Some Reflections on Borges' "A New Refutation of Time"

I've read most of Borges' fiction several times over, but I've never seriously applied myself to his essays. To rectify my neglect, I've been reading A New Refutation of Time, whose significance for the understanding of his fiction can hardly be overestimated. As he himself remarks in a Prologue, "This refutation is found in some way or another in all my books."
   The essay is divided into two parts: an earlier version (published in 1944), and a reworking of it from 1946. Borges explains that instead of merging the two versions or suppressing the earlier version in favour of the later version, he decided to publish the two versions side by side, in order that "the reading of two analogous texts might facilitate the comprehension of an indocile subject." However, there is no material difference between the ideas in the two presentations, and I shall treat the two texts more or less as one.
   In the essay, Borges defends theories of the nature of time that could have come from some of the characters in his stories, such as Nils Runeberg in Three Versions of Judas or the Histriones in The Theologians. And indeed, the first sentence of the Prologue echoes the first paragraph of Three Versions of Judas. As a preliminary, however, he runs through the tenets of Idealism as propounded by George Berkeley.
   My own view of Berkeley is that he belongs to the class of persons that Plato and Aristotle inveighed against in their time, that is, Sophists, pseudo-philosophers who present clever but fallacious arguments leading to annoying paradoxes. Of "unthinking things" (I shall come shortly to the question of "thinking things") he maintained that "their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the mind of the thinking things which perceive them." Thus, he begins from perceptions, but concludes that there can be no such thing as a perception, if by this we understand an idea in the mind of something existing outside the mind. He attempted to evade this contradiction by supposing that God, who is always perceiving everything, keeps the world in existence - though why keeping it in existence for God keeps it in existence for another mind, he does not explain. Berkeley has the reputation of being a Solipsist, though in the passage quoted above he seems to leave open the possibility of 'thinking things' other than himself, that is, other minds. In any case, the distinction between Idealism and Solipsism strikes me as more a matter of philosophical respectability than of Metaphysics. On an idealist understanding, I have no way of distinguishing an idea of another mind from an idea originating in my mind. If the image of a face speaks in my own language, that is only what I would expect from one of my images. If it speaks in another language, which I have to learn laboriously, then that is because there is an unknown world in my mind.
   Without Idealism we have no platform from which to ascend to a denial of space or time, but these denials are worth examining as pathological specimens. We should note at once that Idealism precludes the existence of space, since space (as Geulincx says in his Metaphysics, II,5) is a kind of body. Borges too takes this as read, and proceeds to the main burden of his essay, that is, whether the existence of time is also precluded. "Once the idealist argument is admitted, I see that it is possible, perhaps inevitable, to go further....Once matter and spirit, which are continuities, are rejected, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity that is time." It is necessary to pause here and reflect on what exactly we mean when we speak of our consciousness of time.
   We (I and all you other minds, if any) have two kinds of idea. Some of them we can modify: I can close my eyes or switch off the image on the television set - though for an idealist, of course, those operations would take place solely in the mind). Others, I cannot modify - though they may get modified in an inexplicable way. I propose that the former kind of idea may can be called ideas of the present, the latter kind ideas of the past. (In Idealism there is no future, or future tense). On this understanding, time is a predicate of ideas, or events (to an idealist these are synonymous). On this understanding also, the contention that a single repetition refutes time is itself refuted, as the same idea can reappear in both modifiable and unmodifiable forms.
   Borges also cites the Sophist Sextus Empiricus, who refuted time as follows: "[He] denies the existence of the past....and the future, and argues that the present is divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in such a case it would have no beginning to link it to the past, nor end to link it to the future, nor even a middle, for what has no beginning nor end can have no middle. Neither is it divisible," for that (to summarise) would lead to the absurdity of a present that itself has a past and a future. However, if (as Sextus Empiricus assumed) the past and the future do not exist, there is no requirement for the present to have links to them, so that the correct conclusion is that the present is indivisible.
   At the conclusion of the essay, Borges admits that Idealism and the denial of time are not only unbelieved, but unbelievable. They are "apparent desperations or secret consolations." In other words, they are material for fiction. In the only story of mine in which I imitate Borges, called The Heretics, the heretics of the title deny time. Unfortunately, after writing Part I of the story, I became completely blocked. I therefore have no idea how Theophano eventually puts to flight the heretics (who are probably not susceptible to logical arguments).