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

by William Egginton

In the first Critique, Kant had shown that the condition of the possibility of our perceiving anything at all was our innate ability to translate an otherwise bewildering chaos of sensory input into ordered events in space and time whose causal relations could be objectively established. Such objectivity in turn required the presumption of a total unity of the physical world, a mechanistic chain of causality from past to future, just as our ability to stitch disparate moments in time together depended on the presumption of a unified seat of consciousness. Crucially, Kant realized that we must presuppose such unity even though we can never verify it in our experience—never see the universe as a coherent object in space and time; never see the self on its own, apart from the flow of experiences it sutures together. Similarly, Kant now realized, whenever we connect two or more specific claims as being examples of a more general truth, of an idea that contains them both, the very coherence of our judgments requires us to assume a web of connections that links each specific instance to the whole of creation, even though that whole can never itself be an object of our experience. Here, Kant said, lay the harmony that the ancients had identified as the source of beauty. For when we perceive the chaos of data we receive about the world to be connected by an underlying unifying idea, we find that amalgam to be beautiful, harmonious, complete on its own. Our desire to explain furthe...