The Quest for God in the Work of Borges

Annette U. Flynn

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441185105
• eBook ISBN: 9781441194978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book argues that the quest for God, though largely unheeded by the critical canon, was a major and enduring preoccupation for Borges. This is shown through careful analysis both of his essays, with their emphasis on his philosophical-theological explorations, and of the narrative articulations which are his stories. It is in the poetry of his middle and closing years, however, that Borges' search is most manifest, as it is no longer obscured. Spanning different periods of his life, and different literary genres, Borges' work attests to a maturing and evolving quest.
The book reveals Borges' engagement as an active and evolving process and its chronological structure allows the reader to trace his thought over time. Flynn shows that the spiritual component in Borges' writing drives key texts from the 1920s to the 1980s. Offering an interpretation that unlocks a fuller significance of his work, she shows how Borges' reflections on time and identity are symptomatic of a deeper, spiritual searching which can only be answered by a Divine Absolute.

Part One

Preludes to Mysticism

Chapter 1

1922–1925: The Nothingness of Self and God

The mirage, the mirror image, the simulacrum, the dream are synonyms for Borges’ search for order and structure; for an underlying (absolute) reality or truth; for some permanence giving cohesion to our fleeting mortal existence; for some purpose. His quest only confirms to him what his sceptical mind had suspected all along: it renders visible the fissures through which the questioning mind, forever misled by its own limitations, must perceive the futility of any system claiming to give purpose or conclusive answers. For Borges, therefore, ideas, theories, philosophies and, indeed, the intellect that he employs so astutely, are insufficient. The conclusion he reaches in these early years is that there is quite literally nothing beyond or underneath the illusion which constitutes our everyday existence.

His earliest arguments for idealism are based on, yet also deviate significantly from Berkeley and Schopenhauer. The belief that the world is but a dream, a man-made, mental construct where the notions of time, space and selfhood hold does not mean that appearances, that is, that which constitutes our empirical world, are mere hallucinations. Both Kant and Schopenhauer insist that appearances are not hallucinations, and that as such they can be experienced:

The whole world of objects is and remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and forever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcended ideality. But it is not, on that account, falsehood or illusion. (Schopenhauer, quoted in Sierra 1997, 12)¹

Appearances are the necessary rules of our empirical world: time, space, individuation and the self are real in the sense that they are what we have access to, what we experience. This is unlike the things or the world as it is in itself, both of which lie beyond experience.²

But despite the oneric nature of the world, the dream is not to be mistaken for illusion or irreality. And herein lies the crux of what can be termed ‘the philosophy of Borges’.

In the early 1920s, there is in Borges’ work, as yet, no differentiation in his discussion of time and identity; there is only denial. Borges holds that the world is a dream or illusion, with no dreamer to it. He accepts the mind-dependency of the world of appearances or perceptions but, in almost solipsistic fashion, denies it not only any underlying reality, but also denies the reality of the dream itself. It is interesting that when arguing his concept of non-causality in ‘El cielo azul, es cielo y es azul’, he recourses to Lichtenberg’s famous suggestion that we should say ‘It thinks’ rather than ‘I think’, as this very assertion by Lichtenberg has always found favour with solipsists.³

‘El cielo azul, es cielo y es azul’ of 1922 (referred to as ‘El cielo azul’ (Borges, 1977)) is a very brief text in which Borges sketches and encapsulates all of the concerns which he is to take up and develop in the slightly later essays ‘La nadería de la personalidad (Borges, 1977) of 1923 and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ (Borges, 1977) of 1925. In ‘El cielo azul’, he questions the nature of reality and wonders how to determine conclusively the one and only ‘reality’ of any one perceived thing. He resorts to various doctrines, mainly materialism and (Schopenhauer’s) idealism, in order to establish the difference between appearance and reality. Schopenhauer’s will, he says, is what underlies the phenomenal reality; but Borges cites other philosophers and their theories as to what underlies the world of appearances (the phenomenal world), such as the Platonic Idea, the Kantean thing in itself, etc. Having established the underlying fault of all of these doctrines (that fault being the adherence to the notion of causality), Borges then proposes his own doctrine of non-causality, claiming (like Hume) that there is no causal link between matter and mind, between object and subject, but a merely relational one. He also formulates his view on language as a player when he introduces one of his recurring convictions: that it is the intellect, not language, which, rather than elucidate the searching mind, misleads it. He argues that language, with its successive, linear structure and inept at arguing non-causality, is not to be blamed for causality itself.

In ‘El cielo azul’, Borges explores the question of perception and reality and defames materialism, professing himself an advocate of Schopenhauer’s idealism.⁴ He introduces the subject by posing this question: how do we determine which is the ‘real’ landscape which changes before our very eyes? In ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ Borges asks the same question again in relation to the figtree. He argues that if it is sensory impressions which govern our perception of a (version of a) given thing – the landscape or the tree in his particular example – then how, when these impressions change, as they would in different circumstances of light, etc., can we decide which of the versions was the real one? How could we determine which qualities were essential and which were non-essential?

And he asks: What are essential qualities anyway? What are the qualities that identify the landscape or the figtree as an individual in its own right? What are the non-essential qualities which, as such, are subject to change? In answer to this, Borges first resorts to the materialist’s explanation. The materialist denies the reality of sensory perceptions, situated somewhere between matter and spirit (‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, p. 119). The materialist postulates that the essence of the world is the atom. Substantividad is constituted by extension. Therefore, reality is physical extension, is matter and assumes the hallmark of existence. To which Borges retorts that the atom, which in itself is not perceptible sensually, nonetheless generates matter, which is indeed perceptible via the senses. This, he says, makes a mockery of the materialist’s attempt to denounce the reality of sensory perception, when, at the same stroke, it is sensory perceptions which the materialist uses to seemingly prove the reality of matter.

Borges decries the materialist’s postulation of two universes, one essential and made of essential qualities, and the other phenomenal and made up of non-essential qualities (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155). And Borges hates multiplication. This is why he is so vehemently opposed to materialism: it adds one reality to another. Nuño (1986, 38) states that for Plato, the dream, as well as intercourse, are instances where man proves the unbridled multiplicity of the material world. Translated into Borgesian terms: in the dream, one reality (that of the dream, of the phenomenal world) is being referred to another (that of the waking state, the inaccessible, absolute reality) and so horribly and unnecessarily multiplied.

Borges favours the idealist notion of perception as mind-dependent. In favour of idealism Borges says:

Escuchemos al idealismo entonces. Schopenhauer, el mediador que con más feliz perspicacia y más plausibles abundancias de ingenios, ha promulgado esta doctrina, quiere dilucidar el mundo mediante las dos claves de la representación y la voluntad. (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155)

We turn to Schopenhauer’s debt to the idealism of Kant and Berkeley, as well as to Plato’s archetypes.⁵ One of Schopenhauer’s great feats were the fusion of two essentially distinct notions: the fusion of Kant’s thing in itself with Plato’s Idea. Schopenhauer came to conclude that the Kantian thing in itself (albeit unknowable, inaccessible and never to be experienced) and the Platonic Idea (very knowable) were one and the same. Janaway gives this excellent explanation (1997, 245–246, my emphasis):

Schopenhauer […] begins by expounding an idealist position. This is the view that the material objects which we experience [matter] depend for their order and their existence on the knowing subject [mind]. […] [Kant had explained] how what is perceived constitutes a world of objects when it is governed by the necessary rules of space, time and causality. Schopenhauer’s account of the world of empirical things is [that they] consist of matter, which fills distinct portions of space and time, and which is in causal interaction with other such portions. But his idealism says that without the subject of experience, all such objects would not exist. To be more specific: it is individual things that would not exist without the experiencing subject. What we experience in the ordinary course of our lives are distinct things [individuation]. One table is an individual distinct from another, one animal or person likewise. But what is the principle on which this division of the world into individual things works? Schopenhauer has a very clear and plausible answer: location in space and time. Now if you take this view, and also think, with Kant, that the organizing of things under the structure of space and time stems from the subject [i.e. the perceiving mind], and applies only to the world of phenomena, not to the world as it is in itself, then you will conclude that individuals do not exist in the world as it is in itself. The world would not be broken up into individual things, if it were not for the space and time which we, as subjects, impose. Here then are two important tenets of Schopenhauer’s philosophy: Space and time are the principle of individuation […] and there can be no individuals on the ‘in itself’ side of the line.

This view echoes the Hindu notion of the oneness of all there is. None of the relationships between subject and object, between time, space and causality ‘applies beyond the phenomena out of which our experience is composed’ (Janaway 1997). It means that none of it applies in the world considered as the thing in itself (the essential, underlying reality to our world of phenomena or representation). The nature of the underlying reality, of that which lies beyond ‘all these subject-imposed modes of connection’ is as follows: ‘The thing in itself [for Schopenhauer: the will] was a hidden essence working away underneath the order we imposed on the objects of our experience’ (Janaway 1997, 243).

So, there is then something else besides the world of representation which is the ‘way things present themselves to us in experience’. It is the other side of the world, the Will, which in turn is ‘the world in itself, beyond the mere appearances to which human knowledge is limited’ (Janaway 1997, 226). Borges says in ‘El cielo azul’ (p. 156) that there is the Will, which operates inside of us and which is a counter-force to the external influences that surround us. Although we are subject to and able to register perceptions, that is, sensory stimuli, we can also create and manipulate them through the Will, which is inherent in all things animate and inanimate.

What underlies all three essays, ‘El cielo azul’, ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ is a strongly anti-materialist and pro-idealist position. Borges’ questioning of the ‘reality’ or otherwise of the landscape in ‘El cielo azul’, and of the figtree in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ echoes the debate between Locke’s materialism and Berkeley’s idealism which may be summarized as follows:

Berkeley’s philosophy is perhaps the simplest version of idealism. For him the world consists of the infinite mind of God, the finite minds that he has created, and, dependently on them, the ideas possessed or experienced by these minds. For Berkeley there are no material things that exist independently of minds; common objects are collections of ideas in finite minds to the extent that they are observed by them, in the mind of God to the extent that they are not. (Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, quoted in Bullock and Trombley 1999, 412)

By contrast, Locke’s materialism is defined in the following way:

The universe is really a mechanical system of bodies in space. It is made, as it were, of matter; and material bodies really possess just those qualities required for their mechanical mode of operation – ‘solidity, figure, extension, motion or rest, and number’. These bodies operate on, among other things, the sense-organs of human beings, who possess minds – ‘immaterial substances’ – as well as bodies. When this occurs, the mechanical stimulation of these sense-organs and brain causes ‘ideas’ to arise in the mind, and these are the objects of which the observer is really aware. In some respects these ideas faithfully represent the actual character of the ‘external world’, but in others not. (Urmson and Rée 1989, 47)

It is this very Lockean notion of an external world, somehow and to some extent representative of our mental ideas, which Berkeley challenges. For, he argues, ‘how could an observer, who was aware of nothing but his own ideas, know anything about Locke’s “external world”?’ (Urmson and Rée 1989, 47). We can now understand Borges’ assertion versus materialism in ‘El cielo azul’ (p. 155):

Oigamos a los materialistas ahora. […] Aberración es ésta [explicación]. […] El materialismo, en suma, no explica nada, y el concepto de dos universos paralelos y coexistentes, uno esencial, continuo, colectivo [Locke’s ‘external world’], y el otro fenomenal, intermitente, psicológico [Locke’s ‘ideas’], es antes una complicación que una ayuda. Si lo aceptamos, nos encaran dos problemas en lugar de uno.

Here, Borges takes particular exception to the notion of multiple universes and realities; it is an early statement of his later, more fervently expressed aversions to anything that smacks of multiplication, duplication, proliferation, such as occurs in mirrors. This is a view very much like Schopenhauer’s, who had felt that ‘realism – the alternative to idealism – saddles itself with two “worlds”, one of which is redundant’ (Janaway 1997, 247). Borges then goes on to scorn the distinction (Lockean in essence) between essential, objective qualities on the one hand, and subjective ones on the other, such as smell, sound and colour which, as Locke holds, are qualities that have no ‘outside’ reality (‘El cielo azul’, p. 155, and ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ p. 118). In order to eliminate both the intellectual absurdities and the aesthetic repulsion which he felt pervaded Locke’s position, Berkeley came up with a solution to all these horrors. All he had to do was deny the existence of matter.

Up to this point, Borges agrees with Berkeley’s non-material universe, and with his denial of existence outside of the perceiving mind. But Berkeley, apart from holding intellectual and aesthetic objections to Locke’s materialism, also felt that Locke swerved dangerously towards atheism. It is in this next stage of Berkeley’s idealism, which explores the cause of our ideas in the mind, that Borges diverges most drastically from Berkeley and to which he dedicates a major part of his analysis in ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’. For it is with the notion of an absolute reality, Berkeley’s God, that Borges grapples and struggles with and ultimately argues against most vigorously. It lies at the heart of his scepticism.

In the earliest of the three essays, ‘El cielo azul’, he does not explicitly argue with or against Berkeley, but he does argue against the notion of an underlying reality, against a higher reality beyond the landscape.

Let us begin by posing the obvious objection to the mind-only existence of things as ideas in our minds: surely our ideas have causes that must come to us from some independent source such as a Lockean external world. Now Berkeley uses this very notion of necessary causation in order to both refute the ‘external world’, and to introduce his notion of the divine mind as the unifying force which lends cohesion to our perceptions; it is because of God, in whose mind ideas persist ‘and who is always there to “conceive” things, that they do not disappear when I turn my back on them’ (Scruton 1996, 24). Berkeley’s position can be stated like this (Honderich 1995, 90):

To cause is to act; and nothing is genuinely active but the will of an intelligent being. Locke’s inanimate material bodies, therefore, could not be true causes of anything; that ideas occur in our minds as they do, with such admirable order, cohesion, and regularity, must be the will of an intelligent being […]: God, eternal and omnipresent, omnipotent, ‘in whom we live, and move and have our being’, ‘who works in all, and by whom all things consist’.

In ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’ (1925) – referring and intending to strengthen the argument of ‘La nadería de la personalidad’ (1923), but also referring back to his initial position in ‘El cielo azul’ (1922) – Borges adopts Berkeley’s theory about the mind-dependency or perception-dependency of things, but challenges his belief in a divine being lending coherence, reality and persistence to these things even when not perceived. The claim Borges makes of the mind-dependency of the world is therefore consistent. He confirms the nullity of time, space, and the self. He denies that there is a subject (self, and also God) as well as an object (the dream, our mirage existence, what we perceive as reality).

But only in the last of the three essays in question, ‘La encrucijada de Berkeley’, does he explicitly challenge Berkeley’s underlying reality, which is God. He openly calls attention to Berkeley’s mistake, ‘la falacia raigal de Berkeley’ (p. 122), a mistake which he attributes to the fact that he was not only a thinker, but also a theologian and therefore, in his view, somewhat constrained. Berkeley affirms that nothing exists outside the mind of an observer. He says that while things are not being perceived, they either do not exist at all (which is what Borges seems to hold) or they exist in the mind of an eternal spirit, which Borges denies. Thus freedom of thought, for Borges, comes at a price: the realization as to the nothingness of existence, a kind of of solipsistic loneliness beyond that which is mere apparition.

In his critique of Berkeley, Borges does more than object to the notion of a God who is at the heart of, and sustains, the phenomenal world. What Borges seems to object to is the very nature of Berkeley’s God, whom he sees devalued, diminished as it were, to a kind of cement which serves to lend cohesion to the otherwise disparate sensory perceptions. Borges laments that in this case God is not even creator, but merely serves to stop the world from emerging and submerging from existence depending on the whim of the individual beholder:

[For Berkeley,] Dios no es hacedor de las cosas; es más bien un meditador de la vida o un inmortal y ubicuo espectador del vivir. Su eterna vigilancia impide que el universo se aniquile y resurja a capricho de atenciones individuales, y además presta firmeza y grave prestigio a todo el siste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Preludes to Mysticism
• Part Two: From Essay to Ficción
• Part Three: The Long Quest
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page