![]() |
![]() ![]() |
![]() |
noorie |
![]()
Post
#1
|
![]() Dedicated Member ![]() Group: Away Posts: 3219 Joined: 21-June 06 Member No.: 6518 ![]() |
Wisdom Of The Fool The paradoxical idea that the fool may possess wis- dom, though it was not to achieve its fullest articulation until the Renaissance, doubtless had its beginnings very early in the civilizing process. As soon as it was possible for man to feel nostalgia for a simpler way of life, he must also have wondered about the superiority of a simpler kind of wisdom, whether innate or inspired, over whatever knowledge of the world he had acquired through his own empirical deducation or from the in- struction of others. Whenever reason has been able to question itself and acknowledge that the heart has its reasons that reason does not know, a kind of wisdom has been attributed to the fool. Men have often noticed that the untutored or simpleminded, in their purity of heart, could penetrate to profounder truths than those encumbered with learning and convention, in the same way that we sometimes sense a more resonant verity in homely sayings or popular proverbs than in rational exposition. It is, in fact, no accident that the fools of literature characteristically resort to proverbial ex- pressions; for proverbs draw their strength, Antaeus- like, from the humble earth and the simple heart. Moreover, developing rationality, like developing civ- ilization, has seemed to bring burdens along with benefits; and the more advanced the development of either, the more some men, longing for an earlier, simpler, more natural state, have experienced the beguilements of the uncivilized and the irrational. The concept of the wise fool, in opposing a wisdom that is natural or god-given to one that is self-acquired, is the most sophisticated and far-reaching of those primi- tivistic ideas with which man has questioned his own potentialities and achievements. The implications inherent in the figure of the wise fool grow out of the attitudes most societies have held about real fools. The names he has been given suggest, in their etymological undertones, the various charac- teristics that have been attributed to the fool: that he is 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 incoher- ently (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, nat- ural, simpleton). Though violent madmen have, of necessity, usually had to be restrained or incarcerated by society, harmless fools have often enjoyed special privileges. Their helplessness has earned them the pitying protection of the more fortunate, just as their childishness has won them the license granted children for their irresponsible—and often irreverent—words or actions. Since they are guided by nothing but their natural instincts, the fool and the child are not held accountable to the rules of civilized society. For while mature adults are enjoined from breaking society's accepted codes of conduct and belief on the assumption that they ought to “know better,” the fool, like the child, is not expected to “know” anything. Because of this, he has often been granted considerable freedom. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this privilege of speaking with impunity that was to make the “all- licensed fool” so attractive to the literary imagination. Moreover, though the fact that fools stand apart from normal humanity sometimes caused them to be treated as objects of derision, it also sometimes caused them to be venerated. In the Middle Ages, as in certain primitive societies, they were thought to be under the special protection of God, and the possibility always existed that what sounded like inane chatter was, in actual fact, theopneustic glossolalia. The modern psychologist has, retrospectively, taken special interest in the personality of the fool; for in Freudian terms he embodies the untrammeled expres- sion of the id. Lacking any vestige of a superego, the fool surrenders shamelessly to his bodily appetites and natural desires, and he is regularly characterized by his hunger, thirst, lust, and obsession with obscenities. It has been pointed out that his very etymology has a genital suggestion (follis), and the familiar bauble of the professional fool is undeniably phallic. With no social personality to mask his emotions, he is childlike in the utter frankness of his responses: when happy, he laughs; when sad, he cries. Since he is equally short of memory and unable to follow anything to its logical conclusion, the past and the future are meaningless to him as he happily lives in and for the moment. In- structed only by his senses and his intuition and seeking only self-gratification, he is the pleasure-principle personified. His enemy, the superego, represents all the ordered conventions and civilizing rationality of soci ety which he finds both incomprehensible and intoler- ably repressive. However we may choose to express the antithesis—id vs. superego, heart vs. head, chaos vs. order, anarchy vs. culture, nature vs. art, passion vs. reason, pleasure vs. virtue, Carnival vs. Lent—his allegiance is always unmistakably clear and one-sided. By at least the end of the twelfth century (and probably earlier), the fool had achieved the eminence of having his own feast day. The famous, sometimes infamous, Fête des Fous gave the lower clergy, if only ephemerally, the traditional freedom accorded the fool. Related to the Roman Saturnalia and embodying the spirit of carnival misrule, the Feast of Fools found its Scriptural authority in a verse from the Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Almost three centuries later, when these blasphemous celebra- tions had been driven out of the church, they were taken over and expanded by the secular Sociétés Joyeuses in the towns and universities. Emulating the sub-deacons of the cathedrals, students and urban citi- zens took the opportunity to lord it over their betters and mock authority, both temporal and religious, with assumed amnesty. But the original Scriptural sugges- tion of The World Turned Upside-Down continued to be closely associated with the fool. For by his very nature, the fool is iconoclastic, not simply irreverent but potentially subversive in his inability to compre- hend the assumptions on which authority is founded. He is too simpleminded to see the emperor's new clothes and too unsophisticated to refrain from point- ing out the nakedness of the truth. At the same time, the fools of the Fête des Fous and the Société Joyeuse were not, of course, genuinely simpleminded, and the distinction must be made be- tween the authentic or natural fool and the artificial or professional fool. Though we do not know when it first appeared advantageous for a normal man to assume the guise of a simpleton, there are accounts in Xenophon, Athenaeus, Lucian, and Plautus of pro- fessionally amusing parasites who earned their bread and butter with idiocies, and wealthy Romans kept deformed buffoons in their households whose impudence was legendary. Their descendants are the Rigoletto-type fools of late-medieval and Renaissance Europe with their traditional costume of motley, cap and bells, and marotte. They had their heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a few of them achieved such fame that their names are still known to us. At least one of them, the fool of François I, is supposed to have been truly witless, and the famous fool of Sir Thomas More had suffered brain damage as the result of a fall from a church-steeple; but most of them were men of normal intelligence who found it profitable to adopt motley for its ability to amuse and the impunity it gave them to speak freely. The professional jester, whose wry quips tended not only to amuse but often to correct his master, personifies the penchant all fools have for commenting on the morals of others and affairs of state. One of the most characteristic gestures of le fou glossateur, as one critic has called him, is to hold a mirror up for our scrutiny and to exclaim, “tu quoque!” It is this aspect of the fool which was to achieve its most moving realization in the nameless court fool who accompanies King Lear across the barren heath of the world. The idea of the wisdom (sapientia) of the fool always stands in contrast to the knowledge (scientia) of the learned or the “wisdom” of the worldly (sapientia mundana). In this respect, the oxymoron, “wise fool,” is inherently reversible; for whenever it is acknowl- edged that the fool is wise, it is also suggested, expressly or tacitly, that the wise are foolish. Perhaps the earliest recorded expression of this paradox is Heraclitus' ob- servation that much learning does not teach wisdom (frag. 40), but the theme was recurrent in ancient literature from Aeschylus to Horace. The classical archetype for the figure of the wise fool is Socrates, whom later theorists constantly invoked. Not only was his educational method based on exposing the folly of the supposedly wise, but he himself claimed that his own wisdom was derived from an awareness of his ignorance. In the Apology (20d-23b), he recounts how the oracle at Delphi had once said there was no man wiser than he. Knowing that he was not wise, however, he attempted to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man among the Athenians; but he found that all those who professed wisdom were in fact ignorant, while he alone admitted his ignorance. Hence he concluded that what the Pythian god had meant was: “The wisest of you, O men, is he who, like Socrates, knows that as far as wisdom is concerned he is actually worthless.” Socrates' account of human ignorance, in attributing true wisdom only to the divine, anticipates Saint Paul's claim that God has made foolish the wisdom of this world (I Corinthians 1:20; 3:19). The Pauline concept of the Fool in Christ, which is given its fullest exposi- tion in the Epistles to the Corinthians, affirms the worthlessness of wordly wisdom in contrast to the wisdom of the Christian, which to the world appears folly. Claiming that we are fools for Christ's sake but are wise in Christ (I Corinthians 4:10), he argues that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (I Corinthi- ans 1:25), and he says of unbelievers that, “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). “Let no man deceive himself,” he exhorts; “if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise” (I Corin- thians 3:18). Christ Himself had exemplified this foolish wisdom, not only when as a child He answered the doctors in the temple, but also later when He con- founded the scribes and pharisees in their wisdom. Moreover, His teaching was seen to be childlike in its simplicity, “foolish” in its homespun imagery; and, it was later argued, although we think of sheep as foolish creatures, He was the Lamb of God. This theological paradox of the Wise Fool in Christ, which was to provide the rationale for so many subsequent treat- ments of the wisdom of folly, was kept alive all during the Middle Ages by such writers as Gregory the Great, Scotus Erigena, Francis of Assisi, Jacopone da Todi, and Raimond Lull. It is, however, in the late Middle Ages and out of that northern mysticism of the devotio moderna taught by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer that two of the most important Christian treatments of the wisdom of the fool appear. Almost simultaneously, near the middle of the fifteenth century, Thomas à Kempis, in his influential Imitatio Christi, urged a Christian life of “holy simplicity” in emulation of Christ the Fool, and Nicholas of Cusa (or Cusanus), in various writings, laid the philosophical groundwork for a new concept of learned ignorance. Cusanus' docta ignorantia, “the coincidence of knowledge and ignorance,” in rejecting rational theology and attributing to God a wisdom unattainable by man, poses serious questions about the very possibility of human knowledge but finally derives a kind of wisdom from the antithesis between the irrational absolute and logical reason. For he argues, as Socrates had before him and as Montaigne would after him (though both in quite different contexts from Cusanus'), that knowledge of our ignorance is itself a kind of knowledge. Throughout the Middle Ages, a less theolog- ical—and, admittedly, often less wise—figure of the fool capered through the sotties, carnival plays, prov- erbs, songs, and jestbooks that appeared all over Europe. Tyl Eulenspiegel, Marcolf, Scogin, Bertoldo, Robin Goodfellow, and a dozen others, though often nothing more than scurrilous buffoons and outrageous pranksters, sometimes give evidence in their jests that they are also vessels of wisdom. In their roguery, they are the direct forebears of the confidence men of later literature—the Elizabethan coney-catcher, Arlecchino, Lazarillo, Simplicius, Scapin, Melville's deaf-mute, Felix Krull; but in their wisdom, they display the char- acteristics of all fools. In particular, the legendary Marcolf, whose origins are distant and obscure, is one of the primordial manifestations of the wisdom of folly. Companion to the very personification of wisdom, King Solomon, he regularly bests the sage in their encounters by means of his earthy, natural, literal-minded acuity. At the same time, there were also literary fools who were only fools, and the medieval imagination took satiric delight in cataloguing them in such works as Wireker's Speculum stultorum or Lydgate's The Ordre of Folys. Their more ominous confrere, the Vice, who replaced the bauble with a dagger of lath, proffered temptations to Everyman on the medieval stage. Sebastian Brandt, gathering them all together at the end of the Middle Ages, was to confirm once more the old observation of the preacher of Ecclesiastes that stultorum numerus infinitus est (I:15). And, indeed, the passengers on the Narrenschiff (1494) are fools in the somberest sense; for, like all men, they are sinners. By the end of the fifteenth century, a fairly complex set of ideas and associations had gathered around the figure of the fool. At worst, he was considered a sinful instrument of vice, who was blind to the truth and had no hope of salvation. It has been suggested that this attitude goes back to Saint Jerome, who translated the opening of Psalm 53/52 with Dixit insipiens in corde suo, rendering the Hebrew word “nabal” as “fool” rather than as “vile or morally deficient person.” At best, the fool was a simple innocent, devoid of the pretentions of learning and the corruptions of worldly wisdom, into whom the spirit of God could most easily enter. The most universal characteristics of the fool, however, lay somewhere in between the two opposite poles represented by the fool of Saint Jerome and the fool of Saint Paul; for these are his social rather than his religious characteristics. On the one hand, he could be found in any rank of society; on the other, he was the shameless critic of all ranks. He saw through the hypocrisy of social status and noble sentiments; he exposed the vanity of beauty and learning. He did not believe in honor, order, measure, prudence, justice, chastity, or any of the stoical restraints society imposes upon itself. If Hercules at the crossroads between virtue and pleasure had traditionally opted for virtue, the fool resolutely took the other fork and sought gratification for the body rather than the spirit, arguing that there will still be cakes and ale though some are virtuous. It had long since been recognized, however, that he was a formidable adversary, not just because he refused to abide by the accepted rules, but because his jocose antics, like all play, could easily turn into high serious- ness and his unbridled tongue was capable of truth as well as foolishness. It was out of these antecedents that the wisest, most important, most influential fool of all was created in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Erasmus' Moriae encomium, written in 1509 and first published in 1511, is, for all its joking, the most profoundly serious and penetrating examination of the wise fool in West- ern literature. It is no exaggeration to say that all subsequent fools of note are, in one way or another, indebted to his figure of Stultitia, who delivers her own eulogy in The Praise of Folly. Not only does she sum up all earlier expressions of the paradox, but she also manages, through her deep sense of humanity and her polysemous irony, to give new dimensions to the con- cept. 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. Like all fools, Stultitia's basic impulse is satiric, and her widespread notoriety throughout sixteenth-century Europe was largely the result of those parts of her speech in which she irreverently boasts that all the chief secular, religious, and intellectual estates of the Renaissance world are under her dominion. No man, not even her own author, is exempted from her mordant ridicule as she anatomizes the follies of man- kind. Yet in the last analysis, it is not her satiric cata- logue but her ironic self-description which was to have the more lasting resonance. For in explaining who she is—in asking, that is, what it means to be a fool—she demonstrates that folly is not merely universal but necessary and even desirable to mankind, that to be a man is nothing other than to play the fool, and that the highest wisdom is to acknowledge this very fact. Portraying herself as the personification of all natural instincts, she claims to be the life-force in the universe and argues that it is only she, Folly, who keeps men from committing suicide. Those impulses of man which attempt to curb or deny his own nature are objects of her deepest scorn. Behind this foolish naturalism lies Erasmus' deep belief, inherited from some of his humanistic predecessors, in the goodness of nature, especially human nature—a philosophical position which enabled Luther later to accuse him of Pelagian- ism. Stultitia, in reflecting this belief, emerges as the champion of φύσις (nature) over all forms of νόμος (law, custom, convention) which attempt to restrict nature. She is, accordingly, an enemy of the Stoics, as all fools inherently are. But this fool has philosophical and theological reasons to buttress her instinctive love of pleasure. In fact, she is one of the earliest spokesmen for the post-medieval revival of Epicurus and suggests, as Erasmus was to argue in detail elsewhere, that “if we take care to understand the words properly” the true Christian is an Epicurean (Colloquia familiaria [1516], “Epicureus”). Though she speaks in learned Latin decorated with Greek tags, Stultitia is equally scornful of the pretensions of learning, whether pedantic sophistry on the one hand or speculative metaphysics on the other. In opposition to both sets of “foolosophers,” as she calls them (μωροσόφοι), she extolls the humility of ignorance and the simple knowledge drawn from experience and faith. Beyond this, she is, as always, acutely conscious of the cares of mankind and the pains of existence. She laments with Ecclesiastes that “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (I:18), and she sadly concedes with Sophocles that “to know nothing affords the happiest life” (Ajax 554). The fool's traditional penchant for turning things upside-down is, in Stultitia, reinforced by the profound Erasmian ability to see both sides of a question. Not surprisingly, she invokes one of her author's most im- portant adages, “The Sileni of Alcibiades” (Adagiorum chiliades III. iii. 1), in which it is argued that the inner essence of any matter is often the opposite of its outer appearance, to explain that the apparently foolish may actually be wise, the apparently wise, foolish. This is, to be sure, the basis of her irony; but it is also the burden of her message. For she proceeds to apply this technique of reversal to all aspects of worldly wisdom, reexamining those virtues and codes of conduct the world takes for granted to be wise, and demonstrating both their limitations and the wisdom of their foolish opposites. For example, she hails Self-love (Φιλαυτία) as her closest companion, only to ask if the Christian can really love his neighbor as himself if he does not, in fact, love himself. Similarly, she attacks Prudence, traditional enemy of Folly in medieval psychomachies, not simply because fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but in order to show that experience can be valuable and that judgments are always difficult. She acknowledges that his illusions and self-delusions are as important to man as his truths; she accepts the passions of the heart as well as the reasons of the mind; and she resolves the ancient antinomy between virtue and pleasure by arguing that pleasure is a virtue. These radical reappraisals of common assumptions are derived throughout from a humane understanding of man's condition and a belief in the essential goodness of human nature if it is uncorrupted by man-made institutions, false learning, and perversions of the will. Once man has stripped himself of these false claims to wisdom, he becomes a proper receptacle to receive the wisdom of Christ, which is the only true wisdom. In the conclusion of her great speech, Stultitia invokes the figure of the Fool in Christ, derived from Saint Paul and Cusanus, and prescribes a pietistic simplicity of heart as the true way to divine wisdom. What is more, she effectively argues that, since to be a man is to be a fool, when the Son of God accepted the role of human frailty He became the greatest of all fools. Erasmus' Stultitia ushers in that host of wise fools who were to play such a dominant role in European thought and literature for the next hundred years, from Murner's Narrenbeschwörung (1512) to Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615). It has often been observed that the great fools of the sixteenth century are essentially the creation of Renaissance humanism and their ironic wisdom the result of the assimilation of Lucian by such humanists as Alberti, More, and Erasmus himself. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize the evidence such fools supply that the hopeful ideals of humanist philosophy were already being subjected to increasing doubt. For the concept of folly, however “wise,” is ultimately the antithesis of the concept of the dignity of man; and if the medieval Feast of Fools was religion on a holiday, the Renaissance triumph of the wise fool was humanism on a holiday—or, perhaps more accurately, humanism in mourning. The optimis- tic dream of man and the heaven-storming possibilities of human reason so proudly advanced by the humanists of the fifteenth century did not concede much if any wisdom to folly. Though the first humanist, Petrarch, had claimed the wisdom of his own ignorance, the ignorance he professed was not that of the fool but only that of the non-Averroist. It is, significantly, only in the sixteenth century, when the shadow of skepti- cism fell across humanist thought, that the wise fool emerges as the spokesman for his epoch. It is precisely when he can no longer determine whether man is the Godlike paragon of animals or the base quintessence of dust that Hamlet puts on the antic disposition of the fool and walks in the corridor reading Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Down the length of the sixteenth century, the wis- dom of folly is described in all its nuances by such diverse authors as Ariosto, Skelton, Rabelais, Folengo, Nashe, Hans Sachs, Cornelius Agrippa, Francisco Sanchez, Montaigne, and many others; the portrait of the wise fool is drawn again and again by Breughel and Bosch, Massys and Holbein, and countless minor illustrators. When Olivia, in Twelfth Night, says of the clown Feste, “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool” (III.i.60) and when Touchstone, in As You Like It, proverbially observes that “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” (V.i.31), they are uttering what had by then become commonplaces. In the age of Elizabeth, foolery did indeed seem to walk about the orb like the sun and shine everywhere; and one of Ben Jonson's last charac- ters, looking back over the drama of the preceding century, can nostalgically claim that “There was no play [that is, of any merit] without a fool” (Staple of News, 1st Intermean, 35). For in England especially, the wise fool found his true home in the drama of Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Dekker, Jonson, and, above all, Shakespeare. In both the comedies and the tragedies, the Shakespearean wise fool has his splendid role to play, from the bantering wit of Touchstone and Feste to Yorick's gibeless skull and Cleopatra's death- bearing clown. If Jaques, in the sun-dappled world of Arden, can learnedly quote The Praise of Folly to demonstrate that all the world's a stage, it remains for Lear, in the storm-tossed kingdom of tragedy, to ac- knowledge that the world is “this great stage of fools.” Lear's own fool is only the greatest of many who, for all their motley, bring tears to our eyes because of the profundity of their wisdom. Nor are those who wear motley the only wise fools in Shakespeare: we better understand such otherwise dissimilar characters as Falstaff and Antony when we recognize that they too manifest many of the traditional traits of the wise fool. Significantly, the last of the great Renaissance fools, Don Quixote, who rides forth as the age of humanism is drawing to a close, is known to the world not for his jesting motley but for his mournful countenance. To be sure, his companion, Sancho Panza, is something of a court jester without the office—or the court; but by the beginning of the seventeenth century the pro- fessional fool had almost had his day. Even his parti- colored costume only partially survives in the Com- media dell'Arte. The concept of folly, however, was far from dead. For fools, whether specifically identified as such or not, have continued down the centuries to call into question the claims of learning, religion, and civi- lization. Whenever human reason has most proudly vaunted its achievements, it has been inevitably chal- lenged by the mocking laughter of the wise fool. Long after the Renaissance fool had made his exit from the scene, from Grimmelshausen and Molière and Swift to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin and Hauptmann's Emanuel Quint and Yeats's Crazy Jane, the idea of the wisdom of folly has persisted. ![]() "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" "You have enemies? Good! It means that you stood up for something, sometime in your life." |
LEGENDRAFI |
![]()
Post
#2
|
![]() Regular Member ![]() Group: Members Posts: 781 Joined: 1-July 05 From: DELHI, INDIA Member No.: 2633 ![]() |
Wisdom Of The Fool The paradoxical idea that the fool may possess wis- dom, though it was not to achieve its fullest articulation until the Renaissance, doubtless had its beginnings very early in the civilizing process. As soon as it was possible for man to feel nostalgia for a simpler way of life, he must also have wondered about the superiority of a simpler kind of wisdom, whether innate or inspired, over whatever knowledge of the world he had acquired through his own empirical deducation or from the in- struction of others. Whenever reason has been able to question itself and acknowledge that the heart has its reasons that reason does not know, a kind of wisdom has been attributed to the fool. Men have often noticed that the untutored or simpleminded, in their purity of heart, could penetrate to profounder truths than those encumbered with learning and convention, in the same way that we sometimes sense a more resonant verity in homely sayings or popular proverbs than in rational exposition. It is, in fact, no accident that the fools of literature characteristically resort to proverbial ex- pressions; for proverbs draw their strength, Antaeus- like, from the humble earth and the simple heart. Moreover, developing rationality, like developing civ- ilization, has seemed to bring burdens along with benefits; and the more advanced the development of either, the more some men, longing for an earlier, simpler, more natural state, have experienced the beguilements of the uncivilized and the irrational. The concept of the wise fool, in opposing a wisdom that is natural or god-given to one that is self-acquired, is the most sophisticated and far-reaching of those primi- tivistic ideas with which man has questioned his own potentialities and achievements. The implications inherent in the figure of the wise fool grow out of the attitudes most societies have held about real fools. The names he has been given suggest, in their etymological undertones, the various charac- teristics that have been attributed to the fool: that he is 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 incoher- ently (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, nat- ural, simpleton). Though violent madmen have, of necessity, usually had to be restrained or incarcerated by society, harmless fools have often enjoyed special privileges. Their helplessness has earned them the pitying protection of the more fortunate, just as their childishness has won them the license granted children for their irresponsible—and often irreverent—words or actions. Since they are guided by nothing but their natural instincts, the fool and the child are not held accountable to the rules of civilized society. For while mature adults are enjoined from breaking society's accepted codes of conduct and belief on the assumption that they ought to “know better,” the fool, like the child, is not expected to “know” anything. Because of this, he has often been granted considerable freedom. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this privilege of speaking with impunity that was to make the “all- licensed fool” so attractive to the literary imagination. Moreover, though the fact that fools stand apart from normal humanity sometimes caused them to be treated as objects of derision, it also sometimes caused them to be venerated. In the Middle Ages, as in certain primitive societies, they were thought to be under the special protection of God, and the possibility always existed that what sounded like inane chatter was, in actual fact, theopneustic glossolalia. The modern psychologist has, retrospectively, taken special interest in the personality of the fool; for in Freudian terms he embodies the untrammeled expres- sion of the id. Lacking any vestige of a superego, the fool surrenders shamelessly to his bodily appetites and natural desires, and he is regularly characterized by his hunger, thirst, lust, and obsession with obscenities. It has been pointed out that his very etymology has a genital suggestion (follis), and the familiar bauble of the professional fool is undeniably phallic. With no social personality to mask his emotions, he is childlike in the utter frankness of his responses: when happy, he laughs; when sad, he cries. Since he is equally short of memory and unable to follow anything to its logical conclusion, the past and the future are meaningless to him as he happily lives in and for the moment. In- structed only by his senses and his intuition and seeking only self-gratification, he is the pleasure-principle personified. His enemy, the superego, represents all the ordered conventions and civilizing rationality of soci ety which he finds both incomprehensible and intoler- ably repressive. However we may choose to express the antithesis—id vs. superego, heart vs. head, chaos vs. order, anarchy vs. culture, nature vs. art, passion vs. reason, pleasure vs. virtue, Carnival vs. Lent—his allegiance is always unmistakably clear and one-sided. By at least the end of the twelfth century (and probably earlier), the fool had achieved the eminence of having his own feast day. The famous, sometimes infamous, Fête des Fous gave the lower clergy, if only ephemerally, the traditional freedom accorded the fool. Related to the Roman Saturnalia and embodying the spirit of carnival misrule, the Feast of Fools found its Scriptural authority in a verse from the Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Almost three centuries later, when these blasphemous celebra- tions had been driven out of the church, they were taken over and expanded by the secular Sociétés Joyeuses in the towns and universities. Emulating the sub-deacons of the cathedrals, students and urban citi- zens took the opportunity to lord it over their betters and mock authority, both temporal and religious, with assumed amnesty. But the original Scriptural sugges- tion of The World Turned Upside-Down continued to be closely associated with the fool. For by his very nature, the fool is iconoclastic, not simply irreverent but potentially subversive in his inability to compre- hend the assumptions on which authority is founded. He is too simpleminded to see the emperor's new clothes and too unsophisticated to refrain from point- ing out the nakedness of the truth. At the same time, the fools of the Fête des Fous and the Société Joyeuse were not, of course, genuinely simpleminded, and the distinction must be made be- tween the authentic or natural fool and the artificial or professional fool. Though we do not know when it first appeared advantageous for a normal man to assume the guise of a simpleton, there are accounts in Xenophon, Athenaeus, Lucian, and Plautus of pro- fessionally amusing parasites who earned their bread and butter with idiocies, and wealthy Romans kept deformed buffoons in their households whose impudence was legendary. Their descendants are the Rigoletto-type fools of late-medieval and Renaissance Europe with their traditional costume of motley, cap and bells, and marotte. They had their heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a few of them achieved such fame that their names are still known to us. At least one of them, the fool of François I, is supposed to have been truly witless, and the famous fool of Sir Thomas More had suffered brain damage as the result of a fall from a church-steeple; but most of them were men of normal intelligence who found it profitable to adopt motley for its ability to amuse and the impunity it gave them to speak freely. The professional jester, whose wry quips tended not only to amuse but often to correct his master, personifies the penchant all fools have for commenting on the morals of others and affairs of state. One of the most characteristic gestures of le fou glossateur, as one critic has called him, is to hold a mirror up for our scrutiny and to exclaim, “tu quoque!” It is this aspect of the fool which was to achieve its most moving realization in the nameless court fool who accompanies King Lear across the barren heath of the world. The idea of the wisdom (sapientia) of the fool always stands in contrast to the knowledge (scientia) of the learned or the “wisdom” of the worldly (sapientia mundana). In this respect, the oxymoron, “wise fool,” is inherently reversible; for whenever it is acknowl- edged that the fool is wise, it is also suggested, expressly or tacitly, that the wise are foolish. Perhaps the earliest recorded expression of this paradox is Heraclitus' ob- servation that much learning does not teach wisdom (frag. 40), but the theme was recurrent in ancient literature from Aeschylus to Horace. The classical archetype for the figure of the wise fool is Socrates, whom later theorists constantly invoked. Not only was his educational method based on exposing the folly of the supposedly wise, but he himself claimed that his own wisdom was derived from an awareness of his ignorance. In the Apology (20d-23b), he recounts how the oracle at Delphi had once said there was no man wiser than he. Knowing that he was not wise, however, he attempted to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man among the Athenians; but he found that all those who professed wisdom were in fact ignorant, while he alone admitted his ignorance. Hence he concluded that what the Pythian god had meant was: “The wisest of you, O men, is he who, like Socrates, knows that as far as wisdom is concerned he is actually worthless.” Socrates' account of human ignorance, in attributing true wisdom only to the divine, anticipates Saint Paul's claim that God has made foolish the wisdom of this world (I Corinthians 1:20; 3:19). The Pauline concept of the Fool in Christ, which is given its fullest exposi- tion in the Epistles to the Corinthians, affirms the worthlessness of wordly wisdom in contrast to the wisdom of the Christian, which to the world appears folly. Claiming that we are fools for Christ's sake but are wise in Christ (I Corinthians 4:10), he argues that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (I Corinthi- ans 1:25), and he says of unbelievers that, “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). “Let no man deceive himself,” he exhorts; “if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise” (I Corin- thians 3:18). Christ Himself had exemplified this foolish wisdom, not only when as a child He answered the doctors in the temple, but also later when He con- founded the scribes and pharisees in their wisdom. Moreover, His teaching was seen to be childlike in its simplicity, “foolish” in its homespun imagery; and, it was later argued, although we think of sheep as foolish creatures, He was the Lamb of God. This theological paradox of the Wise Fool in Christ, which was to provide the rationale for so many subsequent treat- ments of the wisdom of folly, was kept alive all during the Middle Ages by such writers as Gregory the Great, Scotus Erigena, Francis of Assisi, Jacopone da Todi, and Raimond Lull. It is, however, in the late Middle Ages and out of that northern mysticism of the devotio moderna taught by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer that two of the most important Christian treatments of the wisdom of the fool appear. Almost simultaneously, near the middle of the fifteenth century, Thomas à Kempis, in his influential Imitatio Christi, urged a Christian life of “holy simplicity” in emulation of Christ the Fool, and Nicholas of Cusa (or Cusanus), in various writings, laid the philosophical groundwork for a new concept of learned ignorance. Cusanus' docta ignorantia, “the coincidence of knowledge and ignorance,” in rejecting rational theology and attributing to God a wisdom unattainable by man, poses serious questions about the very possibility of human knowledge but finally derives a kind of wisdom from the antithesis between the irrational absolute and logical reason. For he argues, as Socrates had before him and as Montaigne would after him (though both in quite different contexts from Cusanus'), that knowledge of our ignorance is itself a kind of knowledge. Throughout the Middle Ages, a less theolog- ical—and, admittedly, often less wise—figure of the fool capered through the sotties, carnival plays, prov- erbs, songs, and jestbooks that appeared all over Europe. Tyl Eulenspiegel, Marcolf, Scogin, Bertoldo, Robin Goodfellow, and a dozen others, though often nothing more than scurrilous buffoons and outrageous pranksters, sometimes give evidence in their jests that they are also vessels of wisdom. In their roguery, they are the direct forebears of the confidence men of later literature—the Elizabethan coney-catcher, Arlecchino, Lazarillo, Simplicius, Scapin, Melville's deaf-mute, Felix Krull; but in their wisdom, they display the char- acteristics of all fools. In particular, the legendary Marcolf, whose origins are distant and obscure, is one of the primordial manifestations of the wisdom of folly. Companion to the very personification of wisdom, King Solomon, he regularly bests the sage in their encounters by means of his earthy, natural, literal-minded acuity. At the same time, there were also literary fools who were only fools, and the medieval imagination took satiric delight in cataloguing them in such works as Wireker's Speculum stultorum or Lydgate's The Ordre of Folys. Their more ominous confrere, the Vice, who replaced the bauble with a dagger of lath, proffered temptations to Everyman on the medieval stage. Sebastian Brandt, gathering them all together at the end of the Middle Ages, was to confirm once more the old observation of the preacher of Ecclesiastes that stultorum numerus infinitus est (I:15). And, indeed, the passengers on the Narrenschiff (1494) are fools in the somberest sense; for, like all men, they are sinners. By the end of the fifteenth century, a fairly complex set of ideas and associations had gathered around the figure of the fool. At worst, he was considered a sinful instrument of vice, who was blind to the truth and had no hope of salvation. It has been suggested that this attitude goes back to Saint Jerome, who translated the opening of Psalm 53/52 with Dixit insipiens in corde suo, rendering the Hebrew word “nabal” as “fool” rather than as “vile or morally deficient person.” At best, the fool was a simple innocent, devoid of the pretentions of learning and the corruptions of worldly wisdom, into whom the spirit of God could most easily enter. The most universal characteristics of the fool, however, lay somewhere in between the two opposite poles represented by the fool of Saint Jerome and the fool of Saint Paul; for these are his social rather than his religious characteristics. On the one hand, he could be found in any rank of society; on the other, he was the shameless critic of all ranks. He saw through the hypocrisy of social status and noble sentiments; he exposed the vanity of beauty and learning. He did not believe in honor, order, measure, prudence, justice, chastity, or any of the stoical restraints society imposes upon itself. If Hercules at the crossroads between virtue and pleasure had traditionally opted for virtue, the fool resolutely took the other fork and sought gratification for the body rather than the spirit, arguing that there will still be cakes and ale though some are virtuous. It had long since been recognized, however, that he was a formidable adversary, not just because he refused to abide by the accepted rules, but because his jocose antics, like all play, could easily turn into high serious- ness and his unbridled tongue was capable of truth as well as foolishness. It was out of these antecedents that the wisest, most important, most influential fool of all was created in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Erasmus' Moriae encomium, written in 1509 and first published in 1511, is, for all its joking, the most profoundly serious and penetrating examination of the wise fool in West- ern literature. It is no exaggeration to say that all subsequent fools of note are, in one way or another, indebted to his figure of Stultitia, who delivers her own eulogy in The Praise of Folly. Not only does she sum up all earlier expressions of the paradox, but she also manages, through her deep sense of humanity and her polysemous irony, to give new dimensions to the con- cept. 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. Like all fools, Stultitia's basic impulse is satiric, and her widespread notoriety throughout sixteenth-century Europe was largely the result of those parts of her speech in which she irreverently boasts that all the chief secular, religious, and intellectual estates of the Renaissance world are under her dominion. No man, not even her own author, is exempted from her mordant ridicule as she anatomizes the follies of man- kind. Yet in the last analysis, it is not her satiric cata- logue but her ironic self-description which was to have the more lasting resonance. For in explaining who she is—in asking, that is, what it means to be a fool—she demonstrates that folly is not merely universal but necessary and even desirable to mankind, that to be a man is nothing other than to play the fool, and that the highest wisdom is to acknowledge this very fact. Portraying herself as the personification of all natural instincts, she claims to be the life-force in the universe and argues that it is only she, Folly, who keeps men from committing suicide. Those impulses of man which attempt to curb or deny his own nature are objects of her deepest scorn. Behind this foolish naturalism lies Erasmus' deep belief, inherited from some of his humanistic predecessors, in the goodness of nature, especially human nature—a philosophical position which enabled Luther later to accuse him of Pelagian- ism. Stultitia, in reflecting this belief, emerges as the champion of φύσις (nature) over all forms of νόμος (law, custom, convention) which attempt to restrict nature. She is, accordingly, an enemy of the Stoics, as all fools inherently are. But this fool has philosophical and theological reasons to buttress her instinctive love of pleasure. In fact, she is one of the earliest spokesmen for the post-medieval revival of Epicurus and suggests, as Erasmus was to argue in detail elsewhere, that “if we take care to understand the words properly” the true Christian is an Epicurean (Colloquia familiaria [1516], “Epicureus”). Though she speaks in learned Latin decorated with Greek tags, Stultitia is equally scornful of the pretensions of learning, whether pedantic sophistry on the one hand or speculative metaphysics on the other. In opposition to both sets of “foolosophers,” as she calls them (μωροσόφοι), she extolls the humility of ignorance and the simple knowledge drawn from experience and faith. Beyond this, she is, as always, acutely conscious of the cares of mankind and the pains of existence. She laments with Ecclesiastes that “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (I:18), and she sadly concedes with Sophocles that “to know nothing affords the happiest life” (Ajax 554). The fool's traditional penchant for turning things upside-down is, in Stultitia, reinforced by the profound Erasmian ability to see both sides of a question. Not surprisingly, she invokes one of her author's most im- portant adages, “The Sileni of Alcibiades” (Adagiorum chiliades III. iii. 1), in which it is argued that the inner essence of any matter is often the opposite of its outer appearance, to explain that the apparently foolish may actually be wise, the apparently wise, foolish. This is, to be sure, the basis of her irony; but it is also the burden of her message. For she proceeds to apply this technique of reversal to all aspects of worldly wisdom, reexamining those virtues and codes of conduct the world takes for granted to be wise, and demonstrating both their limitations and the wisdom of their foolish opposites. For example, she hails Self-love (Φιλαυτία) as her closest companion, only to ask if the Christian can really love his neighbor as himself if he does not, in fact, love himself. Similarly, she attacks Prudence, traditional enemy of Folly in medieval psychomachies, not simply because fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but in order to show that experience can be valuable and that judgments are always difficult. She acknowledges that his illusions and self-delusions are as important to man as his truths; she accepts the passions of the heart as well as the reasons of the mind; and she resolves the ancient antinomy between virtue and pleasure by arguing that pleasure is a virtue. These radical reappraisals of common assumptions are derived throughout from a humane understanding of man's condition and a belief in the essential goodness of human nature if it is uncorrupted by man-made institutions, false learning, and perversions of the will. Once man has stripped himself of these false claims to wisdom, he becomes a proper receptacle to receive the wisdom of Christ, which is the only true wisdom. In the conclusion of her great speech, Stultitia invokes the figure of the Fool in Christ, derived from Saint Paul and Cusanus, and prescribes a pietistic simplicity of heart as the true way to divine wisdom. What is more, she effectively argues that, since to be a man is to be a fool, when the Son of God accepted the role of human frailty He became the greatest of all fools. Erasmus' Stultitia ushers in that host of wise fools who were to play such a dominant role in European thought and literature for the next hundred years, from Murner's Narrenbeschwörung (1512) to Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615). It has often been observed that the great fools of the sixteenth century are essentially the creation of Renaissance humanism and their ironic wisdom the result of the assimilation of Lucian by such humanists as Alberti, More, and Erasmus himself. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize the evidence such fools supply that the hopeful ideals of humanist philosophy were already being subjected to increasing doubt. For the concept of folly, however “wise,” is ultimately the antithesis of the concept of the dignity of man; and if the medieval Feast of Fools was religion on a holiday, the Renaissance triumph of the wise fool was humanism on a holiday—or, perhaps more accurately, humanism in mourning. The optimis- tic dream of man and the heaven-storming possibilities of human reason so proudly advanced by the humanists of the fifteenth century did not concede much if any wisdom to folly. Though the first humanist, Petrarch, had claimed the wisdom of his own ignorance, the ignorance he professed was not that of the fool but only that of the non-Averroist. It is, significantly, only in the sixteenth century, when the shadow of skepti- cism fell across humanist thought, that the wise fool emerges as the spokesman for his epoch. It is precisely when he can no longer determine whether man is the Godlike paragon of animals or the base quintessence of dust that Hamlet puts on the antic disposition of the fool and walks in the corridor reading Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Down the length of the sixteenth century, the wis- dom of folly is described in all its nuances by such diverse authors as Ariosto, Skelton, Rabelais, Folengo, Nashe, Hans Sachs, Cornelius Agrippa, Francisco Sanchez, Montaigne, and many others; the portrait of the wise fool is drawn again and again by Breughel and Bosch, Massys and Holbein, and countless minor illustrators. When Olivia, in Twelfth Night, says of the clown Feste, “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool” (III.i.60) and when Touchstone, in As You Like It, proverbially observes that “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” (V.i.31), they are uttering what had by then become commonplaces. In the age of Elizabeth, foolery did indeed seem to walk about the orb like the sun and shine everywhere; and one of Ben Jonson's last charac- ters, looking back over the drama of the preceding century, can nostalgically claim that “There was no play [that is, of any merit] without a fool” (Staple of News, 1st Intermean, 35). For in England especially, the wise fool found his true home in the drama of Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Dekker, Jonson, and, above all, Shakespeare. In both the comedies and the tragedies, the Shakespearean wise fool has his splendid role to play, from the bantering wit of Touchstone and Feste to Yorick's gibeless skull and Cleopatra's death- bearing clown. If Jaques, in the sun-dappled world of Arden, can learnedly quote The Praise of Folly to demonstrate that all the world's a stage, it remains for Lear, in the storm-tossed kingdom of tragedy, to ac- knowledge that the world is “this great stage of fools.” Lear's own fool is only the greatest of many who, for all their motley, bring tears to our eyes because of the profundity of their wisdom. Nor are those who wear motley the only wise fools in Shakespeare: we better understand such otherwise dissimilar characters as Falstaff and Antony when we recognize that they too manifest many of the traditional traits of the wise fool. Significantly, the last of the great Renaissance fools, Don Quixote, who rides forth as the age of humanism is drawing to a close, is known to the world not for his jesting motley but for his mournful countenance. To be sure, his companion, Sancho Panza, is something of a court jester without the office—or the court; but by the beginning of the seventeenth century the pro- fessional fool had almost had his day. Even his parti- colored costume only partially survives in the Com- media dell'Arte. The concept of folly, however, was far from dead. For fools, whether specifically identified as such or not, have continued down the centuries to call into question the claims of learning, religion, and civi- lization. Whenever human reason has most proudly vaunted its achievements, it has been inevitably chal- lenged by the mocking laughter of the wise fool. Long after the Renaissance fool had made his exit from the scene, from Grimmelshausen and Molière and Swift to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin and Hauptmann's Emanuel Quint and Yeats's Crazy Jane, the idea of the wisdom of folly has persisted. Thanks for this highly interesting piece of information! Sorry, couldn't go through the whole piece (blame it on the times we live in) but from whatever I could gather "the Wise Fool" sure makes for a great concept and perhaps for an even greater human being! If you know, what I mean (I hope you do as it would save me some explaining). |
![]() ![]() |
![]() |
Lo-Fi Version | Disclaimer | HF Guidelines | ![]() |
Time is now: 4th May 2024 - 07:04 PM |