In our upcoming November gathering, we will discuss Jorge Luis Borges's mystical and bittersweet story, "The Aleph," which describes a point in space that contains all other points—a cosmic totality hidden under the nineteenth step of a cheap, dark cellar in Buenos Aires. To prepare for this discussion, it is worth looking at the history of mystical optics and the human attempt to capture the infinite within a bounded gaze.
The pursuit of a singular, all-seeing point has haunted the history of science and theology. In the medieval period, scholars like Roger Bacon and Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) studied the physics of the camera obscura, realizing that a tiny, pinhole opening in a dark room could project a complete, inverted image of the outside world onto a wall. This optical phenomenon was treated as a physical metaphor for divine vision. If a pinhole could contract a wide landscape into a single beam of light, it was argued, then God's mind could hold the entirety of time and space in a single, eternal point. Later, in the seventeenth century, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza proposed his concept of sub specie aeternitatis—beholding things under the aspect of eternity, seeing every individual object as a necessary modification of the infinite substance.
Borges’s Aleph is the physical realization of this optical theology. But Borges introduces a crucial, tragic element: the limitation of human attention. When the narrator looks into the Aleph, he sees everything at once—every eye in the universe, every grain of sand, the secret letters in a forgotten book. Yet, because the human mind operates in time, he cannot hold the totality. The infinity of sight collapses into a catalog of memories, and eventually, into forgetfulness. The tragedy of the Aleph is not that it is hidden, but that our minds are too small to survive its exposure.
This November, we will explore the tension between our desire for infinite information and our biological limits. We will discuss how the modern internet acts as a crude, secular Aleph—offering us a point that contains all other points—and how this total exposure leads not to Spinozist wisdom, but to cognitive exhaustion and the loss of our ability to see what is right in front of us.