Borges' Refutation of Nominalism in "Funes El Memorioso"

Jon Stewart Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in “Funes el memorioso”* imone de Beauvoir recalls that when she first made the ac- quaintance of Jean-Paul Sartre he, then still a young man, S proudly and somewhat hubristically declared that when he be- came older he wanted to be Stendhal and Spinoza (Cérémonie 182, 228). Not satisfied with the dream of being merely a great writer or a great philosopher, Sartre hoped to pursue both academic vocations at the same time. For him, this meant not merely writing both philosophical and literary works but also sometimes combining the two. For instance, in order to illustrate a philosophical point, he at times gave literary character sketches such as that of the waiter or the coquette in L’Être et le néant. Conversely, he incorporated philosophical ideas to good effect into his plays and novels such as his portrayal of existential freedom in Les mouches or his account of intersubjective human rela- tions in Huis clos. In fact, it was by means of these literary genres that his philosophical theories found perhaps their most eloquent expres- sion. Consequently, it is not uncommon for commentators to go to his literary works in search of information to supplement the official philosophical statements of Sartre’s views. Sartre’s willingness to blur the lines of demarcation that separate the humanities disciplines has, however, not always been seen favorably. There is, for instance, an unfortunate prejudice among philosophers in the Anglo-American world to discount literary works as modes of ex- pression inappropriate for philosophical investigation, and Sartre himself was frequently the victim of this kind of dismissive thinking. How- * I would like to thank Professor Michael Mendelson from Lehigh University for his invaluable comments and suggestions on this essay. Variaciones Borges 2/1996 Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in “Funes el memorioso” 69 ever, since in addition to his literary texts, he also wrote purely philosophical works such as L’Être et le néant and the Critique de la raison dialectique, the philosophical side of his dual identity was soundly es- tablished, and he was able to assure for himself some measure of philosophical credibility. Yet, it is doubtful whether his name would ever be mentioned in philosophy departments today if these two works had never been written and his reputation had remained primarily that of a littérateur. The situation of Jorge Luis Borges is, however, quite different. Like Sar- tre, Borges employed literary forms in order to illustrate philosophical ideas. But unlike Sartre, Borges never deviated from genres tradition- ally associated with comparative literature, and aside from a few short essays he never wrote a purely philosophical work. For this reason, unlike Sartre, Borges has not been perceived as a philosopher in his own right, and his works have rarely been investigated for their philosophical meaning and significance. The few attempts to trace the philosophical import of Borges’ thought1 have not been generally taken up and acclaimed, and Borges today still remains a largely unrecognized source of insight among professional philosophers. The present essay is a small attempt to correct this neglect of the philosophical side of Borges’ academic identity. Some of Borges’ most philosophical texts are the short stories or cuentos originally published individually and later collected in the anthologies Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). These collections along with some of his other works have earned Borges the reputation of being one of the foremost exponents of Latin American fantastic literature. It is well known that in his stories Borges posits fantastic or imaginary worlds, but what is less well known is that these worlds are often based on philosophical theories. Borges’ procedure is to use a particular philosophical doctrine as a point of departure and then to create a world based on it. Then in the course of the cuento, he examines the problems or con- tradictions which arise in such a world. Thus, he gives in the form of a short story what can be seen as a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument against a given philosophical position. The story allows him to bring out the consequences of a given position and to illustrate them with a character or situation in a way that a philosophical treatise can only do imperfectly with limited examples. 1 E.g. Agheana, Champeau, Jaén. 70 Jon Stewart In the present essay, I would like to explore the philosophical elements in the cuento, “Funes el memorioso”2 (1942) from Ficciones. This story is about a young Uruguayan who has the ability to perceive and remem- ber everything down to the tiniest detail. He is in possession of a su- perhuman perceptual apparatus and an infallible memory. The origi- nal inspiration for the story apparently came from the experience of insomnia from which Borges occasionally suffered (Cf. Shaw 45). The heightened sense of awareness and consciousness that is the result of insomnia is similar to the condition of Funes. This explains Borges’ oth- erwise obscure description of the story as “una larga metáfora del in- somnio”(Cf. Burgin 45-47). There are striking similarities between the abilities of the fictional character, Funes the memorious, and the philosophical doctrine of nominalism and the fundamental intuitions that guide it. The central claim of the present essay is that the point of Bor- ges’ story here is (a) to refute nominalism via the person of Funes the memorious. By analyzing the perceptual and cognitive capacity of Fu- nes, Borges implicitly criticizes nominalism. But this is by no means merely a superfluous criticism of a philosophical position that has no representatives and has long since been recognized as untenable, but rather in this refutation of nominalism Borges indicates certain positive facts about human cognition and knowing. The story is also intended (b) to provide an argument for the dialectical nature of human cognition which requires both universality and particularity. Borges’ criticism of nominalism here brings him into one of the most important dis- cussions in both the philosophical tradition and recent analytic philosophy. Thus, this essay can be seen as an attempt to locate Borges in this philosophical debate, where he has generally never been recognized as a legitimate participant. I. Nominalism is, of course, an age old philosophical doctrine which has made periodic appearances in the history of philosophy. According to this view, the only things that are real are particulars or individual entities. Grounded in common sense, nominalism claims that individual things such as trees or rocks which we can perceive with our senses have an ontological status in the world that abstract concepts such as 2 The story, “Funes el memorioso”, originally appeared in La Nación, Buenos Aires, junio 7 de 1942. Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in “Funes el memorioso” 71 “justice” or “the good” do not. The mind’s grouping of entities into general categories or concepts is considered wholly arbitrary with no grounding in the individual entities themselves. Thus, for the nominalist, abstract ideas are merely subjective, appearing only in the mind of individual thinkers, whereas individual objects of perception have an independent existence apart from the perceiving subject. General concepts are considered to be mere names or “nominates” with no ontological reality of their own. Nominalism can thus be called “particular- ism” since it attempts to construct a metaphysics and an epistemology on the basis of particulars alone. Nominalism is in a sense related to empiricism which insists that all knowledge ultimately derives from the perception of individual sensi- ble entities. But in contrast to the empiricists and conceptualists, nominalism claims that abstract ideas, whose primary characteristic is universality, are nothing more than abstractions from a number of individual perceptions. In other words, like the empiricists, nominalism argues that the abstract concept “dog” is formed in one’s mind only after one has perceived a number of individual dogs and then has per- formed the mental act of abstracting from them. Thus, the individual perceptions are primary and the abstract concepts, derivative. How- ever, unlike empiricism, nominalism claims that such abstract concepts have no independent ontological reality apart from the mind. Here we can note that the question concerns not merely language but also perception and the relation between the two. In the story “Funes the Memorious,” Borges alludes to Locke, and when we examine this allusion carefully we can see that he uses Locke’s criticism of nominalism as his starting point here. Borges tells us of Locke’s notion of a language of particulars: Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an im- possible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name. (93) The passage to which Borges refers comes from Locke’s famous An Es- say Concerning Human Understanding. There, Locke briefly discusses the idea of a nominalist language of particulars. For the nominalist, abstract concepts do not adequately represent things in the empirical world. Thus, if our goal is to make language veridical, it would be de- sirable to purge language as far as possible of general concepts such that it could more accurately reflect what is actually given in our perception. This would involve having individual words for every indi- 72 Jon Stewart vidual thing or even every individual perception. Locke gives three reasons for rejecting the notion of such a nominalist language. The first and most obvious reason that Locke gives is that a language that contained only particulars would defy the human capacity of memory.

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