THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the ultimate nature of realityby William Egginton
Chances are if you’ve ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s memory ability was so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, and even sequences of random syllables called out to him by the audience. His world was rich in details, full of images and sensations. When asked to share his understanding of the number 87, he said he imagined it as “a fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.”
But his extraordinary gift was also a terrible torment. Shereshevsky was unable to generalize from the barrage of specific inputs he was experiencing. Communicating with others was exhausting. Forgetting something was not a matter of passively letting it fade into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. When everything you encounter has a unique meaning, it becomes impossible to put those pieces together into a cohesive picture. Unlike memorization, recall requires a slight touch of abstraction. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can become like “totally forgotten.”
Shereshevsky only makes a cameo appearance in Egginton’s mind-bending book, but his fate opens a gateway to thinking about space and time and our place in both. Challenging, ambitious, yet elegantly written, ‘The Rigor of Angels’ explores nothing less than ‘the ultimate nature of reality’ through the lives and works of three figures: Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; the German theoretical physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg; and the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Egginton, a literary scholar at Johns Hopkins, brings these three very different men together in one book because they all shared something unusual. They resisted the temptation to assume that some reality existed somewhere completely independent of our attempts to know it.
The formidable creativity of their work was, as Egginton puts it, a matter of “letting go” of what we assume should really be. This turns out to be extremely difficult. Even Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius, struggled. In 1915 he let it go, albeit only to an extent. His theory of relativity required him to “ignore what everyone knew about space and time in favor of what the data told him,” Egginton writes. But Einstein’s own calculations told him that the universe was either shrinking or expanding, so he added a cosmological constant to perpetuate the fiction that the universe (which is in fact expanding) remained a constant size.
In the 1920s, Einstein engaged in a discussion with Heisenberg about quantum mechanics—provoking concern about what physicists at the time considered “the ultimate nature of reality.” Einstein’s theories of relativity could explain the workings of the universe on a large, cosmological scale, but Heisenberg discovered something quite different at the subatomic level. Egginton describes how the “smooth continuity of the motion of matter” is replaced by “violent quantum fluctuations.” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was especially offensive to Einstein; Einstein refused to accept that particles such as electrons would not follow a clear path until they were observed. In Benjamín Labatut’s recent genre-bending non-fiction novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, Heisenberg is memorably described as “who seemed to put out both his eyes to see further.”
Egginton points to connections between the work of Heisenberg, Kant and Borges, between physics and metaphysics, between fiction and fact. All three men were fascinated by paradoxes, or antinomies—situations in which “both options seemed at once absolutely necessary and utterly impossible.” They all realized that such dilemmas arise when we confuse different ways of thinking. In Zeno’s famous paradox, Achilles will never catch the tortoise that gets an edge if we define the race in terms of a distance between them that is infinitely divisible into ever smaller slices. But of course, in a real race, Achilles will eventually catch the tortoise; the paradox arises from the way we imagine the race in the first place.
This is a book about the smallest things: the position of an electron, a moment of change. It’s also about the greatest things: the cosmos, infinity, the possibility of free will. Egginton processes ideas by embedding them in the lives of his characters. Heisenberg’s scientific research was so daring, yet his political engagements were curiously cautious and passive; in the 1930s he seemed unable to comprehend the monstrosity of the Nazi regime. But Egginton says Heisenberg’s behavior may not have been as paradoxical as it seems. Heisenberg’s “supernatural patience with trying things out” may have manifested itself in “an inability to recognize a real evil in the world and to react forcefully against it.” The mindset that made him such a brilliant scientist was, Egginton suggests, hindering his ability to understand what was going on around him.
In Shereshevsky’s example — not to mention Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” about a young man who was similarly struck by the capacity for total memory — such preoccupation with detail came at the expense of understanding the bigger picture. Borges describes Funes as “not very good at thinking. Thinking is ignoring (or forgetting) differences, generalizing and abstracting.” But thinking can also get us into trouble, Egginton shows. Sometimes we can become so enamored with our ideas that we project them onto the world, confusing our own way of thinking with something as grand as “God’s plan.”
The beauty of this book is that Egginton encourages us to recognize all these intricate truths as part of our reality, even if the “ultimate nature” of that reality will forever remain elusive. We are finite beings whose perspective will always be limited; but it is also these boundaries that create possibilities. When we choose what to observe, we insert our freedom to choose into nature. As Egginton writes, “We are, and always will be, active participants in the universe we discover.”
THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the ultimate nature of reality | By William Egginton | 338 pp. | Pantheon | $30
