Borges approaches his essay “A new refutation of time” with a razor-sharp wit & feather-soft nuance that knows no bounds. My current conjecture is but an attempt to nitpick. The “new” in the title of his essay, which might come off as a contradictio in adjecto, is a humorous approach Borges deliberately uses as an attempt to downplay the gravity of his refutation. In the essay Borges grapples with the idealism of Berkeley and Hume’s opinion on it, taking idealism to what he considered to be its logical conclusion. The essay is reminiscent of one of his stories in which he describes a fictional planet called Tlön that holds idealism as its core belief. The story leaves one wondering what form language would take if man didn’t think there were objects that were independent of the mind. Language as we know it presupposes realism. His essay, on the other hand, concerns itself not with what form language would take as a result of idealism but with the consequences of Berkeley & Hume’s idealist views on the concept of time.

Berkeley didn’t deny the concept of perceptions. He simply denied that there was anything invisible & intangible called matter aside from the perceptions. He denied that there were colours no one sees, forms no one touches, pains no one feels and believed in the world of appearances woven by our senses but he understood that the material world is an illusory duplication. Thoughts, passions & ideas can’t exist without the mind, he believed. Even the sensations and ideas imprinted on the sense can not exist without the mind perceiving them & no matter how avidly we’d like to refute him by pointing at a table, there’s simply no way to prove that things exist beyond mere perception. Berkeley believed that all bodies in the world don’t have any substance without a mind and thus he deduced that if they persist and do exist without man’s mind, then its because they subsist in the mind of an eternal spirit. This comes as no surprise since it is obviously something that the Bishop that he was would use as a crutch for his argument. Hume noted that while Berkeley’s arguments admit not the slightest refutation, they inspire not the slightest conviction. Nevertheless, Hume used Berkeley’s assumptions and took his argument to the next logical step.

Berkeley denied that there was an object behind our sense impressions; David Hume that there was a subject behind the perception of changes. Berkeley denied the existence of matter & believed that everything is mind dependent. Hume denied the existence of spirit/self and believed that we’re just a collection of perceptions; this repudiates solipsism. Berkeley didn’t want us to add to the succession of impressions the metaphysical notion of matter. Hume didn’t want us to add to the succession of mental states the metaphysical notion of self.

Borges took this argument a step further in an attempt to present a reductio ad absurdum of idealism. Picking up from where Hume stopped, he concluded that if man is reduced to a collection of sensations as Hume had suggested, a single repeated perception, either in one man’s life or in the experience of two different men, suffices to prove that time is a fallacy, since this repetition destroys its linear sequence.

Borges seemed to me not to have refuted time but to have refuted the concept of linear time. He seems to have presented an argument in favour of the traditionalist & Hinduism concept of cyclical time. Traditionalists believe in the Hinduism belief that human history has always cycled through four distinct ages; from gold age, to silver, to bronze, then to dark before moving back to gold and starting the cycle over again. Gold refers to virtue and dark to depravity but that’s a topic for another day.