A Good Review.

I’ve complained about bad reviews more than once, so it’s only fair that I give credit to a good one — namely, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton. The book itself sounds like something I might want to read:

William Egginton, a literary scholar at Johns Hopkins, calls this tendency “metaphysical overreach.” His new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, is a joint biography of three figures who called attention, much as Dostoevsky did, to the problems and paradoxes that emerge when we try to extend our ordinary way of seeing the world beyond the human scale. These contradictions—or what Kant called antinomies—arise when we try to eject ourselves beyond space and time, imagining earthly life from an eternal perspective. (Egginton calls this illusory vantage “the god of very large things.”) They also arise when we zero in too closely on things at a minute scale. (Egginton calls this, borrowing a phrase from Arundhati Roy, “the god of very small things.”)

Whether large or small, the point of view is presumed to be objective, unmoored, and impartial: hence the false divinity. This is not a new problem, but Egginton argues that it slyly persists in many thought experiments and theories, including the multiverse hypothesis, interpretations of quantum mechanics, and debates about free will. Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg each cautioned against such confusions and, as Egginton puts it, “shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God’s secret plan.”

(A copyeditor’s quibble: rather than “borrowing a phrase from Arundhati Roy” I would say “adapting a phrase from Arundhati Roy,” since Roy’s title was The God of Small Things.) O’Gieblyn describes philosophical concepts in such a way that I feel I might be able to wrap my head around them, which is comforting; here she is on Kant:

This is the problem encountered by “the god of very small things,” a vantage so immersed in particulars that the world becomes incomprehensible—and one that has a habit, Egginton shows, of creeping into science and philosophy under different guises. David Hume fell prey to it when he argued, in the conclusion of A Treatise of Human Nature, that there is no such thing as a continuous self. Hume believed that the self was a meaningless abstraction we impose on a collection of unconnected impressions—heat or cold, light or shade. Because of this, we cannot know anything for certain about the world that comes to us through our senses; no perception in isolation can be an example of a general rule.

Kant claimed that this argument, which he first encountered in a German translation in 1771, woke him from his “dogmatic slumber,” and his attempts to wrestle with it led to the insight that gave birth to Critique of Pure Reason. What he realized, basically, was that Hume’s proposition was incoherent. The very notion that we can discern the difference between heat and cold, light and shade, necessarily entails a self embedded in time and able to bridge two disparate moments. Without a self, Kant argued—without a sense that someone is looking and can register the beginnings and endings of sensations—experience itself would not exist.

She goes on to tie this to quantum physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and continues:

The larger truth that Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg uncovered was that we often confuse our knowledge of the world with the world itself. Science and philosophy fall into error when they treat time, space, or the self as objects of observation, as opposed to the necessary means by which we can observe anything at all. Heisenberg was well aware that his principle did not just identify an anomaly in the physical world; it suggested that there is no coherent reality independent of our observations of it. As he put it: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Egginton’s title is drawn from a Borges line: “Enchanted by its rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels.” What we forget, in other words, is that the world ceases to make sense when we imagine we are transcendent beings who can stand outside it, not the players of a board game whose rules are formulated by our own limitations. “Our reason propels us to incredible heights—understanding the fundamental components of matter and laws of the universe, seeing almost to the edges of the cosmos and the beginning of time,” Egginton writes. “But it also leads us woefully astray. For the very ability we have to map our world and hence see our way through the dark also treats that map as though it were the world.” […]

“The god of very large things” is a subtle and insidious delusion, Egginton maintains, one that creeps into discussions about cosmological fine-tuning or attempts to imagine what happened “before” the origins of the universe. Some fourteen centuries after Boethius, he insists, arguments about free will still defer to a godlike knowledge. As an example, he considers a thought experiment proposed by Sam Harris, an outspoken determinist. Harris asks the reader to imagine that all the atoms in his body have been replaced with the atoms of a murderer’s; in that case, he argues, there would be no remaining part of himself that could resist committing the same crime. For Egginton, Harris’s thought experiment smuggles metaphysics back into the picture and relies, implicitly, on some transcendent awareness that exists outside the conditions of the thought experiment. (Harris’s example, Egginton writes, is “in fact doing precisely what he disallows: positing a secret extra part of himself able to clock those differences and report back.”)

But what I especially appreciated was the last part of the review, where she starts out with a complaint and then pivots to make some interesting points:

I realize that the book I’ve been describing does not sound much like a biography. I should probably mention that Egginton’s discussion of these ideas comes between long narrative passages about Borges’s heartbreak, Kant’s home renovation headaches, and Heisenberg’s impressive skill as a downhill skier. Almost every new chapter begins with a scene from one of the men’s lives, narrated relentlessly in medias res. (“When Heisenberg entered the room for the Bohr Festival in Göttingen on a balmy spring day in June 1922, he was still only twenty years old.”)

I’ve resisted recounting all this here because these passages, although lucid and well written, arrived as unwelcome distractions and felt largely irrelevant to the book’s drama of ideas—though not from any lack of effort on Egginton’s part. […] I did not find many of these connections persuasive, and they tended to come at the end of each section, just as the wild strands of ideas promised to coalesce. One particularly engaging thread about eternity ended, much to my disappointment, with some back-of-the-envelope psychoanalysis. (“Time is loss. Time is heartbreak. Time is desire for timelessness,” Egginton writes of Borges’s unrequited love.) It was the same letdown I’d felt years ago while watching Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a film that plumbs the depths of quantum weirdness only to arrive at the conclusion that love is the one thing in this crazy universe that transcends space and time. […]

But it’s arguably the subjective nature of such explorations that makes them so meaningful. At its best, reading The Rigor of Angels feels like watching someone chase down a wild and possibly ill-advised thought experiment, one that might metastasize at any moment into a paranoiac string map. If I was annoyed by the occasional reminders that it was, in fact, a biography, it’s because they felt increasingly like a smoke screen, a literary scholar’s attempt to smuggle a hypothesis that spans physics, philosophy, and theology into the acceptable, and acceptably modest, conventions of that genre.

[…] Last fall, when the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll interviewed Egginton on his Mindscape podcast and asked whether he considered The Rigor of Angels a “contribution” or merely an attempt to explain things to the person on the street, Egginton replied that it was “equally both.” Carroll acknowledged that it was an impressive work of scholarship and noted that the depth of Egginton’s research (which included reading source material from the pioneers of quantum mechanics) was rare, even among physicists. But later in the interview, Carroll bristled at the loose connections Egginton made between quantum mechanics and Kantian epistemology. “Immanuel Kant did not know about quantum mechanics,” Carroll said. “He was talking about a different thing than the fundamental laws of physics…so I think it’d be wrong to give people the impression that quantum mechanics is a version of the same problems we had in the classical world.”

Carroll was expressing an all-too-common skepticism among scientists and academics toward grand philosophical conclusions and sweeping connections across centuries and domains. The human mind, so this logic goes, is prone to flights of fancy, and disciplinary guardrails are crucial to keeping it rooted in concrete particulars. […] What’s interesting, however, is that Egginton’s book suggests that “metaphysical overreach” is actually more common in disciplines that maintain a narrow focus and become captive to the language of specialization.

Among the most memorable passages in The Rigor of Angels is a discussion of Heisenberg’s 1942 essay about the use of language in physics. Humans need language in order to think, and natural language is entirely built on metaphor. This was why, Heisenberg argued, the emphasis on linguistic precision in his field so often prevented physicists from genuine understanding. There was also truth in the way that poets use language, calling upon associations, multiple meanings, and intuitive connections. Just as the physical world ceases to make sense when we zoom in too far, so language (as Borges’s story of Funes demonstrates) becomes meaningless when it’s too static and precise. “What is sacrificed in ‘static’ description,” Heisenberg writes, “is that infinitely complex association among words and concepts without which we would lack any sense at all that we have understood anything of the infinite abundance of reality.”

To read Heisenberg, Kant, or Borges—or, for that matter, Dostoevsky—is to be dumbfounded by the breadth of knowledge that was once expected of intellectuals (Heisenberg once claimed “that one could hardly make progress in modern atomic physics without a knowledge of Greek natural philosophy”), and it’s clear that the ability to think and express themselves in broad, analogical strokes deepened their work. On the Mindscape podcast, Egginton noted that after spending half his career writing scholarly books that were read only by colleagues and graduate students, he found popular writing to be a revelation—not because it was easier but because it demanded more rigorous thought. “And then it began to seem to me that some of my past writing was relying on, say, jargon,” he said, “or skipping steps in thinking through a problem by using a kind of shorthand that I felt that my colleagues and students would totally understand but that we hadn’t necessarily really thought through.”

Another way to put it: perhaps true understanding requires an observer who maintains enough critical distance from a given field to perceive the continuities that extend beyond it. The advance of knowledge might even benefit occasionally (who knows?) from an ambitious mind that attempts to span centuries of thought, drawing connections between the ideas that keep resurfacing and that feel increasingly destined to vanish in a deluge of data and the granular fixations of isolated expertise. The disciplinary boundary policing is itself evidence that we keep forgetting the most important insights these very fields have produced. If it’s true that our knowledge of the world is filtered through language and cognitive structures—if it’s true that what we’re studying is, at least in part, our own Euclidean minds—then commonalities, and common errors, are bound to recur across different contexts. The through line is us.

I like that conclusion (and I too was annoyed by Interstellar).