Child And Fool In The Western Wisdom Tradition (2)

DAVID KENNEDY CHILD AND FOOL IN THE WESTERN WISDOM TRADITION Published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 11, 1 (1993) ABSTRACT: Fools and children--particularly infants and young children—proliferate in the wisdom traditions of the world. Both are outsiders to, and subversive of, the positive, adult male tradition of knowledge. King Lear’s Fool, for example, turns out to be the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over the old king's rebirth, and his reassumption of childhood. The child and the fool, as they are presented in wisdom discourse, stand for a crisis in the human understanding of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. Historically, this crisis occurred in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the Near Eastern wisdom-as-technical knowledge tradition which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close relative, the even older Egyptian wisdom-as-harmony-with-cosmos tradition which culminated in Stoicism, fell to the radical Socratic aporia. This paper seeks to identify the psychological and epistemological moment at which the child and the Fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of the hidden wisdom for the Western tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western selfunderstanding.

"In learning one gains a little each day; In understanding the way one loses a little each day." Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 48

Fools and children--particularly infants and young children--have never been hard to find in the wisdom traditions of the world. Lao Tzu's infant's "bones are soft, its muscles are weak, but its grip is powerful. . . . so complete is its harmony . . . . "1;

Christianity and the Western literary tradition it

informed

for

have

worked

almost

two

millenia

with

the

radical

pronouncements of Jesus about children and spiritual knowledge; in the African tradition, the newborn child carries a message from the world from which he has come, which is the source of all wisdom. 2 The Fool is defined, exemplified, and memorialized from earliest times in aboriginal trickster traditions, where he is often the creator himself, or at least a sort of demiurge. First among Western philosophers, the barefoot Socrates himself is never averse to playing the fool, if it will further his complicated, irony-ridden search for wisdom.3 And in ancient, sacred story, the preternaturally wise wonder child Taliesen, or Hermes, combines the fool, the child, the god, and the hero.4 Because they are both outsiders to, and subversive of the positive, adult male tradition of knowledge, the child and the fool will always be connected. In the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, for example, which is very much in the patriarchal tradition, the wise man is "upright," "righteous," "blameless," and blessed with prosperity and length of days, while "folly is bound up in the heart of the child," who must be purged by strong discipline, and the "fool" and the "wicked" are difficult to distinguish. Yet in the Christian tradition which develops out of Judaism, the child becomes a symbol for a kind of knowledge which the adult male finds, at the moment of his greatest spiritual need, unavailable to him; and in the Shakespearean wisdom, the fool turns out to be the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over the old king's rebirth, and his reassumption of childhood. This same reversal occurs in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the wisdom-as-technical knowledge tradition which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close relative, the wisdom-as-harmony-with-cosmos tradition which culminated in Stoicism, fall to the radical Socratic aporia. I want to explore this reversal--to seek the psychological and epistemological moment at which the child and

the fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of wisdom for the Western tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western selfunderstanding. Specifically, I want to argue that the child and the fool, as they are presented in wisdom discourse, stand for a crisis in the human understanding of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. This crisis is in fact the very one represented by philosophy, if philosophy is understood in that ultimate sense identified by Socrates in the Phaedo as "practicing death." For death is the great, paradigmatic crisis in human understanding. Like a fool, Socrates takes "practicing" it as the most important thing a person could do, rather than, like a sensible man, avoiding it in any way possible. This reversal leads him into a noetic metaworld where, like the wandering fool of the Tarot, he is busily seeking out, in what to his frustrated interlocutors appears to be one digression after another, a grasp of fundamental meanings which lead into ever new realms of explanation, none of which every proves to be the final, encompassing one. Socrates' "folly" is to have permanently suspended us in wonder. This is also the child's part, who also, if in quite a different way, calls into question the ability of any adult discursive tradition ever to reach this level of understanding called "wisdom." But the child of the Western tradition also offers a prophetic glimpse of a kind of knowledge which, because it emerges from

a

different

subject-object

relation,

and

therefore

a

different

epistemological source, has reached this level already. Both the child and the fool offer a paradoxical, countertraditional form of knowledge. They are both symbolic of a unity of knowledge and being, which in fact is the goal of the wisdom tradition which they reverse. The Tradition

In the West, wisdom is understood to be a form of knowledge of a certain kind. In the early Greek and Solomonic traditions, it seems first to have meant a kind of divinely ordained technical ability, whether of the purely practical or morally prudential sort. The wise man is supernaturally gifted: the skills of the builder, the goldsmith, the statesman or the general are gifts of the gods, i.e. distributions of the divine order as represented by Athene, Haephestos, Apollo, and for the poets and musicians, the muses. Typical of the heroic age, wisdom is an aristocratic and even agonistic ideal, in that the gifting of the gods is distributed unevenly, and sometimes even wrested from them through trickery, although the latter case is often ultimately tragic. The wisdom tradition of the ancient near east, which has deeply influenced the West through its expression in the Wisdom books of the Bible, is related to this notion of divine gifting, but universalizes and regularizes it. The goddess Maat of the Egyptians, for example, is daughter of the sun god, who "came down to men as the right order of all things in primal time." Thus the term maat, difficult to translate, connotes truth, rightness, cosmic order. The very possibility of such a term depends on the conviction that there is no distinction between divine and human or heavenly and earthly right and order--that there is only one order obtaining throughout the whole universe. And the goal of the Near Eastern wisdom teachings is to grasp and align oneself with that order, which--another meaning of maat--results in a "true silence."

The wise person is master of any situation because he is self-

controlled, because he acts according to maat, "restraining himself both outwardly and inwardly, and avoiding all excitement."

His opposite is the

rash, heated person who, like the "fool" of the Hebrew tradition, described extensively in Proverbs, is incapable of right action—whose life is in disorder, who is imprudent, arrogant, subject to his passions.5

Like the Egyptian, the wisdom tradition of Mesopotamian civilization turns on the possibility of the success of the wise man through coming into correspondence, or right relationship, with the order of things. The whole idea of astrology, and of its eastern analogue, the I Ching, as practical tools has to do with the correspondence betweeen the

human/natural and the divine

order. Wisdom as a form of alignment is not just a theory of knowledge but a theory of action. It is also a theory of morality, in that it must assume that the "fool," or that radicalization of the fool, the "wicked" man, must, because he breaks the fundamental order of the cosmos, end badly, and the wise must prosper, through the discipline and skill of self-alignment with cosmos and the powers of cosmos. Israel incorporated the Near Eastern wisdom tradition during Solomon's reign, when the wisdom teaching became the culture and morality of the ruling class, but it was also Israel which brought that same tradition into crisis and transformation, with Job, Ecclesiastes, the Prophets, and, finally, Jesus.6 As in the Near East, the Ionian tradition of wisdom as techne, i.e. of the wise person as gifted by the gods with skill, insight, the capacity for right action, gave way in the natural philosophers to the idea of a higher, more systematic technique--the ability to grasp the general laws of all things, and to investigate their nature, origins, and modes of becoming. Leaving aside for a moment the developments of the Sophists and of Socrates and Plato, we see the

Ionian

tradition

continued

in

Aristotle

and

the

Stoics.

Aristotle

distinguishes between practical wisdom (phronesis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia), and he may in this distinction be said to be summarily restating and secularizing the traditions of the ancient world.

Phronesis--although it

incorporates a great deal more--corresponds to the practical ability with which wisdom had always been associated, and sophia

with the wisdom of the

philosophers. The latter is the "most precise and perfect form of knowledge . . . true knowledge of the fundamental principles themselves . . . science in its consummation, the science of the things that are valued most highly."7 Thus it is the "first philosophy," an activity of which man is capable because of something divine in his nature. Its objects are those things which cannot be different from what they are and so never change. Implicit in this wisdom ideal is a complete grasp of origins and ends, and so it is by definition incapable of misuse.

It is connected with the very root Western notion of

theory as a complete, fundamental grasp of the essences, which is expressed in a visual metaphor, as a "beholding," in which, so to speak the divine basis for the natural is clearly revealed. For Aristotle wisdom is not "rational" in the empiricist or even the Enlightenment sense, although it is a completely positive, cataphatic8 ideal. For Aristotle, for whom the moon and stars were divine, for whom "man is not the best thing in the universe," for whom "everything

has

by

nature

something

divine

about

it,"

wisdom

is

understanding in the realm of the non-rational--an immediate, non-discursive knowledge of ti esti, "the that."9 Thus Aristotle's approach to wisdom is in the positive tradition of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilization, which understands it, like maat, to be an alignment between the natural and the divine, except that for him the alignment is not at all mystical or based on the overcoming of a division. Sophia is at the peak of a rationalized hierarchy of forms of knowledge, and although it grasps the non-rational divine foundations, it is reached through rational forms of knowledge, which are specific and attainable—for the divine is the ground of rationality, and there is no contradiction between the two. In this way Aristotle lays the basis for Western rationalism, and transforms the ancient doctrine of alignment into a positive

scientific ideal. And Stoicism shares the ancient tradition as well, in defining wisdom as a form of knowledge which is the diathesis--the fundamental attitude or disposition--which corresponds to the logos that constitutes the unity of the cosmos, which makes of it an ethical as well as a cognitive ideal. Even in later neo-Platonism, where wisdom is understood as a philosophical approximation to the divine, the ideal is a putting in order, a thinking and an acting according to the correspondence of all things natural and divine, a revelation of cosmos which reveals the place of the human in it, and thereby leads to a fundamental balance.10 The Reversal The reversal of the positive wisdom tradition shows traces of starting early, at least as early as the Book of Job in the Near East, and with Socrates in Greek civilization.

Even today, it exists contemporaneously with the

positive tradition, if (in a technocratic age) overshadowed by it, and thus may be called the "left handed" part of the Western tradition. It was codified and institutionalized--thereby losing much of its power--in Christianity, which may be called the religion of the reversal par excellence. It is explored ceaselessly in Western theology, mysticism, and literature. The reversal may be termed an apophatic, or negative tradition, and its classic philosophical formulation is in Socrates, who searches out wisdom and concludes that the closest he can come is to prove that no one is wise, including himself. Socrates is led to this in reaction to the ascendance of the aggressively cataphatic, secularized wisdom tradition known as sophism, which claimed the ability to teach the virtues. Sophism is actually the ancient mainstream techne wisdom tradition in modernist, Athenian dress. In what Gadamer has referred to as his "aporetic" dialogues, Socrates goes about demonstrating the inadequacy of the Sophistic technical knowledge ideal. His

vocation becomes that of "seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command, if I think that anyone is wise, whether citizen or stranger, and when I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving that he is not," and he adds, fool that he is, "my service to God has reduced me to extreme poverty."11 He proves that the knowledge of the good which would amount to wisdom is unteachable. Not only that, but, as Gadamer has put it: Knowledge of the good would seem to be different in kind from all familiar human knowledge. Hence if measured against such a concept of specialized expertise, it could indeed be called ignorance.

The

anthropine sophia (human wisdom) that is aware of such ignorance must inquire beyond, and see beyond, all the widespread presumed knowledge that Plato later will call "doxa" (belief, opinion).12 In this reversal, the seeker who would "inquire beyond" comes under the sign of eros. He or she is driven by the yearning for wisdom, "which is proper to God alone," for an understanding which is "beyond being."

Eros is the

mediator between ignorance (amathia) and wisdom (sophia). So Diotima tells Socrates: Love is never altogether in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between ignorance and wisdom.

You must understand that

none of the gods are seekers after truth. They do not long for wisdom, because they are wise--and why should the wise be seeking the wisdom that is already theirs? Nor, for that matter, do the ignorant seek the truth or crave to be made wise . . . For wisdom is concerned with the loveliest of things, and Love is the love of what is lovely.

And so it

follow that Love is a lover of wisdom, and being such, he is placed between wisdom and ignorance . . ."13

Socrates' reversal breaks the positivism of the technocratic, the ethical, or the

Ionic traditions of systematic knowledge, and strews the path to

wisdom with paradoxes and aporias. Wisdom becomes associated with the passionate search for it--the gods, it is intimated, may not even have the word in their vocabulary, since they have no other kind of knowledge with which to contrast it.14 The good, which is the object of wisdom as knowledge, becomes incapable of being taken as a direct object of knowledge, and is therefore unteachable. It can only be approached dialectically, and when in fleeting moments it is experienced, it is not as a knowledge attained or learned, but rather is "called forth" as a remembrance of something, familiar and known. 15 So one sets out to find out what one already knows, in a modality which is not cognitive, but conative and affective. In Plato, wisdom is directly connected with the acknowledgement of ignorance, with the experience of the refutation of any positive knowledge, and the existence of a "prior knowledge which guides all one's seeking and questioning."16

This amounts to a dramatic

problematization of the traditional ideal. The Near Eastern reversal is first evident before the Socratic reversal in Job's refutation of the Hebrew academic wisdom tradition. Job in his agony melts the theodicy, the positivistic assurance of the prosperity of the manaligned-with-the-divine.

He excoriates the tradition, ironically invoking the

great virtue of maat in his biting reply to his counselors: "Oh that you would be completely silent, and that it would become your wisdom!"

In Job, the

cosmic moralism of the Near Eastern wisdom tradition--the idea that the good man experiences good and the wicked, evil from the hand of God--meets a humiliating defeat. Job represents the falsification of the wisdom theory, the case which will not fit the model, and Job's counselors are demoted from the position of legitimators of the wisdom sayings of Proverbs to an ineffectual,

tragic chorus.

The effect is to precipitate Job--who is Everyman--into the

existential crisis associated with the experience of a shattered cosmos. Out of the huge caldron of this experience emerges a new concept of the location of God in the spiritual economy, of the knowability of God, and of the ability of humans to fit the divine into an ordered scheme. In Job 28, "man" is characterized as the technological genius he is, using the metaphor of the miner, who "puts an end to darkness, and to the farthest limit he searches out the rock in gloom and deep shadow," "overturning the mountains at the base." But homo faber is helpless before the mystery of good and evil. Job says, Where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know its value, Nor is it found in the land of the living. The deep says, `It is not in me'; And the sea says, `It is not with me.' ....... Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? Thus it is hidden from the eyes of all living, And concealed from the birds of the sky. Abaddon [Destruction] and Death say, `With our ears we have heard a report of it.' God understands its way; And He knows its place. ....... And to man He said, `Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;

And to depart from evil is understanding.' (Job 28: 12-14, 20-23,28) Job expresses the same paradox as Socrates: God, or the "good," is a mystery beyond positive understanding, beyond the order of language, or even of behavioral similitude or correspondence. Like Socrates, Job has come under the sign of Eros, of the longing for the divine whose first and most important step towards understanding is in recognizing its own ignorance, and for which the recognition will be a major dimension. Job in his torment and longing for the healing of the personal cosmos which is lying ruin about him, cries out, "Oh that I knew where I might find Him,/That I might come to His seat!" (23:3-4) yet in that very longing recognizes for the first time the tremendous noetic gulf set between himself and the Source and Order of the universe: Behold, I go forward but He is not there, And backwards but I cannot perceive Him; When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him; He turns on the right, I cannot see Him. (Job 23:8-9) And the cry is multiplied as Job's crisis deepens. As his longing to see God increases, so does his sense of God's otherness, and of the structural incommeasurability of human understanding and the nature of the divine. It is a break with the anthropomorphism that had, up to that time, made of the wisdom tradition the legitimation of the status quo. So Elihu, the pneumatic prophet who precedes the appearance in the narrative of God Himself, says: "Behold, God is exalted, and we do not know Him (36:26) Teach us what we shall say to Him; We cannot argue our case because of darkness (37:19) .......................... The Almighty--we cannot find Him (37:23)

.......................... He does not regard any who are wise in heart (37:24) Thus both Socrates and Job reverse the ancient logos principle, the notion of a cosmic order which humans can understand and align themselves with. The assurance of retributive justice, the interpretation of prosperity and success as blessing and salvation, the assurance that a good act always end in good, and a

bad in evil, is shaken, along with the assumptive value of

prudent and instructed conduct in the ethical or religious sense. The aporia deepens in Ecclesiastes, where, at the very moment of the ascendance of the positive wisdom tradition in Solomonic Israel, Qoholet--reputed to be Solomon himself--testifies: "and I saw every work of God, I concluded that man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun.

Even though man

should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise should say `I know', he cannot discover" (Ecclesiastes 8:17). Qoholet does not so much confound the customary admonition to "get wisdom" (Proverbs 4:5) as intensify it through showing it to be completely removed from the utilitarian or eudaimonistic wisdom of the schools.

It is uncontrollable—in fact it is

revealed at the end of Job as the mind of God itself, "a breath in man, the inspiration of Shaddai" (32:8)

Real understanding is gained only from

personal encounter with God, an encounter which confounds systematization of any sort. The next blow to the positive wisdom tradition comes in the form of the Hebrew prophets, who, like Job, connect wisdom with that sacred awe, called the "fear of God," which is analogous to the Socratic eros. The prophets radicalize the reversal by disdaining, in the name of God, the official cultus--"I hate your burnt offerings"--and thus becoming fools in the eyes of men. While Socrates played the fool by leading every search for truth into hopeless

aporia, thereby demonstrating negatively the mystery of the good, the prophet plays the fool in a mimetic anti-world of oracular transgression. The Hebrew prophet is at play in the hidden, non-rational forces of Word of the Lord; like a young child's, his is an involuntary wisdom--he acts out the cosmic order in dramatic play.17

He turns life, existence itself, into oracle, but it

transgresses the rationalism of the wisdom schools, and demonstrates, as did Socrates, that to seek true wisdom is to become an outcast to the normal wisdom, and the carrier of God's riddles. The prophet's is a negative wisdom, a picture of the truth presented in a mirror, a reflection of something which cannot be seen or presented directly, an enigmatic representation of the unknowable. This is inevitable because the human and even the natural order are fallen, are distortions of the divine order, and the fool, because he does not fit in this order, demonstrates its fallenness, and points mutely and mysteriously to another order. Christ As Fool The reversal is made complete with the rise of Christianity, according to whose narrative the logos itself in the form of a man is executed as a common criminal, his identity permanently shrouded in doubt and controversy. And it is with the rise of Christianity in the West that the reversal moves into the mainstream of Western thought. The cross—index of the ultimate humiliation, and also precondition for the ultimate glorification of resurrection--is its final symbol. So Jesus' disciple Paul later refers to the "wisdom of the cross," the "wisdom hidden from the wise," and develops, in an extended passage in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, a theology of the reversal. The crowning event of this reversal is the appearance of the First Cause in the world and its not being recognized—an event which deeply underscores the inaccessibility through positive formulations of knowledge of first things with which speculative

wisdom is associated in the Greek philosophical tradition. Paul’s reversal breaks with the tradition of Jewish Apocalyptic speculation as well, for which wisdom would be revealed to the "wise and understanding," those who grasped the Law, which is the logos, the rule of cosmos.18 But Christ comes as the "end of the Law" (Romans 10:4), i.e. the end of any clear and obvious correspondence between the divine and the natural. In Christ God personally introduces the sign of mystery, of hiddenness, of discontinuity between "above" and "below," and of the necessity of another form of knowledge in order to find the correspondences between appearance and reality that were once rationally (theoretically) beheld. The true knowledge of ultimate things is immediate and non-discursive, before (or after) the "wisdom of the wise," which knows everything except the most essential thing to know, and therefore is "foolish in the eyes of God."

It has, as Simone Weil has said,

"passed beyond what men call intelligence, and into the beginning of wisdom."19 In this new universe of the Christian myth, the reversal becomes a guiding metaphor for the Western search for wisdom. God, the great I Am, is incarnated in the form of the archetypal fool--a homeless, androgynous wanderer, whose real identity is constantly contradicted by his uncomely appearance, whose finitude belies his infinite character. Like the youngest son in the classic Indo-European fairy tale, Christ the fool reverses the terms of the argument, and wins through losing. Analogous to Lear's Fool, and the Fool figure of the modern stand-up comedian, he lives in a state of psychological immediacy which is dangerous to normal adult consciousness, because he suppresses nothing, and that, in a fallen world of danger, separation, and hiddenness, is equivalent to a state of psychosis.

The fool's is a mantic

language--the language of the unconscious, an infinitely polysemous code, the

language of desire hiding even from itself, whose dark and chaotic symbolism strikes the remote chords of the lost cosmic correspondence. The words of the fool have tremendous portent, but we are not sure of what: they emerge as dark parables, expressed in jokes, puns, logical absurdities ("I am the resurrection") or disgusting riddles ("unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood . . ." John 6:53). Those whom the Platonic eros draws to this martyr and saint of the wisdom reversal know him and see his real lineaments.

They understand the fool as a paradoxical incarnation of the

goddess Sophia of Proverbs 1-8, the divine wisdom.20 For those who don't, he is a threat, an alien from the transgressive world of the unconscious. The fool is subversive because she threatens to reveal that existence is a dream, and that the language of the mundane, of the world of everyday consciousness, is a curtain drawn by so-called normal people to shield their eyes from the abyss. The fool is analogous to the child. Whereas the latter is a pre-adult, the former is a post-adult, a drop-out.

Like the child, he is minor, despised,

thought mad. He has abandoned history, and returned to nature and to the unconscious, so he expresses nature perfectly. Lear's Fool, in his babble on the heath, expresses the chaos of the storm raging around him, which in turn is an expression in nature of the storm of conflict which is destroying the king's family. But the Fool's babble is not babble at all--its very chaos, like the chaotic language of the unconscious in dreams, does not just express, but articulates the subtexts--sexual, political, and even metaphysical--which inform the events of King Lear.

The Fool's discourse, as effortless and

unconscious as it is, is the most sophisticated commentary on the action, the highest wisdom available. The effect of Jesus as culture hero in the West has been to establish the

fool as an honored and significant psychological archetype, and to associate him with the archetype of the Hero, of which his life is also an exemplary instance.21

The heroes who follow him, like St. Anthony and St. Francis,

become "fools for Christ." The higher knowledge—or wisdom—is shown in the fool to be a form of immediate relation rather than a form of contemplation, or a speculative grasp of the universal order. In the fool, who lives in a different relation to the unconscious, it is shown that self is transformed towards its universal character through an erotic participation with the larger order, whereby it enters into that super-rational understanding of the whole which characterizes wisdom. Eastern Christianity understands this transformation as "deification," and sees it as resulting from a long acesis, which returns the erotic seeker after Sophia to a state of childhood, or childhood before God. The utter transparency of children is symbolic of the total transparency of the redeemed, in whom, in Peter Brown's words about the early desert saints, "the tensions of the `evil heart' would have been eliminated." 22 The Christian quest is to regain the "single eye" of childhood, but on a spiritual rather than a natural level. The New Eden of the Kingdom is a result of a restoration of the "true, undivided state of man," a recovered spontaneity.

So the Christian

acetic: Those whose feet already trod the slopes of Paradise in this life, by opting for the “angelic” existence of the monk or the virgin, might pass with eyes as innocent as those of a child through countryside, through the villages, and through the crowded towns, mingling unrestrained with men and women alike.23 The Child and the Reversal In identifying the fool as Hero, and, analogously, the marginalized as the carriers of a wisdom which confounds the "wisdom of the wise," the theology

of the reversal planted a master seed for the deconstruction of class, gender, and even ethnicity which has become a Western hallmark. So in the Gospels it is women, the so-called "weaker vessel," who seem to have the clearest recognition of the Christ, and make the least attempt to use him in the interests of domination, as the male disciples are tempted to do. 24 It is the crippled, the dumb, the blind, and even the social outcast and the addict who seem to be given to see the kingdom first.

And it is children, particularly

young children--either naypioi (infants) or paidioi ("little" or young children)-who are, in a most unlikely turn for the Hebrew tradition, 25 held before his quarreling

followers

as

models

of

Christian

discipleship

and

self-

understanding. So Jesus says, "I praise you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children [naypiois]" (Matthew 11:25). And when, as a culmination of his triumphal entry into Jesusalem, he enters the Temple, it is the children who are "shouting in the temple area, `Hosanna to the Son of David'." This makes the chief priests and teachers of the law "indignant." "Do you hear what the children are saying?" they ask him. He answers by quoting the only reference in the Old Testament to the hermeneutical motif which he is about to permanently codify into the Western wisdom tradition: "Yes. Have you never read, `From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise'?" (Matthew 21: 12-16). Here indeed is the countertradition in a nutshell. For the chief priests and scribes are indignant, not only at the blasphemy of him being called the Messiah (Son of David), but that it should be those most insignificant of knowers, children, who should make such a claim. For we can imagine these children are participating in the chant, not with any "real" "knowledge" of their claim, but playfully, foolishly even. In playing, in their

dramatic ritualization of existence, like the fool, they involuntarily represent the higher wisdom. Children, like fools, embody the reversal because they too are marginal figures, outsiders, like women, slaves, the "mad," or aboriginals. Children are "minor," "other"— adults either do not notice them, or they persistently misunderstand them. They are "originals," those that the culture of adulthood has not yet made over. Thus the child is Nature, which is always "just there," without a voice, as well. So the "singing voice of a child" behind the garden wall in Augustine's conversion experience, which "again and again . . . repeated the refrain, `Take it and read, take it and read'," 26 is like a natural element--like the wind talking, or an animal cry which suddenly, inexplicably, becomes a message in human language. The child, before adulthood, is the Whole speaking, in the language which, after the reversal, has become indecipherable, if no less significant. Reinhard Kuhn has identified this motif in Western literature as "the enigmatic child," what he calls "the forever undecodable signifier," whose "appearance is transparent, but in its inexplicability forever opaque."27 Because the play of the child is an aspect of the play of the world itself, it is, in a mysterious way, a representation of its essences. As Ricoeur has characterized it, "The child who disguises himself as another expresses his profoundest truth."28 Children carry a message which, as Kuhn says, "they forget just as soon as they are old enough to tranmit it." 29 In her play, the young child represents perfect understanding, or wisdom, but it is a wisdom she can only be, and not have.

Perhaps this is the crucial

paradox of the reversal. So in the Western tradition, the archetypal "inner child" represents the beginning of the unification of consciousness, of above and below, of being and knowing--a continual beginning, an emergence of the new, the redeemed order, which is connected in Western psychospiritual

thought with the process of individuation. The Reversal in Romantic Thought The crisis in the positive wisdom tradition which the child of the Jesus sayings represents was not directly taken up by Christendom. In fact the ancient philosophers' contempt of childhood remained--and remains--a characteristic attitude of adults. Among the Fathers of the Church, Tertullian, for example, interpreted the well-known New Testament pericope in which the disciples are told, "unless you are converted [lit. "turned"] and become like little children [paidia] you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3) as meaning that the Christian is like a little child only in his or her ignorance of evil; in all other respects, he or she is held up to that Pauline conception of a "mature man," in whom childish things are "put away."30 In a similar way, modern literary critics and historians of the Enlightenment tend to interpret the "become as little children" tradition as a regressive ideal,31 as they do other non-dominant epistemologies in the West--whether women's or "primitives." The reversal represents the "left hand" of Western positivism. In the modern, secularized world, it is represented by Romantic and Existentialist thought, and, in continuity with the left-handed tradition throughout Western history, the child and the fool become its symbols. For the Existentialist tradition, the fool is a dramatic personification of the wisdom crisis, whether as represented in the picaresque hero of the The Tin Drum, in the tragi-comic dissimulations of Kierkegaard's literary persona, or in the dead-serious joking of Dada and Surrealism. For the Romantics, of whom the Existentialists are in many ways the antinomian heirs, the child comes to represent a secular articulation of the paradise of the unity of knowledge and being first stated for the West by Christianity, and now understood as a goal of psychological development. As we have already seen,

the fool is under the sign of childhood, as one who has re-entered that sort of ignorance which is the wisdom of a mind which "has come to the end of its intelligence, such as it was, and has passed beyond it." 32 So the Romantic Novalis speaks of the mature person as the "highest synthetic degree of the child,"33 and identifies the child as a prophet of psycho-spiritual reintegration. The form of life of childhood prefigures the dialectical reappropriation of the unconscious by the ego, of the irrational by the rational, of nature by historical development, which is the goal of the human life cycle.

Children, in the

"mystery of their luminous innocence,"34 point to a return, through the vicissitudes of the life cycle, to a nature spiritualized--to the single eye, to the "utter transparency" of a human nature restored to Eden. Wisdom is a resolution of the contradiction between childhood and adulthood. The young child is the first statement of a higher integrity which must be earned through development.35 Romantic literature and philosophy, unlike the 19th century bourgeois sentimentalization of childhood innocence, make a clear distinction between the real child and the child as prophetic statement. Schiller, for example, calls the child "a lively representation to us of the ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined." 36 Childhood is doomed to die in each person, because "child" means relative undifferentiation, and, as Coleridge points out, distinction is "the necessary condition for progressive development." But the goal of the wisdom tradition is to regain undifferentiation on a higher level--to, again in the words of Coleridge, "make the external internal and the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature." "Highest human reason reachieves at the end of the scale the unity of the beginning, but in a functioning that incorporates all the intervening stages of differentiation." 37 Thus Holderin can say, "The intimations of childhood must be resurrected as

truth in the spirit of Man."38 In that both child and fool express the goal of development "not fulfilled, but enjoined," they show us how the reversal posits the goal of cosmic understanding--based on the correlation between above and below, of mind and nature--as an infinite task, framed in paradox. So Abrams characterizes the Romantic instinct for transformation: "The infinite demands of man's noumenal ego drive him through an endless progress from lower to higher stages toward an end from which he is inescapably cut off by the finite bounds of his phenomenal ego. The ultimate goal of man is utterly unattainable."39 The child and the fool do not embody the goal, but are stand-ins for it. They demonstrate that overcoming of the paradox of existence which Lossky, in his elaboration of Christian Orthodox theology, called "the antinomy between the unknowable and the knowable, the incommunicable and the communicable."40 Rather than a speculative grasp of the whole, a putting it at a distance, this is a total transformation of self, a metanoia, or "turning" of the whole mind to a form of immediacy of consciousness which, as Schiller characterizes the "play impulse," aims at "the extinction of time in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity."41 As a final ideal, this transformation through "union" rather than "knowledge"42 is equivalent to the union of above and below symbolized by Maat. It is the same unified cosmos of the wisdom traditions of the ancients, except that it is represented, not as an objective, behavioral ideal, but as an existential one. The ideal of cosmos is now represented as a state of immediate knowledge, a unification of subject and object, a return to the mythic time before they were sundered by reflection, and, in Hegelian terms, "consciousness became an object to itself."43 The child represents this mythic time before the sundering of consciousness by reflection, and the fool, along

with the Romantic genius, represents the return to it, which in the modern West is understood as a return to "nature" in the form of the unconscious. So Coleridge: "To have a genius is to live in the universal, to know no self but that which is reflected not only from the faces of all around us, our fellow creatures, but reflected from the flowers, the trees, the beasts, yea from the very surface of the waters and the sands of the desert." 44 To "know no self" means that all of nature becomes self, and corresponds with Blake's intuition that, in the universal reintegration of sundered human consciousness into the Universal Man, even "outer nature" will be understood as an element of consciousness.45 That we perceive nature as lifeless and mechanical is the mark of our fallen, disunified state; for perception redeemed, according to Schelling, "the world of thought becomes the world of nature," for mind and nature have consummated what Wordsworth referred to as a "marital union," whereby "Paradise and groves Elysian" become "a simple produce of the common day."46 Diotima's Eros reunited with wisdom is, then, a return to what Novalis referred to as "the primal world, the golden age," where "men, beasts, plants, stones and stars, flames, tones, colors must at the end act and speak together as a single family or society, as a single race."47 The unattainable paradise of which the child is prophetic is, in the Romantic formulation, simply the restoration of what both Blake and Wordsworth called the "Imagination," and indicates, not some new world, but the common, ordinary world transformed in consciousness.

So Thomas

Traherne, poet of childhood, said, "You never perceive the world aright till the sea itself runs through your fingers, and you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the sun."48 For the Romantic, Imagination is a codeword for the restoration of the world of perception through a reappropriation of the

perceptual life of the child.

The young child inhabits what D.W. Winnicott

described as "transitional space," the "intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality." It is, he adds, "retained throughout life in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginitive living, and to creative scientific work."49 Transitional space is the location of the restored world of heaven and earth unified, which is promised in the Christian revelation. The Romantics read it simply as a reanimated everyday world, result of the recovery on a higher level of the child's relationship between "the object seen and the eye that sees."50 Thus the Romantic wisdom ideal is represented, not as merely a cognitive, or behaviorial, or technical kind of knowledge, but as a situation of total meaning, in which perception itself is transformed. So for the Romantics the sign of wisdom is "joy," which Coleridge described as "the spirit and the power, which wedding nature to us, gives us in dower a new Earth and a new Heaven."51 In the "marital union" between mind and nature, Wordworth, Coleridge, and Novalis directly invoke the end of history, but envision it as emerging from within the hearts and minds of persons. And Schiller looks for a "third joyous realm of play and of appearance, in which man [is released] from all the shackles of circumstance, and [freed] from everything that may be called constraint, whether phyical or moral."52 These contemporaries of the French Revolution--with its exhilarating beginnings followed by its hideous outcomes-looked for a "new age in which mankind will achieve on earth the fullness of freedom, community, joy, and intellect."53 The new age will be governed by what Schiller referred to as the "the aesthetic state," which, because it is a result in a change in perception itself, alone is capable of uniting society, and "subjecting the individual to the general will" voluntarily. Analogously, Blake

referred to the "New Jerusalem" as a regenerated state of mind, in which, through the joyful annihilation of selfhood in "Jesus the Imagination"--who is the Universal Humanity--humans are delivered from the hell of isolated selfhood, and restored to an original community of love and joyful mutuality. 54 Coleridge looks for a time When [man] by sacred sympathy might make The whole one self! Self! Self that no alien knows! Self, spreading still! Oblivious of its own, Yet all of all possessing! This is faith! This is the Messiah's destined victory.55 Conclusion The crisis of the ancient wisdom tradition which this paper has been concerned to trace does not relinquish the ideal of that tradition, which is the vision of completion, or the harmony between heaven and earth--a part-whole relationship in perfect correspondence. The reversal does not abrogate the overwhelming drive for what Schiller called "an existence according to its own laws, its inner necessity, its eternal unity with itself." 56 The difference is that it understands the harmony to be the result, not of an alignment through expertise, through proverbial rules of thumb, through cultic practices, or through ethical or political system building, so much as through metanoia, a whole turning of the mind, a transformation of consciousness whose source is fundamentally non-rational.

If the crisis in the ancient tradition is the

recognition of what amounts to a logical contradiction between the knowable and the unknowable--between the part and the whole--its goal is the overcoming of that contradiction in a form of knowledge which is immediate and non-discursive, which only begins when we have "come to the end of our intelligence . . . and passed beyond it."57

The crisis in the Western wisdom tradition is a logical outcome within the tradition, for it is already implicit in the founding moment within the Western mythic code.

It stands for the separation, the division implicit in

existence, a division which is, indeed, a principle of growth in existence. It is put mythically in Genesis in the expulsion from the Garden, result of the felix culpa, or happy fault, which begins the crisis. The Western cultural command which initiates the wisdom tradition is to overcome the separation which is there almost from the beginning, and to make our way back to the Garden through a dialectical journey, which ends not just in a restoration of an original, but of a higher unity.

This in fact is the plan of the Christian

"completion" of the Hebrew scriptures, in which Christ the second Adam returns, and instaurates the "kingdom of God," thereby restoring paradise on a higher level. This is also the plan of Lear's developmental journey towards "ripeness," which ends tragically because of human corruption, although (ironically) that corruption itself seems to have been necessary to activate the journey. Lear's re-entry into childhood is an exemplary tale of the reversal. Humans first seek to restore the undivided psychological and social situation of Eden through wisdom as techne, or expertise.

But in that

technical intelligence itself is a result of the expulsion--of the loss of the absolute, of total meaning—and in it, "intelligence reaches its end." The child and the fool represent that last resort. Both are in a relationship with a nonrational whole. The child lives before rationality, and the fool lives after it. Both point, in their very modes of being, symbolically both backward and forward--backward to that lost paradise, forward to its restoration through the dialectical vicissitudes of development. So Schiller can say of children: "They are what we were; they are what we are to become again. We were, like them, nature, and our culture shall lead us, by the road of reason and

freedom, back to nature again. The goal which man strives towards by means of culture is infinitely higher than that which he reaches by means of nature."58 Neither child nor fool have lost their significance for Western selfunderstanding.

They

still stand as mysterious

signs of involuntary

transcendence, and thereby aboriginal guides in the Western spiritual journey. They are perhaps even more powerful symbols in the modern imagination now than in previous historical periods. Freud's investigation of the unconscious, for example, is constructed on the base of the childhood psyche. Both the "normal neurosis" he described as characteristic of adulthood, and the close relationship he discovered between humor and the unconscious, point to the realm of the fool. The recent attention given in psychotherapeutic circles to the "child within" is a cultural evocation both of the Jungian archetype of the divine child, "paradise of common day."

of Lear's journey, and of Wordsworth's

The Romantic use of the child as symbol for

human developmental capacity, and the idea of maturity as a second childlikeness, a new "kingdom of play," are as powerful as ever as forms of developmental self-understanding. In a world of rapidly exploding technology, it becomes ever more painfully clear that wisdom is not a form of expertise. So even as the child and the fool become increasingly marginalized by the culture of technocratic instrumentalism, the reversal they represent appears more clearly on the Western psychological horizon.

ENDNOTES 1

. Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), Ch.55.

2

. See Pierre Erny, Childhood and Cosmos: The Social Psychology of the Black African Child (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973).

3

. Socrates strongly evokes the Fool when he refers to the philosopher as one who, "standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing nigh to the divine, . . . is rebuked by the multitude for being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity." Phaedrus, 249d, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.

4

. See "Childhood of the Human Hero," in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 318-334; and C.G. Jung and Carl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

5

. Quotations are from the article "Sophia," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Volume VII, Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. and ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), p. 479.

6

. I will not take up directly the association of wisdom with a goddess--whether Prajnaparamita of the Indian tradition, Maat of Egypt, or the Semitic Ishtar or Astarte--i.e. a divine principle in the world. The goddess motif was incorporated into the Hebrew wisdom tradition in Hellenistic times, with the advent of Sophia, or the Wisdom of Proverbs Chapters 1-8, where she is represented as bride and life-companion, pre-existent and instrumental in creation, seeking dwelling and union with man. Wisdom as the goddess would be a crucial area to explore in a more complete treatment of the tradition, but is not necessary to an understanding of the role of the child and the fool in the tradition, which is what I am after here.

7

. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1962), p. 156.

8

. Cataphatic is a term from Orthodox theology, which refers to a positive knowledge of God which proceeds by affirmations. This is considered a lesser way, and is opposed to "apophatic," or negative theology, which proceeds by negations, and is "fitting in relation to God, who is of His very nature unknowable." Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge, James Clark, 1957), p. 25.

9

.

Aristotle, pp. 156, 209.

10

.

"Sophia," pp. 473 & 475.

Martin

Ostwald,

trans.

11

. Apology 21a-23b,in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 7-9.

12

. Hans Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in PlatonicAristotelian Philosophy, P. Christopher Smith trans.(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 24.

13

. Symposium 203e-204b, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p.556.

14

.

Ibid, 204a, p. 556.

15

.

Gadamer, p. 52.

16

.

Ibid, p. 57.

17

. See for example, the prophets use of the waistband in Jeremiah 13:1 ff, or the yokes, 13:27, 28.

18

.

19

. Simone Weil, "Human Personality," in Two Moral Essays, Ronald Hathaway, ed. (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1981), p. 29.

20

. For a summary of the tradition, widespread in the early Church, of understanding Christ of the New Testament as incarnation of the goddess Sophia, or Wisdom, see Susan Cady, Marian Ronan, Hal Taussig, Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

21

.

22

. Peter Brown, "Person and Group in Judaism and Early Christianity," in A History of Private Life Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, Paul Veyne, ed, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 254.

23

. Ibid, pp. 290, 298. And see The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 238-239, where Brown describes the acetic as one who senses physical beauty "with unaccustomed intensity, but without temptation," a state analogous to the unconscious, diffuse, and polymorphous, sexuality of the young child.

24

.

"Sophia," p. 503.

See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Women assume a striking new role in the Christ narrative from

the moment of crucifixion on. It is women who find the empty tomb, it is a woman to whom Christ appears, and who is the messenger of the resurrection to a group of initially unbelieving males. 25

. It is in fact the Hebrew wisdom literature which gives us the Proverb, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod will drive it far from him."

26

. Saint Augustine, Confessions trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 177. Augustine, sequestered in a closed garden, was at the height of his crisis, "weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, `Take it and read, take it and read'. At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall."

27

. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), p. 20.

28

. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, John "B. Thompson trans. and ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 187.

29

.

Corruption in Paradise, p. 64.

30

.

Find in The Anti-Nicene Fathers

31

. See for example Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: Theme and Variations in Seventeenth Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), which interprets the theme of childhood in Herbert, Vaughn, Marvell, and Traherne, and the Romantic movement of the early 19th century as well, as a failure of nerve in the face of rapid social and political change. Or see Jean Hagstrom, Eros and Vision (New York: Norton, 1988), in which he refers the Romantic concern with childhood as reflecting "a consuming nostalgia for the past, the persistence of boyhood into manhood, and the regression from adult responsibility and mature and personal social relations to a condition that sometimes looks like arrested development" (p. 57). And George Boas, in The Cult of Childhood (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1990, originally published 1966), interprets the Western fascination with childhood as cultural primitivism

tout court. 32

.

33

. Quoted in M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 379.

34

.

Kuhn, p. 50.

35

.

Abrams, p. 270.

36

. Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, Julius A. Elias, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), p. 87.

37

.

Coleridge quote or paraphrased in Abrams, pp. 267, 269, and 270.

38

.

Quoted in Kuhn, p. 169.

39

.

Abrams, p. 216.

40

.

Lossky, pp. 87-88.

41

. Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In a Series of Letters (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965 [originally published circa 1795]), p. 74.

.

42

See note 17 above.

Lossky, p. 28.

43

.

See the discussion of Hegel in Abrams, p. 232.

44

.

Coleridge, quoted in Abrams, p. 276.

45

. See Abrams discussion of the Ninth Night of Blake's Four Zoas, p. 259.

46

. Schelling quoted in Abrams, p. 222, and Wordsworth in Abrams p. 337.

47

.

Quoted in Abrams, p. 252.

48

.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation (

49

. D.H. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: 1971), p. 14.

50

.

Basic Books,

Book XII, 368-79, William Wordworth, The Prelude, second edition,

Ernest de Selincourt, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 51

. From "Dejection: An Ode," quoted in Abrams p. 276. Abrams refers to "joy" as "a central and recurrent term in the romantic vocabulary, which often has a specialized meaning. In Coleridge's philosophy of the one and the many, in which a central concern is reconciliation of subject and object in the act of perception, `joy' signifies the conscious accompaniment of the activity of a fully living and integrative mind. . . . it is the state of abounding vitality . . . which, by breaking down the boundaries of the isolated consciousness, relates the self both to other human selves and to an outer nature which it has inanimated, and so made compatible with itself." Joy is "the inner power which unites the living self to a living outer world. . . . in the flow of a shared life between the elemental polarity of mind and nature" (pp. 276-277, passim).

52

. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), p. 137.

53

.

Abrams, p. 351.

54

.

Abrams, pp. 364 & 258.

55

.

From Coleridge's Religious Musings, quoted in Abrams, p. 266.

56

.

Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, p. 85.

57

. See note 19 above. In the same passage, Weil refers to a kind of thinking which "has learned to grasp thoughts which are inexpressible because of the number of relations they combine, although they are more rigorous and clearer than anything that can be expressed in the most precise language . . ." This, I suppose, as close as one can come to Plato's highest form of knowledge, noesis, when speaking of thought in quantitative or logical terms.

58

.

Naive and Sentimental Poetry, p. 85.