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

by William Egginton

The sublime, like the beautiful, does not reside in things in the world, whether natural or made; it emerges as a reaction of our judgment to the representations we make of the world. For our representations to cohere, we must assume a greater order to them that ultimately outstrips our ability to verify it. As we verify such order locally, our judgment gratifies us with a feeling of beauty, of the parts fitting an ideal of the whole, a center that seems to contain the astonishing variety of existence and give it sense or purpose. In contrast, whenever we engage phenomena that threaten to overwhelm our ability to grasp them with our senses, reason stretches in a vain attempt to comprehend the very edges of totality itself, the border conditions of the universe, small and large, and we are taken simultaneously by our inadequacy to the challenge and by the awesome power of reason that permits us to conceptualize that very impossibility in the first place. The capillaries of coherence flowing from species to genus, from the particular to the universal, are the necessary presupposition that permits us to encounter and differentiate particulars in the first place. As we uncover those patterns of coherence, we experience their necessity and feel pleasure. Contemplating such purposiveness, we are lulled by its harmony, but we simultaneously strive toward a totality whose very incomprehensibility stokes that desire like an ever-present dissonance we desperately wish to resolve. St...