The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lest We Forget

What does it mean to speak or write or think precisely or truthfully? Knowing a lot of words perhaps? But words on their own don’t help very much. Crossword puzzle addicts know well that any word has multiple, sometimes dozens, of meanings (‘run’ will have 645 in the next OED) , sometimes nouns (‘use’), sometimes verbs (‘use’), sometimes homographs (‘quail’) and homophones (‘to, two, too’), sometimes contradictory (‘oversight’).

In other words, words have no significance at all until they get absorbed into a context of other words. It is only through their connections with other words, that is the totality of language, that they mean anything at all. The linguistic ‘atoms’ of words (with their quark-like letters and punctuation marks acting as gluons) don’t really exist until they are used. It is only then that words become definite, and even then only in terms of other words. This is the quantum physics of everyday life.

One of the great traditions of Western religion is that of ‘negative theology’. This is the recognition that anything that is said about the divine is necessarily false. According to this tradition, to believe that it is possible to capture any aspect of God in language is not only incoherent it is blasphemous since it would turn God into an object, a mere word which is part of language created by human beings and which can only use other words to describe, analyse, and specify relations with it.

The greatest proponent of negative theology in the 20th century was the Swiss conservative theologian, Karl Barth. Barth thereby articulated a fundamental fault line in Christian thought, namely that there are irrecoverable flaws inherent in all human knowledge of the divine which cannot be overcome. As he put it succinctly, the word of Man is not the Word of God. And for Barth, the word of Man included the gospels and other sacred texts (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

Science, Literature, and Philosophy have their own Barths, all with similar messages. William Eggington picks three: the quantum scientist, Werner Heisenberg; the philosopher, Immanuel Kant; and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The connection between these and Barth is apparent when it is remembered that traditionally God has been defined as Ultimate Reality. And the consistent message from all four is that the essence of this reality is not just elusive, it is unknowable.

That is to say, nothing about our knowledge of the world is stable much less true or correct. What Borges would call “eternal crevices”, Immanuel Kant “antinomies”, and scientists like Heisenberg “paradoxes”, and Barth “words” tout court, are crucial to an understanding of what it is to be human, namely the maintenance of a distance from reality in order to survive it.*

This distance is achieved through the use of language. And to the extent that language is necessary for reflective thought and therefore consciousness, it is consciousness itself which insulates us from reality for our own good (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). That is to say, through consciousness we lose one world of possibly limitless materiality for an at least as infinite a world of words, their permutations, their ambiguities, and their utter alienation from that which is not words.

So reality can be found neither in religious texts and dogma nor the equations of physics. This principle has been perennially established and perennially forgotten. The tendency persists to put faith, trust, or commitment in language as if it could somehow contain the infinite depths it cannot express. This is called either fundamentalism or scientism. The terms are functionally equivalent and reflect a baseless faith in language rather than anything beyond language like God or reality..

The essential human virtue implied by folk like Barth, Heisenberg, Borges, and Kant is, interestingly, neither among the central virtues of religious teaching, nor is it mentioned in courses on mathematics, scientific method, or literary writing. This virtue is Intellectual Humility. Humility might be summed up as devotion to a single (linguistic) maxim: Whatever we think we know about God or reality, it is not that.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, was an implicit devotee of negative theology and professional humility when he noted “… what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence” We can only speak with and therefore about words. Heisenberg was somewhat more expansive: “The ability of human beings to understand is without limit. About the ultimate things we cannot speak.” These are humbling remarks. And I think they reflect Eggington’s central thesis, evident in his use of the Borges quotation in his title: “There is indeed rigor in the world, but humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels.”

* This is explicit in the Jewish Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum (withdrawal) in which Ein Sof, the originary substance of God, is made self-limiting because creation could not live within it.

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