George Luis Borges and Post Irony

George Luis Borges, 1951 portrait by Greta Stern

George Luis Borges, no relation to the Danish entertainer Victor Borge, when he was a young man had a wonderful approach to personality. In a bit of writing he called The Nothingness of Personality he suggested and this is the quote: "I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He wrote this in 1922 when he was 23 years old. I'm tempted to suggest he was thinking about his own approach to the characters in his stories, I'm probably wrong. But he doesn't stop there, he goes on to say a few slightly cruel things about the "...general acquiescence conceded by a man in the role of reader..." who makes massive assumptions about and pays only a "slothful" attention to the "rectitude" of the "rigorous dialectical linkages" in the story, account, or whatever it is the writer has written. His use of the word "dialectical" is particularly enjoyable. The original meaning of dialectic began with the Greek for "conversation or good at debate." Aristotle saw the dialectic as a word that described a form of reasoning that produced conclusions from a premise assumed to be true. Two thousand years later Hegel used the word dialectic to describe a form of reasoning that resolved the internal contradictions within an argument through a three step process of thesis (a dubious premise), antithesis (another suggestion) and the third step was synthesis (a new premise.) Then when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started waxing dialectical, in some quarters the word dialect quickly became another word for Mephistopheles. Which is about where we are at the moment with The Nothingness of Post Ironic Discourse. Is it Irony, is it a search for purpose, an operatic addiction to displays of passion, a resurrection of Swiss Dadaism? George Luis Borges point in his Nothingness of Personality had something to say about these sorts of conjoinments. As someone who wanted to write he was aware that he wasn't a whole person, when seated by his window with pen in hand he was a self who wanted to write words that gripped the attention of the reader, then when he was elsewhere, in the park or walking to the café, he was someone else. The temporal nature of being a person, includes the temporal nature of personality, we change from second to second. His other point in the essay was to point out that given the mostly passive role the reader played, a writer's words had to follow a custom of writing if they were going to retain attention and not stretch the reader too far. In another way, the writer had to latch on to mental heuristics in the minds of his or her readers. The thesis achieved (boy meets girl), an antithesis resurrected (girl doesn't like freckles), the synthesis was more or less predictable (boy throws himself from balcony). George Luis Borges found himself blurring the lines between speculation and reality, he embraced the postmodern understandings, it was back then when the demise of the modern and the emergence of a new truth seemed as terrifying or as ridiculous as the Post Ironic children of today and as ludicrous as the waddling and geriatric political classes attempting to incorporate or seduce them by reducing their passions to dollar bills. George Luis Borges went blind at the age of 55, he died in 1986 at the age of 86.  

The Plain or Gathering Place of Ideal Forms

Gray Tree Frog

On this first day of a possible rapture, Baxter has volunteered a word of two about Plato and chariots. It begins with a parable, allegory, haggadah, whatever you want to call it, this one is about people, gods and ideal forms. And yes, to give this particular exemplum from Plato a degree of juj I have run rather loose with the details while retaining the basic distinctions Plato makes between men and gods, as well as his approach to what knowledge is, where it is, and how we people get our fingers on it. We all, men and gods, start out the same. Dumb as bricks yet beady eyed and blinking in the light surrounded by Ideal Forms of everything there is. And lo as we become less and less adorable and more and more obnoxious we begin to outstay our welcome, so the power from beyond, the origin of all, what Schopenhauer might have called the Blind Irrational Universal Will that exists outside of space and time, what Plato thought of as a non-physical eternal realm, this power from beyond produces chariots to send us on our way. Not sure whether you get a weeks training, whether there's any classroom work, or whether horse management and chariot driving literacy is assumed. What does happen is that some of us are more adept at chariot driving than others, some of us have well matched horses who get along with each other. But some of us have no idea what we're doing, we're a little nervous of horses, their teeth and their hooves, we're given ill-matched horses who have little respect for each other. And off across the plain we go to explore the host of perfect forms, absorb every ounce of perfect knowledge that's been laid out on display for our benefit. Lucky for you if your chariot gets manageable horses, you can take your time, explore, maybe pause get a closer a look at the ideal form of feminine beauty, the perfect carpenter, perfect table, an interior designer or an ideal lemon tree. But if your horses are Ill-matched and uncontrollable, charging around like mental patients, good chance you'll hide in the bowels of your assigned chariot waiting for it to be over. In time the more confident charioteers cheer on their steeds and up they go toward the clouds where they become gods. It's like a rapture. Sadly the less confident charioteers get flung around, this way and that until they get tossed carriage-less out of the Realm of Ideal Forms, they fall to earth were they wake up in a birth canal, find themselves kicking and screaming as they enter the world as mortals. It sucks even worse, because as a new born mortal even though you had your chance to fully grasp and understand the totality of knowledge you remember nothing. You're an empty bucket that leaks. For us mortals, knowledge will never be learned, if we're lucky, and there's a slim chance, with a little help from Plato telling us how to think properly we might remember something from our visit to the Plain of Ideal Forms. The point to keep a hold of, whether you call it Will or Eternal Realm, for both Plato and Schopenhauer this whatever it is lies outside us. For Kant, the plain of the ideal forms is inside us. The European Enlightenment strove for the idea that for us consciousness was our individualized special place, it was time for us to master ourselves, become the self overcoming Übermensch. Now and then a wacko like Schopenhauer popped up, occasionally physicists in their dotage made the odd sinister suggestion about a universal consciousness. The well-off, god bless them, in the West, the comfortable, those subject to aggressive tutelage and the threat of career, while struggling with third generation wealth, feeling overwhelmed and disenchanted by The Enlightenment looked to the East for solace from a wider perspective on the subject of being alive. We wanted cold baths and the whip in the drive to define our frightfully special me.

Will and the Ideal Forms for Schopenhauer

Waiting for Rain

The great sadness in life, and Baxter is trying to be brave, is that you can't talk about Kant or Schopenhauer or any of Kant's disciples, without mentioning Plato's metaphysics. When I was a callow youth, back when The Spleen was a cheerful, a happy go-lucky and confident atheist and when Baxter was no more than a distant glint in an abdominal aorta's eye, the word metaphysics was something Doctor Faustus used to pick up chicks who he could never marry because marriage was apparently a solemn Christian rite and Mephistopheles didn't approve of solemn institutions. Soon enough I realized that a majority meaning for the word metaphysics had less to do with the physical and legal conjoining of boys and girls and more to do with an understanding of the origin of the physical world. Certainly Plato wasn't the first to venture into the role of educating the youth and anyone else who would listen, but it was his metaphysics that had a profound influence on the western world. Even Foucault had to join the other postmodernists and reckon with Plato. And there's a chance the brothers and sister of Post Irony might one day ask a large language model to explain Plato's building blocks of reality, his Ideal Forms, before the data banks are subsumed by passionate and fashionable warbling of a Post Irony Aesthetic, a mid twenty first century Punk, a reincarnation of Siouxsie and the Banshees, what fun, and mindbogglingly First World, where's Pontius Pilate when you need him, but I have promised Baxter we'll try to live long enough to see it. Anyway! What on this good earth is an Ideal Form and why didn't Schopenhauer agree with Kant on what Plato said about Ideal Forms? It's a massive question that's put the shakes into Baxter who's already been accused of anti-antisemitism by the Spleen for saying that Ivan gave him the heebie-jeebies. Plato had decided that everything that happens in our brains was subject to our flawed perceptions and as a result was fundamentally imperfect. His Ideal Forms were the perfect, nonphysical archetypes of everything that exists. For Plato these perfect, non physical Archetypes existed outside our brains, they were in the universe, not in our minds. Kant decided that Plato had made an error, Kant argued that these perfect non physical archetypes were not in the universe they were in our brains. Schopenhauer dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal Forms were in our brains. He dismissed Kant's idea that Ideal forms were a priori structures of knowledge which our superior and unique cognitive abilities allowed us to access. Instead Schopenhauer insisted that of course ideal forms existed outside our brains, he rather denigrated Kant's positive attitude to cognitive ability, and Schopenhauer was determined that the timeless essence of all things were a manifestation of will, or more accurately Ideal Forms were a first level manifestation of will. For Schopenhauer, what he meant by Will was a metaphysical primal energy that exists outside of time, space and causality. Hold on, didn't Plato have his own thoughts on primal energy. Yes, I think he did, sort of. Plato put it together in a parable about the difference between the obedient horses that drew chariots for the Gods and the unruly horses that drew the chariots for men. Either way Baxter's yawning and we have a life to live.  

Understandings of Myth and Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer. Portrait by Johann Schäfer 1859

Conway's 2017 approach to a myth of Crowd Size now feels like a hundred years ago, but in another way something as intense as the origin of Christianity, or even the origin of the word Zoroaster, instead of Zarathustra, is rife with alternative possibilities, or alternative facts. Here I'm happy to argue that years and years ago, without myth we people would have failed, we'd have been canned food for the Saber Tooth Tiger, it's just that the Conway version of myth making remains fundamentally pathetic, a tragic misunderstanding of venerable and ancient myth making protocols. To dwell a while longer with myth, I always thought our generation of thinking emerged from the understandings drilled into us and our teachers by the influential Immanuel Kant. Kant enjoyed the idea that the enlightenment was a chance for us people to finish our apprenticeship, he saw our chance to "emerge from a self-incurred tutelage." His view of myth was: because of it, we people remained in a sort of bondage. At the same time, for the sake of his Lutheran students, he added the suggestion that God was mostly about morality, he went on to suggest that the pursuit of moral behavior within a society was an entirely reasonable search by reasonable creatures. Indeed that pursuit of morality was a Categorical Imperative about which we could do nothing, we just couldn't help ourselves but want to be nice, it was a Universal law in a Kingdom of Ends - we're talking The Metaphysics of Morals published 1797. Mind you Kant wasn't totally averse to mystery. Uniquely blessed as he thought we were  by reason, he nonetheless reckoned we remained cave dwellers who could never fully grasp everything. Yet Kant had a reverence for the sets of emotions assigned to the word Awe and the word Beauty. He knew not why the starry night evinced both awe and a reverence for the beautiful in him and yet it did. It may have been a union of Georges Sorel's writing on the power of myth and Arthur Schopenhauer's understanding of myth and religion that opened a reverential door for me, or at least struck me with a liking. Sadly this side of the Appalachians, the more delicate English speakers are made nervous by something as harmless as the Frankfurt School's thoroughly reasonable, almost an embodiment of reason, collection of suggests that have been given the two words Critical Theory. This, shall we call it a gang land intolerance, does rather taint an environment increasingly dominated by the current iteration of state employed Brown Shirts, who presumably are beneficiaries of the very latest managerial Approach to the opportunities of Purity through Privatized Internment Camps. So instead of considering the role of myth in Sorel's Revolutionary Syndicalist views, his oligarchy of syndicates which for Sorel was to benefit the working man not the Indolent Capitalist, it's probably best all round if I wax more than somewhat on the Poodle loving and delightfully bad tempered Schopenhauer's understanding of myth. For those who may be temporarily disabled by a Post Irony Condition, yes, Schopenhauer's Poodles were a dog breed that originated in Germany, not, as some still believe, France. And for goodness sake, look at Arthur's face, you can sort of see him leading his people into the wilderness. Rest assured our guide Schopenhauer did indeed find humanity a constant source of "vexation and disappointment."