ABSTRACT
In his celebrated fiction, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges tells of the discovery of an encyclopaedia of an illusory world, The First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. The fantastic world of Tlön was, he tells us, congenially Idealist in its philosophy. For the peoples of the planet of Tlön, as for Bishop Berkeley, to be is to be perceived; the world is not a manifold of objects in space, but a series of mental events. In such a world, causal connections are only associations of ideas, and the idea of a continuous universe that exists independently of our momentary states of consciousness is unknown except as a jeu d’esprit of metaphysical speculation. The doctrine of materialism has indeed been formulated, but as a paradox or a conceit; however ingenious the arguments in its favour, they do not convince the inhabitants of Tlön. It might be supposed that a world consisting only of successive and irreducible states of mind would be a world without science and philosophy; but this, Borges tells us, would be a mistake. The world of Tlön abounds in sciences, countless in number, as it does in metaphysical systems; all are treated as dialectical games, or branches of fantastic literature, from which is sought not conviction, but astonishment. It is to the description of this illusory world, its languages, religions, numismatics, ‘its emperors and its oceans, its architecture and its playing cards’, amounting to a complete history of an unknown planet, that The First Encyclopaedia of Tlön is devoted.
