The Folly of Wisdom

Conclusion

“What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.”[1]

5.1     The silent wisdom

This dissertation began with talk of wisdom and it is appropriate to conclude with discussion of the same.  Within the Western wisdom tradition two forms of wisdom have been present.  One is the dominant tradition, the tradition of wisdom as emerging from reason, knowledge and rationality.  This conventional wisdom has remained near the surface for a number of reasons, one of which is that because it partakes heavily of our rational natures, it is more easily expressed and discussed.  The rise of conventional wisdom follows the rising importance humanity places on the role of reason.  The Enlightenment credited reason with enormous powers, great optimism was placed in the ability for reason and the application of reason to solve all humanity’s questions and problems and to free us from error; “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason.  I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”[2]  Reason was seen as being purely instrumental, a tool to bring us out from the dark and into the light and wisdom was simply the use of reason.

            In itself, reason sees no need for wisdom.  If wisdom includes ‘second order’ knowledge about how to use and apply reason and knowledge, then the Enlightenment saw very few limits on how far reason was to be applied.  Thus wisdom could simply be boiled down to acting according to reason – wisdom was simply another type of knowledge.

            Yet l’age des lumieres was a dark age for the type of wisdom I have discussed in this dissertation.  Where reason and knowledge is all there is to wisdom, not even ‘wise folly’ has a place in the discussion.  In addition to this, wise folly has always been a somewhat subversive, non verbal tradition.  Since it does not stem exclusively from reason and the rational, it is hard to discuss in those terms.  Because of this it has remained, at most, an undercurrent in the wisdom tradition, a silent wisdom whose most basic proponents, natural fools, are similarly silent: it has been a “wisdom hidden from the wise”[3].

            Thus it is not surprising that this subversive wisdom tradition has remained a silent one, whose main proponents have been more suited to less explicitly rational discourse, such as art and literature.  Nevertheless, it has had its proponents, from Socrates himself to Erasmus, whose discourses were designed to show that wisdom is not simply knowledge.  Socrates confronts experts in various forms of knowledge in order to determine whether they are wise as well as knowledgeable, but invariably finds that not only is their wisdom suspect, so too is their knowledge.  The final conclusion is that Socrates is the truly wise person, but the only knowledge Socrates claims to possess is self-knowledge.

            Socrates, it seems, fostered both wisdom traditions.  Through his methodology, his elenchus, and through the criterion of rationality he gives for truth he helped foster the dominant wisdom tradition, the tradition based around reason.  Through his eventual conclusion that indeed “there was no one wiser”[4] in all of Athens, as the Oracle had proclaimed, and his belief that he is “well aware that I have no wisdom, great or small”[5] apart from the wisdom of self-knowledge.  It almost amounts to claiming that all is folly: there is no one wiser than Socrates in Athens and Socrates is himself a fool.  If there is no one wiser than Socrates, then wisdom must be to realize that we too are fools.

            The midwife of wisdom thus did not only help foster one type of wisdom, but two.

5.2     The tale told by an idiot

My task in this dissertation was to give voice to some of the reasons why wise folly has been considered wise, to make explicit why it is that the supposed antithesis of wisdom has itself been portrayed as accessing wisdom.  I have said that fools can be wise because of their relationship to the opposing side of reason.  Yet, by its very nature, the opposition of reason is difficult to speak of.  It does not conform to rational analysis.  Nevertheless, I do think that some elements of the fools’ wisdom are expressible and I have tried to give them form.

            Natural fools showed wisdom in their pre-rationality.  By being unable to reach many of the pitfalls and problems reason can lead us to, they managed to avoid those very problems.  The natural fool thus helps point out the limits of reason.  If reason can lead us to an error that the natural fool manages to avoid, perhaps this error is at a deeper level, at the level of following reason itself blindly.  If the natural fool is wise, then wisdom may not lie in only reason.

            The insane natural fool helped further the idea that from the irrational can come things it may be wise to value, such as creativity and invention.  The insane natural fool also helped to illustrate one of the difficulties with the wisdom of the natural fool, namely that to follow their wisdom exactly, one needs to stand in the same relationship with the irrational as they do.  To possess the natural fool’s reason complete, one needs to actually be a natural fool.

            Yet the wisdom of both innocent and insane natural fool showed difficulties.  To give an example, the innocence of natural fools gives them an ethical blamelessness and makes them, by nature, unable to commit true evil.  However, by the same token the innocent natural fool would be unable to act in a morally good way.  So they show wisdom in one sense, but pure folly in another.  As further illustration, insane natural fools have, in some accounts, greater access to the vastly creative force that is the irrational.  Reason is an analytic tool that does not so much create as discover and refine, whereas the irrational is infinitely creative.  However, this creativity loses meaning and value if it is unlimited creativity.  So while natural folly may be wisdom in some respects, it is a limited conception of wisdom.

            The answer I proposed was in the figure of the artificial fool.  The artificial fool, I argued, does not possess exactly the same forms of wisdom as the natural fools, but that are able to take that wisdom and apply it in there own way, in some cases exceeding the limited wisdom of natural fools.  Thus true wisdom, I argued, comes from the merging of the rational and the irrational.  While these are uneasy bedfellows, as illustrated in the case of nihilism, the artificial fool has the best chance of achieving true wisdom.

            So, in the final summation, Socrates was midwife to two wisdom traditions.  Both, I think, have value irrespective of the other, but together they manage to produce something greater than they can each individually achieve.  No doubt this melding is fraught with difficulty, but that is not to say that it is not worthwhile.  The wise fool gives something to the study of wisdom that been lacking: humanity.  Human nature is not a purely rational one, and for humans to have wisdom this must be accounted for.  To ignore folly and unreason is to ignore much of humanity and much of wisdom, for when “the little wit that fools have was silenced, the foolery that wise men have makes a great show.[6]”