"One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite"
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Borges goes for the jugular by refusing the comforting, church-friendly version of evil: the kind you can file under “ethics,” prosecute with rules, and quarantine inside individual bad acts. His pivot is surgical: evil with a “limited sphere” implies borders, jurisdiction, a case you can close. But “the infinite” is not a crime; it’s a metaphysical contagion. The real threat isn’t wickedness as behavior, it’s wickedness as an idea that metastasizes through every other idea, staining language itself.
The line “One concept corrupts and confuses the others” is Borges at his most philosophical and most literary. He’s warning that certain notions don’t sit politely in the mind; they reorganize the entire library. Once you install “the infinite” as a moral category, all other categories wobble. Causality, responsibility, even identity start to blur. That’s classic Borges: the horror isn’t blood, it’s epistemology. A single abstraction becomes a labyrinth in which every corridor looks plausible.
Contextually, Borges is writing from a 20th century saturated with systems that claimed total explanations: fascism, Stalinism, technocratic rationalism, even certain theologies. “Infinite” here hints at absolutes that pretend to be beyond argument, beyond human scale. The subtext is a rebuke to any worldview that inflates moral certainty into cosmic destiny. Borges isn’t minimizing evil; he’s insisting it becomes most dangerous when it stops being human and starts impersonating eternity.
The line “One concept corrupts and confuses the others” is Borges at his most philosophical and most literary. He’s warning that certain notions don’t sit politely in the mind; they reorganize the entire library. Once you install “the infinite” as a moral category, all other categories wobble. Causality, responsibility, even identity start to blur. That’s classic Borges: the horror isn’t blood, it’s epistemology. A single abstraction becomes a labyrinth in which every corridor looks plausible.
Contextually, Borges is writing from a 20th century saturated with systems that claimed total explanations: fascism, Stalinism, technocratic rationalism, even certain theologies. “Infinite” here hints at absolutes that pretend to be beyond argument, beyond human scale. The subtext is a rebuke to any worldview that inflates moral certainty into cosmic destiny. Borges isn’t minimizing evil; he’s insisting it becomes most dangerous when it stops being human and starts impersonating eternity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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