Later in the hut, Craigie tries to count those blue stones and discovers with horror that our system of counting does not apply to them. The four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are impossible. Craigie claims:

If someone were to tell me that there are unicorns on the moon, I could accept or reject the report, or suspend judgment, but it is something I could imagine. If, on the other hand, I were told that six or seven unicorns on the moon could be three, I would declare a priori that such a thing was impossible. The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn’t have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that’s that. He cannot conceive a different sum. (Collected 500)¹

Thus, challenging fundamental assumptions and long-held beliefs about a universal arithmetic, these formidable blue stones multiply, decrease, or simply disappear. “Forty disks, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield three hundred” (Collected 502). Craigie sets himself as a task to discover the law that governs their unexpected behaviors and tries various experiments. He makes an incision in the form of a cross in one of these portentous disk-like stones, shuffles it among the rest, and although the number of stones increases, he loses the marked one. Subsequently, he does an analogous test with a stone into which he cuts an arc of a circle, and he loses it in the same way. With a punch, he opens a hole in the center of a third stone, repeats the test, and loses it forever. Surprisingly, on the following day, the stone with the cross returns “from its journey into the void” (Collected 501). Desperately, Craigie comes to the conclusion that these blue stones defy not only arithmetic but the calculus of probabilities as well, for it is impossible to discover a law in their “unpredictable variations” (Collected 501). Furthermore, the blue stones also challenge the conception of space that underlies Euclidean geometry. Craigie wonders about the nature of the “mysterious sort of space” that “will absorb the stones and then in time throw an occasional one back again” (Collected 501).

Craigie has always regarded mathematical “truths” as universal. Yet they do not seem to work with these stones. But what disturbs Craigie the most is the fact that alongside the notion of an “absolute,” “objective” mathematics, these little blue stones challenge our notion of a trustworthy reason. Craigie asserts: “There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying ‘four.’ But I, Alexander Craigie, of all men on earth, was fated to discover the only objects that contradict that essential law of the human mind” (Collected 500). Indeed mathematics is not value-free. Perhaps the main value that it carries with it is its total support of reason. And this is the value that Craigie does not want to jeopardize at all. He would have preferred to become crazy, since his personal hallucination is much less important to him than “the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness” (Collected 500). Precisely for his profound “faith in reason,” Alexander Craigie is the perfect narrator for our story.

“Blue Tigers” may be compared with Borges’s “El Zahir” [The Zahir] in many respects. Both stories revolve around the accidental discovery of something portentous. Moreover, by virtue of this discovery, both protagonists gain an unexpected insight into the world. Yet both of them wish to forget their awesome experiences, for those experiences are leading them to madness. Let us look briefly at “The Zahir,” which offers some valuable clues as to how to interpret “Blue Tigers.” The protagonist of “The Zahir,” whose name is Borges, comes across a twenty-cent Argentine coin that will certainly change the course of his life. Indeed Borges claims that after encountering it, he is no longer the same man he used to be. But what is so extraordinary about this coin? What kind of power does it have? Borges (the protagonist) comes to the realization that it is actually no simple coin but rather a manifestation of the “zahir.” As he explains to us, the belief in the “zahir” is of Islamic origin. The term “zahir” literally means, in Arabic, “visible, manifest, evident” and is used to refer to the visible aspect of the divinity (Collected 246).² Through a German monograph, the protagonist learns further that the zahir may adopt diverse forms. Particularly interesting in view of “Blue Tigers” is the information that it may adopt the form of a tiger. Moreover, we also learn through the same source that the expression “Verily he has looked upon the tiger” is commonly used among the Muslims to refer to “the madness or saintliness” that arises in whoever looks at the zahir-tiger, “even from a great distance, for never afterward could a person stop thinking about it” (Collected 247).

In light of this context, Alexander Craigie’s disk-like stones—which we should recall the people of the village nicknamed “blue tigers”—may be interpreted as a manifestation of the zahir, the visible aspect of the divinity. The divine nature of these disks is indeed suggested in the story. Thus, as a response to Craigie’s intention to climb the hill where the disks are found, the elder in the village warns Craigie about the divine nature of that hill. He claims: “He who trod the peak with mortal foot was in danger of seeing the godhead, and of going blind or mad” (Collected 497). Furthermore, like the protagonist of “The Zahir,” Craigie feels the inextricable attraction exerted by the disks-tigers-zahir and rightly suspects that it will be impossible to free himself from their fascination. He asserts:

After about a month I realized that there was no way out of the chaos. There lay the unruly disks, there lay the constant temptation to touch them, to feel that tickling sensation once more, to scatter them, to watch them increase or decrease, and to note whether they came out odd or even. I came to fear that they would contaminate other things—particularly the fingers that insisted upon handling them. (Collected 502)

However, there is an important difference between these two stories: As opposed to the protagonist of “The Zahir,” who is irremediably captured by the visible aspect of the divinity and hopes to find God behind the coin, Alexander Craigie finally gets rid of the atrocious blue stones. Ultimately, Craigie asks God or Allah, whom he conceives of as “two names for a single, inconceivable Being,” to free him from those hideous disks (Collected 502). A blind beggar, who confesses having sinned and being worthy of the frightful disks, approaches him and tells him to give him the stones. Craigie does so. In their place, he recovers the “days and nights,” the common-sense, “the habits, the world” (Collected 503).

THE ILLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPINOZA’S DICTUM

In that desperate confrontation with the disks that challenges our mathematics, Craigie resorts to Spinoza’s Ethics. For Spinoza, nature is an uncaused, unique substantial whole. Outside of nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of nature and is brought into being by nature. Furthermore, this uncaused, unique, substantial whole is what is meant by “God.” Indeed Spinoza uses both terms indistinctively: “God or nature” (Deus, sive Natura), he says in his Ethics. Because of the necessity inherent in nature, Spinoza believes that there is no teleology in the universe. In other words: nature does not act for any ends, and things do not exist for any set purposes. Accordingly, for Spinoza, God does not “do” things for the sake of anything else. Spinoza’s God is not the personal and transcendent Creator of revealed religions, nor is it a Being who shows rage, has to be obeyed, or performs miracles. All talk of God’s purposes, rage or performance of miracles is, in Spinoza’s view, just an anthropomorphizing fiction. The order of things, according to Spinoza, just follows from God’s (nature’s) essences with an inviolable determinism.

Moreover, Spinoza tells us that there are two attributes of God of which we have cognizance: extension and thought. The expressions of extension are physical bodies (matter), while those of thought are ideas (mind). There is, however, no causal interaction between these two realms, between the physical and the mental, between bodies and ideas, between matter and mind. Physical bodies and ideas are, in Spinoza’s view, two different perspectives of the same nature. As Rorty asserts, “there were two equally valid ways of describing the universe: a description in terms of matter and a description in terms of mind. God or Nature could be viewed with equal adequacy under the attribute of extension and under the attribute of thought” (“Spinoza’s Legacy”). Consequently, conceiving nature under the perspective of thought is as valid as conceiving it under the perspective of bodies. Or as Rorty says, “Spinoza claimed that one did not have to choose between the body and the spirit, for the two were, properly understood, one. The natural order, he suggested, is expressed in many ways, only two of which—extension and thought—we are able to grasp. The order and connection of corpuscles is the same as the order and connection of ideas” (“Spinoza’s Legacy”). So, the next question is: How does Borges view Spinoza?

As early as 1928, in his essay “Indagación de la palabra” [An Investigation of the Word], Borges argues that “Spinoza did not postulate more than eight definitions and seven axioms to level the universe for us” (Selected 39). Accordingly, Spinoza appears here, along with Raymond Lull, as an example of those thinkers who perhaps too hastily identify their systems with reality, disregarding the fact that we have only a mediated access to the world. Again, almost forty years later, in a conference entitled “Spinoza,” Borges addresses Spinoza’s confidence in reason and its capacity to discover axioms. Borges claims that Spinoza understands that there was “algo de vulnerable” (something vulnerable) about empirical truths. And precisely because geometric definitions are not empirical, Spinoza, Borges argues further, “tomó como ejemplo, como modelo para su libro [Ética], la geometría de Euclides” (chose Euclidean geometry as the model for his book [Ethics]) (“Spinoza” 27). Furthermore, in a sonnet entitled “Spinoza,” which is to be found in El otro, el mismo [The other, the same] (1964), Borges presents the philosopher creating a map of the universe, which, as we have indicated, according to Spinoza’s identification of God and nature, is, at the same time, a map of God.

But for Borges, Spinoza’s metaphysics is a mere mental “construction.” Accordingly, in a sonnet entitled “Baruch Spinoza,” which appeared in La moneda de hierro [The Iron Coin] (1976), Borges refers to Spinoza as someone who “is building God in a dark cup” (Selected Poems 383).³ Moreover, in the same sonnet, Borges stresses the idea that Spinoza’s God is “constructed” and that his construction is out of words. Borges claims:

(…) The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he’s begun
To construct God, using the word. (Selected Poems 383)

If Spinoza’s metaphysics is a mere verbal construction, it follows that his belief that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connections of things” does not elucidate reality but invents another reality.⁴ Some years earlier, in the story “Unworthy” (1970), Borges characterized Spinoza’s philosophical system as “fantastic” and possessing an “illusory sense of rigor” (Collected 353).⁵ And now we arrive with more insight at Borges’s “Blue Tigers.” Craigie firmly believes the Spinozist dictum that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” In an attempt to “exorcize” the disturbing reality revealed by the abhorred disks, Craigie repeats aloud Spinoza’s eight definitions and seven axioms. But the expected exorcism does not take place. In blatant opposition to Spinoza’s self-evident truths, the mysterious “blue tigers” suggest to Craigie that our thoughts and sciences do not faithfully represent “true” connections of events but construct them. For, if they provide a “true” account of the world, how is it, then, that our mathematics does not apply to those blue stones?

In this respect, it may be fruitful to locate and read Borges’s “Blue Tigers” against the background of Hermann von Helmholtz’s claim that only experience can tell us where the laws of arithmetic do apply. Helmholtz argues that certain areas of experience may suggest the use of certain types of numbers (whole numbers, fractions, irrational numbers). However, if any of the areas is enlarged, the applicability of those numbers may be lost (Kline 97).⁶ Within this context, Borges’s blue stones could be read as standing for some kind of worldly pressure or resistance to the application of certain types of numbers or of certain laws of arithmetic. On this reading, however, we would expect the protagonist to come up with some new type of numbers or arithmetic law that would be applicable to the new experience. But this is not the case. The protagonist does not learn to adjust his knowledge to the blue stones. On closer inspection, Borges’s story seems to deny Helmholtz’s claim. Rather than some kind of worldly constraint, those blue disks, with their chaotic behaviors, suggest the existence of a world that has no contours or articulations other than the ones we project onto it with our own systems or descriptions. Thus, Borges seems to suggest here that our mathematics are not sensitive to the way the world articulates itself but are rather a useful invention we project onto the world. Scientific ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Borges and Richard Rorty
• 2 Borges and Hilary Putnam
• 3 Borges, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur C. Danto
• 4 Encountering the Other: Borges, Donald Davidson, and the Radical Interpreter
• 5 Self and Subjectivity
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index