A New Refutation of Time by Olafur Gislason In 1944 and 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published two essays on time that he later combined under the ambiguous title A New Refutation of Time. The title is ambiguous because by refuting time as the natural progression of reality, we are also refuting the new in one way or another. Borges claims to have purposely used this title to emphasise the importance of word play in the two essays. Through this work, Borges exposes the cul-de-sac of absurdity that the idealism of the philosophers Berkley and Hume leads us to, when we on the one hand efute the material world in a form other than as a subjective perception (as Berkley does), and on the other refute that a subjective being is the basis of our perception of the material world (as Hume does). One denies matter, says Borges, the other the spirit. He then illustrates the result of this dead-end idealism using an old tale of a dream, where a Chinese man named Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly, four centuries before the birth of Christ. When he awoke he no longer knew whether he was a man who had dreamt that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly that was dreaming it was a man. Borges says that, according to Berkley's logic, neither Chuang Tzu's body nor the room he slept in had existed while the dream was taking place - except in the mind of God. According to Hume's logic, however, Chuang Tzu's spirit had not existed while the dream was taking place, only the colours of the dream and the certainty of being a butterfly. The idea that behind the perception of the butterfly there was a real butterfly is an unnecessary flaw, according to Berkley, and the presupposition that behind the perception of the butterfly is an individual self is equally unnecessary according to Hume. Idealism holds that there is no reality other than that which takes place in the mind of man. The dream and the perception did take place, yet there was no dream, and no dreamer. Borges says that the story of Chuang Tzu's dream has been widely known in China for centuries, but no one knows precisely when the dream took place. Yet let us imagine the possibility, Borges continues, that one of the readers of this folk tale had dreamed exactly the same thing as Chuang Tzu: first that he was a butterfly, then that he was Chuang Tzu. If the dreams were exactly the same, would they not have a common time line? Does one such case not suffice to re-shuffle the entire history of the world and prove that it does, in fact, not exist? Borges says that, in contrast to what has been suggested, this imaginary hypothesis suggests that no single incident fills all space in the universe at the same time, and therefore there is no universal space in the world. These questions lead again to the question of time and space being indivisible. If time were indivisible, says Borges, it would have no beginning that tied it to the past, and no nd that tied it to the present, and therefore no middle because there can be no middle without a beginning and an end. But time is not divisible, because if it were it would be on the one hand something that has been, and on the other something that has not been. Consequently time does not exist, and thus neither does the future nor the past.

Borges points out that inherent in this logic is the denial of individual aspects which lead to the denial of the whole. He himself, however, says he would rather deny the whole in order to then be able to accept individual aspects. The arguments of Berkley and Hume have, he says, led me to Schopenhauer's conclusion that the manifestation of will is only a fleeting moment, not the future nor the past. No one has experienced the past and no one has experienced the future, therefore the passing moment is the one form of all life. And he likens time to a wheel that turns, where the upswing is the future and the downswing the past, and the highest point is the moment of passing time. This point is also the surface that marks the contact of the objective being, which is time, and the subjective being, which lacks form, because it stands outside that which is known and is the primary basis of knowledge. (As in A. Schopehhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 54). These contemplations of Borges's are a useful lesson in ideological history and logic. They are also useful to those who want to access the thought that forms the basis of Finnur Arnar's videos about chairs and villages. They elicit questions about the divisibility of time and space based on the objective form of technology, of the natural progression of time and space on the one hand, and of our subjective experience of time and space on the other, with the involvement of the will and determination that give both meaning. Because even technology and its involvement are, in the end, merely extensions of the will and determination of man. With the technology of the video and its objective "real time", Finnur Arnar shows us twenty minutes of a fishing village in two segments, shown side by side over the space of 10 minutes. In its entirety, the work shows a picture of a bygone past and a bygone future. Between them we see the visual absence of the moment between a vanished past and a vanished future, that is projected for the benefit of the viewer, like a puzzle. Of a 120-minute recording of a chair we see 60 minutes, divided up into 6x10 minute segments, shown simultaneously. They show the empty chair, because the 60 minutes in which someone sat in it have been removed. The first chair shows us 10 minutes of absence, the last chair 60 minutes of absence. The being is the manifestation of the determination that gives the chair meaning. The question of that being is projected to the viewer, with a reference to his position regarding the real chairs that fill the exhibition space. In this context it is interesting to contemplate the final worlds of Borges in the aforementioned essay on time: "Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."