The Rigor of Angels

The trouble comes when we take our common and perfectly acceptable image of reality as an independent space-time in which things are happening in blissful disregard of our knowledge and start applying it where it doesn’t belong: below the limits of observability or beyond the very borders of existence itself; between the links of the mechanistic ca

Consciousness, for instance, isn’t for Kant some mysterious entity that needs to be explained; rather, it is nothing other than the necessary presumed unity that allows there to be a timeline against which I order and distinguish my perceptions.

Imprisoned in the here and now, siloed by an ever-narrowing thresher of choices, we combine and connect experiences and create a story of ourselves, a timeline of our lives. At the same time, though, we imagine a story of our unlived lives, potentially infinite ramifications of worlds and meanings exceeding the grasp of anything but our imagination

The very impossibility of recovering a scene from the past, of recapturing the flow of an afternoon in life, guarantees that self’s persistence.

he realized that mixing the two realms—treating, that is, intellectual ideas as if they had extension in space and duration in time or taking mere sensory impressions for inexhaustible and incontrovertible truths—would inexorably lead thinkers to untenable contradictions.

be. What I can know is always conditioned on an unconditioned whole that I must presume to exist but that remains unknowable.

the assumption of mechanistic causality is utterly at peace with the existential blindness that allows for responsibility, for freedom.

For us to register the moment of change from one space-time cell to the next requires that there exist some anchor in the flow that can register differences, and hence a pivot from which to choose what to observe. But try as we may, we cannot find that anchor and turn it into an object of our cognition.

To experience anything at all, to grasp any one thing, to observe a particle, to hold on to the flow of an afternoon in life, is also to experience something else, and to open the imagination toward what could have been, but wasn’t.