Link Between Borges And Nietzsche example essay topic

"Catatonia, convulsion, cannibalism, and cruelty are stupid. Kindness is smart. Forget love. Be kind". Amber Nickel, The Art of Making, 2001. The Sun of Nietzsche and the Black Hole of Borges: An Affirmation and Negation of Life Nothing cures great loss.

Everything vanishes. Past, present, future, everything is connected to the infinity of things. Everything must go. Everything is this one thing, this invisible abstraction, this nothing.

This one thing is nothing. Jorge Luis Borges looks for a tiger, thinks of one in the poem, "The Other Tiger" p 117 Selected Poems (SP) 1999. Yet, "the act... of guessing what is its nature and its circumstance creates a fiction, not a living creature". This grief prowls the pages of his work. This plurality of guesses of the nature of things and their circumstances (event environments), this fiction, this effective guess justifies destruction with an aesthetic of oblivion. This noble predator, this big cat, this sublime one with retractable claws, hunts in labyrinths p 251 Collected Fictions (CF) 1999, this black hole of raging grief devours and destroys time and essence leaving nothing.

Almost in counsel to this kind of raving Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Those Who Are Sublime", p 117 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) 1966, emphasis mine, offers this wisdom, "out of his seriousness peers a savage beast - one not overcome", one with claws. "He subdued monsters, he solved riddles: but he must still redeem his own monsters and riddles, changing them into heavenly children. As yet his knowledge has not learned to smile and to be without jealousy; as yet his torrential passion has not become still in beauty". Zarathustra tells the tiger, "Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws". And before that, "Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you". Before that, "And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest".

Sunny yes? It is said that the link between Borges and Nietzsche is the doctrine of the eternal return. One must not bring the life affirming Nietzsche into the life negating Borges' camp by way of some metaphysical circle. The two are worlds apart and share no spherical intersection much less union. In contrast to Borge's devouring tiger is Nietzsche's wise lioness. "My wild wisdom became pregnant... she gave birth...

(TSZ, 85)". Borges' hopes that oblivion will not long delay. He wants to die completely. He wants to die with his body (CF, 339). In contrast to Nietzsche's radiant sun is Borges' rubric at A New Refutation of Time (SNF, 317).

"Before me there was no time, after me there will be none. With me it is born, with me it will also die". This is solipsism. When he dies the universe dies. In contrast to radiance is darkness, radiance sucking darkness.

Black holes are hypothesized celestial objects that suck everything including time into a vortex of oblivion (Douglas C. Gian coli Physics for Scientists & Engineers, Third Edition, page 149). In contrast to Nietzsche's life sustaining sun there is Borges' black hole of oblivion. There is such a thing as intention. Do not ask who the In tenders are, whether they are a double each inventing the other. Nature abhors infinities.

One must stop to contemplate infinity. The In tender is as invisible as Borges' personality (SNF, 5) but not for the same reason. Mirrors multiply divisions in their own squat frames. They cannot multiply choices.

Mirrors are just something else from which to bounce. Mirrors multiply by echo, and distort all reflections, amplifying the imperfections between their not so flat surfaces. During iteration (repetitive subtractions) mirrored images become faint, indistinct smudges. Only life shows intention. It alone adjusts focus.

It chooses to concentrate heat, differentiate thermal states, and wreck the equilibrium. Life extends to where it is not. It exits intentionally in defiance of reflecting, dissipating forces. Life loves mirrors and periscopes for the sake of vanity and wisdom, for the sake of making love and moving.

People always do things for a reason; otherwise we'd have nothing to talk about. Borges records a personal experience in the heart of "The Nothingness of Personality". He leaves a friend behind in Mallorca. The separation was evidently traumatic, emotionally devastating. This was a special friendship. Letter writing could not lessen the agony of the separation.

Nothing would do except "to show my soul in its entirety to my friend. I would have wanted to strip myself of it and leave it there, palpitating". Bold emphasis is mine. Do not miss the poignancy of his admission.

Do not miss the tangibility of that word palpitating. One can see this thing lying on the sidewalk pulsing with a heartbeat. Here is heartbreak. Do not break the heart of a genius unless you are ready to have your worldview substantially altered. We do not know from this essay why the two men could not see one another again. It smacks of some kind of prohibition.

The graphic description of his soul palpitating on the sidewalk at least shows how deeply the separation wounded him. And we know from the end of the paragraph his reaction. He denied personality. He despised it.

Personality is nothing, he said. Is there an obvious reason why he denied his personality? Do we need to walk with him through labyrinthine arguments against meaning to understand why he does this? If he committed suicide would those labyrinthine arguments help us understand the suicide? No. We would blame it on the heartbreak of losing his friend, at least Occur would.

Why then do we need these elaborations to understand a deed just short of self-inflicted death, this entire body of work against the self, namely, Borges's elf? He says. "I am tired of myself, of my name, and of my fame, and I want to free myself from all that (SNF, 487)". The answer to that question is also obvious. He is not just tired of himself. He is tired of you.

He is tired of the whole human race. He despises the very notion of us. Though his words commit virtual suicide, he survives to commit us to oblivion with words, with weapons eternally more powerful than swords. He builds up an aesthetics of annihilation. For this reason we do well to fear this sedentary, yet devouring beast. He is hell bent on disproving the heresy of individual personality.

He would convince us we are nothing, then if nothing worthless, if worthless expendable. He never affirms life. He is the penultimate Christian. He snaps his line to a great lineage of philosophers but he would kill them too, so extreme is his wrath. Watch how he makes the great characters of his fictions dissolve into nothingness. See how remorselessly he covers his protagonists with blood.

Nietzsche is not like Borges. Borges writes, "Romantic ego-worship and loudmouthed individualism are... wreaking havoc on the arts". (SNF, 7) ). Nietzsche titles his essays, "Why I'm So Wise."Why I'm So Clever."Why I Write Such Good Books (Ecce Homo, Table of Contents)". He doesn't write, "Why IT wrote such good books". He says "my children are near... this is my morning... rise now, rise, thou great noon!

(TSZ, 327) " Zarathustra points up! Borges' is a stopper. He loves the way Xeno runs a race by stopping to take measurements. By dumping a pile of mathis t suppositions and conjectures of infinity he makes Xeno's paradoxes appear worse (SNF, 317). Xeno made hay out of the difference between the punctilliar and linear aspects of the verb to run. The punctilliar aspect of the verb is run.

The linear aspect of the verb is running. In the linear aspect the paradox disappears and Achilles wins the race. The punctilliar aspect freezes time at a point like a snapshot. And from this point progress can be measured, as well as how much farther ahead is the goal (this allows for Xeno's infernal divisions because these points may be located anywhere). On the other hand the linear aspect shows continuation without stopping like a motion picture. Can you imagine showing a motion picture of Achilles race with the turtle that illustrates Xeno's paradox?

The paradox disappears in the linear. (See The Gay Science section 112, "confronted by a continuum") From "Circular Time" (SNF, 225) Borges maintains there is nothing new under the sun. Eternal duration and every possible position of a fixed number of elements yield a repeatable multiplicity. Again the obvious problem here is that life is cleanly neglected, there is no choice or will in the above observation. The will can ensure something never reoccurs. It can make sure every possible position of a fixed number never happens.

When life cannot will, cannot choose and work toward an outcome then all things will be old under the sun. Then novelty will cease. Borges' eternal return can only work if the will is an illusion, if the universe is perfectly insulated and neither contracting nor expanding. He's almost right. However, will does not equal chance. It is not illusory.

(Refer to SNF, 227) Will, as the exercise of choice, is informed by past events and plans for the future. Intention can only be understood as a plan for the future. "No man will live in the future?" Only if man wills wrong. To speak of simultaneous past present future corrupts the definitions and distorts the experience of duration. It is as absurd as the notion of black holes. It is meaningless.

The confusion rises from punctilliar abstraction. Lucidity returns in the linear. We will the future; it is made, sometimes well, sometimes not so well. In Borges' essays on Oscar Wilde and Apollinaire we find first his promotion of nihilism in the oxymoron, "innocent despite habits of wickedness" and then the putrid valorization of war in the poems of Apollinaire together with praise from this sedentary man of letters who is nostalgic for slaughter (SNF, 311-314).

In contrast to Borges' frozen, circular stop sign of unity Nietzsche's wheel is self-propelled (TSZ, 27), "a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'Yes. ' " The very thing that rises from difference, classification, Borges uses to demonstrate non-differentiated unity. "John Wilkins' Analytical Language" (SNF): "there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is". No, emphatically not, there is much we do know about what the universe is personally and commonly before any classification is undertaken.

Classifications of oneness, sameness, and nothingness are absurd. The act of classification depends upon a necessarily prevailing condition of differences. Difference is known (organically) - the phases of matter, weights, colors, and sensations, this cornucopian milieu of our environs is not smooth, undifferentiated sameness. Two separate organs exist side by side in the retina for just that reason.

The rods detect black and white; the cones detect color. At other times this ability to detect difference, followed by deliberate selectivity (a form of classification) of discrete groups of things to ignore was important to Borges: "in order to write we need to forget (Lecture 4/17)". This is a selective amnesia, forgetting a class of things, involving however informally a classification of what is uninteresting. "The very fact of perceiving, of paying attention, is selective; all attention, all focusing of our consciousness, involves a deliberate omission of what is not interesting (SNF, 61)". One would wish for an even finer fastidiousness, that would yield a forgetting of this account from Gibbon in that same passage: "They massacred their hostages, as well as their captives: two hundred young maidens were tortured with exquisite and unrelenting rage; their bodies were... ". he goes on and on (SNF, 60). Why?

Borges remarks that Gibbon's mention of Attila's suspicions regarding the quiet plains evinces "certainly a harmless metaphor: the reign of silence (SNF, 61 emphasis mine)". Borges is said to have declared in another place, "we are not united by love but by horror (Lecture 4/17)". Again no, decidedly not, oblivion (silence) is not a justification, a great permission for atrocity. This metaphor is not harmless. It masks misogyny. His second example, Cervantes' Lothario's seduction of Camilla gives a clue to the basis of this misogyny: a woman's vain pride of appearance.

Else, why does this passage follow the one about torturing young maidens with exquisite rage, when all he wants to disprove is the romantic notion of personality? What does that have to do with young women and a woman's vanity? And why does he declare that passages like these make up the most worthy parts of world literature (SNF, 60)? Of interest is a passage from Foucault's The Care of the Self page 222. See if it doesn't resonate with the articles above and a certain list of things Borges finds objectionable as part of literary description.

"In a display of rancor, Callicratidas reels off a series of commonplaces against women. One only has to look closely to see that women are intrinsically ugly, truly so: their bodies are unshapely and their faces are as ill favored as those of monkeys. They must take great pains to mask this reality: makeup, fancy clothes, coiffures, jewels, adornments. For the benefit of spectators they give themselves a spurious beauty, which a careful gaze suffices to dissipate". On page 233 of SNF we find listed: firm raised breasts, flat belly, opulent hips and pelvis, naked throat and arms, intimate undulation of braids upon her shoulders. It is an image "no one would think of imagining".

Well obviously he has no problem imagining these items strewn over the highways following the "exquisite" tortures of two hundred young maidens, neither does he show any temerity in presenting them to us from Gibbon. Classification is an act not a fact. It is a filing system. The reason we classify is not to "know what the universe is".

The reason classification seems arbitrary is it is deliberate. It is not random, born from an ignorance of reality. It comes from an act of imposition, separation, and doing-work-on what we do know. Classification is never discovered.

It is an assignation, a valuation. Classification is targeting. The distinctions and differences between things are either poorly or clearly understood, poorly or clearly explained. The planets behave just as periodically in earth-centered cosmologies as they do in solar-centered ones. But there is a reason we prefer the solar-centered cosmologies. They have more explanatory power.

"For in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp [the sun] in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time?" (Nicholas Copernicus on the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen, quoted by Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, p. 103, 1997) What difference does it make if my basket holds 12 (Hindu-Arabic), 1100 (Leibniz), or xii (Roman) eggs? That depends on who is counting and what is at stake (SNF 215). Thrown against the door of the Total Library these eggs break into even more pieces. And how shall we then count the mess? Calling lead gold does not make my roll of solder a sudden treasure.

Distinctions matter. They are a matter of weighing (see TSZ, 117). Thus we understand the ejaculation of Archimedes (287-212 BC). Shelving these Jabberwocky concoctions Borges' has served up for examples, we also understand that the most useful classifications are those that are indexed by subject.

Can you imagine the catalogue in Borges' Total Library? Useless. He says we must go further and suspect that there is no purpose to life, not even a made up one. Good here not to overlook the obvious. Scripture (Genesis) echoes the Prime Directive (purpose of life). "Be fruitful and multiply".

Our purpose is to procreate and occupy space where we are not. We extend life, necessarily. This follows from the observation that life at every level willfully concentrates heat out of the cold equilibrium and spreads these concentrations farther and farther into as many places as it can reach. Those species that ignore this purpose may soon disappear. What would happen if we gave up that purpose?

Would we get more of these stultifying eternal nothings of the sarcastic sardonic? Would guilt-ridden, disillusioned, furious defenders of reduction-myopia lead us? We have something better to do. Go - occupy - exit.

Toward that we communicate using common clarity, useful information, continually revised and updated classifications of dangers, resources, opportunities, positions, and progress. Neither is this arbitrary. It follows from spreading sail in the wind. It comes from pointing up, like Zarathustra.

It comes from going up. We seek effective, easy, communication, unsullied by pickled zombie pastimes of riddling out how many angels and their miniatures crowd the heads of the golden not named.