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

by William Egginton

What is an observation? At its very minimum, any observation entails something connecting two disparate moments in time and space. As for Kant and Borges’s character Funes, a being who was truly, exclusively saturated in a present moment wouldn’t be able to observe anything at all. Observation, any observation, installs a minimal distance from what it observes, for the simple reason that for any observation to take place, one here and now must be related to another here and now, and that relation needs to be registered by some trace or connector between the two. Crucially, this aspect of observing doesn’t assume a conscious or otherwise human agent. It also doesn’t mean, as the popular misunderstanding of Heisenberg’s discovery would have it, that the tools we use to observe something always affect what we observe, although that, too, is true. Far more fundamentally, the blur of the instant of change that is a logical prerequisite for stitching together any two moments in space-time inextricably inheres in the very reality being observed. This, in a nutshell, is the uncertainty principle: you can know a particle’s position or its momentum, but you can’t know both.