Borges Via the Dialectics of Berkeley and Hume

hen Kant inquired into the capability of the human mind and drew the conclusion that the entire universe, as we know it, is only appearance and not reality —i.e., noumena— “he said nothing absolutely new,” Paul Deussen notes humorously in Die Philosophie des Upanishads (204). According to this critic, Kant’s doctrine on the phenomenal world comes down to demonstrating in a more intelligible way a belief that had been in existence long before him. Deussen draws our attention back to ancient philosophy claiming that a basically similar teaching is found in Parmenides’ world of appearances; in Plato’s empirical reality, a mere shadow of the world of Forms 1; and in the Upanishads’ vision of the universe as mâya—a sheer illusion. Years later, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, long committed to metaphysical perplexities, shapes in the confidant and quiet companionship of a Buenos Aires’ library a world of fiction, a fantasy, that curiously endorses Deussen’s view. Borges indeed devotes his writings to portraying the only existence he seems to hold as certain: dreams. This time, however, fiction is not only seen as the object of experience, but fundamentally as the object of mystery, the object of art