The necessary folly

Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem: mingle a little folly with your wisdom, Horace tells us in his Odes. Let us consider this.

Wisdom, being the fermented accumulation of experimented learning, characterizes man like no other living being. In that sense, one may consider that the path to free will, the liberation from the immediacy of instinct and its replacement for fundamented rational judgment, is a remarkable trait of our evolution on Earth.

What about folly? Technically, it is rationality trapped and diminished. But poetically, folly is getting rid of the shackles: it becomes creative vertigo.

What does Horace suggest, then? Mingle, he said. He did not say add or include. He said mingle. Adding or including could lead us to layers or strata - but Horace is poignant and surgical in the choice of the word: misce. Mingle thus implies a tangle, a fusion with a nature of its own and not just a sum of properties.

Misce stultitiam, absorb the folly, make it an aspect of wisdom, one embedded in the other; and brevem, in the right quantity, as a spice or condiment, not as a main course: simply, stultitiam brevem.

Thus, let us act boldly; let us conquer the future, forsaking the gloominess that binds us to the ground. The fact that INESC Porto is moving forward with a visionary growth project, which joins it together with new allies, research Units that were formerly acting isolated, has exactly the necessary amount of wisdom and folly. We do not conform, we do not abide by routine, we do not decide based only on the grayish day-to-day: we ambitiously want more and better, we decisively want to be more and better.

Being able to associate other interests in this ambition is both a sign of the times and of INESC Porto’s catalyst abilities. Let us praise this new alliance. Let us praise the constructive lucidness of the leaders of the new groups that join INESC Porto: in artificial intelligence, in computer science, in industrial management, in robotics. We invite the entire INESC Porto community to rejoice.