Borges, Averroes & Umberto Eco

By Vivek Iyer
Borges's 'Averroes search' appears, prima facie, to be an exercise in an ignorant type of Orientalism. Muslims
are too stupid to grasp the notion of a play performed by actors because they lack theory of mind. They don't get
that there is a difference between one guy telling a story and two or three people interacting such that what is
revealed to the audience is the 'configuration space'- i.e. the different ways that interaction could have taken
place.

Averroes did translate the term 'comedy' in Aristotle's Poetics as 'art of praise' and 'tragedy' as 'art of blame'.
However, since plays were performed in Islamic Spain and shadow puppet theatre was very popular, it wasn't
the case that Averroes could not understand the concept of Theatre. The fact is, there was a bit of a 'moral panic'
about actors, musicians, and female patrons of the Arts like Princess Wallada- the Arabic Sappho- who died
some 30 years before Averroes was born. Muslim Spain did go through periods of puritanical reaction- the
savants would pretend, when speaking to a wider Islamic audience, that though kids, and entertainers at wedding
parties and Jews and other such infidels might put on plays, pious men did not pay attention to such things.

Borges's story was published in 1947. In 1941 Leo Strauss- had published the following in his essay
'Persecution and the Art of Writing'.

Persecution is therefore the indispensable condition for the highest efficiency of what may be called logica
equina. According to the horse-drawn Parmenides, or to Gulliver's Houyhnhnms, one cannot say, or one cannot
reasonably say "the thing which is not": that is, lies are inconceivable. This logic is not peculiar to horses or
horse-drawn philosophers, but determines, if in a somewhat modified manner, the thought of many ordinary
human beings as well. They would admit, as a matter of course, that man can lie and does lie. But they would
add that lies are short-lived and cannot stand the test of repetition - let alone of constant repetition - and that
therefore a statement which is constantly repeated and never contradicted must be true. Another line of
argument maintains that a statement made by an ordinary person may be a lie, but the truth of a statement
made by a responsible and respected man, and therefore particularly by a man in a highly responsible or
exalted position, is morally certain.

The corollary is that the 'thinking few' will write between the lines. They may appear to endorse an orthodox
position but in so unreasonable or ignorant a manner that the opposite view is vindicated. But a habitus of
reading against the grain fulminates the subject of literature. In the case of Averroes, Strauss says

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Averroes was thought to have been hostile to all religion.
After Renan's successful attack on what is now called a mediaeval legend, present-day scholars generally
consider Averroes a loyal, and even a believing, Moslem.

It would be equally foolish to consider Averroes so puritanical a Muslim that he was unaware of the
entertainment provided at weddings or the shadow-theatre performances which attracted the sensation seeking
hoi polloi.

I suppose Muslim Spain, or Elizabethan England for that matter, could boast of nothing so splendid as Christian
Spain's Golden Age of Theatre. But it wasn't a dull place. For folk of a literary bent, what was memorable about
the period was the similarity between Princess Wallada & Eleanor of Aquitaine. Was there a common source to
the 'Courtly love' tradition or was this a case of convergent evolution? The answer doesn't matter very much.
Christian Spain rose and rose. Islam sank. Might the same fate overtake the literary culture of Europe? Would it
be snuffed out by rancorous proletarians or plutocratic Philistines? The answer did not greatly matter. Literature
is a service industry. All great books, in some sense, have the same author. It is merely the market which
changes.

Borges ends his story thus-

In other words, Borges's Averroes was a projection of himself. But it was not a projection he could sustain.
Why? Did he lack imagination or erudition or patience? No. He had set himself an impossible task. The mirror
fulminated what it ought to reflect because it wasn't a mirror but a particular mind's 'catoptric prosthesis'- i.e. an
instrumentalized metaphor. The useful work it did was nudge Borges's readers towards a notion of univocity in
literature such that semiotics could always be sublated.

From the mathematical point of view, the problem Borges is grappling with is whether higher dimensional
spaces can be reduced to one dimension. That's why even if there are ten actors on the stage and all sorts of
concurrency problems or hysteresis effects arise and the 'configuration space' could easily explode unless great
care is taken, still we know there is some one person narrative which it could be reduced to. It may not be
unique and some information- re inherent structure or locality- may be lost or difficult to access. The good news
is we have evolved to have quite good heuristics to deal with this. But 'verification' of a buck-stopping kind-
even if provided by judges or a Condorcet Jury- can improve outcomes. Moreover, something like the law of
increasing functional information applies, such that if a thing is useful, we evolve better instruments to register
or classify it.

Borges's tale, on re-reading, is just such an instrument.

In the preceding tale, I have tried to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat. I thought first of that
archbishop of Canterbury who set himself the task of proving that God exists;

and did so well enough. Godel would show that if there is an absolute proof then there is a proof of God. If there
isn't an absolute proof, then a provisional proof is good enough for any practical purpose.

then I thought of the alchemists who sought the philosopher’s stone;

rather than the 'lawful magic' which is literary virtuosity such as that which Borges displays

then, of the vain trisectors of the angle and squares of the circle. Then I reflected that a more poetic case than
these would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to other men, but is forbidden to him. I
recalled Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy
and comedy. I told his story; as I went on, I felt what that god mentioned by Burton must have felt – the god who
set himself the task of creating a bull but turned out a buffalo. I felt that the work mocked me, foiled me,
thwarted me. I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater
is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more material that a few snatches from
Renan, Lane, and Asin Palacios. I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I
was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I
had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum. ( And just when I stop believing in him, „Averroës“
disappears.)

So, it is a diminishing series. Nothing wrong with Averroes disappearing from the realm of Orientalism or
Islamophobia. We get that Spain's golden age of Theatre greatly eclipsed the shadow theatre of the Muslims.
Indeed, it made that of the Elizabethans look threadbare. The country rose to greater and greater heights after the
Reconquest.

Umberto Eco believed that Borges had written 'a long fanciful novel' about Avicenna's difficulty with
conceiving of theatre. But Borges's story is short. Eco could have easily asked a Professor of Arabic- like
Shmuel Moreh- whether Avicenna had seen a play. But, in that case he would not have been write gibberish
about 'the Semiotics of Theatrical Performances'.
Consider the following extract from Eco's 'Semiotics & the Philosophy of Language' regarding 'Mirrors as
rigid designators'.

I should explain that a 'rigid designator' picks out the same object in all possible worlds. This involves
identifying an uncorrelated asymmetry- e.g. fingerprints or unique DNA signatures. It has nothing to do with
mirrors- which are merely reflective surfaces useful for particular purposes.

The mirror has a peculiar characteristic.

It has the same characteristic as any reflective surface.

As long as I look at it, it gives me back my facial features, but if I mailed a mirror which I have long looked at
to my beloved, so that she may remember my looks, she could not see me (and would instead see herself).

I read that, in ancient Japan, you'd send your girl a mirror with the injunction 'to see everything in my heart, look
but in this'. She'd send you a chamber pot by return of post to indicate she thought you were full of shit. That
way you got a lot of chamber pots and could set up in that line of business.

The self-evident datum I have just highlighted deserves some thought.

No. If you are in one place and you send a letter to someone else at a different place, you don't yourself
magically appear in that place. Also, did you know that if you can see the other person's face, that person doesn't
see what you see? How mind-blowing is that?

If we compared mirror images to words,

we would be making a category mistake. Words aren't images. A sign may be an image and may serve the same
function as a word in a particular context. My shaving mirror works just as well as your shaving mirror. But
words could discharge the same function. You could tell me if I missed a spot on my chin.

they would be like personal pronouns: like the pronoun /1/, meaning " Umberto Eco» if I pronounce it, and
someone else if someone else does so.

Similarly if we compare farts to words, they would be like personal pronouns. My fart would be mine. Yours
would be yours. Sadly my magnum opus 'Fartology and the Philosophy of Language' has not been accepted for
publication by any major academic press.

I may, however, happen to find a message in a bottle reading "I was shipwrecked in the Juan Fernandez
islands"

You would not find such a message. The castaway would mention his name, nationality, and which ship he
served on. You don't ring the police and say 'help! Someone is trying to kill me in my house.' and then hang up
the phone. You supply your name and address and add any information which may help catch your assailant or,
at the very least, help locate and identify your corpse.

; it would be clear to me that someone (someone who is not myself) was shipwrecked.

Maybe you wrote that note when you were drunk.

But, if I find a mirror in a bottle, after taking it out with considerable effort, I would always see myself in it,

only if you look at it. Once you notice it is a mirror, you don't need to find out who it is reflecting.

whoever may have sent it as a message. If the mirror 'names' (and this is clearly a metaphor),
No. It is stupidity. Mirrors reflect. Reflections don't 'name'. They may be given names but nobody has ever been
stupid enough to stand in front of a reflecting surface giving names to all the things he sees there.

Why not say 'if the fart 'names', it only names a concrete object- viz the farter- on the principle that 'who smelled
it, dealt it'. ?

it only names a concrete object, it names one at a time, and it always names only the object standing in front of
it. In other words, whatever a mirror image may be, it is determined in its origins and in its physical existence
by an object we shall call the image referent.

This is not true. The mirror image is determined by the nature of its reflective surface. If it is convex, the image
is different from if it is concave. Moreover lighting conditions and the nature of the object plays a role.

In an extreme attempt to find one more relation between mirror images and words, we might compare mirror
images to proper names.

If we were as stupid as shit. I suppose a day may come when a fartometer could get DNA information about the
farter and its inbuilt database would allow it to name and shame her.

If in a crowded station I would shout John! I am likely to see a great many people turning around

shouting attracts attention. You'd get a bigger reaction if you shouted 'Beyonce!'

- which allowed many to say that proper names have a direct relation to their bearers . Yet, if someone looking
out of the window would say Look, there comes John!, inside the room and without knowing John, I would know
that the other saw (or says he saw) a male human being (provided he is making an appropriate use of
language). If this is so, then even proper names do not refer directly to an object whose presence determines the
proper name utterance .

No. Proper names refer directly to objects. It's just the same name may belong to different objects. There are
plenty of Vivek Iyers in the world. I'm the only really stupid one.

Not only could my comrade lie, and mention john when John is not there, but the linguistic expression John first
and foremost refers me to a general content.

It prompts you to guess at that context. Prostitutes refer to their clients as 'johns'. If I am talking to a BBC
journalist who says 'here comes John', I'd assume he meant that he had spotted a potential client. This is
because, it is my firm conviction, all BBC journalists are rent boys. That's why I don't pay my license fee.

So much so that, if someone would eventually decide to christen his newborn daughter John, I would tell him
that he is making an inappropriate use of current onomastics, since John usually names males.

Girls have been named John.

Therefore , there is a difference between a mirror image and a proper name, in that a mirror image is an
absolute proper name as it is an absolute icon .

Nonsense! You can't sell mirror images of yourself naked. You can sell photographs or even drawings of
yourself in various indecent positions.

In other words, the semiotic dream of proper names being immediately linked to their referent (just like the
semiotic dream of an image having all the properties of the object they refer to) arises from a sort of catoptric
nostalgia.
No. It is magical thinking. It would be cool if saying 'Beyonce' caused Beyonce to appear. She and me will
become bestest friends for ever and ever and I would show her my diary and she'd agree with me that boys are
yucky. Then Rihanna would show up and be totes jelly.

There is actually a theory of proper names as rigid designators (Kripke)

which is what they are in buck stopped, protocol bound discourse of a useful type- e.g. the Law or Medicine or
Accountancy.

by which proper names could not be mediated by definite descriptions ( like John is the fellow who . . . ) but
could undergo counterfactual exercises (like Would John still be John, were he not the fellow who . . . ?). An
unbroken chain of designations, called a 'causal' chain, links them to an original object they were allocated to
by a sort of initial 'baptism' . Now, it is mirrors which allow us to imagine this kind of situation.

No. It is some protocol bound method of verification. Neither smoke nor mirrors nor Semi-idiotics have any
role to play. I am accused of credit card fraud committed in Delhi. I am able to prove that I was in London. Yes,
the man on the cctv footage looks like me. That's because I'm Indian. Almost all Indian men look like me.
Further investigation shows the man could be no taller than five ten. I am six foot one. I can't be the criminal.

Umberto Eco's detective may disagree. He shows me a mirror which the culprit happened to drop. He asks me to
look into it and to identify the person I see there. I tell him he is a fucking cretin. I'll make sure he is sacked.

Let us assume that along a certain distance , between point A, where the reflected object is located, and point B,
where the observer is standing (who under normal conditions cannot see point A), we fit an unbroken series of
mirrors at regular intervals and at a suitable inclination, so that by chain reflection, the observer in B may see
the object image from A in the nearest mirror.

The image would degrade

We would always be in the case of a prosthesis-channel.

Because blind people can use mirrors to see- right?

Of course, we must necessarily assume that there is an odd number of mirrors. Only in this event would the
mirror nearer to the observer give him an image of the original object as if it were reflected in the first mirror.
With an even number of mirrors, in fact, the image would be 'reversed' twice, and we would not be in the
presence of a simple prosthesis

permitting the blind to see

but, rather, of the effect of a more complex catoptric apparatus, this having translation functions.

blind people will not just be able to see, they will also be able to translate from Chinese into Arabic despite
knowing neither language.

In any case, for the problem we are concerned with here, the observer need only know that there is an odd or
even number of mirrors, and he will then behave as he does when facing his bathroom mirror or his barber's
mirrors.

No he won't. He will behave as an observer using a CCTV camera would behave. A detective may make funny
faces when in front of a bathroom mirror. He would not do so if he was using reflective surfaces to 'shadow' a
suspect.

Now, on the grounds of the principles enunciated in Mirrors [2 13] our previous pragmatics of the mirror, the
observer knows (a) that the final mirror is a mirror and (b) that it is telling the truth; therefore, he also knows
(c) that, at that very moment, the reflected object does exist in point A. Through this causal chain, the final
mirror image becomes a rigid designator of the object which is the source of stimuli;
No. It becomes the proximate locus of the object. It does not designate it in any way.

better still, we know that the final image 'christens' , so to say, the initial object in that very moment.

It has no such power. A CCTV camera may tell us where the suspect was but it can't tell us his name. The same
is true of a series or mirrors or other reflective surfaces.

Such catoptric apparatus would be a rigid-designation apparatus.

No. A bunch of reflective surfaces may enable you to say where an object is or was. It can't tell you the name of
the object.

There is no linguistic contrivance which would provide the same guarantee, not even a proper name, because in
this event two conditions of absolutely rigid designation would be missing: ( 1) the original object might well
not exist at the moment and also might never have existed;

That doesn't matter. Superman does not exist. Yet Courts can verify who owns the Intellectual Property in
Superman because there is a chain of admissible evidence. One may say 'rigid designation' is a Schelling focal
solution to a linguistic coordination game for some particular purpose- e.g. the Law.

(2) there would be no guarantee that the name corresponds to that object alone and to no other having similar
general characteristics.

There would be good enough verification for any practical purpose.

We therefore come to discover that the semantics of rigid designation is in the end a (pseudo-) semantics of the
mirror image and that no linguistic term can be a rigid designator (just as there is no absolute icon).

Eco doesn't get that a bunch of people can verify that I am the Vivek Iyer who was born in Bonn 62 years ago.
This can be supplemented by DNA evidence and so forth.

If it cannot be absolute, any rigid designator other than a mirror image, any rigid designator whose rigidity
may be undermined in different ways and under different conditions, becomes a soft or slack designator.

Yet 'Umberto Eco' was just such a rigid designator. The entire legal, administrative and economic system
depended on this being the case. Semiotics turned Eco's brain to shit.

As absolutely rigid designators, mirror images alone cannot be questioned by counterfactuals.

Sure they can. When I meet a beautiful lady I say 'OMG! It's like looking in a mirror- right?' She replies 'fuck
the fuck off you fat sack of shit'. This is totes counterfactual. It is obvious that there was no lady. I was in fact
looking in a mirror. That's why it didn't try to gain access to my sperm.

In fact, I could never ask myself (without violating the pragmatic principles regulating any relation with
mirrors): "If the object whose image I am perceiving had properties other than those of the image I perceive,

it would be me- a three dimensional being.

would it still be the same object?"

Yes. Mirror images are two dimensional. You are three dimensional.

But this guarantee is provided precisely by the threshold-phenomenon a mirror is.

Eco is simply wrong. When you try to kiss the mirror you discover that the image is two dimensional. You
aren't. That's why you can't fuck yourself in the mirror.
The theory of rigid designators falls a victim of the magic of mirrors.

Borges's Avicenna is fulminated in the mirror. Why? Because what Borges is doing is silly. The fundamental
premise is foolish, not to say racist. It goes against his own fundamental conviction regarding the Art he had
dedicated himself to.

I don't know whether there are 'possible worlds'. I do know that different people live in different mental worlds.
Yet, for the purpose of solving collective action problems, we have evolved inter-subjective protocols and buck-
stopped decision processes such that there is rigid enough designation of things which matter. Mirrors or
metaphors or metaphorical mirrors have no magic. As for Philosophy, the thing is retarded.