In Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something to sing about; Mallarmé’s statement, “The world exists to end up in a book,” seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic justification for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely coincide; the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to an era of the written word. One speaks of telling the story and the other of books....
Later, Léon Bloy would write:
“There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light…. History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden.” (L’Ame de Napoleon, 1912)The world, according to Mallarmé, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.--Borges (1951) On the Cult of the Books.
While I was reading Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (about which more soon, because it gave me some ideas about the Principle of Sufficient Reason), I came across a reference to the Book of the Brethren of Purity. Wikipedia sent me to Borges. His essay is, in part, about the problem famously remarked upon, as Borges notes, by Plato that "A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers, who may be wicked or stupid." (The problem is also a trope in Borges--recall.) This presupposes, controversially, that a true teacher is capable of reading souls. And it also presupposes that a genuine teacher is capable of discerning wickedness or stupidity in his pupils before, as it were, it's too late. The life and fate of Socrates does not entirely inspire confidence in this matter; we can, as Abe Stone taught me, understand, say, the Meno as a reflection on this. Even if we grant the two controversial presuppositions, modern professional philosophers do not have the luxury of picking their own pupils, except, perhaps, at the level of a dissertation (or thesis). Even then, in the modern context it would be a bit odd, say, to blame Rawls for misdeeds of his students (if there were any misdeeds) unless these deeds were somehow traceable to Rawls's teaching(s), doctrines, or meta-philosophy. This latter point reminds us that we can't entirely absolve Wittgenstein for the annoying features of his school because Wittgenstein clearly encouraged a kind of cult of personality around him (as witnesses in his own age already noted).
Yet, Borges's essay is framed by a bit of historicized history of metaphysics. (Above I have quoted the first and last paragraphs of the essay.) And, indeed, in this history he also discusses the contributions of the three great Monotheisms of a Book (including a subtle observation on Al-Ghazali and the Brethren of Purity.) The historicization turns on the switch from oral to written culture.
One way to understand substance monism, is to understand us as imperfect 'entities' without genuine identity. To be sure, Sub specie aeternitatis there may well be perfect identity (A=A), but from the vantage point of the 'letters' in the text there is none least of all about our own all-too-human identities. Even relying on baptismal naming ceremonies will not do.
It is tempting to treat Borges's essay as a geneaology of error. There are two bits of evidence for this in the piece: first, because he treats the Muslims, Jews, and Christians in increasing order of "extravagance." Second, post-Darwin, he may well reject teleology. But we would be underestimating Borges if he drew an inference from extravagance to falsity.
Identity (A=A) is trivial, of course, from the perspective of eternity. But when we mortals rely on that perspective to do our own metaphysics, we tacitly rely, as Borges hints, on a teleology that presupposes, as it were, an intelligible and epistemically stabilized reality (with 'entities') available for an infinite knower (that just happens to be substance). It would be professional foolishness to call relying on such identity a form of extravagance. But again, even if it is extravagance, it would not follow it is false.
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