[trgv]

I really enjoyed the interview as well. Borges' manner of speaking is wonderful.

> Borges says he's not a thinker in the interview. But I dunno, even if his influences are clear, his ability to understand, and then convey these ideas in such a way as to make them self-evident is in some ways the greater act of philosophy than the raw conception of the ideas.

I disagree here. Borges is a storyteller: he's interested in provoking a response from his readers. He's not arguing for or against a philosophy, but rather he finds inspiration in the philosophical writings of people who are arguing one way or another (ie philosophers).

What he's doing is no more or less impressive than what they're doing, but the two things very different. I think he's absolutely right to point that out to the interviewers.

[beat]

I agree. I've done the same thing in works of art - used art as a vehicle for communicating philosophical concepts. Which is fine, but there's no rigor there, no defense of the concept, no detailing the implications. There's no need, because I'm not creating or defending philosophical concepts, only sharing them.

I recently wrote a song called "Everything Is Made of Love", which lifted pretty heavily from Spinoza. The song works well, but it no way makes me Spinoza's peer. More recently, I've been reading some of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and their idea of art as a means of expressing revolutionary (in a political sense) ideas. I looked back on a play I wrote/produced last year in that context, and was very pleased to see how well I expressed the ideas of Marcuse et al, manipulating pop culture in order to criticize society on other levels, even though I wasn't really cognizant of the Frankfurt School at the time.