William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels unveils a shared common ground to bind an unlikely trio, despite the centuries, continents and disciplines holding them apart: theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, philosopher Immanuel Kant and writer Jorge Luis Borges.
In brief, they humbly accept the “irreconcilability of our cognition and the whole of the cosmos”. While understanding the fundamental nature of reality is desirable, it is similarly elusive; the experiential reality of humans and reality itself are at odds. Through biographies focusing on their ideas and predecessors, The Rigor of Angels tracks the forking paths that established a commonality between these three thinkers.
From the Uncertainty Principle – the position and momentum of a particle are knowable, but not both simultaneously – to The Critique of Pure Reason, the subjects of this book have revolutionised how humans understand themselves in relation to the physical world.
While emphasising the limits of a subjective human experience might appear conservative, it in fact establishes a starting point to guide our metaphysical inquiries into the fundamental nature of reality. Our human perspective can help us to uncover facts about underlying reality; the glimpses of goodness noticeable in the worst reprobates imaginable was, for Kant, an indication of a moral law that exists beyond our subjective experiences. Rather than jumping the gun and imagining a moral law from the perspective of a deity, we need to route our understanding of underlying reality in our own experience.
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While Heisenberg and Kant stress the limits of what is knowable, Borges’s fiction divulges readers captivated by the mysteries of the universe. In The Aleph, the entirety of space is visible in a disk a few centimetres wide, while Funes the Memorious tells the story of a man who can literally remember everything. Borges’s work is an illustrative warning of the antimonies that arise when a subjective experience and an unfettered one coexist; more often than not, Borges’s protagonists are monsters, who thought “they knew God’s secret plan”.
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Beyond the core trio, The Rigor of Angels has a far-reaching supporting cast. The likes of Zeno, Boethius, and Leibniz all crop up, though never needlessly; they’re explored to highlight the influence on their successors. A winding, lyrical text that juggles biography and theory, Egginton’s book pulls together three Leviathans and champions them for their surprising humility.
