Fooling about

"A fool thinks himself to be wise,
but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."

~ William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

The Fool is the first of the Major Arcana - the twenty-two trump cards of the Tarot deck - that we will consider: fittingly, because it is the first, and so, of course, numbered... zero. The twenty-two cards represent what some call "the Fool's journey," which can be represented as the evolution from folly to wisdom (although in the truer transcendental sense, it's the evolution from seeing the folly in the Fool to seeing the wisdom in the Fool).

 

There are a number of illustrations used to depict the Fool; perhaps the most famous sequence is the Rider-Waite deck which dates back to the early 20th century. It shows a medieval "fool," a court-jester-type, strolling unconcerned, head back, a staff slung over his shoulder with his meager possessions in a bag on the end, a dog trotting along by his side. He carries an innocent white rose. He is walking blindly towards the lip of a precipice.

 

Earlier versions from the Italian Trionfi (which was a popular card game; Tarot cards are still used for playing as well as divination) depict a beggar or a wild man, in some cases chased by the dog that accompanies him in Rider-Waite. In some French versions, the Fool becomes a more stylized analogue to the traditional Joker of conventional playing cards.

 

Symbolically, the Fool represents a rich mythological tradition of tricksters, from Kokopelli to Anansi to Loki to Shaitan to Rumpelstiltskin. Like Lucifer - the light-bearer - the Fool is about to plunge into the darkness of the Abyss, which is only implicated in Rider-Waite but represents the Unknown, the darkness of ignorance. Reason recoils from ignorance as the alert man shies away from the abyss; but the Fool is without fear. He accepts the Abyss without needing to interrogate it. He plunges into the Unknown neither willingly nor unwillingly; he plunges into it because it is before him, and for no other reason.

 

Just as zero produces all numbers - creatio ex nihilo - so the Fool produces all the other possibilities through his interaction with the Void. The Fool seeks wisdom, but he does not seek it consciously: he seeks wisdom because he is a Fool. In emptying his mind, he enters the void; in entering the void, he loses material things [his pack], beauty [the rose], and the world [the dog], and finds what the void has for him.

 

Nietzsche said: when you stare into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back.

 

The Fool is mankind subjected to that pitiless reflected stare; Mankind at his core, Mankind compelled by his basest instincts toward acquisition, toward beauty, toward companionship, and toward transcendence. He is both a beginning and an end; a reliquary for wisdom and a dispenser of wisdom; an origin and a goal. There's a reason his number is zero, and there's a reason that zero is represented by a circle. But we'll get around to that.



As through a glass, darkly

“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until
I knew it as such without a single doubt” ~ Rene Descartes

 

We begin, then, at the unsatisfactory base camp established for us by the arch-skeptic Rene Descartes; we begin within our minds. Descartes uneasily proclaimed a link between the world-within and the world-without, with his Cogito. He was at least as aware as any of his critics, either at the time or coming after, of the problem of committing a petitio principii - but the Cogito was the best he could do within the empirical frame he had available to him. We cannot presume to place ourselves above Descartes, who is justly lionized as one of the more important thinkers of Western philosophy; but we can tentatively observe that we have more frames available to us, and the benefit of access not only to the oeuvre of Descartes but to that of many other great minds, too. Korzybski says we are time-binding, and happily he is sufficiently correct that we can rely on him to say so rather than having to appreciate it independently.

One of the more trivial bequeathals of Descartes' thought is the concept of the Cartesian theater. This is a metaphor or model for what we might poetically term the "mind's eye," and describes the milieu for those entities that occupy our minds - all the things that I have communicated to you and that you have read awoke such entities in your mind, and all of those things existed in the same subjective sense. Subjective being has the character of arising endogenously within our minds - it is real to us, but is not directly accessible to anybody but us. Indeed, it is only directly accessible to ourselves insofar as we understand ourselves to be entities within the Cartesian theater - that is to say, insofar as we are possessed of self-awareness. All subjectively real things are things of which self-aware beings have awareness.

We could assert that there are subjectively real things of which we are not, or cannot be, subjectively aware; but that would invoke entities with which nobody could interact, and Occam's Razor tells us we need not involve such entities in our models. More importantly, we understand enough about these subjective entities that we can approximately measure their impact on us, and as a result we can advance the scientific hypothesis that subjective entities arise in the process of developing awareness of them. Thus, a subjective entity is a 'made thing' in a sense analogous to the Art we discussed earlier, and we as rational beings thereby become 'Artists of the mind.' The Art, in this instance, comes into existence only when we are aware of it, and this is an aspect of the reason why I chose to define Art to necessarily involve an Observer. We are aware of subjective entities as being the manifestations of a conscious and self-aware experiencing of the world, and in this sense we-qua-Observers intuit the agency of we-qua-Artists in the construction of that experience.

The idea that we could experience the world without either consciousness or self-awareness is a very hard one for us to grasp, because it is an idea that is from first principles not appreciable as a subjective entity. It is in this sense of a subjectively real existence that Bishop Berkeley intoned: Esse est percipi. We'll not follow Bishop Berkeley all the way back up the causal chain to the original Unobserved Observer, partly because that would be too lengthy a digression and partly because the notion of subjective existence we're discussing here is only a beginning.