Rigour

Rigour or rigor refers to a process of adhering absolutely to constraints, or the practice of maintaining strict consistency allowing no abatement or mitigation.

Quotes

• A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.
  • Theodor Adorno, “Why still philosophy?” Critical Models (1998), p. 12

• For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
  And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
  Show’d me the high white star of Truth,
  There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
  • Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855), st. 12

• Mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than philological-historical knowledge. It merely has the character of “exactness,” which does not coincide with rigor.
  • Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, p. 96

• You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 357, Kauffman trans.

• The brutality of a man purely motivated by monetary considerations … often does not appear to him at all as a moral delinquency, since he is aware only of a rigorously logical behavior, which draws the objective consequences of the situation.
  • Georg Simmel, “Domination,” On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 110

• Physicists are sloppy about mathematical rigor, but even so, they have to careful once in a while to make sure what they are doing actually makes sense.
• Anthony Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, 2nd edition (2010), p. 23; 1st edition (2003)

See also

• Carefulness
• Diligence
• Precision

• Laxity