Well, I thought that I’d talk about a random William Blake quote today: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise“. This quote was something I first encountered whilst reading the works of the 20th century mystic, and William Blake fan, Neville Goddard (1905-72) a few years ago, I suddenly found myself thinking about it again a while ago.
If you look on the internet, people have at least a couple of theories about what Blake was trying to say here. I’ll give my own theory in a bit, but the quote itself comes from Blake’s 1790-93 work “The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell” – namely the “Proverbs of Hell” segment.
Wikipedia points out that: “The diabolical proverbs are provocative and paradoxical. Their purpose is to energise thought.” This sounds similar to how a Zen Buddhist Koan is supposed to work. In other words, the puzzling nature of the saying is literally the whole point. It’s a riddle where, in trying to understand it, you also end up thinking about larger and more interesting things too. It’s an indirect path to wisdom.
A more basic – and less likely to be true – explanation for the saying that I’ve seen on the internet is that it was an old-fashioned way of saying the popular modern US-style warning of “F–k around, and find out!“. In this context, “become wise” is seen as a euphemism for “Suffer the consequences of your actions” or “Learn a hard lesson“. And, yes, Blake’s saying maps on to this modern warning surprisingly well. But, whilst it is impossible to learn anything without making a few mistakes, I don’t think that this was the entire point of what Blake was saying here.
To me at least, the most obvious explanation for “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” is that it’s about focus and – perhaps – the connected nature of everything. If you do something stupid, frivolous and/or foolish for long enough then, not only will you become a seasoned expert at that one thing, but you’ll probably also learn a lot of other stuff along the way too.
For example, whilst I can’t remember the name of the channel, I once stumbled across a Youtube channel run by a millionaire who offers short soundbites of financial advice. Yes, social media only shows you an incomplete – and carefully-selected – “highlight reel” of someone’s life and the site’s algorithm also rewards channels which hyper-focus on just one topic, so the channel itself probably isn’t the full picture of this man’s life. But, whilst watching this Youtube channel, I realised that the man behind it is both wise and a fool at the same time.
On the one hand, he is an expert player of this game that we’re all told is one of the most important things in life. In his decades of experience, he has gained an intricate understanding of things like investments and multiple income-streams. He’s also clearly wise enough not to bother with ostentatious displays of wealth or pointless luxury goods, often deriding them as things that either waste money and/or which poorer people buy in the hope of looking rich. On one level, he’s an intelligent and wise man who is good with money and a master of the financial game.
Yet, at the same time, he also at least seems to be a very boring person whose only real hobby or interest is money. Likewise, he has clearly never thought to ask any larger questions about the world’s economic systems or about the meaning of life or anything like that – and is, instead, just content to play the game of “How can I increase this number on a screen as much as possible?” without question. He also seems to mostly treat money like an end in and of itself, rather than as a tool for buying interesting/fascinating things with. He’s a fool. But, by devoting his life to the “foolish” pursuit of money, he’s also clearly gained a lot of wisdom along the way.
And this is hardly the only example I can think of. If you focus on literally any “foolish” hobby, fascination or whatever for long enough then not only will you become an expert on that one thing but you’ll learn a ton of other stuff along the way. If you spend hundreds of hours playing a single videogame, you’ll not only become good at that game but you’ll also understand a bit more about game design and about whatever inspired the game too. If the game is multiplayer, you’ll probably learn about teamwork, psychology and stuff like that as well. Focusing on something intensely, however “foolish” it might be, will often teach you all sorts of other stuff in the process.
Another example is how if, like me, you are lazy enough to only really be fluent in one language (English)… then you probably know more about other languages than you might think. After all, English is technically a mixture of different languages (with the main ones being Old English, Old Norse/Danish/German and French/Latin, but also including words from everything from Greek to Arabic as well).
Many languages, to varying extents, have an element of this (where they borrow and/or reinterpret words from other languages – yes, even French does this). So, even if you just “foolishly” focus on knowing just one language really well, then you’ll probably unconsciously pick up at least a few words from all sorts of other languages as well.
So, in one sense “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” is about how there are lots of different paths to wisdom. It’s a bit like how the totally opposite philosophies of solipsism and pantheism – if thought about for long enough – literally both lead to the exact same place. Namely the idea that “Everything is one” or “This is all one thing”.
Whether you take the coldly “selfish” path of solipsism, or the more communal “new age hippie” path of pantheism, then you’ll eventually find yourself reaching the same ultimate conclusion that everything is part of a single connected whole.
And perhaps this theme of connection is the point of Blake’s saying? Because everything is often connected in all sorts of ways, if you focus on studying or practicing any one thing – however “foolish” – then you will eventually gain some level of wisdom because nothing exists in isolation. Everything is built upon or connected to other things.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
