Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation

Notes

Notes Introduction: Philosophy, Literature, and the Accidents of Translation 1. See Gingerich for a discussion of Borges’s own dismissal of his investment in philosophy. 2. Merrell quotes Borges from his preface to Ronald Christ’s The Narrow Act (1969). It should be noted that Merrell goes on to explore in detail Borges’s relation to mathematics, post-Einsteinian physics, and language philosophy. Ivan Almeida explains what philosophy is for Borges: “What Borges and Schopenhauer understand by philosophy is a conceptual or figuruative work of inflection calculated from human perplexities until they have found in it their precise intonation [Lo que Borges y Schopenhauer entienden por filosofía es un trabajo conceptual o figurativa, de impostación calculada de las perplejidades humanas hasta que hayan encontrado en el su entonación justa]” (Almeida 109). On this account, philosophy is a question of (conceptual or figurative) tone. It is a question of accent, then. 3. Almeida writes: “appreciation of a philosophical doctrine is, for Borges, a function of the virtualities of fiction that this doctrine offers him [la apreciación de una doctrina filosófica es, para Borges, una función de las virtualidades de ficción que ésta le ofrece]”; see Almeida 113. 4. Balderston quotes from Cordua (1988), 637. A longer, version of Cordua’s 1988 essay appears under the title “La imaginería metafísica de Borges” in Cordua (1997), 115–33. 5. The work/text distinction corresponds to the tenor/vehicle distinction . The “text” is the material medium—“a group of entities used as signs” (Gracia 87)—or the vehicle that conveys meaning; the “work” is a specific meaning, thus tenor, of the text. There is no text without meaning, but there are cases in which the meaning does not meet criteria sufficient to determine it as a work. According to Gracia, “the cat is on the mat” is 225 meaningful, but it is not a work; Don Quixote, however, “is both a text and a work” (87). 6. Korsmeyer’s remark that Kant’s “numbingly clumsy writing” warrants “accolades . . . for advancing German as a philosophical language” (Korsmeyer 4) signals her contention that Kant made possible the philosophical determination of German as a universal language, as the language of philosophical expression. But, as we’ve already seen, if Kant’s philosophical prose affects German, it must be conceded that philosophy has a relation to the idiom in which it is conceived. That is, the ideas of philosophy are bound to the language in which they are expressed. 7. Borges’s “Autobiography” was first published in The New Yorker in collaboration with Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Borges dictated his “life” in English. The Spanish is a translation. Here and throughout, I refer to and translate from the translation. On Borges’s relation to German and to German philosophy, see Chapter 3, “Kant’s Dog.” 8. Heidegger writes: “We can recognize that all translations must be an interpreting. Yet at the same time, the reverse is also true: every interpretation . . . is a translating. In that case, translating does not only move between two different languages, but there is a translating within one and the same language” (1996b, 62). 9. Here and throughout, the Greek text of Aristotle is taken from the Loeb Classical Library editions of Aristotle. 10. Brogan writes: “Kata sumbebēkos is the opposite of and that which is not kath’hauto. . . . To sumbebēkos is that which belongs to and is present along with that which shows itself as such. The accidental is that which is present ‘under’ an archē. The ‘accidental’ is governed by an archē that is outside itself. That which is the same can never simply belong together with itself in the way of sumbebēkos. Its unity—the being-together of itself—is not of the sort that one could say it just happens to be together. The law of non-contradiction says that it is impossible for a being that has phusis as its way of being to appear in the way ‘properties’ come and go in beings. It is possible for accidents not to be present. Therefore they are not necessary . That which is not necessary cannot be of itself. . . . That which shows itself as itself has the kind of presencing Aristotle calls ousia. This enduring presencing of the same is a unity that excludes that kind of appearing that can never hold itself in its being” (74–75). 11. On chance and necessity...