La ilustre incertidumbre: Borges, Wittgenstein

Although they were contemporaries, Borges and Wittgenstein never met, quoted, or read. But there are powerful affinities and connections between the two. For example, at the end of the Tractatus Wittgenstein understands that one must remain silent precisely there because a point has been reached in which the conceptual is subordinated to the poetic. The idea that the aesthetic nature of the world cannot be represented through language is also characteristic of Borges. The sea, the sunsets, the flame of a bonfire, for example, are the imminence of a revelation that never occurs, they are the aesthetic fact. Wittgenstein's work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary. This proposition seems true also for the case of Borges's work.