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Summary
Summary
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
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.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
An intellectual history centered on three men who expanded our understanding of what we can and cannot know about reality. Egginton, a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins and author of The Splintering of the American Mind, describes in detail how Immanuel Kant in the 18th century and Werner Heisenberg and Jorge Luis Borges in the early 20th century grappled with the widely accepted metaphysical prejudice that reality is "out there," encased in rigid space-time coordinates and "conform[ing] to the image we construct of it." For Kant, these basic but false truths interfered with the "necessary postulate of reason" that enables us to manage our personal lives and public affairs. Human thought, he argued, brings reality into existence, and our perceptions are merely "construct[s] in our minds." For Heisenberg, reality becomes real when science "translates [it] into thought." Our ability to know reality is thus saturated with the "ineradicable uncertainty" intrinsic to both observation and language. Additionally, Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, together with Einstein's Theory of Relativity, undermined the presumed fixity of space and time. Borges was poetic in his assessments, noting that "We…have dreamt the world," and "the self's experience of permanence and solidity [is] illusory." Humans must "straddle the impossible border between ephemerality and eternity, loss and permanence," never fully understanding themselves but still having to negotiate between freedom and responsibility. All three men elevated free will over determinism and dispensed with the autonomous and omniscient self. Divine origins were also cast aside: Kant, Heisenberg, and Borges shared "an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God's plan." Egginton traces Kant's influence on Heisenberg and Borges and situates the men in their historical contexts, discussing their personal lives, describing their seminal writings, and noting how their ideas emerged from engaging with others. A challenging book that rewards those willing to suspend their prejudice about the fixed nature of reality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Throughout history, humans have sought to understand, explain, and depict reality. This drive seems encoded in our DNA. The challenge, however, is that our primary instruments for observation, ourselves, are extremely limited and subjective. Egginton, a humanities scholar, presents this overview with panache and a keen sense of story, making the more complex scientific theories accessible and entertaining. Egginton carefully lays out the distinction between reality and our knowledge of it. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant acknowledged after reading Hume that he had awoken "from my dogmatic slumbers." This theme recurs in the work of Werner Heisenberg, who had to reject previously accepted wisdom to devise his uncertainty principle. Indeed, the link between imagination and scientific insight is illuminated in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose fiction permitted his rational mind to become subservient to imaginative aspects. Egginton further draws on the work of a range of thinkers that includes Boethius, Dante, and Einstein while illuminating the subjects of free will, memory, the nature of time, and the multiverse in this accessible, thought-provoking work.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 UNFORGETTABLE It was only midmorning on April 13, 1929, but Solomon Shereshevsky was already having a bad day. The journalist had just attended the daily editorial meeting of his Moscow newspaper when his section editor called him into his office. What was Shereshevsky playing at? his agitated superior asked him. Why did he just stare at the editor while he ran over the day's stories? Was he too full of himself to take notes like all the other reporters? Nonplussed, Shereshevsky explained that he didn't need to take notes, because he remembered everything the editor said. Then he proceeded to recite the entire meeting back to him. Verbatim. By that afternoon Shereshevsky found himself amid a gaggle of psychiatrists at the Academy of Communist Education, among whom was a young doctor, Alexander Luria. Luria took on the task of testing Shereshevsky's memory, which he did by reading him increasingly long lists of random words and numbers and asking him to recall them. By the end of the day Luria had to admit that the capacity of Shereshevsky's memory "had no distinct limits." As Shereshevsky would later recount, until that day he had no idea his abilities were anything other than normal. When he returned to work, he delivered to his editor the verdict of the state's psychiatric experts: his memory exceeded "the bounds of what was believed to be physically possible." His editor promptly advised him to change careers. So Shereshevsky found a circus trainer to manage him and began booking shows around the country as a mnemonist. Despite his natural talent, Shereshevsky had to work hard at his new career, and he developed techniques to push his capacity ever further. To be able to recite back the lists of numbers, random words, poems in foreign languages, and even nonsensical syllables that audience members would call out to him, he landed on the strategy of picturing them drawn on a chalkboard. When it came time to recall the lists, he would return to this mental chalkboard and simply read from it out loud. To his horror he soon discovered that the very indelibility of his memory could interfere with his performance. Closing his eyes and finding his way back to the board on which he had arranged the sounds and images, he might instead come upon the board from an earlier performance and read back that list. To counteract this danger, he found he had to mentally erase or otherwise destroy the writing on his mental board. In short, to remember better, he had to learn to forget. This interference didn't wane with time. Luria, who continued to study Shereshevsky for decades, discovered he could flawlessly recall lists Luria had used to test him fifteen years prior. In fact, Shereshevsky waged an almost constant war against the images and associations from the past that threatened to flood his every waking moment. It wasn't just memories that menaced his perception of the present. Shereshevsky suffered from synesthesia, sensory crossover. A sound of a certain pitch might produce a coppery taste on his tongue; numbers appeared as specific figures with rich, unchanging characteristics. For most of us, 87 is a number, say, of pages read or years lived; Shereshevsky saw it as "a fat woman and a man as individuals, not instances of a general system. He once exerted intense effort to memorize a vast table of numeric sequences, failing to notice that it followed a rule of such simplicity that a child could reproduce it ad infinitum, because each line simply started with a higher integer than the previous one. For Luria it soon became clear that Shereshevsky's remarkable ability came with an equal disability. He lived in a world of particulars, "rich in imagery, thematic elaboration, and effect," but also "peculiarly lacking in one important feature: the capacity to convert encounters with the particular into instances of the general." To understand the intended meaning of a normal sentence, Shereshevsky had to overcome his sensual experience of how a word sounded here and now; he had to forget his immersion in the present and connect to a different moment in space and time, an endeavor that would at times prove impossible. In truth, he struggled mightily with the very aspect of language that makes it function in human communication and knowledge. Even our most common expressions contain words that we use figuratively, or that have different meanings in different situations. A nightmare for Shereshevsky. The simple act of "catching a cab" would present him with a barrage of possible interpretations to contend with. As he would later explain to Luria, the word ekipazh means "cab," but it also means "the crew of a ship." To understand the one meaning, he had to "picture for myself not just a driver in the cab but an entire staff manning it. That's the only way I can make sense of it." Living in a world of particulars, being constantly bathed in the immediate, makes communication a difficult affair. Language loses its ability to connect two disparate agents, to translate the experience of the one into the context of the other. But more than just a stumbling block for understanding what others were saying to him, in Shereshevsky's world, as the neuroscientist Jerome Bruner would later put it, "elements and features can be isolated, but a 'whole' or meaningful picture cannot be put together." Indeed, it seems that the more perfect Shereshevsky's extraordinary memory, the less he had a coherent self who could remember. For a brief time, Shereshevsky's feats brought him fame and a sustainable existence. But even as stories of the man who couldn't forget seeped into the outside world, life behind Stalin's iron curtain was getting harder, especially for Jews like Luria and Shereshevsky. After the war, as Stalin consolidated his power through "anti-cosmopolitan" purges, Luria lost his position for a time and took to keeping a bag packed in case the authorities came for him in the night. Shereshevsky, who had refused to lend his talents to the secret police, found himself followed and harassed, his performances interrupted, and his career eventually ruined. Luria would regain his footing and become one of the preeminent neuropsychologists of the twentieth century, his analysis of Shereshevsky a profound influence for later scientists like Jerome Bruner and Oliver Sacks. Shereshevsky, for his part, learned another way of erasing or at least dampening the remembered and perceived sensorium that had become his prison house. He started drinking heavily and died in obscurity a few years later. Excerpted from The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction: Where Did It Go? | xi |
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 | 3 |
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 | 27 |
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! | 46 |
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 | 75 |
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 | 102 |
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 | 122 |
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) | 141 |
As his country flirts with fascism, Borges organizes the shelves of a municipal library he imagines to be without borders | |
8 Gravitas | 163 |
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 | 189 |
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 | 215 |
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 | 235 |
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 | 254 |
Heisenberg defends his decisions during the war, as we consider what his discovery meant for questions of free will and determinism | |
Postscript | 277 |
Wherein we see how Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, each in his own way, worked to undermine the effects of metaphysical prejudice | |
Acknowledgments | 283 |
Notes | 285 |
Bibliography | 305 |
Further Reading | 317 |
Index | 321 |