Bion of Borysthenes.

Bion of Borysthenes. I was unaware of the existence of this philosopher; I didn't even remember ever hearing or reading about him. And now that I am reading Montaigne's Essays, I felt like searching for something related to him. And why Montaigne? Because this author mentions the philosopher Bion on a few occasions. A particularity of Montaigne is that in his work he mentions many characters and events; there, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Pyrrhonists, and humanists coexist—that is, a plurality of voices even though he was, or at least is recognized as, a skeptic. That mix is no coincidence, but a mosaic that reinforces his skepticism: if so many philosophies contradict each other, none can claim absolute truth.

Biography. Who was Bion of Borysthenes?

Entry with the biography in J. Ferrater Mora's Dictionary of Philosophy.
BION OF BORYSTHENES (fl. 230 BC), a student in Athens of the Academic Crates (whose doctrines he harshly criticized), of the Cyrenaic Theodorus, and of the Peripatetic Theophrastus, adhered to Cynicism, which he popularized, especially through the introduction of the literary form known as the diatribe. According to Diogenes Laërtius (IV, 53), Bion of Borysthenes—who had been the slave of a rhetoric master—was distinguished by his literary skill and especially by his brilliant parodies. Now, Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one. Consequently, Bion—like his imitator, Teles, and like Menippus of Gadara—almost completely abandoned the old Cynic idea of effort and the hardening of the wise man to give Cynic life that rhetorical, skeptical, and realistic tone that prevailed during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Horace followed and imitated some of the literary forms developed by Bion.
J. P. Rossignol, Fragmenta Bionis Borysthenitae philosophi, Lutetiae, 1830 and F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, II, 423 et seq. — On Bion: J. M. Hoogvliet, De vita, doctrina et scriptis Bionis, 1821. — Art. by H. von Arnim on Bion (Bion, 10) in Pauly-Wissowa.

The bronze head of a philosopher was recovered in 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck. It was part of a life-size statue of the man. Date of creation: between the 3rd century BC and 1st century BC. It is not certain that it represents the figure of the philosopher Bion, although it is the main hypothesis most cited by art historiography. The sculpture—formally known in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens as the Philosopher of Antikythera (3rd century BC)—does not retain any inscription confirming who it is. Therefore, the attribution to Bion of Borysthenes is a probable attribution, but not a definitive one.

•    The Bion of Borysthenes hypothesis: It is the most accepted identification by various archaeologists due to the features of the portrait: an expressive face of maturity, a thick combed beard, and unkempt hair that fit the stylistic profile of Cynic philosophers (the movement to which Bion belonged).
•    Other possible attributions: Over the decades, other specialists have proposed that the portrait could represent the Cynic Antisthenes or contemporary orators/philosophers of the Hellenistic period.

Links.
•    https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Antikythera_philosopher.JPG
•    The Bronze Head of Antikythera – A Late Classical or Very Early Hellenistic Masterpiece? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349657262_The_Bronze_Head_of_Antikythera_-_A_Late_Classical_or_Very_Early_Hellenistic_Masterpiece
•    http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=5564

Bion in Montaigne's Text. He mentions Bion. "And the philosopher Bion, speaking of that king who pulled out his hair in grief, was he not witty when he said: 'Does this man think that baldness relieves grief?' Who has not seen people chew and swallow playing cards, or gorge themselves on a bag of dice, to have something on which to avenge the loss of money?" Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter IV. How the soul discharges its passions upon false objects when true ones fail it.
This passage belongs to Chapter IV of Book I of the Essays, and he quotes it just as he is building a broader argument: that the soul, when overwhelmed by passion, needs to discharge itself onto something, and if it does not find the true object (the real cause of grief or anger), it invents a false one just so as not to be left with an unreleased passion. The king pulling his hair out, the gambler biting cards: they are not reasoning; they are acting out emotion on whatever surface is available.
Why Montaigne quotes him. The entire chapter is an accumulation of examples—Caligula wanting to destroy the world over his sister's death, Xerxes lashing the sea, Cyrus taking revenge on a river—that all point to the same thing: passion does not obey reason; it seeks an object even if that object is absurd or non-existent as a real cause. Montaigne is not assembling a systematic thesis (that would be the Stoic approach); he is stacking concrete cases to undermine, through empirical accumulation, the claim that human beings govern their affections with reason.
The connection with skepticism. That is the Pyrrhonian nerve of the essay. The Stoics maintained that reason could—and should—master passion. Montaigne uses these examples as evidence to the contrary: if even kings and philosophers end up biting dice or tearing out their hair, reason does not have the control attributed to it. It is not a frontal attack with a deductive argument; it is the typical technique of the essai: testing the idea with cases, not syllogisms, and letting the accumulation of anecdotes generate doubt. Montaignian skepticism does not say "this is false"; it says "look how much evidence there is that we do not know what we think we know about ourselves." It is failed self-knowledge put on display, not refuted by logic, but by observation.
Bion's specific Cynicism. Bion of Borysthenes was an itinerant philosopher with Cynic training (and also touched by Academic skepticism), famous for his biting diatribes. The phrase about baldness is Cynicism in its purest state: it takes a conventional and "noble" gesture—mourning, tearing out hair as a sign of genuine grief—and reduces it to its absurd literalness. That is the Cynic method: deflating pretension through sharp irony, showing the gap between what the gesture claims to mean and what it actually does.
Why Montaigne turns to Bion and not another. Because Cynicism and skepticism, although starting from different places, function as rhetorical allies: neither builds a positive system; both are corrosive to self-complacency—the Cynic through direct mockery of convention, the skeptic through methodical suspension of judgment. Montaigne, who distrusts any discourse that claims to own the truth about the human soul, finds in Bion's joke a perfect tool: there is no need to refute the Stoic with another treatise; a single phrase exposing the ridiculousness of the gesture is enough. It is exactly his own method on a minimal scale—the Cynic aphorism as a miniature of the skeptical essay. The skeptical essay operates by dismantling absolute certainties through exploration, systematic doubt, and argumentative detours. When that same impulse toward suspicion undergoes maximum condensation, the result is the Cynic aphorism: not a dogmatic maxim seeking to establish a truth, but a quick thrust aimed at dismantling an illusion.

He mentions Bion: "My spirit was always on that side. All things considered, it takes more effort to guard money than to earn it. If I did not do quite as much as I say, at least it cost me an effort to avoid doing it. I derived little or no profit from it. Having more spending capacity did not make it weigh any less heavily on me. For, as Bion used to say, the hairy man gets just as angry as the bald man if his hair is pulled; and once you have accustomed yourself and fixed your fantasy upon a certain pile, it ceases to be at your service. You would not dare diminish it. It is a building that, so it seems to you, will completely collapse if you touch anything. Necessity will have to grab you by the throat for you to reduce it. And previously, I used to pawn my rags and sell a horse far less forcibly and reluctantly than what then made a dent in this favorite purse, which I kept aside. But the danger lay in the fact that one can hardly establish safe limits to this desire—they are hard to find in things believed to be good—and fix a boundary to saving. One continues to enlarge the pile, increasing it from one number to another, until vilely depriving oneself of the enjoyment of one's own goods, basing everything on custody, and not using them. According to this form of use, the richest people in the world are those in charge of guarding the gates and walls of a fine city. Every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious. Plato thus ranks bodily or human goods: health, beauty, strength, wealth. And wealth, he says, is not blind, but very clear-sighted when illuminated by prudence." Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter XL. That the taste of goods and evils depends in large part on our opinion.
This passage is central to Chapter XL because Montaigne is not talking about money in general, but illustrating his thesis: that pleasure and pain do not reside in things themselves, but in the opinion and habit we project onto them. Bion's anecdote is the argumentative hinge of the whole fragment.
Who Bion is and why he quotes him. Bion of Borysthenes is a curious figure: he passed through the Academy, through hedonistic Cyrenaicism, and ended up fixed in the Cynic orbit through Crates (a pupil of Diogenes). He left no system of his own; he left a style—the diatribe, the sharp aphorism, the maxim that strikes without constructing doctrine. Montaigne almost certainly takes him via Plutarch (who collects the same image in On the Love of Wealth), and it serves him perfectly because Montaigne himself proceeds in this way: he does not cite authorities to ground a system, but to "essay" a personal intuition using borrowed material.
The logic of the aphorism (bald/hairy). Bion's point is of almost behavioral precision: the pain of loss is not proportional to the amount one possesses, but to the mental fixation (the "fantasy," as Montaigne says) placed upon it. It hurts the bald man just as much to have his only lock of hair pulled as it does the hairy man to lose one out of a thousand. This is what Montaigne finds in himself: he loses a horse with less anguish or pawns clothes—things he never "accumulated" with attachment—than touching his "favorite purse," precisely because that purse became a symbolic building, not an objective sum.
The skeptical link. There lies the Pyrrhonian heart of the chapter. The title itself—that the taste of goods and evils depends on our opinion—is a classic skeptical thesis: nothing is by nature (physei) good or bad, pleasant or painful; it becomes so by custom and judgment (nomos, doxa). The Pyrrhonists (Sextus Empiricus being the underlying source) held that opposing appearances have equal force (isosthenia) and that suffering arises from dogmatically adhering to the belief that a certain thing "is" valuable. Bion's example is almost a skeptical thought experiment in miniature: it shows that pain does not follow the real magnitude of the loss, but the fixed belief about the object. Montaigne does not say "saving is bad"; he suspends judgment on the objective value of money and demonstrates that suffering is an artifact of the mind, not a property of the thing.
The Cynic link. But the passage does not remain solely within epistemic relativity: it has a moral edge that is purely Cynic. The final paradox—that the richest people in the world are, strictly in terms of use, the guards who watch over the gates and walls of a city—is an inversion in the style of Diogenes: the person who "possesses" actually serves what is possessed; ownership does not liberate, it enslaves in perpetual vigilance. It is the same gesture Diogenes makes by living in a tub and mocking Alexander: real wealth is the reduction of need (autarkeia), not accumulation. When Montaigne says "every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious," he is applying that Cynic diagnosis of pleonexia (the desire that has no natural limit, "safe limits are hard to find… in things believed to be good").
How they connect. Skepticism provides the epistemology (why pain/pleasure has no objective foundation, only opinion); Cynicism provides the ethics (what to do about it: do not fix your fantasy on the pile, because to possess is to begin serving). Montaigne merges them without declaring allegiance to any school—which is exactly his method: he uses Bion as one uses another's tool to carve out an observation about oneself, not to prove a system. Cynic ethics answers the question of what to do after discovering that nothing has intrinsic value. Cynic ethics is active and provocative; skeptical ethics is passive and adaptive. An echo that might resonate: the quote from Plato at the end (wealth as blind except when illuminated by prudence) is almost an anti-Cynic closure within the same paragraph—it tempers the radicalism of Bion and Diogenes with the idea that wealth is not bad in itself, but in the blind relationship one maintains with it. Here Montaigne returns to his usual tone: he does not advocate for asceticism, but for clarity regarding one's own attachment.

He mentions Bion. "They affirm, he says, by virtue of the reason of their judgment, that whatever is told about hell and future punishments is fiction. But when the opportunity to experience it arises, when old age or illness brings them close to death, the terror of it infuses them with a new belief out of horror for their future condition. And since such impressions make minds fearful, he forbids in his laws any instruction regarding such threats, as well as the belief that any evil can come to man from the gods except with a view to a greater good, when appropriate and with a medicinal effect. They tell of Bion that, infected by the atheisms of Theodorus, he had long mocked religious men; but that, when death caught him by surprise, he surrendered to the most extreme superstitions, as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need." Essays. Montaigne. Book II. Chapter XII. An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
This passage belongs to one of the sharpest moments of the Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and most radical chapter of the Essays, where Montaigne develops his Pyrrhonian skepticism against the presumption of human reason.
The argument Montaigne is building. Just before mentioning Bion, Montaigne is discussing an idea he takes from Plato (The Laws): that although hell and future punishments may be "fictions"—useful constructs, not rationally proven truths—those same fictions re-emerge with full force the moment death approaches. Old age or illness causes terror to reactivate a belief that reason had discarded. For this reason, he says, the prudent lawmaker forbids teaching that the gods can do harm to man except for a "medicinal" purpose (a kind of therapeutic, non-dogmatic theology).
Bion as concrete proof of that thesis. Bion of Borysthenes is the historical example Montaigne uses so as not to remain in abstraction. Bion was a curious figure: he passed through several schools (including the Cyrenaic, hence the "contagion" with the atheism of Theodorus, a follower of that movement) and ended up adopting the Cynic style—a wandering life, biting satire, provocative contempt for conventions, including religious ones. He became famous for openly mocking pious people.
But according to the anecdote (which comes from Diogenes Laërtius, and which Montaigne probably knew through Plutarch), when death came upon him, Bion abandoned that posture and fell into the most extreme superstition. Montaigne concludes with a devastating phrase: "as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need"—that is, Bion's gods were not the object of a stable conviction (neither in atheism nor in faith), but a reflection of his own mood and fear.
How it connects to Montaigne's skepticism. Here is the core: Montaigne does not use this example to mock Bion or to defend official religion. He uses it to demonstrate the radical inconstancy of human reason in the face of passions, which is the engine of the entire Apology. His point is: Bion's religious "Cynicism" or skepticism was not a solid rational conclusion, but an intellectual posture, almost a rhetorical fashion (Bion was famous precisely for his biting wit, for dressing philosophy "in courtezan robes," according to Eratosthenes' famous phrase about him). It was surface skepticism, maintained as long as there was nothing at stake. When a real existential threat appears (death), that position collapses instantly, revealing that underneath there was no deep rational conviction, but pure fear disguised as philosophical certainty.
This is exactly the type of argument Montaigne repeats time and again in the Apology: reason does not govern man; it is governed by him—by his humors, his fear, his vanity. Neither the defiant atheism of Bion alive nor his desperate superstition dying were the result of a stable judgment; they are two sides of the same weakness. That is why Montaigne, later in the same chapter, will extend this distrust to all human claims of knowing ultimate truths through reason alone, which forms the basis of his fideism: if not even the sharpest philosopher can maintain a firm stance in the face of death, what authority does reason have to rule on the divine?
In summary: Bion is mentioned neither as a villain nor as a buffoon, but as a mirror of man in general—living proof that "rational" convictions regarding gods and death are, for Montaigne, more an effect of circumstances and passions than a stable achievement of the understanding.
Connection with modern skepticism. I will take a phrase to relate it to a more modern and current reading of skepticism. The phrase "maintained as long as there was nothing at stake" is the perfect gateway to connect Montaigne with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's contemporary concept of "skin in the game," as well as his critique of superficial and bookish skepticism. Fake skepticism vs. flesh-and-blood skepticism. For Taleb (and for Montaigne), there is a vast difference between opining from the comfort of an ivory tower and suffering the real consequences of your actions or beliefs.

•    Bion (the case Montaigne refers to): Played at being a skeptic or a Cynic when everything was going well. He had an elegant "opinion" about death and the gods, but it was a theoretical stance.
•    The acid test: When the Grim Reaper arrives (the real threat), that intellectual conviction evaporates because it was never anchored in the reality of "skin in the game." It was merely rhetoric to impress at banquets. Skin in the Game. In Taleb's philosophy, no one can consider themselves the owner of a true belief or knowledge if they have nothing to lose by it. If you say you do not fear death or that you despise religion, but you enter into absolute panic and recant everything at the first symptom of a serious illness, it proves that your stance lacked skin in the game. Montaigne, being a great precursor of this existential empiricism (bringing philosophy down from its metaphysical pedestal and placing it directly on the terrain of everyday experience), detested armchair philosophy. For him, ideas are worth as much as a man's behavior when life gets difficult. Montaigne's true skepticism is not an abstract mental game; it is a humble acceptance of our bodily weakness and our passions. Superficial skepticism vs. deep skepticism. Taleb frequently distinguishes between intellectuals who theorize about the world ("intellectual yet idiots" or IYI) and those who operate in the real world under risk.
•    Bion's superficial skepticism survives only in the absence of risk.
•    Montaigne's radical skepticism, by contrast, is profoundly honest: it recognizes that reason is weak before passions and fear because both share the same mortal flesh.

Why do some authors label Bion as a "hedonistic philosopher"?
A biography defines him as: "Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325–250 BC) was a Cynic philosopher known for his provocative style and his hedonistic approach within Cynicism."
They call him a hedonistic philosopher (or, more precisely, a hedonistic Cynic) due to his blend of Cynicism with Cyrenaic influences.
Diogenes Laërtius places him among the Academics due to his initial training, but modern scholars consider him an atypical Cynic.
He studied under several schools: the Academy (Xenocrates and Crates of Athens), Cynics, Theodorus the Atheist (a Cyrenaic philosopher), and Theophrastus (Peripatetic). The influence of Theodorus and the Cyrenaics is key: they advocated pleasure (especially physical and immediate pleasure) as the supreme good.
His Cynicism was not the ascetic and rigorous style of Diogenes of Sinope. According to sources like Ferrater Mora's dictionary, "Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one." He largely abandoned the idea of the extreme hardening of the wise man and adopted a more rhetorical, skeptical, realistic, and accommodating tone.
He accepted, in the Cyrenaic style, making use of present circumstances (wealth or poverty) and diverse social roles, including relationships with kings (such as his connection with Antigonus Gonatas). Diogenes Laërtius describes him as someone who sometimes lived in a degree of luxury, moved from city to city, adopted young men, and was a "lover of himself," though these accounts stem partly from hostile sources.
In summary: he was not a pure hedonist in the style of Aristippus of Cyrene, but an eclectic Cynic who softened classic Cynic rigor with hedonistic/Cyrenaic elements. That is why Spanish Wikipedia presents him directly as a "hedonistic Cynic and skeptical philosopher," and he is known for popularizing a more flexible and satirical version of Cynicism that influenced the diatribe and Latin authors such as Horace.
The label reflects that philosophical hybridization rather than a systematic defense of pleasure as the sole end. He is difficult to fit into a single neat box, which is why labels often appear together or with nuances: atypical Cynic, hedonistic Cynic, eclectic, etc. He is difficult to fit because he did not allow himself to be boxed in. That very difficulty is what makes him interesting. That combination makes him a hybrid figure of the early Hellenistic period: Cynicism was transforming, moving away from harsher rigorism and drawing closer to more rhetorical, skeptical, and "realistic" forms. Bion precisely represents that transitional moment. That is why modern scholars usually say "Cynic with strong hedonistic/Cyrenaic inclinations" or "atypical Cynic" instead of forcing him into a single label.

Links:
•    https://www.ferratermora.org/ency_filosofo_ad_bion.html
•    https://symploke.trujaman.org/Bion_de_Bor%EDstenes
•    https://www.informacion.es/sociedad/2026/05/13/bion-boristenes-filosofo-cinico-hedonista-130091097.html
•    https://concepto.de/hedonismo/
•    https://e-torredebabel.com/compendio-de-las-vidas-de-los-filosofos-antiguos-bion/
 

Something interesting to me, given my interest in chance, randomness, luck, and fortune, are these two fragments: "Far from considering her a deity properly speaking, the early Cynics despised Fortune, refused to take her seriously, and interpreted her blows as a stimulus for moral effort. However, starting with Bion of Borysthenes (c. 335–245 BC), their attitude changed significantly. They sought to accept whatever she sent them, regarding her as the khorēgos of the great human comedy, the director who assigns each person their role on the stage of life, and whom, therefore, we must obey." "Only one of his ideas cannot be attributed to the first generation of Cynic thought. It arises when Bion expresses himself regarding the idea of Tychē, Fortune. In fragment 16 Kindstrand, preserved in Teles' diatribe On Self-Sufficiency, Bion compares Fortune to a poet. The poet distributes roles to actors, and good actors know how to perform well in their roles. Similarly, Fortune distributes roles to men, and good men know how to accept the roles assigned to them: one is a king and another a beggar; one commands and the other is commanded. Consequently, Bion advises every man to accept the role assigned to him. This attitude is markedly different from that maintained by earlier Cynics, who criticized Fortune and laughed at her attacks. But this is the only aspect, I believe, that does not agree with Diogenes. Thus Bion could very well have found the content of his critiques in Cynicism, even if he expressed them in his own particular style." The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

The fragment highlights one of the most interesting philosophical evolutions of Cynicism: the transition from frontal combat to strategic acceptance of life. Early Cynicism (Diogenes, Crates): Provocation and combat. Initially, Tychē (Fortune/Chance) was not seen as a sacred destiny, but as a rival to be challenged. For the early Cynics, setbacks of luck were not misfortunes, but a "moral gymnastics" (askēsis). Poverty or exile were not suffered: they were actively used to demonstrate the wise man's autarky (self-sufficiency) and apathy (imperturbability). The shift with Bion of Borysthenes: The theater metaphor. Bion introduces a crucial nuance that would enormously influence later Stoicism (especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius): life as a theatrical play.
Fortune is no longer an enemy to fight against, but the khorēgos (the producer/director of the play). You do not choose whether you play the role of king, beggar, or servant; your sole moral duty is to flawlessly act the role assigned to you by the director, without wishing for another.

The diatribe. *"Quite simply, the map of Greek literature was never the same after the Cynics. Nor were their innovations limited to prose: the Cynics wrote in iambics, elegiacs, and hexameters, and Cercidas invented a new meter, the meliamb, for a political poem from a Cynic perspective.
The diatribe, frequently associated with Bion of Borysthenes, constitutes another fine example of a form that was certainly extra-literary or oral in the Classical period, and which the Cynics established as a characteristic part of their own literary repertoire."* The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

 The concept of the diatribe as a written work arose in the 3rd century BC, attributed to Bion of Borysthenes, the Greek Cynic philosopher. Just as some authors credit him with inventing it as a genre, others argue that he brought it from the oral world into the written world, and others hold that he was the one who popularized it.
A diatribe (from Classical Greek: διατριβή, diatribē, "spoken discourse," "lecture") is a violent, sometimes abusive text directed against individuals or social groups. As a written work, its purpose was to reach a broader audience, although at that time it did not carry the somewhat offensive connotation the word has today; rather, it consisted of Bion's humorous yet sharp attacks against human flaws and weaknesses.
In its original meaning, this term named brief ethical speeches delivered by Cynic and Stoic philosophers. However, due to the polemical tone that typically characterized these popular moral lectures, the concept quickly shifted toward its modern sense of invective.
 

Core sources:
•    The Essays. Michel de Montaigne. (According to the 1595 edition by Marie de Gournay). Prologue by Antoine Compagnon. Edited and translated by J. Bayod Brau. Digital edition. Epublibre 2014. https://archive.org/details/montaigne-michel-de.-los-ensayos-epl-fs-1580-2014/mode/2up
•    https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ensayos-de-montaigne--0/html/
•    Montaigne. Essays (I)(II)(III). Complete edition. Ediciones Orbis. 1984. Translation by Juan G. de Luaces.

Transparency note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude, Gemini, and Grok for text analysis and structuring. The illustrations, informative graphics, and visual infographics were generated with the support of Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT.

Il bastone miracoloso (The Miraculous Staff) by Lorenzo Pignotti

Il bastone miracoloso (The Miraculous Staff) is a poemetto burlesco—a satirical narrative poem written in octaves (ottava rima)—by Lorenzo Pignotti. The standard description found in Wikipedia and academic sources notes: «Uscì postumo, nel 1831, il suo poemetto burlesco Il bastone miracoloso che narra la storia di un uomo dotto abissino che smaschera i ciarlatani». Published posthumously in 1831 (with a Dublin imprint, though actually printed in Florence), the work tells the story of a learned Abyssinian scholar who uses a "miraculous" staff to unmask impostors, charlatans, and frauds.

The text maintains an ironic and critical tone characteristic of the author's most satirical side, distinct from his more widely known fables. While in his Favole e Novelle he attacked human vices through irony, in Il bastone miracoloso he continues along the same lines, focusing specifically on intellectual hypocrisy and charlatanism. Alongside La treccia donata, it was praised in its time as one of his most agreeable and pleasant verse compositions, even though it contains sharp wit and period-specific personal references that are less easily understood today.

I’ve been writing several blog entries about this text. The issue was that I couldn't find a Spanish translation of the work. It is a rather unusual and hard-to-trace text. It doesn't appear fully digitized and accessible on Google Books or on easily searchable Italian public domain sites. It is only mentioned in biographies and catalogs of Pignotti's works (Italian Wikipedia, Treccani, etc.), but the complete text isn't available. Either my search was insufficient, or there really are no digitized translations published on web platforms.

However, there is an Italian version uploaded to Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_JOBFm18SyJQC/mode/2up

So, what I did was use the help of an AI—in this case, Grok, although all AIs have OCR capabilities that allow them to read and translate text from an image. I was originally planning to convert the result into a PDF, but the AI solved that for me by generating a clean PDF directly. Finally, I uploaded it to Archive.org so that it remains available for anyone interested in reading these unusual texts.

https://archive.org/details/pignotti-lorenzo-el-baston-milagroso-en-espanol/page/n15/mode/2up

The Cane and the Doubt: Ismaele and the Forms of Disillusionment

 

There is a phrase that could summarize Ismaele's entire story, even if at first it seems like a contradiction: he has studied too much. It is not about an ignorant man who one day discovers that wise men make mistakes. It is the exact opposite. Ismaele traversed disciplines, learned languages, studied metaphysics, physics, mathematics, theology, medicine, astrology. He did everything a society that venerates knowledge would ask of an intelligent man: accumulate, compare, learn. And yet, he arrives at an uncomfortable conclusion: the more he knows, the less sure he is of knowing. That is where his true disillusionment begins.

Lorenzo Pignotti could have constructed Ismaele as an enemy of books—the ignorant man who scoffs at scholars because he does not understand what they say. That would have been the easiest route. But he does something far more interesting: Ismaele knows doctrines from the inside out. His mistrust does not stem from a lack of reading, but from an overabundance of explanations. He found too many answers to the same question, and when that happens, an uncomfortable suspicion arises: perhaps some of those answers are nothing more than different ways of disguising ignorance.

This is why his observation about words being mistaken for things matters so much. There is a moment when language creates the illusion of knowledge: naming something seems to explain it. A complicated word, an elegant theory, a detailed classification give the sensation of having penetrated reality, when in truth only a description was constructed. The danger lies in failing to notice the difference. A word can be a window, but it can also be a curtain. Ismaele begins to suspect the curtains.

A Crisis with Precedents

His crisis is somewhat Socratic, even if Pignotti resolves it through satire. Socrates is not important because he accumulated answers, but because he discovered a strange relationship between knowing and ignorance: recognizing that one does not know can be a superior form of knowledge. Ismaele arrives at a similar place after having studied so much that he begins to see the seams of what previously seemed solid.
However, there is also a touch of Montaigne in the scene. Montaigne turns doubt into a form of intellectual hygiene: he does not deny that knowledge exists; he mistrusts the ease with which we turn our opinions into certainties. His Que sais-je? does not simply mean "I know nothing," but something more unsettling: What do I really know, and what do I merely think I know because others taught me to believe it?

And then the Genius appears. What is remarkable is what he does not do: he does not hand Ismaele a new theory, he does not offer him a doctrine to replace the ones that disappointed him, he does not say "you studied incorrectly, now you will study correctly." He gives him a cane.

After traversing a universe of words, Ismaele receives an object. After systems, a thing. After arguments, an experience. The cane does not explain the world: it reacts to it. It does not construct a metaphysics of error; it strikes it when it appears. Pignotti takes it, of course, into the realm of caricature—it is a magical and absurd instrument—but beneath the joke lies a serious intuition: after too many theories, perhaps what is needed is to look at what happens once again.

This unexpectedly brings Ismaele closer to an empiricist attitude. The empiricist mistrusts what claims to be valid simply because it was asserted; he wants to know what happens when an idea collides with experience. Doctrines can contradict one another infinitely in the realm of words; the world has the bad habit of not caring too much about our debates. A wise man can construct an explanation for hours about what a cane should or should not do. But if the cane actually strikes, the nature of the discussion changes. Reality has just barged into the conversation.

The Third Place

The most interesting aspect is that disillusionment does not turn Ismaele into an absolute skeptic. The vulgar skeptic says "everything is false"; the naive person says "what I was taught is true." Ismaele begins to occupy a third place: I do not yet know what is true, but now I mistrust the reasons I used to settle for. That place is far more fertile, because doubt does not act as a final destination, but as the beginning of a more careful investigation.

Here, it is worth bringing in Taleb, despite the enormous historical distance. Taleb insists on our tendency to construct overly satisfying explanations after events occur: human beings detest explanatory vacuums and prefer an imperfect story over admitting they do not know. Ismaele is not bothered solely by the fact that wise men contradict each other; he is bothered that each one has an overly confident explanation for something that, viewed from the outside, remains deeply uncertain. There lies true disillusionment: not in moving from one certainty to its opposite, but in discovering that between the two lies a vast territory called I do not yet know.

This makes the Genius an ambiguous figure. He can be read as the teacher who frees Ismaele from pedantry, but also as someone who hands him a dangerous tool. Abandoning the authority of scholars does not guarantee having found the truth: one can replace one authority with another, turn personal experience into dogma, or stop believing in scholars only to start blindly believing in oneself. Mistrusting the certainties of others does not automatically make us lucid; we must also learn to mistrust our own.

Therefore, Ismaele's story yields more value if it is read not as a defense of ignorance, but as a defense of a certain intellectual modesty. Studying stops meaning accumulating answers and starts meaning distinguishing between an explanation and an illusion of an explanation, between a word and a thing, between knowing something and knowing that one believes something. The truly disillusioned man is not the one who stops believing, but the one who begins to ask himself why he believes. The cane knows no philosophy, physics, theology, or metaphysics—yet it possesses a property that scholars seem to have lost: it reacts to error without needing to turn it into a doctrine.

A Phrase That Changes Owners

There is a phrase by Ismaele that sounds like a conclusion, but is better read as the beginning of a conversation: "I have studied a lot, and yet I know nothing." It holds a touch of paradox—if he studied so much, how can he know nothing? And if he knows nothing, what was the point of all that study? But the paradox perhaps lies not in Ismaele, but in our idea of what it means to know. We tend to imagine knowledge as accumulation: first we do not know, then we learn, and finally we know—as if intelligence were a room gradually filling with objects. Ismaele discovers that the opposite can also happen: the fuller the room gets, the harder it becomes to distinguish which objects serve to guide us and which merely take up space.

It is worth circulating that phrase among different thinkers, not to make them "say the same thing," but to see what happens to doubt when it changes hands.

In Socrates, the phrase becomes a question: What do I really know? That is not the same as saying "I know nothing"—which can be hyperbole, provocation, or despair. The Socratic question forces us to examine what we claim to know. Socrates does not need to prove that all opinions are false; it is enough for him to show that someone can defend an opinion without having examined the reasons behind it. Ismaele arrives at doubt through an excess of books; Socrates arrives through questions. Yet both discover that knowledge consists not only in having answers, but in knowing what kind of answer lies before you: it could be true, false, a conjecture, an inherited opinion, or a word simulating an explanation. Perhaps one of the primary forms of intelligence is knowing how not to confuse them.

In Montaigne, the phrase becomes an observation. If Socrates asks "What do I know?", Montaigne seems to ask: "How can I know anything, if I myself change while trying to know it?" In the Essays, knowledge does not appear as a tower built from outside the world, but as something entangled with the body, customs, mood, memory, illnesses, and circumstances. Montaigne does not merely observe things; he observes himself observing them. This complicates Ismaele's phrase, because the problem is not just that doctrines contradict one another, but that the person judging them is not a stable machine. Today something is believed, tomorrow it is disputed; after an illness, a loss, or an unexpected conversation, what seemed obvious may prove to depend on conditions that had gone unnoticed. Montaigne does not simply say "I do not know": he seems to say, "I am going to watch how my own knowledge behaves."

In Taleb, the phrase becomes a warning. The problem is not just that we can be wrong, but that we can build a convincing explanation for something we do not sufficiently understand. An explanation can seem excellent after an event occurs: it organizes the facts, highlights causes, and produces a coherent narrative. But the coherence of a narrative does not guarantee that what happened was actually understood. Ismaele studied many theories about the origin of the world; when he contemplates them together, he suspects that the abundance of explanations does not prove knowledge, but rather humanity's extraordinary capacity to produce answers before having resolved the problem. Taleb would not ask to abandon explanations, but rather pose a more uncomfortable question: What would have happened if things had turned out differently? An explanation that only works after the fact can be much less useful than one that allows us to recognize uncertainty before it happens. Socrates teaches us to examine reasons; Montaigne, to observe conditions; Taleb forces us to think about what explanations fail to anticipate. Ignorance ceases to be merely a lack of knowledge and becomes a condition of risk.

And in Gardner and Kant—a stranger connection, not because they speak of Ismaele, but because they allow us to think about another boundary: the boundary of what we can represent—the phrase becomes a frontier. In The Fourth Dimension, Gardner shows how an idea can be understood without being directly imagined as a daily object: one can reason about an additional dimension, follow its consequences, and build analogies without ever visualizing it internally as one sees a table. Kant, in his discussion of space, distinguishes between what belongs to the structure of experience and what can be thought through concepts: not everything thinkable presents itself in the same way. Perhaps studying a lot consists not just in accumulating knowledge, but in discovering that there are things that can be thought without being fully represented. The phrase could then mean: I have learned to think beyond what I can imagine, but that does not mean I have ceased to have limits. Ignorance is no longer just a deficiency; it is a border. And a border may prevent advancement, but it also lets us know where we stand.

Placed side by side, the four doubts are not the same doubt: Socrates suspects unexamined answers; Montaigne suspects the stability of the knower; Taleb suspects overly satisfying explanations after the fact; Gardner and Kant suspect the idea that everything thinkable must present itself in the same manner to us. None of them need to say exactly what Ismaele says, and that is where the fertility lies: the phrase does not remain identical as it passes from one author to another. And there is still the cane, which introduces something none of these thinkers need accept literally: that error can be interrupted by something that does not depend on our capacity to construct explanations. The cane does not prove a theory, does not explain the world, and does not replace one doctrine with another: it simply appears when someone makes a mistake. The man who cannot tolerate doubt needs to defend his explanation; the man who learned something from doubt can say, "Perhaps I need to look again." Ismaele does not pass from ignorance to knowledge: he passes from an excessive trust in knowledge to a more careful relationship with it. The cane does not deliver truth to him; it delivers an experience that prevents him from continuing to speak as if he already possessed it.

The Miller: Thinking for Oneself

The chain can continue in a rarer direction: Ismaele → Carlo Ginzburg's miller. One is a character in a short burlesque poem; the other, a real 16th-century man reconstructed from Inquisition trial documents. One receives a miraculous cane; the other ends up facing the tribunals of the Inquisition. The distance is vast, yet something brings them together: neither calmly accepts that the world is exactly as it is explained to them.

The miller did not study all the doctrines of his era. Out of what he reads, hears, observes, and thinks, he constructs his own interpretation of the world—one that does not align with religious authorities. His thought is not a collection of errors: it has structure, connections, internal logic, questions, even a certain coherence. He does not spout nonsense: he tries to understand. The problem is not that he does not think, but that he thinks outside the boundaries others consider legitimate.

Ismaele mistrusts out of an excess of knowledge; the miller, because he began to think for himself. One arrives at doubt by reading too much; the other, through a combination of readings and experiences that do not fit authorized knowledge. Yet both discover that knowledge is not only what a society permits one to learn, but also what a person attempts to understand when received explanations no longer suffice. The crucial difference is that Ismaele has a Genius accompanying him; the miller has only his own head, which can be far more dangerous.

Pignotti's cane is a comical authority: it strikes the one who makes a mistake, strikes again if he persists, and stops when someone acknowledges his error. The Inquisition is a historical authority, complete with tribunals, interrogations, documents, and punishments. The cane and the Inquisition can be read as two forms of interrupting thought, but they are not equivalent: the cane produces laughter, the Inquisition produces fear; the cane forces the scholar to say "I am an ox," while the Inquisition forces the miller to face the consequences of his ideas.
In Ismaele's case, error can be corrected: the cane strikes, the scholar acknowledges it, the scene ends. For the miller, error is not a mistake but a transgression: it is not about having said something false, but about having thought something an authority deems inadmissible. A society can tolerate someone making a mistake; what it cannot always tolerate is that person building an independent explanation of the world. Error is forgiven; intellectual autonomy is far more dangerous.

There lies the question bringing both together: What happens when a person stops accepting that knowledge belongs exclusively to those authorized to produce it? In Ismaele, the response is comic; in the miller, historical. Yet both stories allow us to consider the same tension: the difference between learning from others and accepting that others have the right to decide what can be thought.

Alongside the miller, Ismaele's phrase shifts in meaning once more. It no longer says merely "theories are insufficient"; it can say "I have learned that I must not confuse the knowledge I receive with the knowledge I can come to build." And that connects with something broader: unexpected connections do not always arise from knowing a great deal about an author, but from finding a question that runs through very different texts. Reading is not merely receiving an interpretation of the world: it can also be building one's own. That demands comparing, connecting, distinguishing, questioning, finding contradictions, and noticing unexpected similarities—without being overly afraid that a connection might seem strange at first, because it does not need to prove that two authors thought the exact same thing. It can simply be a question that emerges when they are placed side by side.

Borges: When Thinking Manufactures Worlds

One last stretch remains, and that is where Borges enters—not as another name on the list of those who mistrust authority, but to take a different step. In Borges, books do not merely contain worlds: they can manufacture them. A reader finds an idea, a citation, an imaginary encyclopedia, and from those materials constructs a reality that can end up appearing more coherent than reality itself. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the discovery of an encyclopedia about an imaginary world ends up altering the characters' relationship with the real world: the encyclopedia does not describe a place; it makes it possible for that place to begin existing.

The miller builds an interpretation of the world with the materials at hand; Borges shows that an interpretation can become a world for whoever accepts it. This introduces a new question: What happens when someone stops merely interpreting reality and begins, without realizing it, to inhabit the interpretation they constructed?

Three objects, three functions: Ismaele's cane strikes, the miller's book interprets, Borges's imagined world ends up imposing itself over the world believed to be real. The problem is then no longer just who has the right to think, but what one does with what is thought. An idea can serve to understand, to debate, to challenge authority—but it can also become a prison. Borges's characters are not always deceived by an external authority: sometimes they are deceived by the extraordinary capacity of books to produce a convincing reality.

If Ismaele discovers that he studied a lot and yet knows nothing, Borges adds a more haunting question: What if what I think I know is merely the world I learned to read? It is no longer just a matter of mistrusting scholars, but of mistrusting the way words organize experience. A map helps with orientation, but it can also make one forget that the territory is not the map. An encyclopedia teaches, but it can also make one forget that the world is under no obligation to resemble an encyclopedia. A theory allows us to understand, but it can also become a room in which we end up living.

Building Worlds and Knowing How to Exit Them

Placing Ismaele, the miller, and Borges in the same scene: Ismaele discovers that explanations do not always suffice; the miller discovers he can build his own explanation; Borges shows that an explanation can become a world. The opening phrase takes its final turn. It no longer means only "I cannot trust scholars," nor only "I must think for myself." It can mean: I must learn to distinguish between the world I understand, the world I imagine, and the world I might be constructing without realizing it.

That is a more complex form of disillusionment because it does not end in mistrust: it ends in responsibility. The responsibility to read, interpret, and build connections—and also not to confuse those connections with reality itself.

This is why Pignotti's cane serves to close the chain. It strikes the one who persists in error; the miller persists in his interpretation; Borges imagines worlds that can impose themselves over the real world. The cane then acquires one final symbolic function: it not only interrupts the discussion, it also interrupts the illusion that our interpretation is the world. An unexpected connection can be extraordinarily fruitful—it can lead from Pignotti to Ginzburg, from Ginzburg to Borges, from Borges to Gardner, from Gardner to Kant—but it can also become a small, private encyclopedia, a world that resembles oneself so closely that one stops noticing how much of oneself is inside it.

Perhaps true intellectual disillusionment consists in learning to do both: building worlds and, every now and then, stepping outside of them. Ismaele studied a lot. The miller thought for himself. Borges imagined worlds born of books. And all that remains for the reader is something more modest, and perhaps harder: finding an unexpected connection and then returning to the text to check if that connection was truly there. Because the miracle is not finding a definitive explanation. It is discovering that a single phrase can open up a world—and that, after opening it, one can still look at it anew.

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The Cost of Nonsense. The Scar as Method: Il bastone miracoloso and the End of Free Opinions.

On Lorenzo Pignotti’s Il bastone miracoloso 

 There is an Italian poem from 1831, published after its author’s death, that deserves to be far better known than it is. It is called Il bastone miracoloso—the miraculous cane—and was written by Lorenzo Pignotti, an author remembered today mostly for his fables, those short, moralizing pieces taught as textbook curiosities. But this poemetto burlesco, divided into four cantos, is a different beast altogether: it is a demolition engine directed at pedantry, written with just enough irony to make the destruction thoroughly entertaining. The most common description in circulation comes from Wikipedia and academic sources: «Uscì postumo, nel 1831, il suo poemetto burlesco Il bastone miracoloso che narra la storia di un uomo dotto abissino che smaschera i ciarlatani.»

It is a poemetto burlesco (a satirical narrative poem) written in octaves (ottava rima). It was published posthumously in 1831 (in Dublin, though printed in Florence). It tells the story of a learned man of Abyssinian origin who, using a "miraculous" cane, unmasks and ridicules charlatans, swindlers, and frauds. It carries an ironic and critical tone typical of Pignotti at his most satirical, far removed from his best-known fables. It is not a genuine miracle performed by the staff that brings about the impostor's magically innocent demise, but rather the satirical use of the object to expose and defeat him.

The author, in his Favole e Novelle, critiques human vices with irony. Il bastone miracoloso follows this same path, but focuses squarely on charlatans and intellectual hypocrisy. Alongside "La treccia donata", it was once considered one of his most enjoyable works in verse, albeit filled with period-specific personal jabs that are less accessible today.

The text is rare. There is no easily accessible translation, nor does it appear complete in any easily searchable public repository; it is only mentioned in biographies and catalogs of Pignotti’s works (Italian Wikipedia, Treccani, etc.), but the full text is absent—except for an Italian version uploaded to Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_JOBFm18SyJQC/mode/2up Anyone wishing to read it must go track it down in Italian on Archive.org and wrestle with the language. Yet the organizing idea of the poem requires no translation to be understood, because it is an idea we recognize instantly: what happens when someone possesses, quite literally, a yardstick to measure nonsense?

 

A Young Man Who Studied Everything and Knows Nothing 

 The protagonist is Ismaele, a young noble from Abyssinia—a "foreign sage" who views European follies with fresh eyes, a classic device of Enlightenment satire—who was educated by the most celebrated scholars of his day. Metaphysics, physics, algebra, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, ethics, law, theology, chemistry, medicine, astrology. The list is deliberately exhaustive: Pignotti does not want an ignoramus dismissing what he fails to understand. He wants someone who has read everything, precisely so that his disillusionment carries real weight.

And that disillusionment arrives in a line that functions as the poem's entire center of gravity: "Gli pareva aver fin dalla culla / Studiato molto, e non saper poi nulla." It seemed to him that he had studied endlessly since the cradle, only to end up knowing nothing at all.

This carries echoes of Montaigne—the que sais-je? turned into burlesque verse—but there is something sharper at work here. Ismaele does not arrive at the conclusion that studying is useless. He arrives at something far more uncomfortable: that accumulated knowledge can yield two completely different results, and it is not always easy to distinguish between them from the inside. It can produce an awareness of one's own ignorance. Or it can produce pedantry—which is essentially the exact opposite disguised as the very same thing.

Words Passing Themselves Off as Things 

 Ismaele’s diagnosis rests on an observation that particularly interests me, as it is a problem one encounters constantly—not only in café erudition, but in any field that undergoes professionalization: he had learned thousands of mysterious words that are mistaken for things.

Therein lies the entire mechanism. A word seems to explain something, but merely names it. It seems to resolve a difficulty, but in reality just shifts it one space down the board. It seems to contain a truth, but all it really generates is the illusion that truth has already been reached. It is the difference between having a map and having the territory, except here there isn't even a map: there is simply a word acting as though it were the territory itself.

Pignotti applies this to the physics of his era—theories on the origin of the world, the Earth ripped from the Sun by a comet, or emerging from water, or from fire—and presents them as if they were fairy tales. The comparison he uses is spot-on: scientists look like players in a magic show, making the world appear sometimes out of water, other times out of fire. Whether the caricature is fair to actual 1800s physics is beside the point. What matters is the mechanism it describes: the confusion between a genuine explanation and a narrative that merely sounds convincing.

And there is an image, further along, that condenses all of this better than any argument: a starving man falls asleep and dreams of an extraordinary banquet—pheasants, partridges, ragouts. He wakes up with an empty mouth. The dream may be magnificent. What the image points out is that dreams do not nourish. A theory can be elegant, brilliant, sophisticated—and completely useless. This is, put in another language, the distance between what sounds convincing and what has verifiable consequences in the real world. It is a distance that Feyerabend exploited two hundred years later with different tools, and that Taleb reformulated as the difference between someone offering an opinion and someone putting skin in the game.
 

The Cane as Mechanism, Not Argument 

 What the domestic Genius does—when invoked by Ismaele in his sheer exhaustion—is not give Ismaele a better argument. He gives him a cane. An object that automatically strikes anyone who speaks nonsense, and which stops only when the victim yells three times: "Sono un bue"—I am an ox.

And here, for me, is the true stroke of genius in the poem. The cane does not need to know who is right. It presents no theory, constructs no syllogism, demands no proof. It reacts to error in a purely mechanical way. This is precisely what Bergson, much later, would describe as the core mechanism of the comic: something mechanical encrusted upon the living. Human debate, which in theory should be flexible and capable of self-correction, turns into an automated sequence. The scholar presents his system. The cane strikes. The scholar persists. 

The cane strikes again. The scene becomes funny precisely because intelligence begins to behave like a machine.

There is a real element of skin in the game here, even if the poem doesn't phrase it in those terms. The cane is, literally, physical exposure to the consequences of one's own error. There is no debating the cane, no qualifying your statements to it, no citing an opposing authority. Error carries an immediate, bodily cost. And the poem rightly laughs at how scandalous this turns out to be: our entire culture of debate is built so that spouting nonsense costs nothing, so that eloquence can indefinitely substitute for verification. The cane shatters that impunity.

Pignotti anticipates, without the modern vocabulary, something I find central: the difference between a system where holding an opinion is free, and a system where holding an opinion carries consequences. Kings argue with cannons, men of letters with syllogisms, theologians with fire, and the cane emerges as the court of last resort—the one left standing when all others have failed. The irony is that the cane, while the most brutal of arguments, is also the only one that cannot lie: there is no way to pretend you are right when facing it.

The Common Folk Believe; The Dotto Do Too 

 When Ismaele tests the cane in secret, leaving it in the Congo square with an inscription, something occurs that could be read as a simple defense of popular common sense against official science: the common people believe in the miracle, while the dotto (the learned) mock it.

However, reading it that simplistically seems like a mistake. The common people believe without examining. But the learned believe too—they believe in their own systems with the exact same lack of examination, only dressed up in methodology. The distinction is not between the credulous and the skeptical. It is between two different objects of faith: the cane on one side, and one's own intellectual authority on the other. And the poem, quite ruthlessly, goes on to show that both faiths can be equally naive—right up until the first blow hits.

Because the first blow does not land on an illiterate bystander. It lands on the scholar who approaches to chastise the crowd for their credulity, claiming it is embarrassing that an entire city should pay attention to such a childish fable. And right there, in the very gesture of intellectual superiority, the cane strikes him. The man who intended to unmask superstition ends up beaten by it. What hurts him most isn't the physical blow: it's that he cannot explain it, cannot stop it, and cannot negotiate with it. He must utter the word that saves him, which simultaneously humbles him.

A Limit, Not Omnipotence  

A detail I find decisive—and one that separates this poem from a simple fantasy of poetic justice—is that the cane has a limited radius of action: about thirty cubits (braccia). It is not omnipotent. It operates under specific conditions. And the people learn those conditions not because they understand the theory behind the cane—nobody does, not even Ismaele entirely—but because they observe what happens when someone steps too close.

It is an almost empiricist lesson, delivered sideways: you do not need to comprehend the mechanism to adjust your behavior in front of it. Seeing the consequences once is enough. This, once again, is an argument Taleb would feel right at home with: the knowledge that survives is not the kind that offers the best explanation, but the kind that leaves a scar.

To Entertain and Instruct, or Laughter as a Scalpel 

 The first canto closes with the narrator announcing his agenda: he wants the cane to entertain and, at the same time, instruct. It is a statement of methodology that applies to the entire poem. Pignotti isn't simply mocking the pedants of his era for sport. He is using laughter as an instrument of precision, much like one would use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer: not to destroy knowledge, but to separate it from its disguise.

Because that is, ultimately, the operation performed throughout the canto. It does not claim science is false, nor that knowledge is useless. It says that out of everything presented as knowledge, very little remains once it passes through the sieve—and that the question that truly matters isn't how much we know, but how much of what we think we know could hold up if it had to face, quite literally, a blow from a cane.

Do we understand De Waal, or do we just like his anecdotes?.

I recently finished reading Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. On the surface, it is undoubtedly a delightful book: it’s filled with fascinating anecdotes about political chimpanzees, elephants that recognize themselves in mirrors, and empathetic bonobos. However, after closing the final page, I was left with an ambivalent feeling that I would like to share.
 

The Anecdote Trap.
The book is extremely pleasant. De Waal writes with a fluency that makes you feel like you're having a conversation over coffee. But therein lies, in my view, the greatest difficulty for the lay reader. Because it is a work by an author at the pinnacle of his career, the text is actually an intellectual battlefield.
 

The Invisible Enemy.
The problem for the average reader is that De Waal throws punches, but we don't always see at whom. If one doesn't know what radical behaviorism is, if one hasn't heard of Morgan’s Canon or the resistance of traditional comparative psychology, many of his statements can seem defensive or unnecessarily insistent.
For those reading for pleasure, the author might seem to be tilting at windmills, when in reality he is taking on scientific dogmas that dominated the 20th century. Without that prior theoretical framework, the reader risks:
1.    Coming away only with the "cute story" of the intelligent animal.
2.    Missing the deep significance of the ethical and biological discussion the author proposes.
 

The Key Word: Anthropodenial.
To understand De Waal’s sometimes combative tone, one must know his concept of "anthropodenial." This is the term he coined to criticize those scientists who—almost religiously—refuse to see human traits in animals. If you don't know that De Waal has spent 40 years dealing with colleagues who consider a chimpanzee to be nothing more than a "biological machine" without feelings, his arguments might seem redundant. In reality, he is trying to tear down an academic concrete wall.
 

The Book as a Mirror, Not a Window.
In the end, you discover that De Waal’s premise is not just a window to look outward (at animals), but a mirror to look at ourselves. The author poses a disarming question: if we are unable to understand the intelligence of a being that shares 99% of our DNA, what does that say about our own intelligence? Perhaps the "blind spot" is not in the chimpanzee's brain, but in our arrogance in believing ourselves to be a species outside of biology.
 

A Suggestion for the Next Reader.
If you are going to read this book, my recommendation is that you don't do it just for the anecdotes. Try to read between the lines and detect who De Waal is talking to when he takes a firm stand. Sometimes, popular science assumes we are all aware of the "hallway fights" of the university, and that can alienate the common reader.
 

A Book for Experts or the Curious?.
I believe this book is enjoyed in two very different ways:
•    For the expert: It is a political and scientific manifesto, a high-level debate between peers who know the rules of the game.
•    For the uninitiated (like me): It is a parade of surprises and wit, but one that leaves a void. Those piercing questions with which the book opens—about our own capacity to understand—perhaps require having first gone through a basic manual of ethology.
 

Conclusion: The Naive Gaze.
Sometimes, ignorance in a subject allows us to approach these readings with a "sense of wonder" that the expert has already lost. But for that surprise not to be merely superficial, we need to know exactly which current the author is swimming against.

In the Spanish entry, I made some additional comments on specific points, which can be found at the following link: https://reuniendoletras.blogspot.com/2021/09/entendemos-de-waal-o-solo-nos-gustan.html