Matt, Maps? Caught my eye cuz I came across something the other day...
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-8588855/Resemblance-made-absolutely-exact-Borges.html Article Excerpt Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher (1855-1916), is best known to readers of Borges in connection with a recursive map-within-a-map drawn upon the soil of England. Indeed, Borges ranks "el mapa de Royce" side-by-side with his beloved Zeno's paradox in "Otro poema de los dones" (336), a Whitmanesque catalog of a few of his favorite things. Borges appreciated Royce as a fellow-wanderer through the late nineteenth-century thickets of both Anglo-American idealism and the new mathematics of transfinite numbers. Royce was not so much an influence on Borges as a fellow-traveler who had arrived in a somewhat similar place after passing through Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Cantor. Who was Royce? Royce is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the philosophical sparring partner of William James, as the inventor of the concept of the "community of interpretation," and as an advocate of the metaphysical position of absolute idealism, a stance that may well have no living advocates on the planet today. As Royce himself noted one century ago: absolute idealism "is, I admit, a thesis which many of the most distinguished among my colleagues, who are philosophers, nowadays view sometimes with amusement, and sometimes with a notable impatience" (Royce, Loyalty 315). James's companionate polemics against Royce were part of a two-sided dialogue, but most of us know Royce only through James, which can make him look vaguely ridiculous. Royce is much more than a gaseous Hegelian. Though his prose style can wax pulpity in a King James register and his buoyant tone can put off readers whose tastes have grown used to the more nihilistic mood of twentieth-century thought, Royce anticipates existentialist and poststructuralist themes, and his last great work, The Problem of Christianity, is a rare amalgam of pragmatism and idealism that leans in weirdly wonderful semiotic directions. We should follow Borges's example and read Royce, who Charles Sanders Peirce called "our American Plato" (CP, 8: 108). Royce's importance for modernist literature is not confined to Borges but is equally notable for T. S. Eliot, who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Royce's supervision. Eliot's poetic method in The Waste Land owes much to the idealist notion (deriving more, however, from Royce's colleague and rival F. H. Bradley) of a transpersonal locale of consciousness from which the span of human experience may be imperfectly viewed, embodied in that poem's narrator Tiresias. Needless to add, Borges and Eliot both pushed idealist themes in stranger directions than Royce ever did. Borges and Eliot stand to Royce as Marx and Kierkegaard stand to Hegel: post-idealist radicals who remove the triumphal affirmative cork of absolute reconciliation and let the spirits flow freely where they will. Royce loved to hike through metaphysical wastelands, frequently drawing on the geographical imagery of the American west across which his English parents had ill fact trekked to his native state of California. But however far he hiked, he always arrived home with a bang and never a whimper. Compared to Royce's stamina, Borges and Eliot sport a greater load of metaphysical weariness. One of the remarkable things about Borges is his lack of jealousy about literary priority: once Borges read Royce, he was happy to attribute ideas to Royce that he had long been thinking for himself. Idealism is a check on the ego's pretension of being original: it teaches the irrepressible joy of being a copy. I didn't know Royce was T.S. Eliot's Thesis advisor and influence. The stuff you find on the internet... I liked the "our American Plato" comment too. John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
