Unfortunately, philosophers tend not to be as self-aware as Pythons, and so they often fail to think about how their methods of thinking are perceived by others. And given the oddity of their examples and thought experiments, this often leads people to dismiss them as irrelevant and impractical. Since this is so, philosophers should take a leaf out of the Pythons’ book, and not just think about thinking but also think about how their thinking will be perceived by others—and, after doing so, work to explain to non-philosophers why their examples and thoughts experiments are relevant. And showing how the Pythons use techniques that are very similar to those used by philosophers would be a good place to start.
So, What Have Philosophers Ever Done for Us?
Appearances can be very deceptive, as the milkman-psychiatrist from “Jersey Cream Psychiatrists” might have said to the housewife who thought that he was just a regular milkman. Although philosophical discussions of runaway trolleys and people being attached to violinists might seem irrelevant to the issues that philosophers use them to address, they’re actually extremely useful tools for clarifying thinking about these issues. We can see this by comparing the use of such examples to the humorous techniques used by Monty Python. The Pythons’ references to their own show within their show parallels philosophers’ aim of thinking about how they (and others) are thinking by means of examples that are designed to identify how to think about such abstract issues as what makes an act morally right. Similarly, the Pythons’ use of bizarre examples to undermine humorously our unreflective everyday beliefs parallels philosophers’ use of similar examples to address such practical moral issues as, for example, abortion. Once we understand what philosophers are up to when they argue using bizarre examples, then, we can see that criticizing philosophers for their use is a bit like Reg (played by John Cleese in Monty Python’s Life of Brian) criticizing the Romans for not having done anything for the people of Judea. In that film, Reg, the leader of the militant revolutionary People’s Front of Judea, asks what the Romans have ever given the people of Judea. This leads one of his men, Xerxes, to reply “The aqueduct.” After Reg admits this, the following dialogue ensues:COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads.
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads . . .
—and then the other members of the People’s Front start listing all the other things that the Romans have given the people of Judea: irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths, public order, and peace. Similarly, if we ask “What have philosophers ever done for us?” we get involved in the following dialogue: “Well, their examples help us to decide what we think about issues we haven’t thought about before.” “Oh, yeah, well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?” “And their examples help us discover whether we really believe what we say we believe, or not.” “Yeah, all right. I’ll grant you that their examples help us to work out what we think, and to think better. But apart from helping us work out what we think, clarifying our views, and helping us to solve hard problems, what do philosophers ever do for us?!” “Well, their examples are amusing…!”
And now I’ll obey Reg’s command at the end of this scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and shut up.87
Pythonic Aspects of Philosophy
“There’s Archimedes, and I think he’s had an idea!”
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Tractatus Comedo-Philosophicus
ALAN RICHARDSON
What is the aim of your philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §309
A Senseless Waste of Human Reason
In the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, philosophers rediscovered an important idea, the idea of nonsense.88 Throughout the next few decades, philosophy was rife with discussions of nonsense. Indeed, an awful lot of philosophers through the first half of the twentieth century thought that an awful lot of other philosophers were speaking nonsense. (Very few philosophers thought that they themselves were speaking nonsense; nonsense was routinely understood to be what they spoke at the next café over, especially if that café was in Paris or the Black Forest.)
Why was nonsense so useful to philosophers at that time? Because those philosophers were coming to understand that much of what passed for philosophy really was, at the end of the day, difficult to understand not because it was deep but because it really did not make any sense at all. Anyone might find occasion to say “Besides the beer, there is nothing in our fridge,” but it takes a philosopher to write, with a show of great profundity, something like, “Besides Being, there is Nothing”—and then go on to investigate, as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) did, the precise nature of that Nothing.89 The claim about the state of the fridge is either true or false—and if you are interested in making dinner, it matters if it is true or false. It began to dawn on a number of philosophers back in the 1920s that the claim about Being and Nothing, on the other hand, was neither true nor false—and the claim couldn’t possibly matter whether you were making dinner, looking to get drunk, or doing anything else. ‘Besides Being, there is Nothing’ is more like saying “Ni! Ni! Ni!” than like saying there is only beer in the fridge. As you can see, then, the importance of having an account of nonsense for some philosophers was precisely to find good grounds upon which to accuse other philosophers of speaking nonsense. If you have taken philosophy classes, you may well feel the pull of this maneuver; if you teach philosophy classes, you certainly feel the pull.
Where do we meet nonsense in our everyday lives? Most manifestly in certain comedic moments. A man with a thick foreign accent enters a tobacconist’s shop, consults a book, and says, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. Certainly, however, the state of this man’s hovercraft is not something a tobacconist is much interested in or can really help with. A blancmange finds itself contesting for the All England Lawn Tennis Championship. Karl Marx finds himself competing for fabulous prizes on a TV game show. Neighborhood women gather round to find out whether the son of one of them—a grown son, who is Minister of Overseas Development—can talk yet. These situations are at best silly and, if taken seriously, would be absurd or nonsensical.90
So, on the one hand, there is a certain form of comedy—a form which many of the greatest moments from Monty Python exemplify—that exploits the absurd and the nonsensical for comedic effect. And, on the other hand, we have a clear twentieth-century philosophical drive on the part of some philosophers to accuse other philosophers of purveying nonsense. Attention to these two facts can change our attitude toward philosophy entirely. Comedy, I shall argue, when viewed as something other than a repository of example, can effect a decisive transformation of a vision of philosophy by which we are possessed.91
Let us return to the philosophers. We have a vision, offered by Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), for example, of Martin Heidegger as engaged in the following sort of activity. Heidegger stands before hundreds of students in a lecture hall and proclaims “I’ll have the spam, spam, spam, baked beans, sausage, and spam.” To this, the students rise in rapturous applause, as both their existence and their German destiny are revealed to them. Heidegger publishes a book in which he reveals that “the human brain is like an enormous fish; it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see.” This book is greeted as the profoundest statement of the place of humanity in the world.
Why, according to Carnap, would Heidegger be engaging in this ludicrous behavior? Carnap’s view is that when philosophers go on this way they are “expressing an attitude toward life” in somewhat the same way that Beethoven or Mozart is expressing an attitude toward life in his music. But,
the Ninth Symphony is not nonsense; even Mozart, the Requiem notwithstanding, did not write nonsensical music. Carnap’s view was that one got nonsense if one tried to express an attitude toward life in the form of a theoretical understanding of the world. Thus, Heidegger ought to have offered us music (most likely involving oompah bands and Lederhosen, in Heidegger’s case, sad to say) and came up with nonsense instead because he thought he was giving an account of the world. This leads Carnap to conclude that “metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.”92
We can dig deeper than Carnap does, though. Let us grant that some philosophers, perhaps even Heidegger, unwittingly purvey nonsense. The offering of nonsense in the world is, however, not a mistaken attempt to turn an attitude toward life into a theory—it is an expression of a particular attitude toward life. Heidegger does not seek to be Beethoven or Mozart and misfire; he seeks to be Professor I.H. Gumby and misfires. Moreover, he misfires not by making more sense than does Professor Gumby, but by being less funny than Gumby. That is to say, Heidegger, unwittingly to be sure, expresses a comedic attitude toward life in offering nonsense as his contribution to the world, but he is a terrible comic; his nonsense is not amusing. We can alter our lesson from Carnap accordingly and say that we have conjectured that philosophers are comedians without comic ability.
This is a profound conclusion that explains many heretofore inexplicable phenomena. For example, among philosophers, the following is a common, all too common occurrence: scores of philosophers gather for a learned talk by a distinguished philosopher on the topic of, say, philosophy of physics; the speaker expresses a desire to be understood by all in the room, but then gives a talk so technical that only three people in the world could understand it. After the talk, two members of the audience meet in the foyer and this conversation ensues:DR. A.R.: That was like a Monty Python skit.
DR. G.H.: Yes, a bad Monty Python skit.
Exactly so! On my diagnosis the talk really was bad absurdist humor. The speaker, just like Heidegger, missed the boat right from the start. He didn’t even realize he was doing comedy. Lacking such self-awareness, he offered up comedy of the worst sort; comedy that mocks rather than amuses or enlightens his audience.
Another important consequence of my view is that we have an explanation of why many philosophers of the sort who are drawn to Carnap (so-called analytic philosophers) find Monty Python particularly amusing, even to the point (witness this book) of thinking that Monty Python has some secret wisdom about philosophy. These philosophers are, on my view, drawn to the very same thing in philosophy and in Monty Python: a sort of pleasure that derives from “getting the joke.” What is it to understand the work of Spinoza or Descartes or Kant, anyway? It is not to learn something about the world, but to learn a style of telling stories about the world. To be sure, these stories are not funny (we are dealing in bad comedy, we must not forget), but this is why we must attend to the peculiarities of absurdist humor. For it is not true that one gets a joke just if one finds it funny. Getting a joke is understanding a joke and understanding why it is, properly speaking, a joke, even if it is not funny. In the case of absurdist humor, we dig down to yet another level, however: sometimes what is most funny about a Monty Python skit is how it resists full comprehension—the way it presupposes wildly bizarre events, often without drawing attention to these presuppositions.93 Graham Chapman appears as a black African tribesman who is also the son of a white working-class Londoner. Calls to the fire department require that you give your shoe size. The intellectual pleasure here is how very much such things do not reflect or describe the world as we know it; they have their own logic, their own structure. The world of the joke is not our world, but the joke reveals something about our world precisely by presenting a different world.
The lesson here about philosophy is not that Monty Python has anything in particular to teach about the issues that philosophers find philosophical. Please, do not, despite what anyone else in this book tells you, watch Monty Python to learn about the mind-body problem or the nature of knowledge. There is no particular philosophical content in Monty Python—but the form of the work tells us something about the form of philosophy. Philosophy is formally just like absurd comedy without being funny. The intellectual pleasure in understanding Leibniz’s monadology is, thus, just like the intellectual pleasure of watching the Python sketch in which Michael Palin is trying to hijack a plane to Luton (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 16, “Show 5”)—except in the case of Leibniz, there is no amusement. The intellectual state of doing philosophy (as analytic philosophers do it) is, thus, like comprehending a Monty Python episode minus the amusement. It is like having a keen sense of humor without finding anything actually funny.94
On this account, the principal difference between, say, Terry Jones and Martin Heidegger is that Jones is aware that he is a comedian and Heidegger is not aware that he is a comedian. This helps to explain why philosophers come closest to being funny when they are sending up those whom they diagnose as asking silly or meaningless questions or offering meaningless propositions. For, in such instances, the self-awareness that the philosopher in question lacks is provided for us, the readers, by the philosopher who is sending him up. For example, without quite being funny in his remarks on Heidegger, Carnap at least does let us see a glimpse of how hilarious he and his philosophical friends in the Vienna Circle found Heidegger.95 Another excellent example of this mode of exposing the comedy under the grave facade of the philosopher is provided by William James. In one of his essays, James tries to convince his reader that the question “which is more essential to knowledge, the contribution of the mind or of the world?” is silly by comparing it to other questions: “Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg or his left leg more essentially?”96 It is clear that whatever else James is doing in this passage, the argumentative work has already been done through reductio ad humorum—once a question has been rendered silly, its possible answers are all silly. James’s point is that philosophers should stop asking such questions. 97 (I leave as an exercise for the reader to watch John Cleese as the Minister for Silly Walks as an attempt to answer James’s question about walking.)
Indeed, on at least one occasion, a philosopher in a reductio ad humorum passage came strangely close to the view that I am here offering. In a well-loved footnote to Chapter 2 of Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) becomes dimly aware that G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) might be, albeit unconsciously, a comedian. We need not burden ourselves with the particular mistake Russell accuses Hegel of making. Here is, however, the lesson Russell draws: “This is an example of how, from want of care at the start, vast and imposing systems of philosophy are built upon stupid and trivial confusions, which, but for the almost incredible fact that they are unintentional, one would be tempted to characterise as puns.”98
Hegel is an unintentional punster, led inexorably by the internal logic of punning to an execrable philosophy precisely because he doesn’t recognize the humor of his own pun. Accept the original pun, and Hegel’s philosophy follows; accept that working class Londoners might beget black African tribesmen, and the rest of the skit follows. Among the many interesting aspects of this passage from Russell is the illumination it offers regarding the errors of philosophers—philosophers do not make factual mistakes at the start of their work. They are confused and their subsequent mistakes derive from this initial confusion.
On very rare occasions, something of self-consciousness on this matter has dawned in the minds of a few particularly acute philosophers. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, and note the ‘s’) wrote that philosophers do not feel like friends of wisdom as much as they feel like “disagreeable fools and dangerous question-marks.” Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future” were to be free spirits, possessed of a joie de vivre that few actual philosophers have shown—they would even know how to laugh.99 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came to understand tha
t the joke was a potent tool for philosophical clarification, as in this passage from the Philosophical Investigations:The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.—Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke [Witz] to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.) 100
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