Wit & Attitude Quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s line reads like a koan with teeth: it flatters the “stupid” without letting anyone off the hook. The word “may” is doing the heavy lifting. He’s not romanticizing ignorance; he’s pointing at the way our most embarrassing missteps can be the only available route to clarity when the terrain is foggy. In his world, the mind doesn’t advance by stacking correct propositions; it advances by colliding with the limits of what can be meaningfully said.

The subtext is methodological. Philosophical “stupidities” are often just category errors performed out loud: taking a word out of its everyday job and trying to make it do metaphysical labor. When Wittgenstein calls those stupidities “great,” he’s acknowledging their scale and their necessity. Grand confusion is frequently the precondition for a serious correction. You have to watch language fail before you can see what you were demanding from it.

Context matters: early Wittgenstein built an austere picture of logic and the world; later Wittgenstein became suspicious of philosophy’s appetite for purity. “Very wise” here is the later voice, skeptical of philosophical heroics and attentive to ordinary use. He’s also mocking the posture of the professional thinker who pretends not to blunder. The line quietly suggests that wisdom isn’t the absence of error; it’s the ability to turn a conspicuous mistake into a map of where the problems actually are.