Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Dante’s poem preserved the Ptolemaic astronomy which for 1,400 years reigned in the imagination of mankind. The earth occupies the center of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it circle nine concentric spheres. The first seven are “planetary” skies (the firmaments of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn); the eighth, the firmament of the fixed stars; the ninth, the crystal firmament which is also called the Primum mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the Empyrean, which is composed of light. All this elaborate apparatus of hollow, transparent and gyrating spheres (one system required 55 of them) had come to be an intellectual necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus is the timid title which Copernicus, denier of Aristotle, placed at the head of the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos.

  For one man, for Giordano Bruno, the rupture of the stellar vaults was a liberation. He proclaimed, in the Cena de la ceneri, that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause, and that divinity is close by, “for it is within us even more than we ourselves are within ourselves.” He searched for words to tell men of Copernican space, and on one famous page he inscribed: “We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” (Delia causa, principio ed uno, V).

  This phrase was written with exultation, in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later there was no reflection of that fervor left and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there can not really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own countenance. In the Renaissance, humanity thought to have reached the age of virility, and it declares as much through the lips of Bruno, of Campanella, and of Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was cowed by a feeling of senescence; in order to justify itself it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures consequent on Adam’s sin. (We know ― from the fifth chapter of Genesis ― that “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; from the sixth chapter, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”) The First Anniversary of John Donne’s elegy, Anatomy of the World, lamented the very brief life and limited stature of contemporary men, who are like pigmies and fairies; Milton, according to Johnson’s biography, feared that the appearance on earth of a heroic species was no longer possible; Glanvill was of the opinion that Adam, “the medal of God,” enjoyed both telescopic and microscopic vision; Robert South conspicuously wrote: “An Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise.” In that dispirited century, the absolute space which had inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space which had meant liberation to Bruno, became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the abhorred universe. He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak, and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Thus do the words appear in the Brunschvicg text; but the critical edition published by Tourneur (Paris, 1941), which reproduces the crossed-out words and variations of the manuscript, reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

  It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

  —Translated by Anthony Kerrigan

  Time and J. W. Dunne

  In number 63 of Sur (December 1939) I published a prehistory, a first basic history, of infinite regression. Not all my omissions were involuntary: I deliberately did not mention J. W. Dunne, who has derived from the endless regressus a rather surprising doctrine on time and its observer. The discussion (the mere outline) of his thesis would have exceeded the limitations of an article. Its complexity requires a separate essay, which I shall now attempt. My study is inspired by Dunne’s latest book, Nothing Dies (1940), which reiterates or retraces the plots of his earlier works.

  Or rather, the plot. Nothing in his argument is new, but the author’s conclusions are most unusual, almost shocking. Before discussing them, I shall mention some earlier manifestations of the premises.

  The seventh of India’s many philosophical systems recorded by Paul Deussen (Nachvedische Philosophie der Inder, 318) denies the self as an immediate object of knowledge, “because if our soul were knowable, a second soul would be required to know the first and a third to know the second.” The Hindus have no sense of history (they stubbornly prefer to examine ideas rather than the names and dates of philosophers), but we know that this radical negation of introspection is about eight centuries old. Schopenhauer rediscovered it around 1843. “The subject who knows,” he repeated, “cannot be known precisely as such, otherwise he would be known by an other subject” (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 19). Herbart played similar ontological multiplication games: before he was twenty he had reasoned that the self must be infinite, because knowing oneself postulates another self that knows itself, a self that in turn postulates another self (Deussen, Die neuere Philosophie [1920], 367). Dunne reworks this plot, embellished with anecdotes, parables, strokes of irony, and diagrams.

  Dunne (An Experiment with Time, chap. 22) argues that a conscious subject is conscious not only of what it observes, but of a subject A that also observes and, therefore, of another subject B that is conscious of A and, therefore, of another subject C conscious of B. He adds, somewhat mysteriously, that these innumerable intimate observers do not fit into the three dimensions of space, but they do in the no less numerous dimensions of time. Before clarifying such a clarification, I invite my readers to join me in thinking about the meaning of this paragraph again.

  Huxley, heir to the British nominalists, claims there is only a verbal difference between the act of perceiving a pain and the act of knowing that one perceives it; he derides the pure metaphysicians who distinguish in every sensation a sensible subject, a sensation-producing object, and that imperious personage, the Ego (Essays VI, 87). Gustav Spiller (The Mind of Man, 1902) admits that awareness of pain and pain itself are two different things, but he considers them to be as comprehensible as the simultaneous perception of a voice and a face. I believe his opinion is valid. Regarding the consciousness of consciousness invoked by Dunne to establish in each individual a bewildering and nebulous hierarchy of subjects, or observers, I prefer to assume that they are successive (or imaginary) states of the initial subject. Leibnitz has said, “If the spirit had to reflect on each thought, the mere perception of a sensation would cause it to think of the sensation and then to think of the thought and then of the thought of the thought, and so to infinity” (Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain II, chap. 1).

  Dunne’s method to attain an infinite number of times simultaneously is less convincing and more ingenious. Like Juan de Mena in El laberinto de Fortuna2, like Ouspensky in Tertium Organum, he states that the future, with its details and vicissitudes, already exists. Toward the pre-existent future (or from the pre-existent future, as Bradley prefers) flows the absolute river of cosmic time, or the mortal rivers of our lives. Like all movement, that motion or flow requires a definite length of time—a second time for the movement of the first, a third for the movement of the second, and so on to infinity.3 Such is the system proposed by Dunne. These hypothetical or illusory times provide endless room for the imperceptible subjects multiplied by the other regressus.

  I wonder what my reader thinks. I do not pretend to know what sort of thing time is—or even if it is a “thing”—but I feel that the passage of time and time itself
are a single mystery and not two. Dunne, I suspect, makes an error like the one made by those absentminded poets who speak, say, of the moon revealing its red disk, thus substituting a subject, verb, and object for an undivided visual image. The object is merely the subject itself, flimsily disguised. Dunne is an illustrious victim of that bad intellectual habit—denounced by Bergson—of conceiving of time as a fourth dimension of space. He postulates that the future toward which we must move already exists, but this postulate merely converts it into space and requires a second time (also conceived in spatial form, in the form of a line or a river) and then a third and a millionth. Not one of Dunne’s four books fails to propose the infinite dimensions of time, but those dimensions are spatial.4 For Dunne, real time is the unattainable final boundary of an infinite series.

  What reasons are there for assuming that the future already exists? Dunne gives two: one, premonitory dreams; another, the relative simplicity this hypothesis lends to the complicated diagrams typical of his style. He also wishes to elude the problems of a continuous creation. . . .

  Theologians define eternity as the lucid and simultaneous possession of all instants of time, and declare it a divine attribute. Dunne, surprisingly, presumes that eternity already belongs to us, as corroborated by the dreams we have each night. In them, according to him, the immediate past and the immediate future intermingle. Awake, we pass through successive time at a uniform speed; in dreams we may span a vast zone. To dream is to orchestrate the objects we viewed while awake and to weave from them a story, or a series of stories. We see the image of a sphinx and the image of a drugstore, and then we invent a drugstore that turns into a sphinx. We put the mouth of a face that looked at us the night before last on the man we shall meet tomorrow. (Schopenhauer wrote that life and dreams were pages from the same book, and that to read them in their proper order was to live, but to leaf through them was to dream.)

  Dunne assures us that in death we shall finally learn how to handle eternity. We shall recover all the moments of our lives and combine them as we please. God and our friends and Shakespeare will collaborate with us.

  So splendid a thesis, makes any fallacy committed by the author insignificant.

  [1940] —Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

  The Creation and P. H. Gosse

  “The man without a Navel yet lives in me,” Sir Thomas Browne curiously writes (Religio Medici, 1642), meaning that, as a descendant of Adam, he was conceived in sin. In the first chapter of Ulysses, Joyce similarly evokes the immaculate and smooth belly of the woman without a mother: “Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.” The subject (I know) runs the risk of seeming grotesque and trivial, but the zoologist Philip Henry Gosse connected it to the central problem of metaphysics: the problem of time. That was in 1857; eighty years of oblivion equal, perhaps, something new.

  In two places in the Scriptures (Romans 5; I Corinthians 15), the first Adam, in whom all die, is compared to the last Adam, who is Jesus.5 This comparison, in order not to become mere blasphemy, must presuppose a certain enigmatic parity, which is translated into myths and symmetry. The Legenda Aurea states that the wood of the Cross comes from the forbidden Tree that is in Paradise; the theologians, that Adam was created by the Father and the Son at the exact age at which the Son died: thirty-three. This senseless precision must have influenced Gosse’s cosmogony.

  He revealed it in the book Omphalos (London, 1857), which is subtitled An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. I have searched the libraries for this book in vain; to write this note, I will use the summaries made by Edmund Gosse (Father and Son, 1907 ) and H. G. Wells (All Aboard for Arrarat, 1940). I will introduce some illustrations that do not appear on those brief pages, but I believe they are compatible with Gosse’s thought.

  In the chapter of Logic that deals with the law of causality, John Stuart Mill argues that the state of the universe at any given moment is a consequence of its state at the previous moment, and that, for an infinite intelligence, the perfect knowledge of a single moment would be enough to know the history of the universe, past and future. (He also argues—oh Louis Auguste Blanqui, oh Nietzsche, oh Pythagoras!—that the repetition of any one state of the universe would entail the repetition of all the others and would turn universal history into a cyclical series.) In that moderate version of one of Laplace’s fantasies—he had imagined that the present state of the universe is, in theory, reducible to a formula, from which Someone could deduce the entire future and the entire past—Mill does not exclude the possibility that a future exterior intervention may break the series. He asserts that state q will inevitably produce state r; state r, s; state s, t, but he concedes that before t a divine catastrophe—the consummatio mundi, let us say—may have annihilated the planet. The future is inevitable and exact, but it may not happen. God lies in wait in the intervals.

  In 1857, people were disturbed by a contradiction. Genesis assigned six days—six unequivocal Hebrew days, from sunset to sunset—to the divine creation of the world, but the paleontologists impiously insisted on enormous accumulations of time. (De Quincey unavailingly repeated that the Scriptures have an obligation not to instruct mankind in any science, for the sciences constitute a vast mechanism to develop and train the human intellect.) How could one reconcile God with the fossils, Sir Charles Lyell with Moses? Gosse, fortified by prayer, proposed an astonishing answer.

  Mill imagines a causal, infinite time that may be interrupted by a future act of God; Gosse, a rigorously causal, infinite time that has been interrupted by a past act: the Creation. State n will inevitably produce state v, but before v the Universal Judgment may occur; state n presupposes state c, but state c has not occurred, because the world was created in f or in b. The first moment of time coincides with the moment of the Creation, as St. Augustine says, but that first instant involves not only an infinite future, but an in finite past. A past that is hypothetical, to be sure, but also detailed and inevitable. Adam appears, and his teeth and his skeleton are thirty-three years old; Adam appears (Edmund Gosse writes) and he has a navel, although no umbilical cord attached him to a mother. The principle of reason requires that no effect be without a cause; those causes require other causes, which are multiplied regressively;6 there are concrete vestiges of them all, but only those that are posterior to the Creation have really existed. There are skeletons of glyptodonts in the gorge of Lujan, but there have never been glyptodonts. Such is the ingenious (and, above all, unbelievable) thesis that Philip Henry Gosse proposed to religion and to science.

  Both rejected it. The newspapers reduced it to the doctrine that God had hidden fossils under the earth to test the faith of the geologists; Charles Kingsley denied that the Lord had carved a “superfluous and vast lie” into the rocks. In vain, Gosse explained the metaphysical foundation of his the sis: that one moment of time was inconceivable without the moment before it and the one after it, and so on to infinity. I wonder if he knew the ancient sentence that is quoted at the beginning of Rafael Cansinos Assens’ Talmudic anthology: “It was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it.”

  There are two virtues I would claim for Gosse’s forgotten thesis. First: its somewhat monstrous elegance. Second: its involuntary reduction to absurdity of a creatio ex nihilo, its indirect demonstration that the universe is eternal, as the Vedanta and Heraclitus, Spinoza and the atomists all thought. Bertrand Russell has brought this up to date. In the ninth chapter of his book, The Analysis of Mind (London, 1921), he imagines that the planet was created only a few minutes ago, with a humanity that “remembers” an illusory past.

  Postscript: In 1802, Chateaubriand (Genie du christianisme I, 4, s), for aesthetic reasons, formulated a thesis identical to that of Gosse. He denounced as banal and ridiculous a first day of the Creation, populated by baby pigeons, larvae, puppies, and seeds. “Without this original antiquity, there would have been neither beauty nor magnificence in the work of the Almighty; and, what could not possibly be
the case, nature, in a state of innocence, would have been less charming than she is in her present degenerate condition,” he wrote.

  [1941] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  Dr. Américo Castro Is Alarmed

  The word problem may be an insidious petitio principii. To speak of the Jewish problem is to postulate that the Jews are a problem; it is to predict (and recommend) persecution, plunder, shooting, beheading, rape, and the reading of Dr. Rosenberg’s prose. Another disadvantage of fallacious problems is that they bring about solutions that are equally fallacious. Pliny (Book VIII of Natural History) is not satisfied with the observation that dragons attack elephants in the summer; he ventures the hypothesis that they do it in order to drink the elephants’ blood, which, as everyone knows, is very cold. Dr. Castro (La peculiaridad lingüistica rioplatense y su sentido historico [Losada, Buenos Aires, 1941]) is not content to observe that there is a “linguistic disorder in Buenos Aires”: he ventures the hypothesis of “slangism” and “gauchophile mystique.”

  To demonstrate the first thesis—the corruption of the Spanish language in the River Plate era—the doctor employs a method that we must classify as sophistic, to avoid casting aspersions on his intelligence; as ingenuous, to banish doubts regarding his integrity. He collects bits and pieces from Pacheco, Vacarezza, Lima, Last Reason, Contursi, Enrique Gonzalez Tunon, Palermo, Llanderas, and Malfatti; he copies them with childlike seriousness and then exhibits them urbi et orbi as examples of our depraved language. He does not suspect that these exercises (“Con un jeca con chele / y una ensaimada / vos te venis pal Centro / de gran bacan” ) are merely caricatures; he declares that they are “symptoms of a grave disorder,” caused by “the well-known circumstances that made the River Plate an area where the heartbeat of the Spanish Empire had lost much of its vigor.” One could argue just as effectively that there are no traces of Spanish left in Madrid, using as proof the following couplets quoted by Rafael Salillas in his book, El delincuente espahol: su lenguaje (1896):