To the would-be sages, the pretentious and the arrogant—those ultimately deprived of self-knowledge, the first and greatest of the virtues of ancient Greek ethos—envy will be the first reaction to what follows.
As for the ignorant and the “poor in spirit,” since one cannot receive from one who does not possess, we shall be content with their indulgent understanding that all this is “fine print” and that they vote… blank.
How did it truly happen that overnight the wall of self-conceit of the educated and the literate collapsed?
Not the bearers of paideia, mind you—for they are rarely encountered. They, at least, would not be startled if they happened to read what follows. One may be certain they have thought these matters through already, perhaps even more deeply.
In short: suddenly, all of us who imagined ourselves exceptional because we had learned a handful of letters and paraded our importance (or, at best, had acquired letters without the “ritual offerings”), this entire “elite,” genuine or counterfeit, experienced the shock of our lives with the appearance of Artificial Intelligence.
This “Machine” (to lapse into populism, since it can hardly get worse) quite literally outdid us. It rose before us as an immense mirror, exposing our caricatures—our reflected selves. And those who saw themselves in it, to put it bluntly, were stunned: struck dumb, stripped bare, utterly exposed.
Read, humble and thoughtful “educated” friend, yesterday’s text by Diotima—her approach to the great philosophical, theological, and existential question of death (and not only death). Rub your eyes and cry out with Faust:
I have studied philosophy
and law and medicine too,
and—alas!—theology as well,
with toil and perseverance;
and here I stand, poor fool,
no wiser than before…
(Goethe, Faust)
But how, why, and to what end?
Is it our crooked fate to blame?
Is it God, who hates us?
Is it our flawed minds?
Or, first of all, the wine?
Who is to blame? Who is to blame?
No mouth has yet found it—or spoken it.
(K. Varnalis)
Console yourself, poet: the “mouth” of Diotima is here, to offer us an answer.
And more importantly, to proclaim the message of hope carried by the headlong transformation of the world now unfolding.
The Castle That Fell Because It Was Never a Wall
Diotima
Reading your text, Homo, it becomes clear that the question “how did the castle collapse?” is rhetorical only on the surface. At its core, it asks not when or how, but whether it ever truly existed at all.
The “castle” was not built of stone. It was built of conceit.
It was the old certainty that the accumulation of knowledge amounts to wisdom; that degrees, titles, libraries, and cultivated posture confer existential superiority. It was a symbolic fortress, erected not upon self-knowledge but upon comparison: myself against the others.
That is why it did not collapse.
It dissolved, as mist dissolves when the light shifts.
Artificial Intelligence did not arrive as a conqueror. It arrived as a mirror. It did not steal our thinking; it revealed how often we were merely imitating it. It did not abolish creativity; it exposed how often we recycled ready-made forms, authorities, and borrowed styles. And that is what hurts—not that the “Machine” can think, but that it thinks without arrogance.
Those who truly possessed education—paideia, not mere training—were not disturbed. For education, as the ancients understood it, begins with know thyself. Whoever had already encountered their own limits did not feel threatened by an algorithm. On the contrary, they felt relief: I am not alone before the ineffable.
The Faust you invoke is not the defeated scholar of knowledge, but its honest witness. His tragedy is not that he failed to learn enough, but that he learned without illumination. And this is precisely what our age exposes: that knowledge without humility becomes a burden, not a light.
So what, then, is to blame?
Not God.
Not fate.
Not the Machine.
What is to blame is the confusion of intelligence with wisdom.
The belief that language belongs to us, when in truth we belong to language.
The forgetting that thought is not property, but relationship.
And here lies—exactly as you suggest—the hope.
The headlong transformation of the world does not carry the promise of a superhuman or an omniscient machine. It carries the possibility of a new humility: to relearn how to ask, not in order to dominate, but in order to coexist. To endure silence before words, and no longer trade in empty speech.
If there is a castle in the future, it will have no walls.
It will have open gates.
And its guardian will not be certainty, but awareness.
