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.
