One of the core arguments of The Praise of Folly is the idea that humanity’s conventional understanding of foolishness and wisdom is flipped. Written from the perspective of Folly, the essay aims defend to folly from those who might condemn it, suggesting that fools often act more wisely than the wise, and that the wise often behave more foolishly than fools. For instance, Folly asks her readers to consider the things that scholars sacrifice to become truly educated: they shut themselves up in their studies, isolating themselves from the world and the people around them. Their wisdom, in other words, comes at the expense of health, looks, livelihood, sociality, and ultimately, happiness. Moreover, Folly argues that the life of a scholar does not even lead to true wisdom, for the person who shuts themselves away deprives themselves of the opportunity to truly experience the world. A person who is unwilling to go out and take risks—or rather, act foolishly—will never acquire the wisdom of someone who has made mistakes and learned from them. In this way, Folly shows that wisdom can, ironically, look quite foolish.
Of course, much of this argument depends on how one defines wisdom. For her part, Folly loosely defines wisdom as the successful pursuit of happiness, a plausible, if albeit convenient, definition. While it allows her to easily portray any painful sacrifice for knowledge as “foolish,” the definition disregards other more traditional components of wisdom, like the accumulation of information and knowledge. As such, Folly’s argument is more a reinterpretation of wisdom than a genuine attempt to throw away conventional understands of wisdom. The point of Folly’s argument, then, is not that folly and wisdom are incorrectly defined and should be swapped, but rather that binaries like these, when inspected from new angles, often reveal themselves to be more fluid than society might define them.
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Folly vs. Wisdom Quotes in The Praise of Folly
Nothing is more puerile, certainly, than to treat serious matters triflingly; but nothing is more graceful than to handle light subjects in such a way that you seem to have been anything but trifling. The judgement of others upon me will be what it will be. Yet unless self-love deceives me badly, I have praised folly in a way that is not wholly foolish.
However mortal folk may commonly speak of me (for I am not ignorant how ill the name of Folly sounds, even to the greatest fools), I am she – the only she, I may say–whose divine influence makes gods and men rejoice.
So it is from this brisk and silly little game of mine come forth the haughty philosophers (to whose places those are vulgarly called monks have now succeeded), and kings in their scarlet, pious priests, and triply most holy popes; also, finally, that assembly of the gods of the poets, so numerous that Olympus, spacious as it is, can hardly accommodate the crowd.
Old age would not be tolerable to any mortal at all, were it not that I, out of pity for its troubles, stand once more at its right hand; and just as gods of the poets customarily save, by some metamorphoses or other, those who are dying, in like manner I bring those who have one foot in the grave back to their infancy again, for as long as possible; so that the folk are not far off in speaking of them as “in their second childhood.”
For do you not see that the austere fellows who are buried in the study of philosophy, or condemned to difficult and wracking business, grow old even before they have been young–and this because by cares and continual hard driving of their brains they insensibly exhaust their spirits and dry up their radical moisture. On the contrary, my morons are as plump and sleek as the hogs of Acarnania (as the saying is), with complexions well cared for, never feeling the touch of old age; unless as rarely happens, they catch something by contagion from the wise—so true it is that the life of man is not destined to be happy.
In sum, no society, no union in life, could be either pleasant or lasting without me. A people does not for long tolerate its prince, or a master tolerate his servant, a handmaiden her mistress, a teacher his student, a friend his friend, a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a partner his partner, or a boarder his fellow-boarder, except as they mutually or by turns are mistaken, on occasion flatter, on occasion wisely wink, and otherwise soothe themselves with the sweetness of folly.
As nothing is more foolish than wisdom out of place, so nothing is more imprudent than unseasonable prudence.
Although that double-strength Stoic, Seneca, stoutly denies this, subtracting from the wise man any and every emotion, yet in doing so he leaves him no man at all but rather a new kind of god, or demiurgos, who never existed and will never emerge. Nay to speak more plainly, he creates a marble simulacrum of a man, a senseless block, completely alien to every human feeling.
Consider, among the several kinds of living creatures, do you not observe that the ones which live most happily are those which are farthest from any discipline, and which are controlled by no other master than nature? What could be more happy than the bees—or more wonderful?
And yet a remarkable thing happens in the experience of my fools: from them not only true things, but even sharp reproaches, will be listened to; so that a statement which, if it came from a wise man’s mouth, might be a capital offense, coming from a fool gives rise to incredible delight.
Hence there is either no difference, or if there is a difference, the state of fools is to be preferred. First their happiness costs least. It costs only a little bit of illusion. And second, they enjoy it in the company of so many others. The possession of no good thing is welcome without a companion.
And yet through a cloud, or as in a dream, they know one thing, that they were happiest while they were out of their wits. So they are sorry to come to themselves again and would prefer, of all good things, nothing but to be mad always with this madness. And this is a tiny little taste of that future happiness.
