9
ONLY PARTLY
WISE: The world has never produced a single 'wise man', since the world is not
geared to wise men but to men, who can only be wise with the aid of their
folly. In order for a man to be capable
of wisdom at all, he must also be foolish.
For unless he is, there will be nothing for him to create his wisdom
from, since he will lack the polarity that guarantees it. Even Nietzsche, wise man that he seems to
have been on various occasions, was also a fool.
Do you disbelieve me, you 'wise' ones, you
who grew out of folly? No matter, your disbelief
will reinstate it. I am foolish, you are
foolish, we are all foolish, but because of this we are all intermittently wise
as well!
Indeed, whenever I see men aspiring to be
wiser than everyone else, men who are usually afraid to live ... from fear that
they should somehow transgress their wisdom, I see them for the half-fools they
really are. They would even go so far,
some of them, as to pretend to having acquired a victory over folly, which, in
reality, would also be a victory over wisdom; though they, being such
half-fools, couldn't be expected to know that!
But there you are: that, in simple
light-hearted language, is fairly typical of the human condition, of that very logical condition which induces us to be wise
intermittently rather than permanently, so that, to revert to D.H. Lawrence
again, we can avoid being at 'a perpetual funeral'.