In the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom, a valorisation of the irrational, the foolish, and

the stupid emerged, as in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would
become wise;"[17] or Jung's belief that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in
extracting wisdom from stupidity. Stupidity is the mother of the wise, but cleverness never."[18]
Similarly, Michel Foucault argued for the necessity of stupidity to re-connect with what our
articulate categories exclude, to recapture the alterity of difference.[19]