Novos meios de expressão filosófica : o debate com o pensamento monadológico na obra de Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

The subject of this work is the analysis of the content of the fictional and essayistic production from the writer Jorge Luis Borges, mainly that one made during the 1930s and 1940s and thematizing metaphysical subjects. The aim is to investigate if is there a philosophical project underlying it, and what are the general lines of this project. The introduction includes brief remarks about the importance of the work of Borges to Western thought in the second half of the twentieth century. The first chapter discusses the limitations that are imposed to a philosophical project included in a fictional work, and of its critical efficacy. The next chapter investigates the metaphysical essays Borges wrote during the period in analysis, searching for their philosophical roots. This effort focuses on interpretations by Borges of the systems built by George Berkeley, David Hume and Francis Herbert Bradley, and leads to the discussion of the refutation of the conception of time that permeates British idealism, promoted by the writer through the application of the principle of the indiscernibility. The borgian refutation of time, however, undermines the notion of personal identity, which is self-evident. The third and final chapter shows up that Borges tried to solve this paradox by means of a critical plunge in Gottfried Leibniz´s philosophical system, no longer by means of the essayistic discourse , but through fictional prose. Accordingly, the final chapter includes an outline of the method by which Borges, drawing on the resources of modal fictional discourse, contests speeches such as philosophy itself, supposed to have higher truth- value. It includes, as well, the review of those short stories written by Borges which reverberate leibnizian categories, in order to show the application of that method and hence the meaning of those narratives, which is, according to our hypothesis, to display, each under a different point of view, the fundamental contradiction of Leibniz´s conceptual system. This contradiction is that, despite all the efforts of the philosopher in safeguarding human freedom before a perfect and infinite mathematical cosmology, and of the assertion of the independence of the individual monad, the human condition which emerges from this order is humiliating for men, reducing them to a single piece in a stiff cosmic system.