Welcome back, everyone! Apologies for the delay in posting on here, but we're sure that it will be worth the wait. Here is an interesting and thought-provoking philosophy essay in English by Ana, a pupil in 1º Bachillerato. Enjoy!
Funes the Memorious
Before the accident, Funes describes his life as a life where he was blind to reality. As a dream. And he claims his “perception and memory are infallible” now.
Now, what does this mean? It could mean that now he sees things as what they are. That, when people only see the concept (“three cups and a table”), he sees what that concept is made of (apeiron= the beginning of all is infinite) ( Anaximander ).
Thus everything can be divided (specified) , but if it is joined instead (generalised) , there will be a point where joining won't be possible anymore and that point is where the “being” is found. This leads us to finding that Funes does not comprehend generalisation, for he “cannot quite understand why the term “dog” is used for so many individuals in so many diverse sizes and shapes. He didn't like that the dog from three fourteen pm (profile view) had the same name as the dog from three fifteen (front view)” .So at the same time as he sees what the concept is made of, he cannot think in a simple way, he can't universalize that concept because what he sees is the evolution and change. In his world, a second is different from the one before, thereby the beings and objects found on that second are different than the ones found on the second before ( Parmenides ).
Furthermore, when the narrator mentions that “we all know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do and know everything”, what does he imply by this? What the narrator might be trying to explain is that a person might not be perdurable, but it's memory is. Concepts and theories are assembled with time. So the storyteller assumes that there will be a time where all concepts are know and all things done and discovered, and that'll be the day all men know everything.
But this can not be true, for, human knowledge has limits, and infinity is divinity ( Xenofanes ) , so in order to know everything someone had to be a god. Another problem is time: if all things are discovered, then nothing in the future is going to happen, so future wouldn't exist, but time cannot end, for time is the one that consumes everything, and it can't consume itself.
Looking at this from another point of view, it's possible to see that the one who tells the story puts Funes on a pedestal, and even at the end he describes him as a god ( Socrates ), by saying Funes is a lonely person and at the last paragraph he explains he thought he was going to be engraved on Funes’s memory and last forever, but then he realizes he just fooled himself, because he sees that at the end, that Funes does and everything he remembered with him too. Now, what we could get from here is if his memory (soul) actually died with him or not, because if it didn't, that would mean the soul would live ( Pythagorean philosophy ) and the soul is immortal and divine, so all the things that contradicted the other philosophies don't matter not because they don't contradict this one. So basically, when Funes died, the bond between his body and his soul breaks and the body, which is temporal, decomposes, and the soul, which is timeless goes to another body.
