The Tyranny of Polymathy and the Silence of Wisdom
Among the scattered remains of Heraclitus’ thought, few sayings possess the enduring sharpness of this brief maxim: πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει — “much learning does not teach understanding” (Fragment XVIII, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. Charles H. Kahn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 36–37). In a world increasingly captivated by the accumulation of knowledge, this ancient fragment persists as both a critique and a corrective.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, known to later generations as “the Obscure,” was not hostile to knowledge itself, but to its superficial accumulation. He reserved his sharpest disdain for those who amassed facts while remaining blind to deeper unity—figures such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and other fellow polymaths. To Heraclitus, the decisive mark of wisdom was not volume but depth, not possession of facts but recognition of λόγος (logos), the underlying order binding the manifold into one.
At the heart of his saying is the contrast between πολυμαθίη (polymathy, or the gathering of knowledge) and νόος (intelligence, intuitive understanding). Polymathy is acquisitive; it accumulates and catalogs. It may grow in quantity, but seldom in quality. Νόος, in Heraclitus’ conception, is penetrative—it cuts through the clutter, grasping the essential, perceiving the harmony hidden beneath the flux of appearances.
Modern Echoes: Information Without Insight
Heraclitus’ critique resonates acutely within the modern world. Never has humanity enjoyed such unrestricted access to knowledge. Vast databases, rapid transmission of ideas, and instantaneous retrieval of information define our age. Yet the paradox deepens: the world grows correspondingly impoverished in intelligence and understanding.
Data is abundant, but coherence is rare. Scholarly disciplines multiply, but their mutual intelligibility diminishes. Algorithms accumulate citations while human insight often withers beneath the sheer weight of accumulated text. Heraclitus reminds us that the mere collection of knowledge is not a pathway to wisdom; the two may diverge as sharply as night from day.
Heraclitus and the Machine Mind
This divergence is nowhere more manifest than in the emergence of artificial intelligence. Large language models, trained on incomprehensible expanses of text, generate fluent prose, plausible argumentation, and stylistic mimicry. They are polymathy mechanized: vast collectors, elegant rephrasers, yet fundamentally lacking in νόος.
Heraclitus would have recognized this phenomenon at once, for the problem is not the breadth of data but the absence of soul. In another pointed maxim, he declared: κακοὶ μάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισιν ὀφθαλμοὶ καὶ ὦτα, βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων —“eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men who have barbarian souls” (Fragment XVI, Kahn, pp. 34–35). It is not merely that the senses deceive, but that without a cultivated and receptive soul, sensory data remains inert, misapprehended, or altogether meaningless.
Machines “see” through vast datasets, “hear” through colossal corpora, but possess no ψυχή (soul), only a barbarian mimicry. Their testimony is immense but alien, their utterances fluent but soulless, incapable of partaking in the λόγος (logos) that Heraclitus saw as the ordering principle of reality. They traffic in appearances without substance, in signals without understanding.
Such systems compound the crisis by making superficial synthesis effortless, further displacing the contemplative labor essential to the cultivation of νόος. The true danger is not that machines think, but that they make it easier for humans to avoid thinking. The peril lies not in the tool itself, but in our eagerness to mistake mimicry for wisdom—to enthrone fluent appearance where only reflective engagement yields genuine understanding.
Conclusion: The Call to Stillness
Heraclitus, who spoke of the river that flows yet remains the same, calls us back to what is most essential: not the accumulation of voices, but the discernment of harmony; not endless learning, but the cultivation of understanding. His words remind us: the vessel may be filled to overflowing, yet remain empty of wisdom.
Against the relentless deluge of data, against the mechanical polymathy of our age, Heraclitus directs us to the deeper current. True understanding arises in the stillness where νόος awakens and the λόγος reveals its hidden thread. To cultivate νόος demands not accumulation but attention: the examined life, sustained reflection, and the pursuit of insight rather than quantity. The wisdom of Heraclitus remains as vital today as when it was first set down in fragments.
Source for Heraclitus: Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo (1908) Indian ink brush wash and colored pencil on paper, 64 × 48 cm. Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium.
At the Crossing
by Donald S. Yarab
Words gather like dew on dawn’s edge, names unspoken, waiting to be born. They tremble in the mouth of silence— a stillness before the world. But say them, and they splinter— what was whole becomes approximate. Each syllable divides the light and leaves behind shadow.
Color can have no truth— for truth demands a stillness color will not grant. It shifts with light, with eye, with sorrow or with song. If it were true, which hue would reign? Whose gaze would be the measure? It is not fact, but feeling— not essence, but event.
Touch is first knowing, before word, before sight. It does not describe—it confirms. Yet it deceives: a surface hides a wound, a hand may linger, then withdraw. What truth lies in contact— in pressure, in pulse? Or is touch merely the place where self and other collide and pretend to know?
Sound resonates not in air alone, but in the hollows of the soul. One hears hymn, another wound. Its truth lies not in frequency, but in the body that receives it— in bones that tremble, in hearts that flinch. Which is the true tone— the one that soothes, or the one that sears?
Time marches allegedly, metronomic, proud— but to whom does it keep this beat? To the grieving, it halts mid-breath; to the joyful, it slips its leash and runs. Some say it flows; others drown without a ripple. Perhaps it does not move at all— perhaps we shift, casting shadows on still walls and calling them hours.
Truth cannot be summoned by sense, nor sealed in proposition. It glimmers, briefly, when doubt is honored, when contradiction is not flaw but form. Truth is not what endures, but what survives the testing— a trembling filament between worlds, not the anchor, but the thread.
Intersection is not a place but a moment— when word is heard, when color wounds, when sound divides the silence, when time dissolves into breath, and touch recalls the nearness of all things.
And there— at that trembling margin— truth does not appear. It haunts the space where meaning almost forms.
A Reflection Interwoven with Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled 2005, acrylic on canvas, 128 x 194½ in “His madness is a circle of fire, an unbroken circuit of excess, each attempt at containment spilling into the next”—Art historian Malcolm Bull on the Bacchus paintings.
The three poems, CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA, which follow—Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum—did not emerge by design. They followed Liber Agglutivi as if by necessity. Once the treatise had been written, these poems had to be. They are not commentaries on the Liber, nor are they didactic restatements of its metaphysical claims. Rather, they are its echo—its ember. They are the hymns sung at the threshold that Liber Agglutivi only describes.
Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval-inspired treatise can enter these poems directly. They function as meditations on how language lives in us before we speak it, while we speak it, and after our words have fallen silent. Readers of the Liber will recognize these concerns, but the poems make them immediate and felt rather than theoretical.
They move through language as tremor, fire, and resonance. The sequence below mirrors the deeper structure of the Liber: from the agglutum primitivum (pre-verbal memory), to the verbum intransitivum (word as creation), to the postverbum and glosselitha (residual presence).
CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA
I. Ante Verba
Language as Tremor, Silence as Light
Ante Verba (Versus ad limen vocis) Verbum non dicitur, sed fit. Non transit, sed regnat. Nomen quod loquitur se ipsum non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus. Lingua non fert sensum, sed tremorem. Memoria quae nescit quid meminerit audit quod non sonat. Tacere est tangere lumen. Loqui est amittere formam, ut recipiatur flamma.
Before Words (Verses at the threshold of voice) The word is not spoken, but becomes. It does not pass through, but reigns. The name that speaks itself arises not from the mouth, but from the bones. Language carries not meaning, but tremor. Memory that knows not what it remembers hears what does not sound. To be silent is to touch light. To speak is to lose form, so that the flame may be received.
This poem inhabits the space where language has not yet been spoken but is already forming. It suggests that words do not begin with speech—they begin with the body, with memory, with a force older than conscious thought. In the Liber, this is called the agglutum primitivum—the murmur that speaks itself rather than being spoken.
The line “non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus” (“arises not from the mouth, but from the bones”) aligns with Martin Heidegger’s vision in Letter on Humanism, where language is not a tool but the “house of Being.” Maurice Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, understands silence not as negation but as a paradoxical mode of presence—a vision we carry forward in our own line from Ante Verba: “Tacere est tangere lumen.”
The poem resists the tendency to think of silence as a void. It suggests instead that silence is already full—that the word is merely what breaks the threshold.
II. Verba
Language Does Not Carry Meaning—It Generates It
Verba Non instrumenta, sed ignes. Non indicia, sed invocationes. Ex spiritu fiunt formae. Ex sono fit lumen. Verbum non portat sensum; generat. Non sequitur lucem; effundit eam. Obliti sumus verba sentire— at illa nos sentiunt.
Words Not instruments, but fires. Not signs, but invocations. From spirit, forms arise. From sound, light is made. The word does not carry meaning; it generates it. It does not follow light; it pours it forth. We have forgotten how to feel words— but they feel us.
Verba shifts from anticipation to ignition. Here, the word becomes flame. It does not describe; it creates. This is the essence of the verbum intransitivum found in the Liber—a word that does not pass meaning from subject to object, but emits meaning by its very being.
This echoes Jacques Derrida’s insight in Of Grammatology: that language does not simply transmit ideas—it generates meaning anew with every utterance. Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? treats language as an existential act, not a report, and this vision is mirrored in the line “Verbum non portat sensum; generat.”
The agglutivum, as the Liber defines it, is precisely this: a word that binds meaning not through grammar, but through presence. The poem closes with a reversal: it is not we who perceive words, but words that perceive us.
III. Postverbum
The Spectral Afterlife of Language
Postverbum Verbum abit, sed tremor manet. Non vox, sed vestigium vocis. Non lumen, sed fulgor in ruina. Post verbum non est silentium, sed memoria quae loqui recusat. Forma cecidit— resonantia viget. Non est oblivio, nec repetitio. Est remanentia sine nomine. Quod dictum est, abit. Quod vivit, remanet.
After-Word The word departs, but the tremor remains. Not voice, but the trace of voice. Not light, but gleam within ruin. After the word there is not silence, but memory that refuses to speak. Form has fallen— resonance thrives. It is not forgetting, nor repetition. It is remainder without name. What has been spoken departs. What lives remains.
What remains when the word falls away? Postverbum addresses the residue of speech, its spectral persistence. The Liber speaks of the glosselitha—words no longer active but still resonant. This poem inhabits that after-space: where meaning is not present, yet not gone.
Derrida’s trace (especially in Writing and Difference) hovers here: a remnant of presence that cannot be fully recovered, nor fully lost. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, evokes this through the fragment—the broken form more alive than the whole. And Bachelard’s “intimate immensity,” in The Poetics of Space, seems apt: the vast echo of what once was word.
This is not nostalgia. It is presence beyond sound.
Coda: Language as Tremor, Fire, Trace
The poems above are not marginal to Liber Agglutivi—they are its liturgy. They enact what the treatise evokes: a philosophy of speech where the word is not a vessel but a lifeform.
If the Liber speaks of agglutive words—words that bind not by syntax but by resonance—then these poems are agglutive acts. They offer no argument. They offer invocation.
Together, they invite us to listen differently—not just to what we say, but to what speaks through us when we are most quiet, most present, most alive to the mystery of having language at all.
In The First Why, I sought to explore the sacred trembling of humanity’s earliest question—the moment when consciousness dared to disturb the hush of creation. There, I argued that the act of questioning was not a fall from grace, but the beginning of wisdom, the awakening of wonder, and the first movement toward meaning.
This essay, The Second Why, turns from the theological to the historical, the philosophical to the political. It examines the ancient and recurring pattern by which those in authority, threatened by the murmur of the question, have sought not merely to answer but to silence it—sometimes by exile, sometimes by imprisonment, sometimes by death, and sometimes by the corrosion of meaning itself.
If The First Why was the breath before the question, The Second Why is the cost of speaking it aloud.
William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794), frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy: a vision of creation measured, and mystery confined.
I. The Question That Threatens
In the hush before thought, in the stillness before speech, there stirred a murmur—the first Why.
In The First Why, I sought to explore that primal trembling: the moment when consciousness first turned inward upon itself and outward upon the world, daring to ask what had not been asked. Yet if that first question marked the birth of wonder, it also, inevitably, sowed the seeds of fear. For in every age thereafter, those who have sought to guard power have found their greatest threat not in armies nor in weapons, but in the fragile, defiant utterance of the questioner.
Throughout history, the act of questioning—not the conclusions it might yield, but the mere audacity of inquiry—has been regarded by authority as a mortal transgression. Again and again, societies have answered the quiet and insistent “Why?” with the grim decree: “Thou shalt surely die.” Whether whispered in the Athenian marketplace, charted among the stars, recorded in forbidden books, or muttered in the corners of censored universities, the question has been met with exile, imprisonment, silencing, and execution.
The pattern is ancient and unrelenting. Socrates, forced to drink the hemlock; Galileo, commanded to renounce the stars; the Inquisition’s pyres; the Nazi bonfires of thought; the gulags swallowing dissenters; the purges and bans now rising anew in the name of security, patriotism, or purity. In every case, the underlying offense is the same: the refusal to leave the hush undisturbed.
In what follows, I will trace the political, historical, and theological burden borne by those who dare to ask. For the suppression of the questioner is not merely an incidental cruelty, but the essential mark of an authoritarian impulse. To disturb the hush is to call into doubt the inevitability of power, the permanence of truth, the sanctity of the given order. Thus, the first Why was not merely a beginning. It remains a perpetual provocation—an act of revolution still echoing, and still condemned, across the centuries.
II. Historical Pattern: The Death Sentence for the Questioner
The history of civilization is marked not only by the questions that advanced knowledge, but by the relentless attempts to silence those questions and destroy their askers.
Socrates, that midwife of inquiry, was sentenced to death not because he espoused a particular heresy, but because he taught the youth of Athens to question the established wisdom of the city. His crime, ultimately, was to disturb the hush.
Galileo, peering through a telescope toward the stars, disturbed a cosmic silence maintained by theological decree. It was not heliocentrism itself that threatened the authorities—it was the precedent that nature, rather than authority, might answer the question.
The Inquisition institutionalized terror against those who inquired beyond the sanctioned bounds, who sought to hear a different resonance in scripture or reason.
The Nazi regime, recognizing the existential threat posed by free inquiry, did not merely censor books—it burned them, seeking to annihilate the memory of questioning itself.
The Soviet Union consigned dissenters to gulags not because their ideas were dangerous in themselves, but because their questioning undermined the infallibility of the Party’s pronouncements.
From the gulags of the Soviet Union, the pattern unfurled still further eastward.
In Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution unleashed an orchestrated assault on memory and inquiry: libraries ransacked, teachers denounced, ancient traditions obliterated in the name of ideological purity.
Today, under the reign of Xi Jinping, that spirit persists: a resurgence of suppression masquerading as stability. Re-education camps, purges of dissenters, the silencing of Tibetan voices, the systematic erasure of Uyghur culture—all stand as testament that the death sentence for the questioner is not an artifact of the past but a method renewed in our own day.
Nor is this pattern confined to other shores.
In contemporary America, the same ancient reflex stirs. Books are banned from public libraries under the guise of protecting the young; universities face funding threats unless they conform to ideological demands; scientific research in fields such as climate change and public health is censored, altered, or silenced.
The Department of Defense has scrubbed the achievements of minority service members—Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo Code Talkers, Medal of Honor recipients—from public websites, erasing memory itself in service of a homogenized narrative. Students at Pentagon-operated schools have sued for the restoration of forbidden books and histories, fighting against the burial of truth.
The administration has attacked the free press, threatened the licenses of broadcasters who report unfavorably, and sought to strip public media of its funding.
At the same time, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been dismantled across the federal government, corporations, and law firms—silencing efforts to reflect a fuller human story.
This temptation is not confined to any one nation or ideology. Across Latin America under military juntas and authoritarian leaders, across the Middle East under rigid theocracies, across Africa under autocratic regimes, the suppression of questioning has reappeared, adorned in different garments, but always driven by the same ancient fear.
It is not a flaw of one party or one epoch. It is a perennial temptation: the temptation of all power to silence what it cannot control.
III. The Keepers of the Keys: Monopoly of Truth and the Death of the Question
Yet the suppression of questioning is only part of the authoritarian project. Its deeper ambition is the monopolization of truth itself.
Authority, when it turns tyrannical, declares not merely that certain questions must not be asked, but that the answers have already been determined, possessed, and sealed.
The rulers, the priests, the inquisitors, the commissars—each claims the sacred keys: the key to salvation, the key to justice, the key to moral righteousness. Good becomes what they pronounce; evil becomes what they forbid.
There is no longer a living search for meaning—only a mandated adherence to the truths held by the gatekeepers.
To question is not simply to err; it is to betray the natural order as they have defined it.
This monopolization is rooted not merely in political expediency but in an ancient theological distortion. In the story of Eden, as handed down by scribal hands shaped by authority, the knowledge of good and evil—the living tension of discernment—is forbidden. The human capacity to navigate complexity is recast as sin; the hunger for understanding becomes rebellion.
Thus the pattern is sanctified:
Only those who possess the keys may speak.
Only those who serve the keepers may think.
The rest must accept silence or accept exile.
Interlude: The Flattening of Knowledge—From Merism to Dualism
In the ancient myth, the Tree offered not a simple dichotomy but a totality: the knowledge of good and evil—the full sweep of moral discernment, the wholeness of moral understanding.
This fullness, this richness, could not be tolerated by those who would rule. Thus the merism was flattened into dualism: Good became what the rulers commanded; evil what they condemned.
The tree of knowledge was not destroyed; it was redefined.
The living dynamic of discernment was replaced with dead certitude.
The gift of discernment became a forbidden fruit.
The complexity of moral vision was narrowed to the dictates of authority.
Thus was the wonder of knowledge itself corrupted, stripped of its vitality, pressed into the service of domination.
IV. The Usurpation of Wonder: Authority’s Theft of Creation
In suppressing the question, in flattening knowledge, and in monopolizing truth, the authoritarian spirit commits not merely political crimes but spiritual ones. It usurps the wonder of divine creation itself.
Creation was never intended as a dead thing, frozen into rigid forms. It was meant as a living, breathing mystery—an invitation to seek, to discern, to wonder.
By claiming sole possession of truth, by forbidding inquiry, authority places itself above the living act of creation, mocking and profaning it. It substitutes its brittle edicts for the breathing Word; it erects idols of certainty in the place of the living search for truth.
Thus, the authoritarian repeats the ancient blasphemy:
Denying the image of God in the questioner,
Denying the breath of the Spirit in the seeker,
Denying the sanctity of wonder.
To defend the right to question is therefore not merely a political duty. It is an act of fidelity to the structure of creation itself.
V. Silencing the Search, Silencing the Finding
Authoritarianism, in its most persistent form, does not merely seek to silence answers it dislikes. It seeks to silence the very act of searching.
The question, the seeking, the wondering—these are intolerable because they suggest that truth is not yet fully possessed, that knowledge is not complete, that authority is not absolute.
Thus, authoritarian power strikes first at the searchers: the scientists, the philosophers, the journalists, the seekers of every kind.
Yet where seekers persist, and truth is found despite them, the authoritarian hand strikes again—this time at the truth itself. Inconvenient findings are erased from records, public data is withdrawn from view, scientific reports are rewritten to serve political ends.
The silencing extends from the human act of questioning to the very realities those questions uncover.
So it has come to pass in our own time: climate science censored, health research distorted, public knowledge reshaped not by the unfolding of discovery but by the fiat of rulers.
In this, the authoritarian spirit reveals its deeper fear: not merely that questions might arise, but that truth might emerge—and stand beyond its grasp.
VI. The Collapse of Meaning: When Words Are No Longer Words
Perhaps the most chilling expression of authoritarianism is not the silencing of speech but the disintegration of meaning itself.
When a government refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order—one plainly written, unambiguous in its demand—by claiming that it does not say what it says, we enter a realm beyond censorship. We enter a space where words no longer signify; where legal language is emptied of content and refilled with the will of power.
This is not merely a constitutional crisis. It is a metaphysical one.
The shared meanings that allow a society to function, to reason, to hold power accountable—these are dissolved.
And in their place arises a new doctrine: that truth is not what is said, but what the ruler claims was meant.
In such a world, there are no longer laws—only declarations. No longer language—only slogans. No longer truth—only the assertion of power over meaning itself.
VII. The Eternal Struggle to Disturb the Hush
The first Why was not a mistake. It was the beginning of the journey, the necessary shattering of silence, the first movement toward wonder.
Those who fear the questioner seek to stop the world from becoming, to freeze it into the shape of their own certainties. They usurp creation itself, not out of strength, but out of terror—the terror that their towers of power might crumble under the lightest whisper of a question.
Yet not all authority need fear the question. Rightly ordered authority—whether of parent, teacher, judge, or priest—can nurture questioning, guiding it without silencing it, guarding freedom without abandoning wisdom.
It is not authority itself that is the enemy of the question, but the corruption of authority into the idolatry of its own certainty.
Nor is the impulse to question so easily extinguished.
Though libraries burn, though words are twisted, though questioners are exiled or slain, the Why rises anew. It survives in secret conversations, in hidden manuscripts, in the defiant wonder of each generation that refuses to accept silence as its inheritance.
To ask Why is to affirm the livingness of being.
To defend the questioner is to defend creation.
To disturb the hush is to proclaim that the world is not finished, that meaning is not the possession of the powerful, that wonder still breathes.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)
Northcoast Antiquarian 