Idiocy and Irony
At the end of his first term at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein supposedly asked Bertrand Russell: ‘am I a complete idiot?’1 If he was not a complete idiot, he explained, then he would become a philosopher. Whether or not this anecdote is true, I like it as an illustration of how a philosophical temperament can give rise to an insecurity—the anxiety that one is not really doing philosophy and that one is not a philosopher but, in Wittgenstein’s terms, an ‘idiot’. This essay is an attempt to think through this insecurity, and might be an instance of it too.
I
Why does my writing seem to concern ‘metaphilosophy’ so often? If I defend Hegel—who asked us to stop anxiously refining our thought, like an instrument, before we get around to actually thinking, and who warned us against trying to swim before we actually enter the water—is it not hypocritical for me to try and understand the nature of philosophy before actually doing it?2 My answer to this question is that I reject its distinction: there is no such sharp difference between ‘thinking philosophically’ and ‘thinking about philosophy’. At least for the ancients, philosophy was seen as an exercise before it was seen as a body of knowledge; these ancients thought of philosophy as concerned, in Victor Goldschmidt’s words, more with ‘forming’ students than ‘informing’ them.3 (Above all, ‘we should be concerned with healing ourselves’, Epicurus said.)4 We learn exercises, games, and sports by doing them; we learn how they work, and how we ought to work at them, only by doing them; and if philosophy is a certain kind of exercise of thought, then reflecting on philosophy is still philosophy per se, insofar as this reflection is the same kind of exercise. What Hegel was wary of was the fear of erring, the anxiety of being wrong. The philosophy I am trying to do—a philosophy that is aware of itself—does not engage in self-reflection as a kind of error-dispelling propaedeutic, but rather as an integral part of its ordinary exercise.
It seems, then, that philosophy does not produce knowledge in the same way that some other disciplines do. It isn’t quite right to say that we read Kant, for example, in order to acquire some beliefs; rather, the way in which Kant communicates certain beliefs, the place these beliefs have in relation to one another, and the practice in which these beliefs are employed is seemingly more important than the often rather mundane content of the beliefs themselves. There is a reason that it is unsatisfying to reduce a philosopher to a ‘life lesson’ or a ‘maxim’—for instance, to say that Sartre wants us to ‘be ourselves’, or that Nietzsche thinks that ‘life has no inherent meaning’. To do so is the same as describing a (figurative) artwork merely by naming what it depicts (as in ‘Botticelli’s Primavera is a picture of some women’, or ‘Rembrandt’s Night Watch is a picture of some men’): it is not wrong, per se, but it is devoid of any significant truth. And there is a reason that Plato presented his thought in the form of conversations: his ambition was not just to state a conclusion—indeed, his writing is famous for often having no conclusion at all—but to enact a transformation in his readers. An idea in Plato is always attached to a character and is thus always depicted as immersed in the sway of life; by engaging with these ideas, therefore, the reader is invited to engage with their own life. (These considerations can make philosophical writing very difficult: there is always the insecurity that, if I am asked ‘What are you writing about?’, any answer I give will reduce my essay from what it is supposed to be—an exercise in thinking a certain way, and an invitation to the reader to think along with me—into just another claim that can be accepted or thrown away at a whim.5)
If philosophy is tied to life in this way—by being a practical exercise, by being immersed in life’s characters, by calling on us to reflect on our lives—it must have some important similarities with literature. Joan Didion famously says that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’; Kierkegaard says that ‘to become human does not come that easily’.6 In both of these modern writers there is the idea that living, simply being human, is not a given; there is a sense of life as something achieved or approached. The gap between what we could call ‘mere’ existence and existence as achieved (as something that we tell ourselves stories about, and which does not come so easily) is seemingly characteristic of human life. As Jonathan Lear puts it:
It is characteristic of human life—either explicitly or in our behavior—that we do make claims about who we are and the shape of our lives. This quintessentially human activity of putting oneself forward as a certain kind of person can, in certain circumstances, set us up for the fall: this can occur when the pretense simultaneously expresses and falls short of its own aspiration.7
No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein wanted to know that he was not an idiot before he would become a philosopher. To commit to a claim that one is a certain kind of person—perhaps especially when that kind is something so supposedly conscious and self-aware as ‘philosopher’—is to brace oneself for the embarrassment of falling short of that kind; that is, of having not been a philosopher; having been an ‘idiot’ all along.
II
The modern novel is particularly good at exploring this gap between mere existence and the existence that an individual imagines or aspires to. Indeed, it is by now a truism that ‘the individual’ is a modern idea, and the ‘individual’ in the sense I am thinking of—insecure, aspirational, trepidatious—seems to populate a lot of modernist literature. Where Augustine in the Confessions writes as if to purge himself of his individual contingencies, to fully reconcile himself with a divine plan far greater than him, and where God is a reassurance to his troubled and formerly skeptical soul, the modern writer feels simultaneously that it is a necessity to express their individuality (‘translating not having been seen into having been seen’, as Hegel puts it) and that they have no assurance in what their individuality actually consists in.8 This particular combination is what gives rise to the insecurity I am concerned with. With no God to defer to, the meaning of the modern individual’s existence becomes the task of the individual themselves; and yet, as Gabriel Josipovici points out, without any assurance of our authority in this task, all of our attempts can appear as presumptuous:
There is nothing special about Prufrock, or about Eliot either, to justify their utterances—so how should they presume? Presume to act, presume to write, presume to tell other people about the world or how to live their lives. … Proust filled, from childhood, with the urge to write, and yet incapable of ever getting down to work because he cannot conceive of an adequate subject about which to write.9
These are not abstract intellectual problems but problems of life: it can be intimidating to live without having a sense of who one is (or is supposed to be), and yet it is dizzying to try and ascertain such a sense.10 This, among other things, is what I take to be central in Elif Batuman’s novels The Idiot (2017) and Either/Or (2022). Selin, the protagonist, is an undergraduate at Harvard, and is thus in a stage in life which, on the one hand, signifies accomplishment and the sense of having completed something (high school, childhood) and yet, on the other hand, positions her as being at the beginning of a process, an under-graduate, a person yet to accomplish something. Either/Or opens with an epigraph from Kierkegaard’s book of the same name:
And is it not a pity and a shame that books are written which confuse people about life, make them bored with it before they begin, instead of teaching them how to live?11
This ‘pity’ is precisely what bothers Selin. If our condition is that we must enact our existence in order to really exist, how and where are we supposed to learn how to enact our existence?12 Selin feels the gap between mere existence and accomplished existence in even the most ordinary occurrences. When she buys chocolate as a gift for a family she is staying with, she tells her friends that she’s afraid she’ll eat it all before she sees them—not because she is really afraid, but because she is ‘following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn’t resist chocolate.’13 For common behaviour to appear as a ‘rule’ to follow is to be detached from (one’s image of) what an ordinary person is; thus even ordinary human existence, which would perhaps take the form of rules being followed as habits, is something aspired to. Like Kierkegaard in the epigraph, Selin reads novels to try and find answers and, like Kierkegaard, she finds none. She reads Proust’s descriptions of his childhood experiences and doubts their relevance: ‘why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?’ Nonetheless, Selin shares with Proust the affliction described above: she is compelled to write, desperate to be ‘a writer’—some aspirational idea of a human existence—and yet finds herself totally unable or unprepared to write.
Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
This is the irony of the condition Selin lives in (and, if I am right, a lot of the rest of us live in it too): a ‘deep conviction’ of one’s existence accompanies an incapacity to enact this existence. From this perspective, the Cartesian movement from ‘I think’ (conviction, aspiration) to ‘I am’ (enaction, accomplishment) is not a mere logical step but a difficult practical task whose destination is concealed (perhaps because it is so tied to the individual ‘I’—there is no rule delimiting it).14 Indeed, the task is so difficult that The Idiot concludes with Selin’s realisation: ‘I hadn’t learned anything at all.’ At least according to the account I have given so far, this makes The Idiot a distinctly modern novel: it is both a reflection on and the result of the aspiration to represent and enact one’s life in a written narrative, and it ends with an acknowledgment of how disappointed this aspiration often ends up being. So where do we go from here? Does modern selfhood condemn us to be idiots, unable to make sense of our lives?
In Either/Or, Selin buys a copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or along with André Breton’s Nadja. At first, she still seems stuck in her aspirational mindset: ‘It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.’ But it seems relevant that Selin does not seem to read the whole of Kierkegaard’s book. By some mixture of events in her life, including the discovery of Kierkegaard—a writer obsessed with the limitations of words and the necessity of risks and leaps—Selin in Either/Or wants to act: to enact her life not just by finding it narrativised in someone else’s book, but by living out a narrative and making sense of her life not as a plan to be realised but as a process that realises itself in every moment. The phrase Selin uses is ‘to get out’. Her desire to be a writer is what she is ‘counting on, in order to get out’; she asks of Breton’s Nadja ‘did she get out?’; at every party, the question she hopes to hear or to ask is: ‘shall we get out of here?’
A philosophical point here (if indeed we can distinguish the philosophical from everything else in life) is what both Selin and Kierkegaard realise: that for life to have meaning, to be recognisable as a narrative, one must from time to time ‘get out’ of the narrative process. That is, to enact one’s life such that it has a sense of narrative tying it together, one must step out of what has been tied together. There are two pictures of life, we might say, and Selin’s journey is to move from one to the other. Firstly, a picture that we find in epic poetry, Augustine, and in more traditional novels: there is a narrative given to us, a meaning stamped upon us, and our life is merely the process of this narrative unfolding. According to this picture we can, as it were, ‘watch’ the story of our lives as they play out. But as Selin realises, to be held captive by this picture is to be an ‘idiot’, hoping to find one’s life readymade in a novel, hoping to ascertain the rules according to which one must live. The second picture, therefore, does away with the authority of the narrative in the first picture; the space left behind is filled by us as authors of ourselves. As Cavell writes, ‘it is the very sense of my need for a human proof of my human existence—some authentication—that is the source of the idea that I need an author.’15 According to this picture we live ‘without authority’ (a phrase Kierkegaard used often, regarding the character of his own writing). A narrative might precede my present moment, insofar as I have found or established one, but this narrative can continue only insofar as I interrupt it; that is, insofar as I recognise myself as the source of this narrative, and not vice versa.
I mentioned before the irony of Selin’s (and our) condition: to have a conviction of one’s identity alongside a feeling of incapacity about enacting this identity. With this second picture, it seems that irony is also the solution to this problem. The narrative of my life continues only insofar as, in acting, I interrupt it. I look at who I am—who I have been so far—and interrupt this continuity as if saying ‘And yet, (…)’. Perhaps this is what Wittgenstein is getting at when he says that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’, at least insofar as, by saying this, he combines the question of practical action with the question of meaning and significance.16
III
And yet, if all of this is the case, one question remains: does philosophy and literature (or whatever blend of the two I am thinking about here) depend upon some practical element which it must nonetheless leave out of its own work? That is, when we afford such an importance to action, must our thinking and writing fall short of themselves in order to leave room for an essential activity that takes place outside of them? Try as I may, I cannot depict the motion of activity in static words. The solution here, I think, is to be found in the form of writing rather than in content. Only in form, in the way that something is written, can the irony that unites aesthetics with ethics be achieved. And this, after all, is what I have actually been concerned with from the start of this essay. When I distinguished between what Kant says and the manner in which he says it, when I noted the importance of dialogue to Plato, and when I ascribed a significant capacity for communication to novels, I was trying to enact a certain attentiveness to form which, if I am correct in what I have said, might be necessary for us to philosophise at all.
Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 23.
See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §74, §76, and The Encyclopaedia Logic, §10.
Victor Goldschmidt, Les Dialogues de Platon: Structure et Méthode Dialectique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), p. 3.
Vatican Sayings, LXIV.
This problem might get us dangerously close to the mistake Pierre Menard makes in Broges’s short story: Menard thinks that, to produce a proper translation of Don Quixote he must, in effect, be Cervantes. In the same way, if someone is to understand an essay not just as a series of claims but as an activity of thought, immersed in a life, would they have to be the author of the essay? To understand what I say, must you also live my life? I would suggest that this Menard-esque approach is mistaken because it assumes that understanding is always a complete understanding; in fact, there is probably no such thing. The incompleteness or subjective colouration of our interpretations is what prevents them from being mere restatements of what we have read.
Joan Didion, The White Album (London: 4th Estate, 2017), p. 11; Søren Kierkegaard quoted in Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 3.
Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony, p. 13.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §396. The last words that Heine attributes to Hegel (‘There was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me’) place Hegel comfortably in this insecure modern tradition, despite his arrogance.
Gabriel Josipovici, The Lessons of Modernism (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 110.
The problem of life I am describing here has the same structure as the problem of expressing belief that I have written about before; ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ has here become ‘How can I know who I am until I see what I do?’
Elif Batuman, Either/Or (London: Penguin Books, 2022).
See Stanley Cavell, ‘Being Odd, Getting Even: Threats to Individuality’, Salmagundi No. 67 (1985).
Elif Batuman, The Idiot (London: Penguin Books, 2017).
Again, see Cavell, ‘Being Odd, Getting Even’.
Cavell, ‘Being Odd, Getting Even’, p. 103.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.421.