Summer and Winter Fools and Foolishness

what’s going on when people get in their own way?

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.

The kind of wisdom we have in mind 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.