But that’s just the start. That talk not only went well; people loved it. In fact, the club requested the talk for the following semester, and each year after that. And word traveled. I sent a videotape of its inaugural delivery to my Ph.D. advisor (who, having braved uncountably many dry-as-dust dissertations, himself pined for the fabled Monty Python tome), and he showed it to others. Soon I was giving the talk at other universities, sometimes to their philosophy department and sometimes to their philosophy club. Its text showed up on the internet (Python fans, truth be told, are a bit geekish) and I began receiving email from Pythonites and fellow philosophers. A few years later, when I found myself in the great American Midwest (aka Wisconsin) I asked the Wisconsin Humanities Council if ordinary Wisconsinites might enjoy this sort of thing, and soon I was showing Monty Python clips and talking about holism, rationality, and philosophy in libraries, schools, and the occasional church basement across the Dairy State. It continues; as I write, I’m scheduled to talk about philosophy and Monty Python in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, next week, as part of an Honors Lecture Series. This sixtieth or so delivery will be as much fun as the others. I may do this well into retirement.
So here’s a question: what has made this talk such a hit? It’s not, I think, merely that it offers a way to see some Monty Python clips; these are readily available without the trouble or expense of having me show them. Nor do I think it’s anything to do with me, since nearly all the people that come to see the talk don’t know me from Professor Gumby. What is it, then, about this talk’s juxtaposition of philosophy and Monty Python that makes it appealing to so many? Here’s a successful mix of popular culture and something quite definitely detached from popular culture, analytic philosophy. What’s behind the success? And what might that tell us about philosophy, or about Monty Python?
Hume’s Gap
That gap that I just mentioned between popular culture and philosophy has been around, it appears, for some time. It’s the starting point the Scottish philosopher David Hume chose for his 1748 essay, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, although Hume described it as a gap as between two “manners” of philosophy. The first of these, the “easy and obvious philosophy,” Hume said, devotes itself to getting people to feel and, thus, to act. Such philosophy, according to Hume (feel free to read this in a rich Scottish brogue), “make[s] us feel the difference between vice and virtue; [it] excite[s] and regulate[s] our sentiments” (p. 1). Now this sort of thing is still with us; indeed, attempts to excite and regulate our sentiments are nearly everywhere, from TV to radio to books and magazines to advertising to greeting cards. Make no mistake; it is thoroughly entertaining stuff, gripping, even, and (in moving us to act—to laugh, cry, applaud, protest, vote, or spend money) stunningly successful. We love it. Of course, we don’t call it ‘philosophy’ anymore; we call it popular culture. And it includes Monty Python.
Hume’s other manner of philosophy is the sort of thing that today goes by the name ‘philosophy’. This “accurate and abstruse philosophy,” as Hume called it, “regard[s] human nature as a subject of speculation; and . . . examine[s] it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object” (p. 1). In a nutshell, then, the “accurate and abstruse” philosophy is about figuring out why people get excited and move, while the “easy and obvious” philosophy is about actually exciting and moving them.
Given that description, it’s no surprise when Hume goes on to note that all the excitement (not to mention the fame and wealth) attaches itself to the easy and obvious philosophy. After all, that’s the sort of thing that, as Hume put it, “enters more into common life; molds the heart and affections; and by touching those principles which actuate men, reforms their conduct, and brings them nearer to the model of perfection which it describes” (p. 2). And the hard and abstruse philosophy? It, by contrast, is “found on a turn of mind, which cannot enter into business and action, [and] vanishes when the philosopher leaves the shade, and comes into open day; nor can its principles easily retain any influence over our conduct and behavior” (p. 2).
That description may sound a bit extreme—harsh, even—but I think we have that very same gap today, right now. In the role of the easy philosophy witness the avalanche of popular culture and its unvarying sentimental assault. The hard and abstruse philosophy, what came to be called simply “analytic philosophy,” lives in the offices and classrooms of our colleges and universities. And never the twain do meet.
For me, this gap is very familiar, and not just because I’m a philosopher. Imagine a comedian on stage in a packed house, doing really well. The audience is roaring. And offstage, next on in fact, is an analytic philosopher with a few comments on, oh, the relation of indexicals to Goodman’s new riddle of induction (if you have no idea what that means, well, then, that’s the point). Maybe the philosopher has an overhead transparency or two, each displaying a full page of quotations from other philosophers in a flashy nine-point font. Here there is a gap, literally, between popular culture and philosophy. Closing it—which the philosopher must do, or try to do, when it’s time to head out on stage—is no small feat. In giving my talk, I’ve been in that same position. That is, I’ve all but been that philosopher at stage right, waiting to say something about empirical research on human rationality or the existentialist predicament, while the audience loses itself in the looniness of the “Burn the Witch!” scene or the impeccable absurdity of the Cheese Shop sketch. The fact that it all turned out okay—that I was able to go out on stage and close that gap—is good news not just for me but, I think, for philosophy itself.
In light of this gap between popular culture and philosophy, then, let’s pose the obvious questions. Chief among them, perhaps, is the question that passes through the head (if not over the tongue) of every student not sleeping through Introduction to Philosophy: why do we have philosophy at all? And given that we do have it, what should we do about the huge gap between it and, well, nearly everything else, including popular culture?
Hume’s Incomplete Advice
Hume offered one and a half answers to these two questions. For the first one, the one about why we have philosophy at all, he gave a psychological answer: he claimed that it was simply part of our psychological make-up that we aim not only to excite and move the people and things around us but to understand the true principles that govern our own excitement and movement. He writes that “man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment” (p. 3). But hold on; Hume adds, right away, that human understanding is so very limited that we are inevitably unsatisfied by science alone. Actually, it’s worse than that. Man, Hume writes, “is a sociable, no less than a reasonable being: But neither can he always enjoy company agreeable and amusing, or preserve the proper relish for them. Man is also an active being; but the mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry” (p. 3). Apparently, we can’t win. We are driven to seemingly incompatible ways of living—the active, the social, the philosophical, maybe there are more—but none by itself satisfies us.
In fact we’ve just managed to pose the second of our questions, in slightly different terms. Having cast the first question—the question of why we have philosophy at all—in terms of our psychological make-up, it’s hardly surprising when he casts the second question in psychological terms as well. The gap between philosophy and popular culture is, for Hume, the difference between the philosophical and the active disposition in all of us. Notice that this makes the gap between philosophy and popular culture a personal problem—for you, for me, and for everyone else. Having managed to make the question so, well, personal, a good answer to it might be all the more pressing, no? How are we to manage these competing tendencies? Hume’s advice is to seek them all, in a suitable balance. Cue the brogue . . .nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to human race. . . . Indulge your passion for scie
nce, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I . . . will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainly in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man. (pp. 3-4)
Eloquent prose. But rather incomplete advice, isn’t it? Seek a balance. Of course! But . . . what is the balance? And how do we find it?
Some, confronted by the gap between popular culture and philosophy, will shrug their shoulders and offer the Nirvanian mantra, “Whatever.” Maybe conflicting tendencies and a fragmented culture—philosophy in this corner, popular culture everywhere else—is just the way it is. But I think we don’t need to settle for that. We can fill in what Hume left incomplete. Remember what I said earlier about my talk on Monty Python and philosophy. It offers a way to think about philosophy and popular culture so that they fit together. To see how it does this, though, we need to learn something about conceptual schemes.
The Complete Two-Minute Introduction to Conceptual Schemes
All of us see the world (metaphorically, but not just metaphorically) in different ways, if only because of the rather trivial fact that none of us are ever in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. But two people who see the world differently might nevertheless use similar categories or concepts in their seeing. You believe that Californians are the secret controllers of the world and read the news accordingly, spotting the devilish Californian hand in every market fluctuation and weather report. I think you’re nuts, because I know its the Texans who really run things, calling all the shots. For all our differences we have much in common, insofar as we both see the world by means of the same categories—secret oppressor, oppressed, news report, and so on. Conceptually-speaking, we are pretty much a match; we use the same concepts and have the same conceptual scheme. And for our purposes, this is all we need to understand by ‘conceptual scheme’.
I invite you to venture beyond the safety of this book and read more about conceptual schemes. (Though you should do so with care; much of the discussion is hard going and some of it is not just confusing, but confused. It’s also a bit dull, but more about that later.) You’ll find much more to read, because conceptual schemes—and they go by many names, among them ‘linguistic frameworks’ and the overused ‘paradigm’—have been all the rage, inside as well as outside the world of college professors. In fact, it’s become popular to regard philosophy as a sort of manufacturing and testing facility for conceptual schemes. This is actually a rather radical idea, since it departs from the notion of philosophy that Hume, for example, had in mind. Hume thought philosophy was after various truths about, for example, how humans work. If we think of philosophy as the manufacturing facility for conceptual schemes, though, truth itself shows up as a part of one conceptual scheme among others, indeed, among many. So if philosophy is the construction and examination of conceptual schemes—ways for us to think about the world—then it’s not a search for truth, whether it’s truth about us, the Holy Grail, or anything else.
And Therefore . . .
I once believed that philosophy was the search for truth. In fact, I went on and on about it in my Ph. D. dissertation, and I remember around the same time that when non-philosophers sidled up to me and said “Hey, Gary, what is philosophy?” I’d say back, “Well, it’s the search for truth.” But now I think philosophy is the presentation and elaboration of conceptual schemes, not a search for truth. This doesn’t mean I have anything against truth; I don’t. I just see it as part of a conceptual scheme that we can adopt or not, as we choose.
One reason I like the conceptual schemes idea, and not the only one, is that it explains why that particular mix of Monty Python and philosophy worked, and still works. Believe for the moment the notion that philosophy consists in the construction and elaboration of, and reflection upon, conceptual schemes. Think if you will of philosophy as a remarkably elaborate and often ridiculously precise exercise of describing how, in general, we can look at things, in general. And though it presents this or that conceptual scheme, it is not the adoption of this or that conceptual scheme. Philosophers build the conceptual glasses, but they don’t actually wear them or even, perhaps, put them on. They look at them, not through them.
Even people who love to do this recognize it is rather dry and removed from everyday life. All of us, though, are driven to do this sort of thing to some degree; we are inclined not just to see the world but to reflect upon how we see the world. Hume didn’t know anything about conceptual schemes, but I think he would have appreciated that constructing and examining conceptual schemes is in this respect akin to the search for truth he imagined philosophy to be.
And Hume would have appreciated what a difference there is between such reflection and actually seeing, or at least being shown, the world in some new way—that is, actually taking on, or being shown, some new conceptual scheme. The latter is far more exciting, for one. So we can cast Hume’s philosophy-popular culture divide in terms of conceptual schemes. It is just the difference between, say, skiing and talking about skiing, between eating great Indian food and discussing Indian food, between visiting a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese and talking about visiting such a cheese shop.
And that’s it. That’s the connection between Monty Python and philosophy. What we have in philosophy is the discussion of conceptual schemes. What we have, so often and so well, in Monty Python is a glimpse of what some new conceptual schema would be like if we, or those around us, actually lived in it. In philosophy you talk the aesthetics of skiing, the nature of the taste of Indian food, and the meaning of life in a world of disappointment. What Monty Python gives you is the conceptual scheme in action, as it were, animated, brought to life. You’re on skis headed toward the cheese shop, Indian food in mouth. Well, not really of course; but at least you’re not just talking anymore.
From the philosophy-as-examining-conceptual-schema point of view, my talk on philosophy and Monty Python looks something like this: Philosopher talks about philosophy and how philosophy has been understood by philosophers. Philosopher shows Monty Python clip of philosophers playing football. Philosopher talks about the notion that any belief could be held in the face of any evidence at all if one is willing to make adjustments in one’s other beliefs. Philosopher shows clip of “Dead Parrot” sketch. . . .
This works because the philosophy and the popular culture are in the right balance; as you have had enough of one, the other takes its place (not always precisely when everyone would like though; a few complain that there’s not enough Monty Python in the talk, and fewer complain that there’s not enough philosophy). But what is in balance involves conceptual schemes—we have the construction and examination of some conceptual scheme, be it holism or existentialism or whatever, and then the nearest thing we might expect to the world with that scheme in force. We have a shopkeeper insisting a dead parrot isn’t dead, for example, and a man determined to find cheese in a plainly empty, albeit very clean, cheese shop. I don’t think we can make sense of this talk without reference to conceptual schemes. We certainly, at any rate, can’t make sense of it as Hume would have wanted, as an alternation between laughter, say, and a search for truths about what makes us laugh.
No Shoes for Muskrats: How the 1956 Olympic Games Destroyed Indonesian Art
Of course I’m still a philosopher, so my inclination is to keep on writing about what I suggested in the previous section. But you are probably eager to stop reading about all this and start actually visiting some of these conceptual schemes, that is, actually participate in some Monty Python . . . you know, laugh at it. Me too, actually. But hang on; I have one last thing to draw your attention to. Why is it that we laugh at these alternative conceptual schemes? Why are they funny?
This is not as deep a question as it sounds, or at
least it isn’t if we regard Monty Python as being in the business of enacting different conceptual schema. We laugh for many reasons, but one reason is because we encounter something unexpected, that is, unfamiliar or surprising. And one thing that a new conceptual scheme is, by definition, is unfamiliar or surprising. So we laugh when we are shown a way the world isn’t, but could be. And that’s what Monty Python does; they present genuinely new conceptual schemas for us to participate in vicariously. And we laugh because, well . . . imagine a world that includes an All-England Summarize Proust Competition. See, you laughed.
Now I’m not so interested in this fact as part of a theory of humor, or laughter, as I am in what it suggests about laughter’s connection to the intellect or, as we might say, to being smart. Laughter has been treated like an emotional reaction just like the other sentiments (disgust, envy, attraction and so on) for centuries. But laughter is more than that. Laughter and humor have a connection to intelligence, to intellect, that disgust, for example, doesn’t have. Being witty isn’t just a sign of intelligence, moreover; being witty is being smart. Laughter’s connection to the intellect is rather puzzling unless we think of laughter in the way I’ve suggested, as the natural byproduct of partaking in new conceptual schemes, something which itself comes on the heels of inventing those conceptual schemes. I quoted W.V. Quine at the very start of this essay, and Quine was right; philosophy itself is no laughing matter. But Hume, who I also quoted at the start of this chapter, was right as well. Philosophy, done well, is surrounded by our culture, and by laughter particularly: the laughter of contemplating the things philosophy suggests. And either one of these things by itself is not much fun at all.
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