Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite philosophers -- indeed, in my book a writer legitimately termed a philosopher, though many would rather recall him as a novelist, a cultural critic, an essayist, perhaps even in a sense a theologian -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  If I had to adduce only one reason for calling him that, I might cite his own words from the first page of his own Orthodoxy, where he tells us:

I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe.  I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Now, as one of the so down-to-earth-characters into whose mouth that author inserted so many excellent quips, paradoxical assertions, and deductions, might have said, we ought not allow ourselves to be followed into concluding that someone is actually a philosopher, simply on the say-so of their speaking of having a philosophy, even of believing in one -- or still yet attributing it to others and claiming to have been shaped and reformed by it.  After all, people are prone to say all sorts of things about themselves, true, false, sage, foolish, deceptive, furtive, bold, craven -- even sometimes to reveal to the attuned eye or the attentive ear realities they only dimly know themselves. 

Summer and Winter Foolishness

Years ago in reading, I encountered the distinction between two families of fools -- and two types of foolishness.  I've invoked that easily remembered and vivid distinction by way of explanation in many conversations down the years, and have puzzled about precisely what goes wrong with the winter fool -- how to explain their folly in terms of defective practical reasoning, what specific defects or failures are involved, what concepts and what moral theories best illuminate this all-too-common but somewhat complex mode of misreasoning.

Why would this distinction -- originating in a Jewish proverb, then trickling through Russian folklore, eventually popping up and popularized in Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls -- continue to draw the interest of a moral theorist?  Well, for one because folly is the classical opposite to wisdom. It is practical wisdom, what the Greeks called phronesis, what the biblical Wisdom literature (which bears similarities to, draws upon, and reworks other similarly sapiential literature not only names but personifies, what the Latin west in its turn termed at some times prudentia, at others sapientia.  It's not enough to know what comprises and constitutes wisdom, though -- and that's tough-enough knowledge to acquire and retain, a never-ending arduous task in actuality -- one also needs to know what the various pitfalls, temptations, and forms of foolishness are, not least to recognize and avoid them, but also to understand them -- for by understanding how one goes wrong, one better grasps how one, choosing differently, goes right.