William Egginton’s 2023 book, The Rigor of Angels, isn't just another dry academic biography. It’s a collision. Imagine throwing a blind Argentinian librarian, a paranoid German mathematician, and a world-shattering physicist into a room and asking them to define reality. That is basically what this book does. It weaves together the lives of Jorge Luis Borges, Georg Cantor, and Werner Heisenberg to tackle a problem that has haunted humanity since we first looked at the stars: the limit of what we can actually know.
The title itself comes from a Borges story, "The Library of Babel." It refers to that terrifying, beautiful precision of a logic so absolute it becomes alien. It’s about the tension between our desire for a final, objective truth and the messy, subjective reality of being alive.
Honestly, we usually think of math, literature, and physics as separate silos. They aren't. Not when you get to the edges. When Cantor started talking about different "sizes" of infinity, people thought he was losing his mind. When Heisenberg suggested that looking at a particle changes its behavior, he broke the fundamental promise of classical science. And Borges? He just wrote stories that showed how our language—the very tool we use to describe the world—is a trap.
The Rigor of Angels and the Breaking of Logic
Kant started it. Or at least, he’s the pivot point Egginton uses. Immanuel Kant realized that we don't see "the thing in itself." We see a version of the world filtered through the hardware of our brains. Space and time aren't out there; they are in here.
This is where the rigor of angels becomes a dangerous pursuit.
Georg Cantor is the perfect, tragic example. He wasn't just doing sums. He proved that some infinities are larger than others. Think about that. It’s counterintuitive. If you have an infinite set of whole numbers (1, 2, 3...) and an infinite set of real numbers (including every tiny decimal), the second one is "more" infinite. This discovery drove him to a breakdown. He felt he was touching the mind of God, a divine rigor that the human psyche wasn't built to sustain. He spent significant portions of his later life in sanatoriums, struggling with the weight of a mathematical truth that seemed to negate the physical world he lived in.
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Heisenberg did something similar with the Uncertainty Principle. Before him, physics was a clock. If you knew where every gear was and how fast it was moving, you could predict the future. Heisenberg said, "No." You can know where a particle is, or you can know how fast it’s going, but you cannot know both at the same time. The more rigor you apply to one measurement, the more the other dissolves. It’s a fundamental blurriness built into the universe.
Why Borges is the Glue
You’ve probably read a Borges story without realizing it. He’s the guy who wrote about a map so detailed it was the same size as the empire it represented. In the context of The Rigor of Angels, Borges acts as the navigator. He understood that our obsession with "the map"—our theories, our equations, our stories—often blinds us to the actual "territory."
In his story "Funes the Memorious," a man remembers everything. Every leaf on every tree he saw ten years ago. Every shape of every cloud. You’d think this is a superpower. It’s actually a curse. Funes can’t think because to think is to generalize. To think is to ignore details. Funes has the rigor of an angel, and it makes him incapable of being a human. He is a victim of his own perfect data.
The Problem With "Absolute" Truth
We live in a data-obsessed age. We think if we just get enough sensors, enough AI, enough "rigor," we will finally solve the human condition. Egginton argues the opposite. The lesson from the lives of these three men is that the pursuit of a singular, objective, "God's eye view" is a path to madness or, at the very least, a fundamental misunderstanding of our place in the cosmos.
Nature isn't a book waiting to be read. It’s a conversation we are participating in.
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When we try to apply the rigor of angels to our messy lives, we fail. We see it in modern politics, where people demand "absolute" facts, forgetting that every fact is framed by a perspective. We see it in "hustle culture," where people try to optimize every second of their day like a Cantor set, only to find they’ve lost the ability to actually experience a Sunday afternoon.
Heisenberg’s struggle during World War II is a sobering reminder of this. He stayed in Germany, working on the nuclear program, caught between his loyalty to his country and the universal truths of his science. His life was a mess of gray areas, even while his math was blindingly white. It shows that you can't live a life by the same rules you use to calculate the behavior of an electron.
Real-World Implications of the Infinite
- In Mathematics: Cantor’s work led to Set Theory, which is basically the foundation of all modern math. Every time you use a computer, you are standing on the shoulders of a man who broke his mind trying to count the uncountable.
- In Physics: Quantum mechanics isn't just for labs. It’s why your phone works. The "blurriness" Heisenberg discovered is the very thing that allows transistors to function.
- In Literature: Borges taught us that the narrator is always unreliable. This isn't just a gimmick; it’s a philosophical stance. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives.
Living With the Blur
So, what do we do with this? If the smartest people in history found that absolute rigor leads to a dead end, how are we supposed to navigate 2026?
The answer is "poetic realism." It’s acknowledging that while the math might be infinite, our time is not. We have to embrace the limitation. Egginton suggests that the beauty of being human isn't in reaching the infinite, but in the attempt. We are the only creatures who know we are limited, yet we keep trying to build maps of the empire anyway.
The rigor of angels is a warning. If you try to see everything, you see nothing. If you try to know everything, you lose the ability to feel anything. The "angelic" perspective is cold. It’s static. Being human is about the movement between the known and the unknown.
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Moving Beyond the Map
If you want to apply these insights to your own life, stop looking for "the" answer. Whether it's in your career, your relationships, or your health, there is no single data point that will solve the equation.
- Acknowledge the Frame. Every time you think you have a "fact," ask yourself what the frame is. Who is observing? What are they leaving out?
- Embrace the Small. Like Funes, we can get overwhelmed by the "infinite" nature of our digital world. Choose to ignore things. It is the only way to keep your sanity.
- Read Borges. Seriously. Start with Ficciones. It will break your brain in the best way possible. It forces you to realize that your "certainties" are just stories you’ve told yourself so often you forgot you made them up.
- Accept Uncertainty. Heisenberg didn't see uncertainty as a failure of science. He saw it as a property of nature. When things feel chaotic or "blurry" in your life, remember that it might just be the universe functioning exactly as it’s supposed to.
The pursuit of the rigor of angels gave us the modern world—our computers, our medicine, our deep understanding of the stars. But the wisdom of these three thinkers suggests that we must never let the rigor of the system replace the empathy of the soul. We are the gap in the code. We are the blur in the measurement. And that is exactly where the meaning lives.
Instead of trying to calculate your way to a perfect life, try to live in the space where the calculations fail. That’s where you’ll find the actual reality, hidden just behind the map.
Actionable Next Steps
- Audit your information sources: Identify three "objective" truths you hold and research the opposing perspective or the "frame" that created those truths.
- Practice Selective Ignorance: Choose one area of digital noise (like a specific social media feed or news category) and intentionally "delete the map" for one week to regain mental clarity.
- Deepen the Theory: Read William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels to see the specific historical intersections between these three men; it provides a much more granular look at their personal correspondences and specific breakthroughs than a summary ever could.