Wise fool

The wise fool, or the wisdom of the fool, is a form of literary paradox in which, through a narrative, a character recognized as a fool comes to be seen as a bearer of wisdom. A recognizable trope found in stories and artworks from antiquity to the twenty-first century, the wisdom of the fool often captures what intellectualism fails to illuminate of a thing's meaning or significance; thus, the wise fool is often associated with the wisdom found through blind faith, reckless desire, hopeless romance, and wild abandon, but also tradition without understanding, and folk wisdom. In turn, the wise fool is often opposed to learned or elite knowledge. While examples of the paradox can be found in a wide range of early world literature, from Greco-Roman works to the oral traditions of folk culture, the paradox received unprecedented attention from authors and artists during the Renaissance. More than Shakespeare for his range of clownish wise men or Cervantes for his lunatic genius Don Quijote, sixteenth century scholar Erasmus is often credited for creating the definitive wise fool and most famous paradox in western literature through his portrayal of Stultitia, the goddess of folly. Influential to all later fools, she shows the foolish ways of the wise and the wisdom of fools through delivering her own eulogy, The Praise of Folly.