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

by William Egginton

later, when Heisenberg explained to Pauli that the path a thing takes through space-time “only comes into existence through this, that we observe it,” this was another

way of saying that things in space and time are, by definition, always in relation to other things and that someone, an observer, needs to put them in that relation.

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.

accomplish. Beings who experience the world through sensory exposure need to unify and organize that exposure.