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Idiocy and Irony - by Anna - Philosophical Crumbs

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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. 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:

Idiocy and Irony Anna Feb 22, 2023 23 1 Share René Magritte, Not to be Reproduced (1937) 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 t

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