The wise fool, or thewisdom of the fool, is a form of literary paradox in which, through a narrative, a character recognized as a fool comes to be seen as a bearer of wisdom. [2] A recognizable trope found in stories and artworks from antiquity to the twenty-first century, the wisdom of the fool often captures what Intellectualism fails to illuminate of a thing's meaning or significance; thus, the wise fool is often associated with the wisdom found through blind faith, reckless desire, hopeless romance, and wild abandon, but also tradition without understanding, and folk wisdom.
In turn, the wise fool is often opposed to learned or elite knowledge. [2] While examples of the paradox can be found in a wide range of early world literature, from Greco-Roman works to the oral traditions of folk culture, the paradox received unprecedented attention from authors and artists during the Renaissance. [2] More than Shakespeare for his range of clownish wise men or Cervantes for his lunatic genius Don Quijote, sixteenth century scholar Erasmus is often credited for creating the definitive wise fool and most famous paradox in western literature [3] through his portrayal of Stultitia, the goddess of folly. Influential to all later fools, she shows the foolish ways of the wise and the wisdom of fools through delivering her own eulogy, The Praise of Folly. [4]
In his article "The Wisdom of The Fool", Walter Kaiser illustrates that the varied names and words people have attributed to real fools in different societies when put altogether reveal the general characteristics of the wise fool as a literary construct: "empty-headed (μάταιος, inanis, fool), dull-witted (μῶρος, stultus, dolt, clown), feebleminded (imbécile, dotard), and lacks understanding (ἄνοος, ἄφρων in-sipiens); that he is different from normal men (idiot); that he is either inarticulate (Tor) or babbles incoherently (fatuus) and is given to boisterous merrymaking (buffone); that he does not recognize the codes of propriety (ineptus) and loves to mock others (Narr); that he acts like a child (νήπιος); and that he has a natural simplicity and innocence of heart (εὐήθης, natural, simpleton). [2]
While society reprimands violent maniacs, destined to be locked away in jails or asylums, the harmless fool often receives kindnesses and benefits from the social elite. [6] Seemingly guided by nothing other than natural instinct, the fool is not expected to grasp social conventions and thus is left to enjoy relative freedom, particularly in his or her freedom of speech. [2] This unusual power dynamic is famously demonstrated through the fool in Shakespeare's King Lear, [7] who works in the royal court and remains the only character who Lear does not severely punish for speaking his mind about the king and his precarious situations. This ability to be reckless, honest, and free with language has greatly contributed to the wise fool's popularity in the literary imagination.
To call a man a fool is not necessarily an insult, for the authentic life has frequently been pictured under the metaphor of the fool. In figures such as Socrates, Christ, and the Idiot of Dostoyevsky we see that foolishness and wisdom are not always what they seem to be. - Sam Keen, Apology for Wonder [8]
The employment and occupation of the fool played a significant role in the ancient world. The Ancient Greek authors Xenophon and Athenaeus wrote of normal men hired to behave as insane fools and clowns while the Roman authors Lucian and Plautus left records of powerful Romans who housed deformed buffoons famous for their insolence and brazen madness. [2] Plato, through the guise of Socrates, provides an early example of the wisdom of the fool in The Republic through the figure of an escaped prisoner in The Allegory of the Cave. [9] The escaped prisoner, part of a group imprisoned from birth, returns to free his fellow inmates but is regarded as a madman in his attempts to convince his shackled friends of a greater world beyond the cave.
Numerous scholars have long regarded Socrates as the paramount wise fool of classical antiquity. [2] Through what would come be to branded as Socratic irony, the philosopher was known to make fools of people who claimed to be wise by pretending to be an ignorant fool himself. [11] His name also bears a strong association with the Socratic Paradox, "I know that I know nothing," a statement that has come to frame him in the oxymoron of the ignorant knower. In Plato's Apology , this self admission of ignorance ultimately leads the oracle at Delphi to claim there is no man with greater wisdom than Socrates. [12]
The wise fool manifested most commonly throughout the Middle Ages as a religious figure in stories and poetry. During the Islamic Golden Age (approx. 750 - 1280 CE), an entire literary genre formed around reports about the "intelligent insane." [6] One book in particular, Kitab Ugala al-majanin, by an-Naysaburi, a Muslim author from the Abbasid Period, recounts the lives of numerous men and women recognized during their lifetimes as 'wise fools.' [6] Folkloric variations of madmen, lost between wisdom and folly, also appear throughout the period's most enduring classic, The Thousand and One Nights . Buhlil the Madman, also known as the Lunatic of Kufa and Wise Buhlil, is often credited as the prototype for the wise fool across the Middle East. [13] Nasreddin was another well-known "wise fool" of the Islamic world. [14]
The fool for God's sake was a figure that appeared in both the Muslim and Christian world. Often wearing little to no clothes, this variant of the holy fool would forego all social customs and conventions and feign madness in order to be possessed with their creator's spirit. [6] [15] By the twelfth century in France, such feigning led to the Fête des Fous (Feast of Fools), a celebration in which clergy were allowed to behave as fools without inhibition or restraint. [2] During the Crusades, Christ was recognized as a 'wise fool' figure through his childlike teachings that yet confounded the powerful and intellectual elite. Numerous other writers during this period would explore this theological paradox of the wise fool in Christ, sustaining the trope into the Renaissance.
The wise fool received tremendous popularity in the literary imagination during the Italian and English Renaissances. In Erasmus' Moriae encomium, [The Praise of Folly], written in 1509 and first published in 1511, the author portrays Stultitia, the goddess of folly, and a wise fool herself, who asks what it means to be a fool and puts forth a brazen argument praising folly and claiming that all people are fools of one kind or another. [16] According to scholar Walter Kaiser, Stultitia is "the foolish creation of the most learned man of his time, she is the literal embodiment of the word oxymoron, and in her idiotic wisdom she represents the finest flowering of that fusion of Italian humanistic thought and northern piety which has been called Christian Humanism." [2]
At the same time, Shakespeare greatly helped popularize the wise fool in the English theater through incorporating the trope in a variety of characters throughout many of his plays. [17] While Shakespeare's early plays largely portray the wise fool in comic terms as a buffoon, the later plays characterize the fool in a much more melancholic and contemplative light. [17] For example, in King Lear , [7] the Fool becomes the only one capable of speaking truth to the King and often takes on the role of revealing life's tragic nature to those around him. For Shakespeare, the trope became so well known that when Viola says of the clown Feste in Twelfth Night, "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool" (III.i.60), his audiences recognized it as a popular convention. [2]
Numerous other authors rendered interpretations of the wise fool across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Hans Sachs to Montaigne. The image of the wise fool is as well found in numerous Renaissance artworks by a range of artists including Breughel, Bosch, and Holbein the Younger. [2] In Spain, Cervantes' novel Don Quixote exemplifies the world of the wise fool through both its title character and his companion, Sancho Panza. [18]
Heimir the Fool, in The Northman movie says “Wise enough to be the fool.”
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to contemplate and act productively using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. It is named after the Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as midwifery because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.
A jester, court jester, fool or joker was a member of the household of a nobleman or a monarch employed to entertain guests during royal court. Jesters were also traveling performers who entertained common folk at fairs and town markets, and the discipline continues into the modern day, where jesters perform at historical-themed events. During the Post-classical and Renaissance eras, jesters are often thought to have worn brightly coloured clothes and eccentric hats in a motley pattern. Their modern counterparts usually mimic this costume. Jesters entertained with a wide variety of skills: principal among them were song, music, and storytelling, but many also employed acrobatics, juggling, telling jokes, and performing magic tricks. Much of the entertainment was performed in a comic style. Many jesters made contemporary jokes in word or song about people or events well known to their audiences.
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BC, marking the end of the Greek Dark Ages, a period lasting more than 1,800 years. Greek philosophy continued throughout the Hellenistic period and the period in which Greece and most Greek-inhabited lands were part of the Roman Empire. Philosophy was used to make sense of the world using reason. It dealt with a wide variety of subjects, including astronomy, epistemology, mathematics, political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, logic, biology, rhetoric and aesthetics.
Diogenes, also known as Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. He was born in Sinope, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.
The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato, dated c. 385–370 BC. It depicts a friendly contest of extemporaneous speeches given by a group of notable men attending a banquet. The men include the philosopher Socrates, the general and political figure Alcibiades, and the comic playwright Aristophanes. The speeches are to be given in praise of Eros, the god of love and desire.
The Charmides is a dialogue of Plato, in which Socrates engages a handsome and popular boy named Charmides in a conversation about the meaning of sophrosyne, a Greek word usually translated into English as "temperance," "self-control," or "restraint." When the boy is unable to satisfy him with an answer, he next turns to the boy's mentor Critias. In the dialogue, Charmides and then later Critias champion that Temperance is "doing one's own work" but Socrates derides this as vague. The definition given next of "knowing oneself" seems promising but the question is then raised if something can even have the knowledge of itself as a base. As is typical with Platonic early dialogues, the two never arrive at a completely satisfactory definition, but the discussion nevertheless raises many important points. The Charmides is one of Plato's most homoerotic dialogues. Socrates admires Charmides' beauty at the beginning of the dialogue, saying "I saw inside his cloak and caught on fire and was quite beside myself."
Daimon or daemon originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The word is derived from Proto-Indo-European daimon "provider, divider ," from the root *da- "to divide". Daimons were possibly seen as the souls of men of the golden age acting as tutelary deities, according to entry δαίμων at Liddell & Scott. See also daimonic: a religious, philosophical, literary and psychological concept.
Crito is a dialogue that was written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It depicts a conversation between Socrates and his wealthy friend Crito of Alopece regarding justice (δικαιοσύνη), injustice (ἀδικία), and the appropriate response to injustice after Socrates's imprisonment, which is chronicled in the Apology.
The Apology of Socrates, written by Plato, is a Socratic dialogue of the speech of legal self-defence which Socrates spoke at his trial for impiety and corruption in 399 BC.
Socratic dialogue is a genre of literary prose developed in Greece at the turn of the fourth century BC. The earliest ones are preserved in the works of Plato and Xenophon and all involve Socrates as the protagonist. These dialogues and subsequent ones in the genre present a discussion of moral and philosophical problems between two or more individuals illustrating the application of the Socratic method. The dialogues may be either dramatic or narrative. While Socrates is often the main participant, his presence in the dialogue is not essential to the genre.
The Apology of Socrates to the Jury, by Xenophon of Athens, is a Socratic dialogue about the legal defence that the philosopher Socrates presented at his trial for the moral corruption of Athenian youth; and for asebeia (impiety) against the pantheon of Athens; judged guilty, Socrates was sentenced to death.
Diotima of Mantinea is the name or pseudonym of an ancient Greek character in Plato's dialogue Symposium, possibly an actual historical figure, indicated as having lived circa 440 B.C. Her ideas and doctrine of Eros as reported by the character of Socrates in the dialogue are the origin of the concept today known as Platonic love.
"I know that I know nothing" is a saying derived from Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates: "For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing...". It is also sometimes called the Socratic paradox, although this name is often instead used to refer to other seemingly paradoxical claims made by Socrates in Plato's dialogues.
A sage, in classical philosophy, is someone who has attained wisdom. The term has also been used interchangeably with a 'good person', and a 'virtuous person'. Among the earliest accounts of the sage begin with Empedocles' Sphairos. Horace describes the Sphairos as "Completely within itself, well-rounded and spherical, so that nothing extraneous can adhere to it, because of its smooth and polished surface." Alternatively, the sage is one who lives "according to an ideal which transcends the everyday."
Divine madness, also known as theia mania and crazy wisdom, refers to unconventional, outrageous, unexpected, or unpredictable behavior linked to religious or spiritual pursuits. Examples of divine madness can be found in Hellenism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Shamanism.
Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.
There are several distinct, although overlapping categories of fool as a stock character in creative works and folklore: simpleton fool, wise fool, and serendipitous fool.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" is a famous dictum supposedly uttered by Socrates at his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, for which he was subsequently sentenced to death. The dictum is recorded in Plato's Apology (38a5–6) as ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biōtòs anthrṓpōi.
In the philosophy of science, epistemic humility refers to a posture of scientific observation rooted in the recognition that (a) knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer, and that, as such, (b) scientific pronouncements must be built on the recognition of observation's inability to grasp the world in itself. The concept is frequently attributed to the traditions of German idealism, particularly the work of Immanuel Kant, and to British empiricism, including the writing of David Hume. Other histories of the concept trace its origin to the humility theory of wisdom attributed to Socrates in Plato's Apology. James Van Cleve describes the Kantian version of epistemic humility–i.e. that we have no knowledge of things in their "nonrelational respects or ‘in themselves'"–as a form of causal structuralism. More recently, the term has appeared in scholarship in postcolonial theory and critical theory to describe a subject-position of openness to other ways of 'knowing' beyond epistemologies that derive from the Western tradition.