“Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.”

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Context: Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The …" by Jorge Luis Borges?
Jorge Luis Borges photo
Jorge Luis Borges 213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986

Related quotes

Otto Neurath photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.”

Source: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 3: Seraphita - Seraphitus.
Context: Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things have a voice for the Spirit.

Myla Goldberg photo

“I believe in the inherent power of language and letters and words. The world started with God saying something, because language is powerful.”

Myla Goldberg (1971) American novelist

As quoted in [Burack, Emily, 10 Writers Capturing The Female American Jewish Experience, https://ew.com/article/2010/09/29/false-friend/, 26 April 2019, The Jewish Week, May 24, 2018]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Daniel Levitin photo
Alan Moore photo

“As I understand, or as I hallucinate conceptual space, nearly all form in conceptual space is language, I might even say all the form in non-conceptual space is language, I’m not even sure of what the difference between physical space and conceptual space is anymore, in the interface. All form is language.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: As I understand, or as I hallucinate conceptual space, nearly all form in conceptual space is language, I might even say all the form in non-conceptual space is language, I’m not even sure of what the difference between physical space and conceptual space is anymore, in the interface. All form is language. The forms that we see, or imagine, or perceive, or whatever it is Remote Viewers are doing, in conceptual space are mindforms made from language, and by language I also mean images, sounds. We dress these basic ideas in language we can understand. Sometimes there are sizable errors of translation.

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Slavoj Žižek photo
Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma photo
Samuel R. Delany photo

“Young writers take that most communal object, language, and perform on it that most individual act, creation.”

Appendix B, “Acknowledgments” (p. 447)
Neveryóna (1983)

Related topics