The Postulation of Reality

Hume noted once and for all that Berkeley's arguments do not admit of the

slightest reply and do not produce the slightest conviction; I would like to

possess a no less cultured and lethal maxim with which to demolish the argu­

ments of Croce. Hume's does not serve my purpose, for Croce's diaphanous

doctrine does have the faculty of persuading, even if that is its only faculty.

Its effect is to be unmanageable; it is good for cutting off a discussion, not

for resolving one.

Its formula-my reader will recall-is the identical nature of the aes­

thetic and the expressive. I do not reject it, but I wish to observe that writers

of a classical disposition tend rather to shun the expressive. The fact has not

been given any consideration until now; I shall explain myself.

The romantic, generally with ill fortune, wishes incessantly to express;

the classical writer rarely dispenses with a petitio principii-that is, some

fundamental premise which is taken entirely for granted. I am diverting the

words classical and romantic from all historical connotations; I use them to

mean two archetypes of the writer (two procedures) . The classical writer

does not distrust language, but believes in the ample virtue of each of its

signs. He writes, for example:

After the departure of the Goths, and the separation of the allied army, Attila was surprised at the vast silence that reigned over the plains of Chalons: the suspicion of some hostile stratagem detained him several

days within the circle of his wagons, and his retreat beyond the Rhine confessed the last victory which was achieved in the name of the West­ern empire. Meroveus and his Franks, observing a prudent distance, and magnifying the opinion of their strength by the numerous fires which they kindled every night, continued to follow the rear of the Huns till they reached the confines of Thuringia. The Thuringians

6o J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

served in the army of Attila: they traversed, both in their march and in

their return, the territories of the Franks; and it was perhaps in this war

that they exercised the cruelties, which, about fourscore years after­

wards, were revenged by the son of Clovis. They massacred their hostages, as well as their captives: two hundred young maidens were

tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were torn

asunder by wild horses, or their bones were crushed under the weight

of rolling wagons; and their unburied limbs were abandoned on the public roads, a prey to dogs and vultures. (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire XXXV)

The clause "After the departure of the Goths" suffices to reveal the mediate

character of this writing, generalized and abstract to the point of invisi­

bility. The author presents us with a play of symbols, no doubt rigorously

organized, but whose eventual animation is up to us. He is not really ex­

pressive; he does no more than record a reality, he does not represent one.

The sumptuous events to whose posthumous allusion he summons us in­

volved dense experiences, perceptions, reactions; these may be inferred

from his narrative but are not present in it. To put it more precisely, he does

not write reality's initial contacts, but its final elaboration in concepts. This

is the classic method, the one perpetually followed by Voltaire, by Swift, by

Cervantes. I shall copy down a second paragraph, at this point almost su­

perfluous, from the last of these writers:

And thinking there was a necessity for shortening the siege, while this

opportunity of Anselmo's absence lasted, Lothario assaulted Camilla's

pride with the praises of her beauty; for nothing sooner succeeds in

overthrowing the embattled towers of female vanity, than vanity itself,

employed by the tongue of adulation: in short, he so assiduously un­

dermined the fortress of her virtue, and plied it with such irresistible engines, that tho' she had been made of brass, she must have surren­dered at mercy: he wept, entreated, promised, flattered, feigned and im­

portuned, with such earnest expressions of love, as conquered all her

reserve; at last, he obtained a complete triumph, which, tho' what he least expected, was what of all things, he most ardently desired. (Don Quixote I , chap. 34)

Passages like this one make up much the greater part of world literature,

and the least worthless part, even now. To repudiate them so as not to incon-

T H E P O S T U L A T I O N O F R E A L I T Y 61

venience a formula would be impractical and ruinous. Within their obvious

ineffectiveness, they are effective; this contradiction needs resolving.

I would recommend this hypothesis: imprecision is tolerable or plau­

sible in literature because we almost always tend toward it in reality. The

conceptual simplification of complex states is often an instantaneous opera­

tion. The very fact of perceiving, of paying attention, is selective; all atten­

tion, all focusing of our consciousness, involves a deliberate omission of

what is not interesting. We see and hear through memories, fears, expecta­

tions. In bodily terms, unconsciousness is a necessary condition of physical

acts. Our body knows how to articulate this difficult paragraph, how to con­

tend with stairways, knots, overpasses, cities, fast-running rivers, dogs, how

to cross the street without being run down by traffic, how to procreate, how

to breathe, how to sleep, and perhaps how to kill: our body, not our intellect.

For us, living is a series of adaptations, which is to say, an education in obliv­

ion. It is admirable that the first news of Utopia Thomas More gives us is his

puzzled ignorance of the "true" length of one of its bridges . . . .

I reread, in my investigation of the classic, the above paragraph by Gib­

bon, and I find an almost imperceptible and certainly harmless metaphor:

the reign of silence. It is an initial gesture of expression-whether it falls

short or is felicitous, I do not know-that appears not to conform to the

strict legal execution of the rest of the prose. Of course, it is justified by its

invisibility, its already conventional nature. Its use allows us to define an­

other of the hallmarks of the classical: the belief that once an image has

been brought into existence, it is public property. To the classical mind, the

plurality of men and of eras is incidental; literature is always one and the

same. The surprising defenders of Gongora exonerated him of the charge of

innovation-by documenting the fine erudite lineage of his metaphors.

They had not the slightest premonition of the romantic discovery of the

personality. Now all of us are so absorbed in it that the fact of denying or

neglecting it is only one of many clever ways of "being personal." With re­

spect to the thesis that poetic language must be a single thing, we may note

its evanescent resurrection by Arnold; he proposed to reduce the vocabu­

lary of Homer's translators to that of the Authorized Version of the Scrip­

tures, alleviated only by the eventual interpolation of certain liberties taken

from Shakespeare. His argument was based on the power and dissemina­

tion of the biblical words . . . .

The reality offered up by classical writers is a question of confidence,

just as paternity is for a certain character in the Lehrjahre. The reality the

62 J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

romantics seek to deplete is of a more overbearing nature; their continual

method is emphasis, the partial lie. I shall not go looking for illustrations:

every page of prose or verse that is professionally current can be examined

with success in this respect.

The classic postulation of reality can take three forms, which are quite di­

versely accessible. The easiest consists of a general notification of the impor­

tant facts. (Except for a few inconvenient allegories, the aforecited text by

Cervantes is not a bad example of this first and spontaneous mode of the

classical procedure.) The second consists of imagining a more complex reality

than the one declared to the reader and describing its derivations and results.

I know of no better illustration than the opening of Tennyson's heroic frag­

ment Marte d'Arthur, which I reproduce here for the interest of its technique.

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur's table, man by man,

Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,

King Arthur; then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

Sir Bedivere the last of all his knights,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a dark strait of barren land.

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Three times this narration has postulated a more complex reality: first, by

the grammatical artifice of the adverb so; second (and better), by the inci­

dental manner of transmitting a fact: "because his wound was deep"; third,

by the unexpected addition of"and the moon was full." Another effective il­

lustration of this method is supplied by Morris, who, after relating the

mythical abduction of one of Jason's oarsmen by fleet-footed river divini­

ties, closes the story in the following way:

. . . the gurgling river hid The flushed nymphs and the heedless sleeping man. But ere the water covered them, one ran Across the mead and caught up from the ground

The brass-bound spear, and buckler bossed and round,

T H E P O S T U L A T I O N O F R E A L I T Y

The ivory-hilted sword, and coat of mail,

Then took the stream; so what might tell the tale,

Unless the wind should tell it, or the bird

Who from the reed these things had seen and heard?

This final testimony by beings previously unmentioned is, for us, the im­

portant part.

The third method, the most difficult and effective of them all, makes

use of the invention of circumstances. A certain very memorable detail in

Enrique Larreta's La gloria de Don Ramiro can serve as an example: the ap­

petizing "bacon broth, served in a tureen with a padlock to protect it from

the voracity of the pages," so suggestive of genteel poverty, the line of ser­

vants, the big old house full of stairways and turns and varying light. I have

given a brief and linear example, but I know of extensive works-Wells'

rigorous imaginative novels' and those of Daniel Defoe, exasperatingly

plausible-which make frequent use of no other procedure than an unfold­

ing or series of those laconic details with broad implications. I shall say the

same of the cinematographic novels of Josef von Sternberg, which are also

made up of significant moments. This is an admirable and difficult method,

but its general applicability makes it less strictly literary than the two previ­

ous ones, particularly the second, which often functions by pure syntax,

pure verbal dexterity. As is proven by these lines from Moore:

1The Invisible Man, for example. This character-a solitary chemistry student in the desperate London winter-must finally acknowledge that the privileges of invisi­bility do not make up for the inconveniences. He must go naked and barefoot, so as not to panic the city with the sight of a scurrying overcoat and a pair of autonomous boots. A revolver in his transparent hand is impossible to conceal. So are the foods he swallows, before they are digested. From sunrise on, his so-called eyelids do not block out the light, and he must get used to sleeping as if with his eyes open. It is just as use­less to throw his phantasmal arm over his eyes. In the street, traffic accidents fix upon him and he is always in fear of being run over and killed. He must flee London. He must take refuge in wigs, in pince-nez made with smoked glass, in carnivalesque noses, suspicious beards, and gloves . . . so that no one will see that he is invisible. Once found out, he begins a miserable Reign of Terror in a wretched little village far from the sea. In order to make others respect him, he wounds a man. Then the police com­missioner has him hunted down by dogs; he is cornered near the train station, and killed.

Another highly skilled example of such circumstantial phantasmagoria is Kip­ling's tale, "The Finest Story in the World," in the 1893 collection Many Inventions.

J O R G E L U I S B O R G E S

]e suis ton amant, et la blonde Gorge tremble sous man baiser

[I am your lover, and the blond/Throat trembles beneath my kiss]

whose virtue resides in the transition from the possessive pronoun to the

direct article, the surprising use of la. Their symmetrical opposite is found

in the following line from Kipling:

Little they trust to sparrow-dust that stop the seal in his sea!

Naturally, the antecedent of"his" is "seal": "dust that stop the seal in his sea."

{1931} {EA}

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meinong/ Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

Meinong's Non-Intentionalistic Table of Categories

If one puts the paradoxical and nonsensical cases aside, Meinong's table of categories according to the modes of being looks as follows:

I.

Objects (All objects have outside-being [Außersein])

I.A.

Objects that have being

I.B.

Objects that do not have being

I.A.1.

Real objects

(which exist as

well as subsist)

I.A.2

Ideal objects

(which only subsist)

I.B.1

Objects that have non-being

I.B.2

Objects that are not

determined with respect

to being

↓ ↓ I.B.1.a

Non-contradictory Objects

I.B.1.b

Contradictory Objects ↓

Complete

objects Complete objects Complete objects

Incomplete objects

whose non-being is

“explicitly

presupposed”

Complete or incomplete

objects

Incomplete objects that

are not contradictorily

determined and their non-

being is not “explicitly

presupposed”

Examples:

Doughnuts

(like the one on

the table in

front of me),

tables, stars,

etc.

Examples:

The objective (state of

affairs) of my

doughnut being on the

table; the state of

affairs of my doughnut

not being in the fridge;

the number of

doughnuts in front of

me

Examples:

The doughnut on the table

but which is made of

chocolate instead of

vanilla; the Platonistic

idea of “doughnuthood”

(if Platonism fails)

Examples:

The mountain

made of

doughnuts; the

golden mountain;

the perpetual

motion machine

Examples:

The ring-shaped doughnut

without a hole; the round

square; the set of all sets; the

greatest prime number; the

doughnut on the table but

with some property in

addition to its complete set

of properties

Examples:

The doughnut as such; the

“auxiliary” object: my

doughnut (see Sections

4.4.3 and 5 below); the

object whose only

property is being blue;

The Triangle

Being has two modes, to wit existence, which is linked with time, and mere subsistence, which is timeless.

Rich Cochrane

Typewritten Text

Dauben, J. W. (1979) Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite. Princeton: Princeton University Press.