Marcelo Abadi
In the same tongue in which Spinoza refuted the Jewish
authorities who brought about his expulsion from the Amsterdam Synagogue, three
centuries later an Argentinean writer, long since blind, dictated a sonnet
entitled "Baruch Spinoza". Some years earlier he had dictated another
sonnet, called, simply, "Spinoza". The poet --Jorge Luis Borges, of
course-- is one of the most prominent writers in any tongue. He produced no
famous novel, no successful play; he created no character comparable to Don
Quixote, or Hamlet, or even Father Brown. But in his poems, stories and essays
our century can detect a voice that stirs the dormant wonder which, according
to the Greeks, lies at the source of the love of knowledge and wisdom.
Borges claimed to be "simply a man of letters" [1];
in private he had described himself as a "puzzled literary man". Yet,
though he never purported to be a philosopher, the stuff of his creation is
often philosophical: the riddles on which the mind dwells while pondering
problems such as the reality of the external world, the identity of the self,
the nature of time.
The Vienna Circle held metaphysics to be a branch of
fantastical literature. Borges shared this view, referring ironically but also
appreciatively to metaphysics and enumerating among the masters of the genre
authors such as Plato, Leibniz, Kant… and Spinoza, whose invention of an
infinite substance with infinite attributes he considered a superb fiction.
Borges, admitting that he appraised philosophical ideas
according to their aesthetic value or inasmuch as their content were singular
or marvellous, never led his readers to expect a style of rigorous
demonstration or sustained coherence, which is not to be found in his writings.
Nevertheless, one should not hasten to conclude that he was indifferent to
truth; he felt there is ultimately a close solidarity between beauty, truth and
good. And if he did express deep-rooted scepticism, it was scepticism that
spurred his vigilant quest.
But Spinoza deemed his own philosophy to be the true one. In
his system there was no place for doubt, not even the provisory doubt of
Descartes.
What, then, was the message that three centuries after his
death the Dutch philosopher conveyed to the Argentinean man of letters? How is
the doctrine of Spinoza to be read in the works of Borges?
