Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1993
Journal / Book Title
Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children
Abstract
The child and the fooL as they were 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 crisis represented by philosophy, if philosophy is thought of in that ultimate sense identified by Socrates in the Phaedo "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 ever 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, counter-traditional form of knowledge. They are symbolic of a unity of knowledge and being, which in fact is the goal of the wisdom tradition which they reverse.
Book Publisher
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children
Journal ISSN / Book ISBN
0190-3330
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Kennedy, David K., "(1993) Child and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition" (1993). Collected Papers of David Kennedy. 6.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/dkennedy/6
Published Citation
Kennedy, David (1993) Child and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 11(1): 11-22.