Folly occupies a remarkably varied position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ontological condition, pedagogical necessity, and moral indictment. In Platonic cosmology, folly (ἀνόητος) is not primarily an ethical failure but a structural feature of embodied existence: the soul plunged into the stream of Becoming is disordered from birth, and one returns to Hades ‘in a state of folly’ unless corrective nurture intervenes. The I Ching’s hexagram Meng — Youthful Folly — reframes this as initiatory confusion, a necessary antechamber to enlightenment in which the teacher waits for the student to seek rather than pursuing the reluctant. Carol Anthony extends this reading into depth-psychological terms, equating folly with lack of Cosmic awareness and positioning it as the expected condition of spiritual beginners. Pascal offers a sharper political and theological valence: folly as the affective basis of royal power and as a form of self-destructive blindness that, paradoxically, serves apologetic ends. John of Damascus treats heresy itself as folly — easily refuted in argument, difficult to cure in person — distinguishing wilful folly from pious ignorance. Across these voices a central tension persists: whether folly is remediable through education and discipline, or whether it belongs to an archetypal condition of undifferentiation that wisdom can illuminate but never wholly dissolve.
YOUTHFUL FOLLY means confusion and subsequent enlightenment. In early life the various qualities and aptitudes are as yet undifferentiated and undeveloped.
The I Ching’s Meng hexagram defines youthful folly as the necessary state of undifferentiation that precedes and enables genuine enlightenment through education.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
YOUTHFUL FOLLY means confusion and subsequent enlightenment. In early life the various qualities and aptitudes are as yet undifferentiated and undeveloped.
Wilhelm’s rendering of the Meng hexagram establishes folly as a dialectical starting-point in which confusion is the precondition for clarity rather than its antithesis.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
a soul comes to be without intelligence (foolish, avov~) at first, when it is bound in a mortal body… a man lives maimed and imperfect, and returns to Hades ‘in a state of folly’
Plato’s Timaeus locates folly as the soul’s original ontological condition upon embodiment, rendering it a cosmological rather than purely moral defect.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
Folly, therefore, means lack of spiritual knowledge, and, ‘you are learning something.’ Receiving Youthful Folly as a second hexagram is to say, ‘You are not expected to know Cosmic lessons in advance.’
Anthony reinterprets the I Ching’s Youthful Folly as a compassionate diagnosis of spiritual inexperience rather than a moral condemnation, aligning it with depth-psychological ideas of developmental stages.
, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988thesis
To importune is folly. To strengthen what is right in a fool is a holy task.
Jung’s commentary on the I Ching’s Meng hexagram in Man and His Symbols frames folly as both the student’s error and the teacher’s sacred pedagogical opportunity.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
it is easy to refute the folly, it is difficult to amend the fool… our demonstration of the truth will afford convincing proof that heresy is nothing else than folly.
John of Damascus equates heresy with folly, distinguishing between the easily-refuted intellectual error and the intractable dispositional condition of the fool who neither reasons correctly nor accepts correction.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
The power of kings is founded on the reason and the folly of the people, but especially on their folly.
Pascal identifies folly as the primary affective foundation of political authority, suggesting that irrational mass psychology undergirds power more fundamentally than reason.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
if their folly makes them run so counter to their own good, the horror of such a deplorable example and so pitiful a folly will help to keep others from it.
Pascal argues that the spectacle of self-destructive folly serves an inadvertent apologetic function, deterring others from the same error through the horror of witness.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
To make a fool develop it furthers one to apply discipline. The fetters should be removed. To go on in this way brings humiliation. Law is the beginning of education.
The I Ching’s commentary on the Meng lines specifies discipline as the practical remedy for folly, framing law and structure as the primary instruments by which youthful obtuseness is transformed.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
To make a fool develop it furthers one to apply discipline… Youth in its inexperience is inclined at first to take everything carelessly and playfully. It must be shown the seriousness of life.
Wilhelm’s commentary establishes that folly’s developmental trajectory requires the intervention of disciplined seriousness to move from careless inexperience toward formed character.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
in the chaos of difficulty at the beginning, order is already implicit. So too the superior man has to arrange and organize the inchoate profusion of such times of beginning
This passage on initial difficulty and the superior man’s ordering role provides the symbolic context within which Youthful Folly is situated in the I Ching sequence.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950aside
in the chaos of difficulty at the beginning, order is already implicit. So too the superior man has to arrange and organize the inchoate profusion of such times of beginning
The preceding hexagram of Difficulty at the Beginning frames the cosmological and sequential logic that makes Youthful Folly the second stage of developmental emergence.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950aside