I have been nourished on letters since my childhood. I esteemed as well-nigh false all that only went as far as probable. Part II 10. Yet notice D's ongoing concern with dreams and madmen as you read through the work.
D opposes reason to any sort of madness or foolishness.
He tends to reduce wisdom to technical knowledge acquired by analytical reason . The idea is that mad, crazy people may possess a higher sort of wisdom. In Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear , for example, Lear's fool is wiser than Lear is, and Lear himself achieves wisdom only after he goes mad. But in Descartes and during the Enlightenment, we find a sharp split between madness on the one hand and reason and wisdom on the other. Part III 20.