Essay: Inquisiciones

Overview
Published in 1925, Inquisiciones inaugurates Borges’s career as an essayist and sets out a program of intellectual curiosity rather than doctrinal certainty. The book gathers short meditations on metaphysics, aesthetics, and reading, written with a polemical clarity that opposes both academic system-building and ornamental rhetoric. Borges treats inquiry as a literary adventure: he turns questions about time, reality, the self, and style into occasions for precise, skeptical argument and for imaginative leaps that make ideas feel as vivid as fables.

Subjects and Concerns
The essays revolve around a few persistent obsessions. One is the instability of reality. Drawing on idealist philosophers, Borges worries the boundary between perception and world, suggesting that what we call reality may be a tissue of relations sustained by memory, habit, and language. A second is the tenuousness of personal identity. He dismantles the prestige of the autobiographical “I,” treating the self as a shifting series of states rather than a substance, and linking this skepticism to an ethics of impersonality in art. A third is time: he probes doctrines of recurrence and cyclic history, testing them with logical scruple and imaginative counterexamples, and showing how grand metaphysical claims often collapse into either tautology or myth. Literature, finally, is for him a laboratory for such questions. He reads poets and philosophers side by side, arguing that books are made of other books and that criticism is a creative act, a rewriting that can discover unsuspected lineages.

Arguments and Examples
Borges’s metaphysical essays interrogate the temptation to posit absolute realities. He highlights how systems that promise total explanation often depend on unnoticed metaphors or circular premises. Against the cult of personality, he prefers classic virtues, lucidity, restraint, precision, over confessional exhibition. He challenges the notion that style springs from an inner essence; style is instead a discipline and a choice, and the writer’s task is to efface the noisy self so that ideas and images can be exact. On time and cycles, he patiently exposes the ambiguities of eternal return: if every configuration repeats, then novelty is meaningless; if repetition is only approximate, the doctrine loses force. These arguments, though philosophical, are staged through memorable thought-experiments and a taste for paradox that keeps them agile rather than dogmatic.

Language, Tradition, and Reading
Inquisiciones also sketches a literary ethics for the River Plate. Borges favors a plain, vigorous Spanish capable of local inflection without provincialism, admiring the concision of certain classics and distrusting baroque excess. He reframes tradition as a dynamic network: the past is not a museum but a set of tools. Writers choose their ancestors; influences travel in both directions as new works cast retroactive light on old ones. He is drawn to marginal forms, apocrypha, glosses, commentaries, because they reveal how literature thrives on misreadings, forgeries, and productive errors. Reading, in this view, is a creative craft that can be as inventive as writing.

Style and Method
The book’s method is anti-systematic. Borges prefers short, sharply angled essays that advance by aphorism, example, and plausible hypothesis. Erudition appears, but never as display; it is a device for juxtaposition. He cultivates a tone that is both courteous and combative, hospitable to other minds yet unsparing toward vagueness and rhetorical fog. The result is a skeptical classicism that rescues speculation from solemnity.

Place in Borges’s Work
Though Borges later revised and even suppressed some early pages, Inquisiciones already contains the seeds of his mature universe: the attraction to labyrinths of reasoning, the suspicion of metaphysical absolutes, the downgrading of personality, the exaltation of reading, and the taste for intellectual fictions. It is a young writer’s book, but its inquiries remain brisk and durable, a foundation for the fables, parables, and later essays that would make those inquiries legendary.