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The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy cites Jorge Luis Borges-along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, George Eliot, and George Sand, Somerset Maugham, and Bernard Malamud-as creative writers influenced by Baruch Spinoza. The inclusion of Borges in this list honors the Argentine fabulist, but it is somewhat misleading: it would be more accurate to say that Borges had an uneasy relationship with the philosopher.
Borges mentions or discusses Spinoza in essays, poems, and short stories; and he agreed with Bertrand Russell's assessment of Spinoza as "the most lovable of the great philosophers."1 Borges also admired Spinoza's recommendation to accept one's destiny dispassionately; but he took pains to distance himself from Spinoza's metaphysics, to point out he could not abide by Spinoza's system, and even less so by his philosophical method. In short, Borges liked his image of the man (he liked Spinoza in the way he liked literary characters like Don Quixote); he expressed sympathy for certain ethical principles espoused by Spinoza; but he went out of his way to reject the philosophy.
Borges began work on a book on Spinoza in the 1970s which he decided he could not finish. It is characteristic of Borges's uneasy relation to Spinoza, not to mention his sense of humor, that after abandoning the project, he wrote an apocryphal biographical note about himself dated 2074, in which an imagined biographer recommends Borges's book on Spinoza to any reader interested in his philosophical inclinations.2 The book of course, does not exist, and he had no intention to write it when he wrote the stylized note. That being said, no other philosopher is mentioned in that biographical note Borges had composed to serve as an ironic epilogue to his complete works. Borges had written stories about theologians and politicians who refute the ideas of other theologians and politicians, but who in the eyes of God, or of history, are identified with each other as if their affinities were deep, and their differences inconsequential. The biographical note, in which Spinoza is the only philosopher Borges mentions by name, may well be inspired by those tales.
Borges had indicated, on several occasions, that the book he never wrote about Spinoza might have been called either A Key to Baruj Spinoza or Spinoza's Key; and there...