Borges Shows Individual
Personality As a
Mirage Maintained
by Conceit and Custom
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote
“The Nothingness of Personality” in 1922
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The following text
is reproduced from
the volume “Selected
Non-Fictions”, by
Jorge Luis Borges,
edited by Eliot Weinberger,
Penguin Books,
2000, 560 pp., pp. 3-9.
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“….. My purpose is (…..) but to
consider the Calvary toward which
idolaters of themselves are on a fatal course.”
(J. L. B.)
Intention.
I want to tear down the exceptional preeminence now
generally awarded to the self, and I pledge to be spurred on by concrete certainty,
and not the caprice of an ideological ambush or a dazzling intellectual prank.
I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and
custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality. I want to apply to
literature the consequences that issue from these premises, and erect upon them
an aesthetic hostile to the psychologism inherited from the last century [1], sympathetic to the classics, yet
encouraging to today’s most unruly tendencies.
Course of action.
I have noticed that, in general, the acquiescence
conceded by a man in the role of reader to a rigorous dialectical linkage is no
more than a slothful inability to gauge the proofs the writer adduces and a
vague trust in the latter’s rectitude. But once the book has been closed and
the reading has dispersed, little remains in his memory except a more or less
arbitrary synthesis of the whole reading. To avoid this evident disadvantaged,
I will, in the following paragraphs, cast aside all strict and logical schemas,
and amass a pile of examples.
There is no whole self. Any of life’s present
situations is seamless and sufficient. Are you, as you ponder these
disquietudes, anything more than an indifference gliding over the argument I
make, or an appraisal of the opinions I expound?
I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out
the words that are most apt to compel your attention. The proposition and a few
muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place
outside my window, constitute my current I.
It would be vanity to suppose that in order to enjoy
absolute validity this psychic aggregate must seize on a self, that conjectural
Jorge Luis Borges on whose tongue sophistries are always at the ready and in
whose solitary strolls the evenings on the fringes of the city are pleasant.
There is no whole self. He who defines personal
identity as the private possession of some depository of memories is mistaken.
Whoever affirms such a thing is abusing the symbol that solidifies memory in the
form of an enduring and tangible granary or warehouse, when memory is no more
than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of
consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way. Moreover, if I root
personality in remembrance, what claim of ownership can be made on the elapsed
instants that, because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a
lasting mark? Heaped up over years, they lie buried, inaccessible to our avid
longing. And that much-vaunted memory to whose ruling you made appeal, does it
ever manifest all its past plenitude? Does it truly live? The sensualists and
their ilk, who conceive of your personality as the sum of your successive
states of mind, are similarly deceiving themselves. On closer scrutiny, their
formula is no more than an ignominious circumlocution that undermines the very
foundation it constructs, an acid that eats away at itself, a prattling fraud
and a belabored contradiction.
No one will pretend that, in the glance by which we
take in a limpid night, the exact number of visible stars is prefigured.
No one, on thinking about it, will accept that the
self can depend on the hypothetical and never realized nor realizable sum of
different states of mind. What is not carried out does not exist; the linkage
of events in a temporal succession does not refer to an absolute order. They
err, as well, who suppose that the negation of personality I am urging with
such obstinate zealotry refutes the certainty of being the isolated,
individualized, and distinct thing that each of us feels in the depths of his
soul. I do not deny this consciousness of being, nor the immediate security of here I am that it breathes into us. What
I do deny is that all our other convictions must be adjusted to the customary
antithesis between the self and the non-self, and that this antithesis is
constant. The sensation of cold, of spacious and pleasurable suppleness, that
is in me as I open the front door and go out along the half-darkness of the
street is neither a supplement to a pre-existing self nor an event that comes
coupled to the other event of a continuing and rigorous self.
Moreover, even if the aforementioned reasons are
misguided, I would refuse to surrender, for your conviction of being an
individuality is in all ways identical to mine and to that of any human
specimen, and there is no way to separate them.
There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any
distance along the inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us
in order to feel like outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days.
There is no community of intention in them, nor are they propelled by the same
breeze. This has been declared by those men who have truly scrutinized the
calendars from which time was discarding them. Some, extravagant as fireworks,
make a boast of so muddled a confusion and say that disparity is wealth;
others, far from glorifying disorder, deplore the inequality of their days and
yearn for the popular uniformity. I will copy out two examples. The first bears
the date 1531; it is the epigraph to De
Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum, composed by the Kabbalist and
astrologer Agrippa of Nettesheim in the disillusioned latter days of his life.
He says:
“Among gods, all are shaken by the jeers of Momus.
Among heroes, Hercules gives chase to all the monsters.
Among demons, Pluto, the King of Hell, oppresses all the shades.
While Heraclitus weeps at everything,
Pyrrho knows naught of anything,
And Aristotle glories in knowing all.
Diogenes spurns the things of this world,
And I, Agrippa, am foreign to none of this.
I disdain, I know, I do not know, I pursue, I laugh, I tyrannize, I
protest.
I am philosopher, god, hero, demon and the whole universe.”
The second testimonial comes from the third part of
Torres Villarroel’s Vida e Historia.
This systematizer of Quevedo, learned in astrology, lord and master of all
words, expert wielder of the most strident rhetorical figures, also sought to
define himself and probed his fundamental incongruence. He saw that he was like
everyone else: that is, that he was no one, or little more than an
unintelligible cacophony, persisting in time and wearing out in space. He
wrote:
“I am angry, fearful, compassionate, joyous, sad,
greedy, generous, enraged, meek, and all the good and bad emotions and all the
praiseworthy and reprehensible actions that can be found in all men together or
separately. I have tried out all the vices and all the virtues, and in a single
day I feel inclined to weep and laugh, give and keep, repose and suffer, and I
am always unaware of the cause and the momentum of these contrarieties. I have
heard this alternative of contrary impulses called madness; if it be so, we are
all mad to a greater or lesser degree for I have noticed this unforeseen and
repeated alternation in everyone.”
There is no whole self. Beyond all possibility of
bombastic gamesmanship, I have touched this hard truth with my own emotions as
I was separating from a companion. I was returning to Buenos Aires and leaving
him behind in Mallorca. We both understood that, except in the perfidious or
altered proximity of letters, we would not meet again. What happens at such
moments happened. We knew this good-bye would jut out in our memories, and
there was even a period when we tried to enhance its flavor with a vehement
show of opinions for the yearnings to come. The present moment was acquiring
all the prestige and indeterminacy of the past….
But beyond any egotistical display, what clamored in
my chest was the will to show my soul in its entirety to my friend. I would
have wanted to strip myself of it and leave it there, palpitating. We went on
talking and debating, on the brink of good-bye, until all at once, with an
unsuspected strength of conviction, I understood that this personality, which
we usually appraise at such an incompatibly exorbitant value, is nothing. The
thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing
all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional
phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the
episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. And I despised all
mysterizing.
The last century was rootedly subjective in its
aesthetic manifestations. Its writers were more inclined to show off their
personalities than to establish a body of work, an aphorism that is also
applicable today to the teeming and highly acclaimed mob of those who profit
from the glib embers of that century’s bonfires. However, my purpose is not to
lash out against one or the other of these groups, but to consider the Calvary
toward which idolaters of themselves are on a fatal course. We have already
seen that any state of mind, however opportunistic, can entirely fill up our
attention, which is much the same as saying that it can form, in its brief and
absolute term, our essence. Which, translated into the language of literature,
means that to try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life
are one and the same thing. A strenuous, panting dash between the prodding of
time and man, who, like Achilles in the illustrious conundrum formulated by
Zeno of Elea, will always see himself in last place…
Whitman was the first Atlas who attempted to make this
obstinacy a reality and take the world upon his shoulders. He believed he had
only to enumerate the names of things in order to make their unique and
surprising nature immediately palpable. Therefore, his poems, along with a
great deal of fine rhetoric, string together garrulous series of words, sometimes
repeated from geographic or history primers, which kindle lofty signs of
admiration and mimic great enthusiasm.
From Whitman on, many have been caught up in this same
fallacy. They have said:
“I have not tormented the language in quest of unexpected
intensities or verbal marvels. I have not spun out even a slight paradox
capable of creating a stir in your conversation or sending its sparks out
through your laborious silence. Nor did I invent a tale around which lengthy
spans of attention would cluster, as many futile hours cluster in remembrance
around one hour in which there was love. None of that did I do nor have I
determined to do and yet I wish for enduring fame. My justification is as
follows: I am a man astonished by the abundance of the world: I bear witness to
the unicity of things. Like the most illustrious of men, my life is located in
space, and the chiming of unanimous clocks punctuates my duration in time. The
words I use are not redolent of far-flung readings, but signs that mark what I
have felt or contemplated. If ever I made mention of the dawn, it was not
merely to follow the easy current of usage. I can assure you that I know what
the Dawn is: I have seen, with premeditated rejoicing, the explosion that
hollows out the depths of the streets, incites the slums of the world to
revolt, humiliates the stars and broadens the sky by many leagues. I also know
what a jacaranda, a statue, a meadow, a cornice are… I am like everyone else.
This is my boast and my glory. It matters little whether I have proclaimed it
in feeble verses or in rough-hewn prose.”
The same is asserted, with greater skill and mastery,
by painters. What is contemporary painting - that of Picasso and his pupils -
but a rapt confirmation of the gorgeous unicity of a king of spades, a
gatepost, or a chess board? Romantic ego-worship and loudmouthed individualism
are in this way wreaking havoc on the arts. Thank God that the lengthy
examination of spiritual minutiae that this demands of the artist forces him
back to the eternal classic rectitude that is creation. In a book like Ramón
Gómez de la Serna’s Greguerías, the
currents of both tendencies intermingle, and as we read we are unaware if what
magnetizes our interest with such unique force is copied reality or is of pure
intellectual fabrication.
The self does not exist. Schopenhauer, who often
appears to adhere to this opinion, at other times tacitly denies it, I know not
whether deliberately or because he is compelled by the rough, homespun
metaphysics - or rather a metaphysics - that lurks in the very origins of
language. Nevertheless, despite this disparity, there is a passage in his work
that illuminates the alternative like a sudden blast of flame. I shall
transcribe it:
“An infinite time has run its course before my birth;
what was I throughout all that time? Metaphysically, the answer might perhaps
be: I was always I; that is, all who during that time said I, were in fact I.”
Reality has no need of other realities to bolster it.
There are no divinities hidden in the trees, nor any elusive thing-in-itself
behind appearances, nor a mythological self that orders our actions. Life is
truthful appearance. The senses do not deceive, it is the mind that deceives,
said Goethe, in a maxim we could compare to this line by Macedonio Fernández:
“La realidad trabaja en abierto misterio”
[Reality works in overt mystery]
There is no whole self. Grimm, in an excellent presentation of Buddhism
(Die Lehre des Buddha, Munich, 1917),
describes the process of elimination whereby the Indians arrived at this
certainty. Here is their millennially effective precept: “Those things of which
I can perceive the beginnings and the end are not my self.” This rule is
correct and needs only to be exemplified in order to persuade us of its virtue.
I, for example, am not the visual reality that my eyes encompass, for if I
were, darkness would kill me and nothing would remain in me to desire the
spectacle of the world, or even to forget it. Nor am I the audible world that I
hear, for in that case silence would erase me and I would pass from sound to
sound without memory of the previous one. Subsequent identical lines of
argument can be directed toward the senses of smell, taste, and touch, proving
not only that I am not the world of appearances - a thing generally known and
undisputed - but that the apperceptions that indicate that world are not my
self either. That is, I am not my own activity of seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, touching. Nor am I my body, which is a phenomenon among others. Up to
this point the argument is banal; its distinction lies in its application to
spiritual matters. Are desire, thought, happiness, and distress my true self?
The answer, in accordance with the precept, is clearly in the negative, since
those conditions expire without annulling me with them. Consciousness - the
final hideout where we might track down the self - also proves unqualified.
Once the emotions, the extraneous perceptions, and even ever-shifting thought
are dismissed, consciousness is a barren thing, without any appearance
reflected in it to make it exist.
Grimm observes that this rambling dialectical inquiry yields a result
that coincides with Schopenhauer’s opinion that the self is a point whose
immobility is useful for discerning, by contrast, the heavy-laden flight of
time. This opinion translates the self into a mere logical imperative, without
qualities of its own or distinctions from individual to individual.
[1922]
[Translation, Esther Allen]
NOTE:
[1] Borges wrote this in 1922. “Last century” is therefore 19th century.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in the
ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical Literature”, by
Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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