For all that, however, the film is not despairing. A thread of optimism runs through it and serves as an alternative to the portrayed estrangements. To see this, I’ll explain how the movie offers a sustained critique of transcendentalism, a way of looking at the world that connects and unifies the film’s sketches.
Is There Really Something Called ‘Transcendental Metaphysics’?
Transcendentalism is a theory embraced by thinkers as diverse as Plato, St. Augustine, and Vedantic Hindus. It posits the existence of two worlds instead of one. The physical world we live in is, according to the transcendentalist, a corrupt copy of a more perfect world. My slowly degenerating body, my material lap-top computer, my faltering democracy, and my entire sensory experience, to take a range of examples, are all just fleeting shadows when compared to the ideal and perfect realm believed to exist by transcendentalists. This ideal and perfect realm is populated by ideas (like “Justice”) and perfect beings (like “God,” “angels,” or even purified “souls”) that are higher and better—and serve as blueprints for—our usual, mundane realm of imperfect ideas and beings. This is not an obscure or uncommon theory. The vast majority of religious humans, both East and West, embrace some form of transcendentalism. If you believe that God is in his heaven, that He created the physical universe and is in some sense above and beyond his creation, then you are a transcendental thinker. Palin’s chaplain who gushes, “Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you,” is a transcendentalist through and through.
In Hindu philosophy the transcendental being is called Brahman. Brahman is the permanent eternal reality that serves as the stable principle underlying the fluctuating world of material nature. The cosmos is always changing and becoming something new and different, but Brahman is the divine unity behind this veil of changing appearances. And in the same way that the cosmos has a persistent unchanging reality that is hidden from view, so too each human has a persistent unchanging reality hidden within. In the West we call the hidden reality within us the “soul” and in the East it is called “atman.” This view of humans as a combination of body and soul is frequently called “dualism.” My body may change its material composition from one year to the next (even one day to the next), but a soul or atman remains the same over the course of these changes and provides my source of personal identity (my self) over time. Hindu philosophers (especially in the Svetesvatara and Katha Upanishads) recognize the common metaphysical functions of these permanent realities, Brahman and atman, by claiming that they are actually one and the same substance or being. In other word, the permanent hidden soul or atman inside me is actually a piece of God or Brahman itself. A bit of Brahman is living inside me as my divine soul and through moral perfection and wisdom I can release this soul (my true self) after death to rejoin its transcendent origin. According to Hindu orthodoxy, my own moral weakness and persistent stupidity prevents the estranged bit of Brahman within me from reaching its “home,” and damns my soul to return again and again in subsequent lifetimes (reincarnation). Hindu scriptures liken the eventual metaphysical reunion (after countless lifetimes) to a drop of water returning to the ocean or a tiny spark returning to the eternal conflagration. And this final communion will be eternal bliss.
The belief in a soul, whether in its Eastern or Western version, is transcendentalist because it posits another reality beyond this mundane world of sensory experience. It suggests that my true self is some intangible undetectable being, having a similar metaphysical tint as God, that will eventually go to live in a world beyond.
In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life the poor Yorkshire father (Palin) who explains to his abundant brood that “every sperm is sacred” is also a transcendentalist. The father is forced to sell his fifty-some children to science for “medical experiments” because God, according to Roman Catholicism, commands that sexual intercourse be for the exclusive purpose of procreation. As a result, there are just too many mouths to feed. Explaining the reason for the family’s predicament, the Yorkshire father says of the Church “Oh they’ve done some wonderful things in their time, they preserved the might and majesty, even the mystery of the Church of Rome, the sanctity of the sacrament and the indivisible oneness of the Trinity. But if they’d let me wear one of those little rubber things on the end of my cock we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.”
This is no mere critique of organized religion and its inflexible dogmatic positions. A deeper critique is lurking here, too. No one, whether Catholic, Hindu, or Muslim, or whatever, would submit themselves to the decrees and directives of organized religion if they did not already accept a transcendental commitment and further accept that an earthly institution is the trustworthy authority on or manifestation of those eternal transcendental truths. This is clear when the father concedes to his dejected children that the Church may not see his transgression of the rules (a transgression lobbied for by the jeopardized children), but God will see everything. There’s no escaping transcendental justice.
The father of this family (and the transcendental moralist, generally) is so focused on upholding the abstract intangible rule of God, that he causes immeasurable misery and suffering in this world—the world that contains his own flesh and blood, his children. The transcendental divine world beyond this mortal coil is so compelling that it takes priority over or overrides this world and its attendant values.
A similar example of this transcendental override can be seen in the classic Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita tells the story of a military leader named Arjuna who finds himself leading an army against an opposing legion of his kinsmen. On the battlefield, just before combat, Arjuna confides to his chariot driver (the divine being Krishna in disguise) that he is morally conflicted about the impending battle. Why should he kill his cousins? Indeed, why should he kill at all? These deep apprehensions plague Arjuna’s mind in the beginning of the text, and the remainder of the scripture is a series of arguments and revelations that Krishna offers to inspire Arjuna into battle. First, Krishna explains, Arjuna should kill his enemies because God says so—on the grounds of simple, straightforward, divine authority. Like Abraham in the West, Arjuna must demonstrate his devotion to the sacred, transcendental powers.
The second explanation that Krishna offers involves the realities of the Hindu caste, or class, system. Arjuna was born into the ksatriya class, which means that it is his sacred duty to fulfill the actions of a warrior. Social caste was understood in cosmic terms, and the harmony of the universe itself was tied to the social harmony of each caste fulfilling its function or destiny. Without the execution of our sacred duties, the world itself slouches toward chaos.
Finally, Krishna attempts to assuage Arjuna’s guilt over murdering his kinsmen by pointing out that it is only the physical body that gets destroyed. The soul, or atman, of his kinsman is divine and eternal and will not perish on Arjuna’s sword. In fact, the atman will only be liberated by the killing of the body. The Gita explains: “This physical body is perishable. But the embodied soul is described as indestructible, eternal and immeasurable. Therefore do fight. Neither the one who thinks it kills nor the one who thinks it is killed knows the truth. The soul neither kills nor gets killed. The soul is never born nor does it die at any time. It has neither past nor future. It is unborn, ever existing, permanent and ancient. . . . Just as a man discards worn out clothes and puts on new clothes, the soul discards worn out bodies and wears new ones” (Bhagavad Gita [Bantam Classics, reissued 1986], pp. 18-22).
What’s So Wrong with Transcendental Thinking?
Under this transcendental override, common sense, human compassion, peaceful diplomacy, and even the evidence of one’s senses are all overridden by Arjuna’s eventual acceptance of a transcendental God whose unfathomable commands require Arjuna to kill the enemy. The transcendental position here actually claims in essence that killing someone is doing them a favor (because it releases their transcendental self). I
f we put John Cleese in the role of Krishna and Michael Palin in the role of Arjuna, we’d have a classic Python sketch. Instead of trying to convince a fellow that his dead parrot is still alive or that his empty cheese shop really has cheese, we’d have God convincing a warrior to see killing as an act of helpfulness.
The meaning of life for the transcendentalist is hidden from the perceptions of common sense. Sometimes it is not just hidden but seemingly contradictory to life itself. As Monty Python often reminds us, transcendental values and the overrides they require can be comical, dangerous, or both. In the section of the film titled “Death,” the Pythons skewer the traditional idea of a transcendental soul that travels after death to a transcendental place (heaven) to enjoy eternal, transcendental bliss. The sketch shows the absurdity of the idea by simply imagining this heaven in concrete detail. After dying from a bad dish of salmon mousse, a group of souls enter a reception area in paradise. “Welcome to Heaven,” a hostess says as she greets them. “There’s a table for you through there in the restaurant.” She then wishes them “Happy Christmas” and explains that “it’s Christmas every day in Heaven.” For the transcendentalist (of both East and West), the return home of the transcendental soul to its transcendental realm is the very zenith and purpose of all life—it is the true meaning of life. Yet here, the Pythons lampoon it as a nauseating Vegas-style dinner-theater. Soon, an unctuous, overly tanned, sequin-tuxedo-wearing Graham Chapman takes the stage to sing, with hyper-white teeth, an unbearably maudlin song celebrating the good fortune of heaven’s elect. Up here, “it’s nice and warm and everyone looks smart and wears a tie.” But there’s more, including “great films on TV . . . The Sound of Music twice an hour, and Jaws I, II, and III.” All this, every day, over and over.
With this reduction ad absurdum, the Pythons vividly suggest that the ultimate culmination of transcendentalism is ridiculous and hardly worth striving for. Much like Palin’s and Cleese’s heartless school administrators and Palin’s sacred-sperm counting father, the sketch reveals how the appeal of transcendentalism collapses under its own weight. Far from being desirable, the fruits of transcendentalism seem not only cloying (Las Vegas-style) but dangerous and dehumanizing. This was exactly what the historical Buddha said about the reigning Hindu philosophy of his time. Much as the Pythons urge in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the Buddha argues repeatedly that belief in a soul or a God or anything eternal and otherworldly actually interferes with our more immediate and pressing responsibilities to each other as human beings.
Remember from the Gita (but also see the earlier Upanishads) that Hindu orthodoxy maintained a transcendentally mandated social caste system (wherein a cosmic class hierarchy manifested itself in all subsequent generations of this earthly realm); a transcendental divine soul (atman); and a transcendental God (Brahman) who would be the ultimate blissful repository of enlightened souls. The Buddha (Siddattha Gotama, 563-483 B.C.E.) didn’t like any of these standard Hindu ideas and explicitly argued against them throughout his original scriptures. These are known as the Tipitika scriptures, written in the language Pali. One of these scriptures, the Agganna sutta, criticizes the traditional caste story that Brahmins were born of God’s mouth while the subservient caste, the Sudras (including the lowest Untouchables) were born from his lowly feet. Buddha counters this longstanding prejudice, and deflates the mystification, by pointing out that all the Brahmins, warriors, craftsmen, and servants that he knows were all born the exact same way—from their mother’s wombs! In addition, the Buddha noted that since virtue and vice are easily witnessed in all the castes (not just the Brahmin priestly class), there is no real ground for saying that one caste is inherently better than another. Open your eyes, he suggests, and you will find Brahmin scoundrels as well as Untouchable saints. A more earthly law of value, of observable ethical goodness, should therefore trump the old transcendentalist hierarchy.
Yet the Buddha saved most of his logical acumen for a career-long attack on the Hindu idea of the soul. He aimed not to be some nihilistic kill-joy, however, but to break the romantic obsession with eternal unseen realities which Indian culture had embraced—the kind of romanticism which, in scriptural form, led Hindu Gods (like Krishna in the Gita) to pronounce that killing is acceptable because this mortal life is only illusion anyway. Death and even human suffering is not as troubling for the transcendental thinker because this short illusory life will be infinitely outweighed by the next world—where we’re going to find perfect joy, and Jaws I, II and III, forever and ever, amen.
The Buddha finds all this buoyant brightness rather suspicious. As did Wittgenstein, who traced the source of philosophical confusions to careless uses of language, Buddha thinks that language has gone on holiday. What does it mean to be perfectly happy? In the Potthapada sutta (Digha Nikaya), Buddha retells a debate he had with some “philosophers and brahmins” who believed that “the soul is perfectly happy and healthy after death.” The Buddha says:I asked them whether, so far as they knew it or perceived it, the human world was perfectly happy, and they answered “No.” Then I asked them: “Moreover, can you maintain that you yourselves for a whole night, or for a whole day, or even for half a night or day, have ever been perfectly happy?” And they answered: “No.” Then I said to them: “Further, do you know a way or a method, by which you can realize a state that is altogether happy?” And still to that question they answered: “No.” And then I said: “Sirs, have you ever heard the voices of heavenly beings who had realized rebirth in a perfectly happy world, saying: ‘there is a right path, a true path, which is in human capacity to follow, a path to the world of unfailing bliss, for we ourselves by following it have come to this world of bliss’?” They still answered: “No.”52
The Buddha concludes from this Socratic questioning, that, while their mouths are moving and words are coming out, these philosophers and Brahmins are really speaking a kind of nonsense. They’re like carpenters who build staircases for mansions that they’ve never seen, and for which they have no dimensions or measurements. They labor, but their misunderstanding of what they do renders their work absurd.
Why must transcendentalists so misunderstand what it is they strive for? The real point of the Buddha’s argument is metaphysical. Why can’t you be perfectly happy? Why can’t you even be happy for more than a few hours? Because happiness is inherently impermanent (anicca). Like all other feelings, happiness comes and goes, and like all other things in the world, it cannot last. Treating a moment as if it were a thing to be possessed ad infinitum is a regular human tendency. But it is regularly in error. Even for those who enjoy Vegas-style dinner theater, two or three hours may be a treat. But days and years and centuries would seem more a propos of hell than heaven.
Upon close inspection, Buddha shows, paradise crumbles. The atman, on the other hand, is a no show. The Buddha thinks that atman is nowhere to be found except in the literary inventions of Hinduism and the confusions of its followers. Buddhism, contrary to all dualistic theories, asserts that we are not made up of two metaphysically different parts, a permanent spirit and an impermanent body. Buddhism breaks with most religions, East and West, by recognizing that we are each a finite tangle of qualities, all of which eventually exhaust themselves, and none of which, conscious or other, carries on independently. All humans, according to Buddha, are composed of the five aggregates (khandas ); body (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), dispositions or volitional tendencies (sankhara) and consciousness (vinnana). If the Buddha was standing around in the battlefield setting of the Bhagavad Gita, he would certainly chime-in and object to Krishna’s irresponsible claim that a permanent soul resides in Arjuna and his enemies. Show me this permanent entity, the Buddha would demand. Is the body permanent? Are feelings permanent? What about perceptions, or dispositions, or even consciousness? The Buddha says “If there really existed the atman, there would be also something that belonged to this atman. As however, in truth and reality, neither an atman nor anything belongi
ng to an atman can be found, is it not really an utter fool’s doctrine to say: This is the world, this am I; after death I shall be permanent, persisting and eternal?” (Mijjhima Nikaya) Buddha examines all the elements of the human being, finds that they are all fleeting, and finds no additional permanent entity or soul amidst the tangle of human faculties. There is no ghost in the machine.
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