At the end of his first term at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein supposedly asked Bertrand Russell: ‘am I a complete idiot?’ 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.
Idiocy and Irony
Idiocy and Irony
Idiocy and Irony
At the end of his first term at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein supposedly asked Bertrand Russell: ‘am I a complete idiot?’ 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.