Borges’s elimination of past and future:

Bertrand P. Helm Borges’s Elimination of Past and Future: A Paradox

“For us, time is a jarring, urgent problem, perhaps the most vital problem of metaphysics, while eternity is a game or a spent hope. . . . Eternity is an image wrought in the substance of time.” A History of Eternity (1936), Jorge Borges ABSTRACT Given the influence of fiction and fantasy about time travel in popularliterature, there is a certain urgency to overhauling human attitudes toward time. A first step appears in Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. He works through the seemingly upside down thesis that facts only become historical posthumously. A sturdier, complementary approach to despatializing time is worked out by Jorges L. Borges in his paradoxical argument that the future emerges prematurely. Across severalof his essays, Borges analyzes several overlapping idealistic claims made by the likes of Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Schopenhauer, in achieving the composite view that the future in addition to the past are willful pro-jects tossed off from our present condition. Future and past are not bookends for the present, but are modes of a human presence. These modes arise as we recast our presentordeals into forms that are most auspicious for maintaining a limited tenancy in selfhood.

KronoScope 5:1 (2005) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005

In his refutation of time, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has woven together an analysis and rebuttal of some pivotal assumptions about time in modern Western philosophy. Paradoxically, he then undermines his own case by tracing important exceptionsto it. Taken as a whole, the issue becomes one of representation: how effectively does time-talk about past, present and future gain a hold upon the course of affairs that we humans travel through and contend with? The body of his work was hardly noticed in the English speaking world until the 1960’s,1 and came after he and Samuel Beckett had jointly received a new international literary prize in1961. Some special attention needs to be given to certain other features of his literary career because of the degree to which he treated his writings as his very life.

I. Borges as Unbridled
The different compositions of Borges, in poetry, in essays, and in short fictions, have helped make him a leading figure in Argentinean letters. Indeed, some literary critics judge him to be a dominant 20thcentury prose writer in the Spanish language.2 Besides being a leading public intellectual, he was also a teacher. In 1955, he took a position in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Importantly for our purposes, he became professor of both English and American literatures at that university.3 So his judgment that Walt Whitman was the ideal English writer, onewhose poetry guided his own early literary efforts, is especially riveting. He also paid close attention to Berkeley and Hume, and was influenced by the work of A.N. Whitehead and F.H. Bradley. But if Whitman was his ideal English writer, his model philosopher was the German, Arthur Schopenhauer.4 Indeed, Borges tends to present himself as being about as unbridled and as untranslatable as Whitmanand Schopenhauer present themselves. He was multilingual in four languages, English, Spanish, German and French, and was bilingual from his earliest years in two of those, English and Spanish. From the first, then, his cognitive processes were freewheeling and imaginative. In his mature years, he extended his turbulent, almost untranslatable thought processes into the creation of an explicitmetaphysical storyboard where he scrambled the main sorts of things in labyrinthine, mind-numbing classifications. His manner of classifying things would, I think, be no more than an oddity deserving at best a footnote somewhere were it not for the fact that it pro74 • Bertrand P. Helm

vided the impetus that set in motion one of the classics of contemporary European philosophy, namely, The Order of...