I have quoted the concluding paragraph of "The Total Library," which is the forgotten sibling of Borges' more celebrated (and slightly younger) "The Library of Babel" although it shares some underlying insights. The Total Library is an articulating of the thesis that "the fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues." That we recognize the name of the story in the sentence describing the utopia of the total library alerts us that use and mention, and even baptistic designation intermingle on macro and micro level, which is a feature of the story, not a bug.
The main narrative, such as it is, of The Total Library, is a history of ideas in Lovejoy's specific sense: an idea is treated as an isolated cultural unit with a clear natural history ("Between Democritus of Abdera and Fechner of Leipzig flow-heavily laden-almost twenty-four centuries of European history"). The most familiar token, Dennett calls it proverbial, of the "typographical image" whose natural history is recounted is Huxley's claim that "half dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum."
Inscribed in this narrative in the history of ideas, is a report on the "polemic" between the system of chance or necessity and the system of divinely organized order. This polemic is decided in favor of Democritus (the proponent of the system of chance).
As an aside, Borges treats Cicero (not his character) as refuted. But Cicero had been introduced not as a proponent of the system of divine order, but as an ironic skeptic. In other words, Borges treats the rise of Darwinism (who is represented by Huxley) and Logic (Carroll) not, altogether without wisdom, as a refutation of the system of divine order, but rather as a defeat of ironic skepticism. This is, of course, not just an aside because one can understand Borges' story as the revenge, or eternal return, of ironic skepticism (which competes with a more successful skepticism familiar from the extension of the holographic principle to a holographic universe.)
The version told by one of Cicero's characters, and now I quote Borges, goes like this:
I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade him-self that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly create even a single verse to read.
Because of the familiarity of Huxley's token of this image in recurring debates over Darwinism, we might overlook that in Cicero the image is used to undermine an epicurean cosmogony (recall yesterday's post on Newton)--the existence of species is a mere subset of this. This cosmogony held that the structure we encounter is the product of the collision of atoms, which have an innate gravity, subject, as we learn from Lucretius and Cicero, to random swerves.
I don't mean to suggest that Cicero or Huxley are idiosyncratic to connect cosmogony to the origin of species. As I noted a few weeks ago, in the revised preface to his Bridgewater Treatise, Whewell trots out Cicero's sibling argument -- which I have dubbed 'Posidonian,' which is just before the passage recounted by Borges' narration -- in response to Darwin's Origin (as I learned from David Haig). And while Whewell treats the nebular hypothesis as plausible, he does not think it is sufficiently explanatory about the origin of the order it exhibits.
But rather than returning to that material, my eye stops at Borges' two-fold claim that Swift's "Trivial Essay on the Faculties of the Soul," (i) is a "museum of commonplaces," and (ii) itself a token of this idea. Part of the joke here is that the correct title of Swift's essay is "A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind." "Tritical" being (now archaic) "trite" or "hackneyed." And in the joke Borges' discerns that a single typographic mistake can be memetically or fitness enhancing.
And when we turn to Swift we find indeed a museum of commonplaces, which presents us not so much with a natural history of the typographic idea, but with a philosophical history, which as the title already suggests, itself a polemic against (ahh) then recent philosophy (and the commitments of an Enlightenment age: democracy, science, etc.).
And lurking in the essay is not so much the observation that democracy is vulnerable to demagoguery, which is indeed trite, but rather the more philanthropic point that would have been evident to Borges' initial readers -- that democratic theorists fail to grasp the true nature of the best kind of democratic public speech. This nature is not truth-telling (as democrats deceives themselves) nor flattery (as the the critics of democracy claim), but rather the art of hiding its artfulness ("in oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art.")
There is no better way to hide artfulness if the surface is random characters which "chance would organize and which would eliminate intelligence." And this would be the case "for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings."
It is tempting to domesticate the thought by saying 'it's fiction' or 'science fiction'. But in the refutation of Cicero the ground from which to deny we inhabit the subaltern horror became unstable, even a trapdoor.
"the holographic principle" - as I understand it - implies the world is simpler than it could be, because of the structure of hidden (quantum) correlations underlying classical reality ("to describe cosmology in D-dimensions using a quantum field theory in (D−1)-dimensions". One might see it as a vote for order...
Posted by: David Duffy | 10/08/2020 at 05:56 AM
Yes, agreed!
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 10/08/2020 at 11:38 AM