As we approach the limits of inquiry, the inferences we draw from our observations tell us more about the method of our investigation than its object. Just as zooming in on a picture eventually stops offering more detail about its subject and instead begins revealing the brush strokes, pencil marks, film grain, or individual pixels of which it is composed, so too do the very concepts we use to describe our experience tell us, when applied with rigor at the extremes of our observational capacity, more about their nature as tools of the understanding than any supposed nature belonging to that which they are taken to represent.
Reflections on the themes in William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels.