The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton 

Leonid Bilmes considers the problems we face if we assume our theories match reality, Stephen Anderson is sad about modern writings on love, and in Classics, Shashwat Mishra introduces Ayn Rand’s massive novel promoting self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.

Sad Love by Carrie Jenkins

IMMANUELKANT, WERNER Heisenberg, and Jorge Luis Borges walk into a bar. Kant, ever punctual, arrives first. The problem for Kant, though, is that the barman cannot see him as he really is. What the barman at Antinomy Inn sees before him is a short man with keen eyes and an inordinately large head. The barman rubs his eyes: the image of the short man standing at the counter remains, yet somehow, it’s not really there: it’s like he’s surrounded by a cloudy veil. When the man orders a drink, the barman has difficulties understanding exactly what this apparition is asking him, even though he hears the words well enough. All the barman can see and hear of the greatest philosopher ever to have walked the cobblestones of Königsberg, is a mental construct – the product of the barman’s perceptual apparatus. The real Kant, ‘Kant-in-himself’, remains forever veiled from direct sensory apprehension, even by Kant himself.

Next to enter the bar is the youthful and athletic Heisenberg. The barman is again bewildered, as Heisenberg cannot seem to cross the threshold. What the barman perceives is a kind of shimmer: there is Heisenberg just before the threshold, his leg outstretched in mid-stride; and here something is vaguely walking over the threshold, but the barman cannot be sure it’s Heisenberg. The barman can choose to see either the stationary Heisenberg before the threshold, or something crossing the threshold, with some speed. What he cannot see is Heisenberg actually crossing the threshold.

The barman understandably leaves Heisenberg to his undecided state, and looks behind him at the lagging Borges. The blind man, sad to say, never even makes it into the bar. Circumspectly tapping his cane in front of him, he first walks half the distance from the pavement to the entrance of ‘Antinomy Inn’; then half of the remaining distance; then again half… His shuffling steps get smaller and smaller all the while. Soon, Borges’s steps become so small that he hardly seems to be moving at all.

William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels (2023) tells a riveting story of intellectual adventure involving our three protagonists – an Enlightenment philosopher, a quantum physicist, and an author of labyrinthine fictions – grappling with the kinds of paradoxes that arise the moment we begin, in Egginton’s pithy phrase, ‘to make idols of our tools’. The ‘tools’ Egginton refers to are ideas spanning the breadth of human endeavour, encompassing philosophical concepts, scientific hypotheses, and artistic creations. Such tools have made life as we know it possible – indeed, it would be impossible to understand the world without their mediation. And yet the moment we idolize them – the moment, that we believe that the world coincides with these instruments conceived by human minds – they blind us.

A ‘crevice of unreason’ emerges, growing ever wider, due to what seems to be a ‘’radical incompatibility between being and knowledge.’’ Each of the book’s protagonists deal with this incompatibility in his own way.

Real Philosophical Problems

Kant argued that we cannot know the world as it is ‘in-itself’: all we can ever hope to know are what we register of the world through our senses. The inputs through our sensemechanisms are then interpreted via various innate principles to create our experiences. For instance, in Kant’s view, the preprogrammed notions of universal time and infinite space are two essential categories for experiencing the world. (Einstein proved Kant wrong where the notions of universality and infinity are concerned, but not about the idea that our experiences of the world are necessarily given in terms of time and space.) Heisenberg, in turn, demonstrated that for elementary particles – the warp-and-woof of the physical world’s fabric – we cannot hope to have absolute knowledge of their behaviour. This is because physical reality does not consist of stable threads existing independently of their interactions with observers, but rather, how we measure affects how it manifests.