A
poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in
the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the
cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way
uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world
Argentine
poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered
by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an
incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss,
that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist
Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on
the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own
epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect
description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the
assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but
emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical
system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits
undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.
Through
fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers
coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an
irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality
as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of
galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in
human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the
origins and nature of the cosmos itself.
As
each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally
incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as
mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its
richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast
extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of
freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we
must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and
work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The
Rigor of Angels
movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world
may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our
humble humanity.