Editing Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (section)

==Major themes==

{{Original research section|date=May 2024}}

===Philosophical themes===
Through the vehicle of [[fantasy]] or [[speculative fiction]], this story playfully explores several [[philosophy|philosophical]] questions and themes. These include, above all, an effort by Borges to imagine a world (Tlön) where the 18th century philosophical [[subjective idealism]] of [[George Berkeley]] is viewed as [[common sense]]<ref>{{cite journal|journal=[[Philosophy and Literature]] |volume=1 |issue=3 |date=Fall 1977 |pages=337–341 |title='..Merely a Man of Letters': an interview with Jorge Luis Borges |last1=Dutton |first1=Denis |author-link1=Denis Dutton |last2=Palencia-Roth |first2=Michael |last3=Berkove |first3=Lawrence I. |doi=10.1353/phl.1977.0016 |s2cid=170118915 |display-authors=1 |url=http://denisdutton.com/jorge_luis_borges_interview.htm |access-date=2015-01-12}} In the interview, Dutton refers to Tlön as "A world in which Berkeley is common sense instead of Descartes". Borges concurs.</ref> and "the doctrine of [[materialism]]" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox.<ref>"Tlön...", p.117</ref> Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the [[Sapir–Whorf hypothesis]] (also called "linguistic relativism")—the [[epistemology|epistemological]] question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. The story also contains several metaphors for the way ideas influence reality. This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later turns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of [[Earth]].

Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived. (Berkeley, a philosopher and, later, a bishop in the Protestant Church of Ireland, resolved that question to his own satisfaction by saying that the omnipresent perception of [[God]] ensures that objects continue to exist outside of personal or human perception.) Berkeley's philosophy privileges perceptions over any notion of the "thing in itself." [[Immanuel Kant]] accused Berkeley of going so far as to deny [[objective reality]].

In the imagined world of Tlön, an exaggerated Berkeleyan idealism ''without God'' passes for common sense. The Tlönian recognizes perceptions as primary and denies the existence of any underlying reality. At the end of the main portion of the story, immediately before the postscript, Borges stretches this toward its logical breaking point by imagining that, "Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater" by continuing to perceive it.<ref name="tlon119">"Tlön…", p.119</ref> Besides commenting on Berkeley's philosophy, this and other aspects of Borges's story can be taken as a commentary on the ability of ideas to influence reality. For example, in Tlön there are objects known as ''hrönir''<ref name="tlon119" /> that arise when two different people find the "same" lost object in different places.

Borges imagines a Tlönite working his way out of the problem of [[solipsism]] by reasoning that if all people are actually aspects of one being, then perhaps the [[universe]] is consistent because that one being is consistent in his imagining. This is, effectively, a near-reconstruction of the Berkeleyan God: perhaps not omnipresent, but bringing together all perceptions that do, indeed, occur.

This story is not the only place where Borges engages with Berkeleyan idealism. In the world of Tlön, as in Borges's essay ''[[New refutation of time]]'' (1947), there is (as [[Emir Rodríguez Monegal]] and [[Alastair Reid (poet)|Alastair Reid]] comment) a "denial of space, time, and the individual I."<ref>Monegal and Reed, notes to ''Borges, a Reader'', p. 353.</ref>  This worldview does not merely "bracket off" objective reality, but also parcels it separately into all its successive moments. Even the continuity of the individual self is open to question.

When Borges writes "The [[metaphysics|metaphysicians]] of Tlön are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature,"<ref>"Tlön…", p.116</ref> he can be seen either as anticipating the extreme [[relativism]] that underlies some [[postmodernism]] or simply as taking a swipe at those who take metaphysics too seriously.

===Literary themes===
In the context of the imagined world of Tlön, Borges describes a school of [[literary criticism]] that arbitrarily assumes that two works are by the same person and, based on that, deduces things about the imagined author. This is similar to the ending of "[[Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote]]", in which Borges's narrator suggests that a new perspective can be opened by treating a book as though it were written by a different author.

The story also plays with the theme of the love of books in general, and of [[encyclopedia]]s and [[atlas (cartography)|atlas]]es in particular—books that are each themselves, in some sense, a world.

Like many of Borges's works, the story challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It mentions several quite real historical human beings (himself, his friend [[Adolfo Bioy Casares|Bioy Casares]], [[Thomas de Quincey]], et al.) but often attributes fictional aspects to them; the story also contains many fictional characters and others whose factuality may be open to question.

===Other themes===
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" also engages a number of other related themes. The story begins and ends with issues of reflection, replication, and reproduction—both perfect and imperfect—and the related issue of the power of language and ideas to make or remake the world.

At the start of the story, we have an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room,  a "literal if inadequate" (and presumably plagiarized) reproduction of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', an apt misquotation by [[Adolfo Bioy Casares|Bioy Casares]], and the issue of whether one should be able to trust whether the various copies of a single book will have the same content.<ref>"Tlön…", p. 111–2.</ref> At the end Borges is working on a "tentative translation" of an English-language work into Spanish, while the power of the ideas of "a scattered dynasty of solitaries" remakes the world in the image of Tlön.<ref>"Tlön…", p. 122.</ref>

Along the way we have stone mirrors;<ref name="tlon113">"Tlön...", p.113</ref> the idea of reconstructing an entire encyclopedia of an imaginary world based on a single volume;<ref name="tlon114">"Tlön...", p.114</ref> the analogy of that encyclopedia to a "cosmos" governed by "strict laws";<ref name="tlon115" /> a worldview in which our normal notions of "thing" are rejected, but "ideal objects abound, invoked and dissolved momentarily, according to poetic necessity";<ref name="tlon115" /> the universe conceived as "the handwriting of a minor god to communicate with a demon" or a "code system... in which not all symbols have meaning";<ref>"Tlön…", p. 117</ref> ''hrönir'', duplicates of objects called into existence by ignorance or hope, and where "those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form that the originals do not possess";<ref name="tlon119" /> and Ezra Buckley's wish "to demonstrate to a nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."

Borges also mentions in passing the [[duodecimal]] system (as well as others). This ties into his description of Tlön's arithmetic, which emphasizes indefinite numbers, and holds that a number does not actually have any value or independent existence until it is counted/named. However, some may see the reference to the duodecimal system as inherently refuting of the changeability of things due to nomenclature—a number may be renamed under a different counting schema, but the underlying value will always remain the same.