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

by William Egginton

Kant was convinced that feelings of approval or disapproval of our or others’ actions must depend on something else, “a necessary internal law that makes us view and feel ourselves from an external point of view.”[19] Our mere feelings, be they of sympathy or anger, pleasure or pain, could never be the basis for knowing the right thing to do, because they were always contingent, always subject to the vicissitudes of a shifting world tossed around in space and time. For Kant, the changeability of the spatiotemporal world undermined the very idea of something being right or true, which required, nay, sprang from, permanence in the face of change. The right thing to do, whatever it was, had to be unconditional.

Like Copernicus removing the earth from the center of creation, Kant had decided to do away with a fundamental presupposition common to all attempts to describe how humans come to know the world: namely, that what we are trying to understand is the world itself. What we are really trying to understand, he now saw, is our picture of the world. And our natural tendency to think we are speaking about the world is what must be subjected to critique. Thus would be born a new “age of critique” that would initiate the downfall of humanity’s submission to the age-old idols of its own creation. This would be called Enlightenment.

Cicero’s challenge was pounced on by generations to follow, leading to the most famous version of the thought experiment, in which a “half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.”[19] It was Lewis Carroll who pointed out that because the number of combinations, while enormous, is finite, there must be an upper limit to the number of possible books that can be written. Given enough time, the question would ultimately become not what book shall I write, but which of the infinite books already written shall I repeat. (As the comic George Carlin once asked, Why do people keep telling me to put it in my own words when they’re the same damn words everyone else uses?)

Space and time, as Kant wrote, are the necessary forms taken by our intuition of an otherwise chaotic influx of sensory data. This explains why Borges’s next step was to unpack Kant’s first antinomy, the problem of whether the universe has a beginning in time or an edge in space. For, as Kant showed, if we conceive of the universe as if it were an object in time and space, we run headfirst into an impossible contradiction. When we imagine it being finite, we come to its edge in time or in space. But that edge must be somewhere, and hence we are forced to imagine something beyond it. However, when we try to imagine the universe without a limit, encompassing all time and all space, our imagination fails, and we are still forced to ask where it is, or what came before.

two astronomers working out of a research facility in Holmdel, New Jersey, noticed an annoying residue of static in the highly sensitive readings their radio telescopes were making of distant space. They assumed it must be due to the pigeons that insisted on roosting up there and crapping all over the dish. So they climbed onto the apparatus and carefully scoured it. To no avail. It turns out they were listening not to pigeon droppings but to the microwave radiation left over from the origin of time. But these traces of the big bang had no specific origin. No matter what direction they trained their instruments, the cosmic background radiation was identical.

The weak anthropic principle, in contrast, simply concedes that, as improbable as it may seem that the universe emerged to support intelligent life, it would be more improbable for life to find itself living in a universe that didn’t support it.