Does literature have a philosophy? Can it give expression to a consistent system of principles, and assert them as true? Literature, by its very nature, is a tumult of conflicting voices severed from any demand for truth and sincerity. Is it rather philosophy’s proving ground? Where philosophy speaks of the universal, does literature test its hypotheses by speaking of the particular? Hasn’t something gone awry if we turn to fiction for proof, evidence, truth? Perhaps they have no relationship then—after all, philosophy is serious business, and literature, as we all know, is play.

But say–for a moment–that literature is inimical to philosophy—where one appears the other is absent. Then could there be philosophy at all? One finds every variation of inventive narrativity deployed among those counting themselves as philosophers, from Plato’s dialogues to Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit has been called a Bildungsroman of consciousness. If we take philosophy’s literary form seriously (which perhaps requires taking it playfully), can anything resembling philosophy survive our reading?

Perhaps the best author to help us place these two terms in relation is Borges. If there is such a thing as “Borges’ philosophy,” it cannot be found as a set of consistent positions and propositions, but rather must occur as the very play of fiction and philosophy within the variegated corpus with Borges’ (often effaced) signature. No one delighted more in the play of genre, treating literature as non-fiction and non-fiction as literature, inventing histories and disguising short stories as academic treatises. Every position one can find in his oeuvre, whether from a character or narrator in his short stories or in his own or someone else’s voice in his non-fiction, will be undermined or ironized elsewhere in his labyrinthine texts. One finds assertion, but never position, positivity—at least, not for long.

His “non-fiction,” which is notorious for riddling its essayistic form with invented authors and works (including the “Chinese encyclopedia” referenced by Foucault), most resembles what we customarily take as philosophy. The names of philosophers appear, their propositions are cited approvingly or logically refuted; one imagines oneself to be approaching the doctrine of Borges.

If one were to take only those statements where the proper name of a proper philosopher appears, one would come away with the impression of a character we could call Borges the Idealist. His favorite philosophers are Berkeley, Hume, and Schopenhauer, and he argues with them only to move further in the direction indicated by their thought.

For example, in “The New Refutation of Time,” Borges offers a sort of hierarchy. Schopenhauer denied the reality of our representations, but seemed to take on faith our representations of our perceiving body and grounded perception in the brain. Berkeley criticizes this cerebralism by reminding us that we know of a brain only through representation, granting it no more fundamental reality. On the other hand, Hume places in question the objective and subjective self-identity that Berkeley affirms by grounding the continuity of objects in the mind of God, and our ideas in a thinking, active subject.

Borges offers to go one step further, still in the spirit of all three thinkers, by denying the reality of time: