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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