The Rigor of Angels Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by Egginton, William

• ISBN13: 9780593316306
• ISBN10: 0593316304
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-08-29
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

A NEW YORK TIMES AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world

“[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written.” —The New York Times

“A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced.” —John Banville, The Wall Street Journal

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.

Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.  

As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.

Author Biography

WILLIAM EGGINTON is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth With Spanish Baroque Literature (2022).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Where Did It Go?
Wherein we meet our three protagonists and are introduced to the problem that unites them
 
PART I. STANDING ON A SLIVER OF TIME
1. Unforgettable
A man shows up in Moscow with an apparently flawless memory, and Borges writes a story pushing the idea to its extreme, touching on a paradox unearthed by Kant and explored by Heisenberg
2. A Brief History of This Very Instant
Kant’s struggle with Hume leads us back to ancient Greece, where we encounter a very “queer creature,” the instant of change
3. Visualize This!
Heisenberg discovers discontinuity at the heart of reality and defends his chunky model against Schrödinger’s smooth waves
PART II. NOT BEING GOD
4. Entanglements
Citing special relativity, Einstein sides with Schrödinger, and they come up with a crazy thought experiment that turns the physics world on its head
5. Sub Specie Aeternitatis
Back in Prussia, Kant asks what knowledge would be like for an omniscient being, and we are transported to the warring factions of early Christianity
6. In the Blink of an Eye
Borges turns to the kabbalistic idea of the aleph to get over Norah, and finds new love while exploring the paradoxes of simultaneity
 
PART III. DOES THE UNIVERSE HAVE AN EDGE?
7. The Universe (Which Others Call the Library)
As his country flirts with fascism, Borges organizes the shelves of a municipal library he imagines to be without borders
8. Gravitas
Heisenberg’s conversations with Einstein reveal an underlying reconciliation between relativity and quantum mechanics in a vision of the cosmos foreseen by Dante
9. Made to Measure
Kant writes his third and final “Critique,” and his notion of beauty paves the way for an understanding of what guides inquiry in the physical sciences
 
PART IV. THE ABYSS OF FREEDOM
10. Free Will
Kant’s search for free will in a deterministic cosmos conjures the Roman patrician Boethius, who salvages freedom from fate while awaiting execution for treason in a dungeon in Pavia
11. Forking Paths
The physicist Hugh Everett has the wild idea that new universes are birthed continuously, and Borges explores the same idea in a spy story
12. Putting the Demon to Rest
Heisenberg defends his decisions during the war, as we consider what his discovery meant for questions of free will and determinism
Postscript
Wherein we see how Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, each in his own way, worked to undermine the e_ects of metaphysical prejudice

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321