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

by William Egginton

Like Kant sparked to hope by Hume’s despair, Borges saw that the very memory needed to see a recurrence as a recurrence would of necessity be an alien element. The order thus discovered, that underlying rigor, is one of chess masters, not angels. But it is a rigor nonetheless. Like Dante’s cosmos, the universe that others call the Library is contained by its center; unlike Dante’s, that center isn’t God. It is, instead, the very observer whose absorption into the whirling, buffeting, random chance generator of temporal and spatial existence requires a minimum of abstraction, an iota of order, an atom of rigor just to feel lost and absorbed in the first place. It is, indeed, that very observer for whom the conditions of possibility of knowing anything at all also require that universe turn itself inside out, become a hypersphere whose central point envelops all existence.