ArticleOriginal scientific text
Title
Doświadczenie mistyczne w opowiadaniach Alef i Pismo boga Jorge Luisa Borgesa
Authors
Abstract
In my paper I undertake an analysis of chosen short stories of Jorge Luis
Borges in which the problem of mysticism occupies an important place. I
claim that Borges, whose works are known for covering philosophical
issues of most fundamental importance, is a writer who describes the
impossibility of reaching a mystical experience in the modern world. As
far as philosophical background of Borges is concerned there exists a
well-spread opinion that Borges, who readily confessed his admiration
for Berkeley and Hume, was an idealist himself. My point is that even
though the Berkeleyan epistemology influenced Borges, there is a
fundamental difference between those thinkers which consists of the fact
that in the philosophy of Berkeley there is a place for God. As a result it
can be claimed that the world as an object of God's experience has a
stable existence. There is no place for such a privileged being neither in
the ontology nor epistemology proposed by Borges. The world as
described by him can be called a fiction because there is no privileged
subject whose experience would not be accidental and private. For that
reason the description of mystical experience is always a failure when it
refers to modern times. I demonstrate it at length by the analysis of the
short story entitled The Aleph, while taking into consideration other texts
as well.
Keywords
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, God, The Writing of The God, mysticism