A New Refutation of Time

by Jorge Luis Borges

Genres: Philosophy

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."

Reviews

[Marcos Pensive · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating case against the existence of time that employs concepts from the idealist school of thought and attempts to expand on them.
This essay postulates, essentially, that every instant or moment is autonomous, and only this current state of perception exists, with the past being simply a present memory of things not chronologically connected with the present, the future never existing at all. The author expands on this by positing that, under such a conception, a "previous" moment repeated identically "later" is actually the same moment, not actually repeated, instead being the only moment.

While I find no reason to reject this notion metaphysically, as it doesn't contain contradictions or leaps in logic, believing in time doesn't involve contradictions or leaps in logic either, and I personally choose to reject this essay's negation of time philosophically.
If this idea about time were the case, only this present unit of perception existing, then there would only be illusion of movement and change by way of memory, meaning nothing about life could be improved or worsened as change could only happen within time; Borges' negation of time means a stagnant present. Life would serve no purpose, provide no value, simply be, rendering all discourse inconsequential. I don't find this refutation to be the "secret consolation" the author describes it as. I choose instead to believe in time existing in relation to consciousness, the option that makes any of our activities worth something, aware that this decision is beholden to a fundamental assumption that purpose and value have inherent desirability, which I embrace, because without it we might as well not exist, and I find no reason to cease existing that surpasses my interest in seeing what existence has to offer. I suppose it’s very human of me.
That being said, the essay makes for a formidable thought experiment.

What I can rescue most from this work is its beautiful passages about eternity (and how moments in time seemingly repeated in feeling are functionally the same) which have a literary value and profundity in relation to human experience and history that I can't deny. Read "Feeling in Death" by the same author, quoted in this essay in-full, to experience a lot of what I'm getting at.

[Timothy Morrison]

.“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

― Vladimir Nabokov

[Fruit Salad · Rating 4 out of 5]

time is a river which sweeps me along, but i am the river.

love being pretentious about stuff like this