Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  You’ve just witnessed what’s peculiar about (the so-called “early”) Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy. Let’s see why his hope to cure philosophy is ambitious by contrasting that aim with the more modest one he expresses in mid-life. To do so we need to get into the head of the so-called “later” Wittgenstein by returning to “Spectrum: Talking About Things.”

  An Exercise for the Reader

  Consider the presenter’s “vexed question.” How might we evaluate the query, ‘What is going on?’

  Is it grossly ungrammatical?

  —No. It’s fine.

  Is it full of obscure words?

  —No. It contains just four words, each of which is perfectly commonplace.

  Does it make sense?

  —It depends! Or so says the mature Wittgenstein, with his eye on the way meaning exists in our use of language. Here are two ways to use the words ‘What is going on?’ and make perfect sense:Situation A:

  The day before your birthday you witness your best friends plotting and whispering. You say: “What is going on?”

  Used in this situation, the sentence ‘What is going on?’ means something like: “You can’t fool me, you guys; what are you up to now?” In this context the sentence ‘What is going on?’ makes perfect sense. It makes equally good sense used in quite different ways, too:Situation B:

  You walk in on your lover in bed with your best friend, and you say: “What is going on?”

  The words ‘What is going on?’ have meaning used in this context too! [What meaning exactly is left as an exercise for the reader.]

  Now suppose that instead of asking, you’re asked, out of the blue, ‘What is going on?’ Even then the question makes sense so long as you can guess how the questioner intends it to be understood. Here are two examples:Situation C:

  You hear ‘What is going on?’ and ask, “Going on where?”

  By wondering this, you indicate that you take your questioner to be using ‘going on’ in the sense of happening at a place, as in the question, “What’s going on at Jean-Paul Sartre’s tonight?”

  Situation D:

  You hear ‘What is going on?’ and ask, “Going on what?”

  This question shows that you’ve understood your interlocutor to mean going on in the sense of being placed on (to), as in: “What’s going on (top of) the telly?”

  No Ambition

  As the four situations illustrate, the meaning of the sentence ‘What is going on?’ depends on its use, so that its meaning changes as its use changes. Nevertheless, we can make sense of the question used in these ways, whereas we can’t make sense of ‘What is going on?’ as it occurs in “Spectrum: Talking About Things.” On this both the twenty- and the forty-something Wittgenstein are likely to agree (for different reasons); where they differ is in their conception of and response to nonsense.

  Suppose we agree that as the presenter uses it, the sentence ‘What is going on?’ makes no sense. If it doesn’t, and we can figure out why it doesn’t, can we apply that diagnosis to philosophical statements in general and perhaps avoid doing whatever it is that leads to nonsense?

  Yes, says the young Wittgenstein. Philosophical nonsense is something distinctive; it is something we can spot and throw away once and for all, after climbing “through it, on it, over it.”

  Nope, says the older Wittgenstein; sad to say, philosophy isn’t like dog-doo. One can’t avoid it by stepping over it.

  In denying this possibility, Wittgenstein admits that his earlier ambition to wash his hands of philosophy amounts to wishful thinking. Why? Because to be able to avoid nonsense, we’d need to know its characteristics, what it looks like. And as we just saw, the details of context matter to whether the sentence makes sense and what kind of sense it makes. It’s easy to see how these contexts might be varied—and so the meaning of sentences occurring in them—in infinitely many ways. Given this, who can describe the contexts that will yield philosophical nonsense. Who can say what nonsense looks like?

  From the later Wittgenstein’s perspective, the presenter and guests on “Spectrum: Talking About Things” can’t predict the ways their conversation might lapse into nonsense. Since their (and our) uncertainty in this regard is inevitable, philosophy has no cure.

  How to Patent Nonsense

  With this in mind, the later Wittgenstein reshapes both his practice of philosophy and his goals. As in the Tractatus, he continues to use philosophical language to subvert it, but instead of attempting to solve the problem of philosophical nonsense once and for all, Wittgenstein’s later practice is to test particular classes of expressions (color words, for instance) in this and that context in order to reveal the variety of ways sense passes into nonsense. He aims to:teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. (Philosophical Investigations, §464)

  Exactly how is this practice—this new way of engaging in philosophy—carried out? Let’s use Monty Python’s Flying Circus to make a preliminary point about the very fine line between making people laugh and liberating them from philosophical headaches.

  “Is There Life After Death?”

  We have, again, a talk show, but now instead of a guest several corpses are “slumped motionless in their seats.” The topic is different as well. The host, Roger Last (John Cleese), asks the question:Gentlemen, is there a life after death or not?

  Sir Brian?

  (Silence)

  Professor? . . .

  Prebendary? . . .

  Well there we have it, three say no. (“ ‘Is there’ . . . Life After Death?,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 36, “E. Henry Tripshaw’s Disease”).

  Despite ourselves, we laugh to see corpses dangling off chairs. Why? Perhaps the impiety of laughing at death is a relief, given society’s unrelentingly solemn attitude towards death; or perhaps we laugh because the bodies are the remains of an aristocrat, an academic, and a clergyman, and who thinks they have much of a pulse to begin with? Plato himself laughs at this in the Phaedo, where he lets fly the quip that you must be dead already if you’re a philosopher. If we reflect also on the attempt to interview dead men on the subject of life after death, we may laugh at the idiotic appropriateness: Who could be better to ask? Who could be worse?

  Why else do we laugh at the skit? Some of the humor of the sketch comes from using language in ways it normally doesn’t get used. For example, we don’t expect corpses to speak or people to speak to them, so the concepts of speaking and asking is out of place here, and it’s incongruous and funny when the host expects an answer, just as it is would be to talk to a lamppost or a mannequin. Similarly, we know that while people use silence meaningfully all the time, in wounded silences, compassionate silences, and so on, corpses do not—in this sense, corpses are not silent—so it’s funny to see someone mistakenly treat the two cases as the same.

  “Language Games”

  So Monty Python derives some of its funniness from incongruous and absurd uses of language; how is this like or unlike Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Certainly, Monty Python’s sketches raise (implicitly or explicitly) the kinds of questions about language that the later Wittgenstein poses.

  But there is an important difference between the nonsense on which their comedy depends and the nonsense Wittgenstein thinks pervades philosophy. We know that comedy misuses language. We know that we are to laugh at these misuses. To use Wittgenstein’s expression, we understand how the “language game” of comedy is played. In practicing philosophy, however, we’re never entirely sure how seriously to take what we’re doing—indeed, we’re often not sure what we’re doing!

  Remember this difference as we begin to engage in philosophy as Wittgenstein does, that is, by investigating our uses of concepts taken from specific areas within our language.

  “I’d Like to Put This Question to You, Please, Lizard”

  Let’s focus on our language about animals. Monty Python occasionally gives us vicious animals—witness the killer sheep in
Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But the sheep kill only after they become intelligent and human-like, and it’s more typical to find animals appearing supremely indifferent to us. This indifference is, moreover, charming. At least, this is the case in “A Duck, a Cat, and a Lizard (Discussion)” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 5, “Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”). Here a “chairman” (Terry Jones) attempts to engage his animal “experts” in a discussion of police force:CHAIRMAN: Now first of all I’d like to put this question to you please, lizard. How effective do you consider the lethal weapons employed by legal customs officers, nowadays?

  (Shot of lizard; silence)

  Well while you’re thinking about that, I’d like to bring the duck in here, and ask her . . . to clarify the whole question.

  (Shot of duck; silence)

  Perhaps the cat would rather answer that?

  (Shot of cat; silence)

  No?

  Lizard?

  (Shot of lizard again and then back)

  No? . . .

  What is it that’s so absurdly dear about the image of a duck, lizard, and cat sitting in chairs, being queried? And why is it that their absolutely unchanging expressions appear so sweet and goofy in this context?

  What is endearing about the duck, cat, and lizard, I think, is that they haven’t got anything to say. What is utterly lovable about these animals is their muteness and indifference. They are not human; they do not babble endlessly. Surrounding them with chairs and microphones, placing them before a television camera-crew, the very incongruity of these things, of putting animals in this situation turns what isn’t exactly front-page news—animal muteness—into something absurd and laughable. At the same time, however, the incongruity and absurdity shows how what we mean by sitting, talking, thinking, and even having a face shifts from sense to nonsense depending on use.

  Does It Sit on a Chair?

  Take our concept of sitting, for example. We say that people, books, and paper sit, that they sit on desks or chairs, and that people and not books or papers sit down. But what does a lizard do? Does it sit on a chair like a book or like a person or neither?

  Similarly, can you really talk to a duck? The concept of expressing , like the companion ideas thinking and gesturing, is enmeshed with our knowledge of the human body, especially the human face—its mouth, brows, eyes—and hands. The concept of expressing is bound up with the concept of having a face, and the concept having a face is bound up with having a human mouth and eyes and brows, that is, the sort that can express.

  Given the interrelationship of concepts about faces and expression, it makes sense to describe a woman’s face as expressionless, but what can it mean to use these concepts of a duck? Does it make sense to say a duck is expressionless? And if not, can it make sense to say that they have faces?

  Notice that we are no longer certain what having a face means: do we mean that ducks have faces in the sense that clocks do—as a front or surface—or what do we mean?

  “But—They Simply Do Not Talk”

  Let us consider a conventional philosophical question like “What is thinking?” A philosopher might believe that thinking causes talking, where talking is understood as the emission of meaningful sounds, the hard copy of thought, from our lips. Given the view that thinking causes talking, it might seem to follow that animals can’t think, since they evidently can’t talk. To this sort of reasoning Wittgenstein responds, in his Philosophical Investigations:It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: “they do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But—they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language. . . . (Philosophical Investigations, §25)

  In a nearby passage Wittgenstein says that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand it. His objection in that passage, as well as the one above, is not based on disagreement over the facts: Wittgenstein isn’t trying to remind us of dolphins or apes as evidence that animals do talk and think. Rather, Wittgenstein is objecting to the tendency to ask questions like “What is thinking?” without acknowledging the infinitely many different uses of the concept thinking (in thinking aloud, being thoughtless, and so on) in their infinitely varied interrelationships with other concepts in our language. Ignorance of these complexities, he thinks, leads philosophers to generate a hairball of difficulties and puzzles.

  “Is There Enough of It About?”

  This brings us back to the philosopher’s cramp and “Spectrum: Talking About Things,” our opening sketch. How are we to explain the curious responses of the presenter and the cricketer: the presenter’s multiplication of questions, the cricketer’s near silence? The cricketer has a mental cramp; he assumes he’d heard a genuine question (‘What is going on?’) that he feels he should be able to answer, though he can’t think how. Though the presenter has also gotten a mental cramp, unlike his guest, he thinks that to meet the challenge he must press further, dig deeper, and soldier on.

  Perhaps, like our presenter, philosophers take themselves and their work too seriously. Perhaps they need to get more laughs from the grueling work of philosophizing. But this is not how “Is There” ends. There, the presenter treats his work and the topics of the show as eminently serious and worthy of consideration. He closes the show saying:On Is There next week we’ll be discussing the question ‘Is there enough of it about?’, and until then, goodnight.

  Philosophers, no doubt, will tune in.

  16

  Why Is a Philosopher Like a Python? How Philosophical Examples Work

  JAMES TAYLOR

  Some people think that all philosophy departments should be closed down faster than a soiled budgie can fly out of a lavatory. It’s not hard to see why. After all, not only do philosophers typically dress worse than the Gumbys, but the way that they argue for their views seems exceptionally silly. When discussing practical moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia, or famine relief philosophers frequently come up with fantastic and far-fetched examples that don’t seem relevant to the case at hand. To illustrate her view on abortion, for example, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929) asks her readers to imagine that they wake up one day to find themselves attached to a famous violinist. Similarly, while arguing that people have a moral duty to aid the starving, the philosopher Peter Singer contends that if you think that a person should be blamed for failing to save a child from drowning in a shallow pond you have committed yourself to thinking that you should give almost all of your income to famine relief.84

  When faced with such examples normal people (that is, non-philosophers) are often incredulous. How on earth can such bizarre examples be relevant in any way to the moral issues that the philosophers who use them are discussing? But it’s not only the ordinary man on the street who is bemused by the way that philosophers argue about such real-world moral issues as famine, abortion, cloning and the like. People in charge of guiding public policy on such issues are also often completely bemused by (or, worse, contemptuous of) the way that philosophers discuss them. For example, Leon Kass, the Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the United States, has written that the contemporary philosophical discussion of cloning, stem cell research, and markets in human body parts “has grave weaknesses . . . [for] it ignores real moral agents and concrete moral situations . . . [preferring] . . . its own far-out, cleverly contrived dilemmas. . . .”85 Or, in other words, Kass thinks that the argumentative methods that philosophers use are as relevant to everyday life as a man with a stoat through his head.

  Complaints about Complaints and Thinking about Thinking

  So, should philosophy be considered just a strange and bizarre hobby, like camel spotting, collecting birdwatchers’ eggs, or teaching Scotsmen to play tennis? Not at all! In fact, philosophers’ argumentative strategies can be very useful in both clarifying the issues that they address and finding solutions to them. Since this is so, perhaps philosophers should follow t
he lead of John Cleese in the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch “Complaints” (Episode 16, “Show 5”) and complain about people (such as Kass) who make rash complaints about philosophy without making sure that those complaints are justified. But before they do this, philosophers have to show why these complaints are rash and unjustified. And (happily enough!) John Cleese’s complaint in this sketch about people who make complaints shows just how philosophers should show this.

  When Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first broadcast many people wrote in to complain about it. Far from being upset by this, the Python team was amused by the fact that many of the people who complained about them had clearly missed the point of the sketches they were complaining about. To make fun of such people they started making up complaints of their own to incorporate into their sketches. For example, after a sketch in which a psychiatrist dressed as a milkman made a pat diagnosis of a doctor’s depression as being the result of a severe personality disorder, Terry Jones, playing a psychiatrist called Dr. Cream, complained about “the way in which these shows are continually portraying psychiatrists who make pat diagnoses of patients’ problems without first obtaining their full medical history” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 16, “Show 5”). The sketch then cut back to the milkman-psychiatrist with the doctor in time to hear the milkman say “Mind you, that’s just a pat diagnosis made without first obtaining your full medical history.” Given this cut, it turns out that the joke’s on Dr. Cream because his complaint fails to be justified once the milkman-psychiatrist issues his caveat to his patient. Moreover, as well as this cut back to the milkman making Dr. Cream the butt of the joke, it also makes fun of certain members of the Python audience, for it highlights how silly it is for the Pythons to be expected to have the characters in their sketches adhere to the professional standards of their occupations. Nobody would believe that a person dressed as a milkman from “Jersey Cream Psychiatrists” who diagnoses people while delivering their morning dairy products is an accurate representation of a real psychiatrist, and so to complain as though someone would believe this is just daft.