Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  What’s So Grotesque about That?

  In their rejection of transcendentalism, Buddhism and Monty Python converge in their celebrations of the grotesque. The Python crew seems to relish the disgusting facts of human biology and they take every opportunity to render them through special effects. Throughout Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, blood spurts, vomit spews, babies explode from birth canals, decapitated heads abound, and limbs putrefy. Theravada Buddhism also celebrates the revolting, treating it as a meditation focus for contemplating the lack of permanence. The transcendentalist consoles herself with the idea that this physical body may decay and perish, but an eternal soul will outlast the material melt-down—not so for the Buddha.

  In an attempt to undercut human vanity and demonstrate the impermanence of all things, Buddhist scriptures are filled with nauseating details about rotting carcasses and putrid flesh. In the Anguttara Nikaya, for example, the scripture asks, “Did you never see in the world the corpse of a man or a woman, one or two or three days after death, swollen up, blue-black in color, and full of corruption? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to death, that you cannot escape it?” (III, 35)

  When I was at a monastery in Southern Thailand, I chanced upon some reproductions of “dhamma paintings” from the mid-nineteenth century. These pictures were from a Chaiya manuscript discovered nearby, and they depicted, in detail, the “Ten Reflections on Foulness” (asubha kammatthana). The paintings illustrate the various uses of corpses as objects for contemplating impermanence. Following the great Theravadan philosopher Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga text (“Path of Purification”), the artist rendered decaying corpses in rather comprehensive stages of dismemberment and putrification. According to Buddhaghosa, staring at a bloated corpse will be particularly useful to me if I’m feeling overly attached and arrogant about the shape and morphology of my body. If instead I’m feeling snobby or bigoted about my skin’s color or complexion, I should focus on the livid corpse that ranges from green to blue-black in color. Or, if I mistakenly feel that my body is my own, I am to rectify this error by meditating on a worm-infested corpse (puluvaka). As Buddhaghosa explains, “The body is shared by many and creatures live in dependence on (all parts and organs) and feed (on them). And there they are born, grow old, and die, evacuate and pass water; and the body is their maternity home, their hospital, their charnel ground, their privy and their urinal.” Buddhist “mindfulness” (meditational awareness) about the body is being aware of its transience, its brevity, its fugacity. The physical body is slowly macerating, and to try to hold onto it or recompose it is a pipe-dream.

  The single issue that invited comment from film reviewers when Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life was released was its wallow in the grotesque. One exclaimed that the film’s “ramshackle bouts of surreal physical comedy—a clotted mass of frenzied bodies, debris, mud, and gore—induce feelings of revolt and despair.”53 In light of the film’s critique of transcendentalism, however, this reviewer got it just backward. Far from despairing, the Pythons aimed to smash the deceptive veneer of puritanical snobbery that devalues the flesh and overvalues the invisible spirit. Like Buddhism, Python asks us to “say yes” to our true nature, filled as it is with impermanence and unpleasantness. At first this may seem jarring and disturbing, but in the long run it is preferable to self-deception through figmentary transcendent reality.

  Buddha’s rejection of a permanent transcendental soul is known as the anatta, or “no-self ” doctrine (and the companion doctrine that rejects the idea of a permanent God is called paticca samuppada, or “dependent arising,” because it denies the need for any transcendent uncaused cause). The most important Buddhist critique of the transcendental soul finds place in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. It is the idea that belief in unseen, eternal, and divine realities ultimately distracts us from our own humanity. Transcendentalism dehumanizes us by feeding selfish craving. If we embrace a worldview that pivots on the idea that we will attain immortality, then we are going to be overly concerned with our soul’s protection and its future fate. We become more concerned with saving our own souls than valuing and attending to the needs of those around us. Simply put, belief in a soul and a heaven of blissful happiness actually makes you less ethical in this life.

  The rejection of souls, heaven, and God, does not lead, as so many critics contend, to bleak egoistic nihilism. Many transcendentalists foretell a gloomy picture without the security of otherworldly meaning, predicting rampant hedonism (pure pleasure seeking) or nihilistic apathy. The Buddha disagrees and thinks that these life patterns are to be avoided as much as otherworldly dogmatism. The extremes, excesses, and general sufferings of the hedonist strategy and the nihilist strategy are revealed in the film.

  Terry’s Jones’s Mr. Creosote, for instance, is the giant embodiment of the crass pursuit of sensual gratification. After gorging himself on multiple servings of food and wine at a fancy French restaurant, his unchecked desire for the pleasures of chocolate puts him over the edge. Though he claims he can eat no more, Cleese easily seduces him with a single, small, “vaffer-thin” chocolate mint. Mr. Creosote then begins to inflate and he soon explodes, showering the restaurant in his blood and entrails. Obviously, such hedonism and self-gratification is not an appropriate fall-back for those who reject transcendental metaphysics and ethics. Nor is it appropriate to give oneself over to despair or indifference. The folly of that is illustrated in the movie’s gruesome portrayal of a liver transplant. After Graham Chapman starts the bloody business of removing this poor chap’s liver in his dining room, his partner, Cleese, chats up the man’s wife (Terry Jones in drag) in the kitchen. Cleese asks if she too would give up her liver, but she replies, “No . . . I don’t want to die.” Cleese perseveres and introduces her to Eric Idle, who steps out of her refrigerator and commences a musical tour of the sublime immensity of the universe and the tiny insignificance of her life:Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving

  And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,

  That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,

  A sun that is the source of all our power.

  The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,

  Are moving at a million miles a day

  In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,

  Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

  The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

  In all of the directions it can whizz

  As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,

  Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed

  there is.

  So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure

  How amazingly unlikely is your birth

  And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

  Because there’s bugger all down here on earth.

  “Makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?” Cleese and Chapman ask. “Can we have your liver then?” She gives in—“Yeah. All right, you talked me into it”—and the two doctors set upon her with their knives.

  Just as Mr. Creosote succumbs to sensual overindulgence, this housewife opts for a groundless underindulgence. Just because she realizes she lives in an almost infinitely large universe, that is no reason for her to think that her life is worthless in itself and not worth continuing. This is what the extreme nihilist does (indeed, this is what nihilism is all about), and the Python crew is showing us the absurdity of it. Life does not become meaningless once you give up the idea that you are playing a role in a transcendentally planned drama. The values of family, work, love, understanding, simple pleasures, and peace, don’t go away once you reject transcendent meaning. Nor does the woman’s natural desire for self-preservation and the avoidance of suffering evaporate once she realizes her own finitude.

  Transcendental dogmatism is dehumanizing, but so are the opposi
ng extremes of hedonism and nihilistic skepticism. The Buddha made this point explicitly when he argued for a Middle Way between all opposing extremes. Just as one should find a middle way between the slaveries of excessive indulgence and excessive asceticism (self-denial), so too one must avoid embracing both absolutist worldviews (like Palin’s toadying transcendentalist chaplain) and relativist worldviews (where all values and meanings are leveled or negated). The Buddha’s Middle Way doctrine seeks to reclaim human values and meaning by avoiding overly rigid blind faith and also avoiding distracting speculations about matters that are remote from lived experience.

  Back Down to Earth

  So, what are these more down-to-earth human values that must be rescued from transcendental flights-of-fancy and nihilistic negativity? In light of the film’s critique of transcendentalism, the extremely modest list of values offered at the end as final “answers” to the meaning of life make good sense. They are introduced by Palin (in drag) as he interrupts the Vegas-style celebration of perpetual Christmas. “Well, that’s the end of the film,” she announces. “Now here’s the Meaning of Life.” She opens an envelope and reads, “Well, it’s nothing special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

  This rather modest sounding list makes perfect sense if we no longer pine for some more grand transcendental meaning. Once we dispatch both the otherworldly values (toadying to God and conserving our sperm, for example) and the otherworldly “realities” which ground those values (soul, heaven, God), then matters of meaning become markedly more pragmatic and demystified. Like Buddha’s philosophy, the essential goals in life become attempts to realize moderation, actualize one’s potential, and reduce suffering. When we try to make issues of ultimate meaning more melodramatic than this, we end up with the distracting and dehumanizing edifices of transcendentalism.

  The Buddha offers us Four Noble Truths that can be used to fight these temptations and distractions. First, he says “All life is suffering, or all life is unsatisfactory (dukkha).” This seems pessimistic at first, but he’s simply pointing out that to have a biological body is to be subject to pain, illness, and eventually death. To have family and friends means that we are open to inevitable loss, disappointment, and also betrayal. But more importantly, even when we feel joy and happiness, these too are transient experiences that will fade because all things are impermanent.

  Second, the Buddha says “Suffering is caused by craving or attachment.” When we have a pleasurable experience we try to repeat it over and over or try to hang on to it and turn it into a permanent thing. Sensual experiences are not themselves the causes of suffering—they are inherently neutral phenomena. It is the psychological state of craving that rises up in the wake of sensations which causes us to have unrealistic expectations of those feelings—sending us chasing after fleeting experiences that cannot be possessed.

  The Third Noble Truth states that the cure for suffering is non-attachment or the cessation of craving. In the Samyutta Nikaya text, the Buddha says that the wise person “regards the delightful and pleasurable things of this world as impermanent, unsatisfactory and without atman (any permanent essence), as a disease and sorrow—it is he who overcomes the craving” (12:66).

  And the Fourth Noble Truth is an eight-fold path that helps the follower to steer a Middle Way of ethical moderation. Following the simple eight-fold path, which contains simple recommendations similar those listed at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, allows the follower to overcome egoistic craving. Perhaps the most important craving that must be overcome, according to Buddha, is the craving for immortality. The Buddha claimed that giving up transcendental tendencies would help us to better see the people all around us who need our help. We would become more compassionate, he argued, because we would not be distracted by cravings for the “other world.”

  Mind the Mindfulness

  As the Pythons suggest, however, not all dehumanizing distraction comes from “above.” Often, we lose sight of compassion and humane living by drowning ourselves in a sea of trivial diversions. In existential terms, we lose our “authentic self ” in the unimportant hustle and bustle of everyday matters. Consider again the executives of the Very Big Corporation of America. Later in the film, we learn that just before they were attacked by the mutineers sailing the Crimson Permanent Assurance they were having a meeting about “Item Six on the Agenda, the Meaning of Life.” The board chairman, Graham Chapman, turns things over to Michael Palin: “Now Harry, you’ve had some thoughts on this.” “That’s right, yeah. I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks,” Palin explains in his best American accent:What we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One, people are not wearing enough hats. Two, matter is energy; in the Universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

  The other Board members sit quietly through Palin’s impressive and important report. But, they need clarification about one of the more important points: “What was that about hats again?” one of them asks.

  Distraction reigns again in Part IV, Middle Age, when the hyper-pleasant, smiley, and vapid American couple (Palin and, in drag, Idle) are served up a “philosophy conversation” in the form of flashcard prompts. The waiter (Cleese) tries to get the insipid couple started on their philosophy conversation by asking, “Did you ever wonder why we’re here?” They fail utterly to stay on topic. “Oh! I never knew that Schopenhauer was a philosopher,” Idle exclaims. Palin responds, “Yeah. . . . He’s the one that begins with an S.

  WIFE: “Oh.”

  HUSBAND: “Um [pause] . . . like Nietzsche.”

  WIFE: “Does Nietzsche begin with an S?”

  HUSBAND: “There’s an S in Nietzsche.”

  WIFE: “Oh wow! Yes there is. Do all philosophers have an S in them?”

  HUSBAND: “Yeah I think most of them do.”

  WIFE: “Oh! Does that mean [the popular singer] Selina Jones is a philosopher?”

  HUSBAND: “Yeah, Right. She could be. She sings about the meaning of life.”

  WIFE: “Yeah, that’s right, but I don’t think she writes her own material.”

  HUSBAND: “No. Maybe Schopenhauer writes her material?”

  WIFE: “No. Burt Bacharach writes it.”

  HUSBAND: “There’s no S in Burt Bacharach.”

  If we combine this tedious conversation and the Boardroom’s fascination with hats, the results of Palin’s research begins to make sense. Human beings must “create” their “souls” day-by-day (rather than simply discover them, ready made) through “a process of guided self-observation.” The great enemy of this process, these sketches show, is distraction.

  This is a conception of the soul that the Buddha could agree with. It embraces impermanence, avoids transcendentalist metaphysics, and accepts the view that we must actively cultivate our “souls.” This is the point of Buddhist “mindfulness” (sati)—a powerful meditation that cuts through the dehumanizing distractions. There’s nothing mystical or particularly fancy about it. You can do it in your daily activities as well as in isolated contemplation. It just requires you to focus your mind and senses in the present moment, and to resist the mind’s natural tendency to wander off into the past or future, to replay events or imagine scenarios that fill our minds with worries, regrets, hopes or cravings. Mindfulness is a state of awareness that comes from training and discipline, a state that shuts out the drifting distractions of life and reveals the uniqueness of each present moment. In doing this careful attending, one can become more present in his
or her own life. Mindfulness helps to rehumanize a person by taking their head out of the clouds. And according to Buddhism it reconnects us better with our compassionate hearts by revealing other human beings as just human beings. Once the distractions of trivia, or theoretical, transcendental, or ideological overlays are removed, we may become better able to know ourselves and compassionately recognize ourselves in others. We may even come to learn that, in fact, we should all wear more hats. But we will only know for sure if we are less distracted and more mindful.

  9

  Is There Life After Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life?

  STEPHEN A. ERICKSON

  Questions regarding the meaning of life have haunted humanity, for these sorts of questions yield little in the way of sustainable answers. Little, that is, unless we answer them by way of belief systems that are quickly taken for granted, becoming merely conventional and soon thereafter artificial: in short, through doctrines that are seldom satisfying.

  It is therefore no surprise that the script of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life proved to be enormously frustrating for the Pythons, so much so that it was their last major project together. Like religions themselves, the questions surrounding the meaning of life separated them, rather than brought them together. In the words of John Cleese, “The script lacked a central idea.”

  But what would a central idea have looked like? Might it have been a specific one, like the idea that eating—or not eating—fish reveals life’s meaning? And to whom? The fish? Their consumers? Not very likely in either case. Something more general then? Perhaps a vantage point from which to understand competing accounts of life’s meaning? This sounds more promising, but also quite abstract and not at all comical. One doubts the Pythons would have pursued this. But we could pursue it, especially if the Pythons’ failure to do so may have been part of what flawed Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. So let us look at some competing accounts of life’s meaning, accompanied, naturally, by Monty Python.