Stupidity - Persisting in Folly

Persisting in Folly

In the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, a valorisation of the irrational, of the foolish and stupid, emerged, epitomised for example in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." A century later, Jung would emphasise that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity. Stupidity is the mother of the wise, but cleverness never."

Michel Foucault argued "categories...guarantee our intelligence and form the a priori of excluded stupidity", so that (in order to profit from the excluded) "the philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and error badly...to persist in his confrontation with stupidity, to remain motionless to the point of stupefaction in order to approach it successfully and mime it, to...await the shock of difference."