Monty Python and Philosophy (31 page)

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 that the joke was a potent tool for philosophical clarification, as in this passage from the
Philosophical Investigations
:

The depth of a grammatical joke is the depth of philosophy. That accords nicely with the view outlined here.

If we expand a bit upon Wittgenstein’s claim and employ it within the framework for thinking about philosophy already given, we will achieve an even more significant conclusion than we have
achieved so far. Recall that in claiming Heidegger was speaking nonsense, Carnap was offering an objection to Heidegger. Carnap wished to overcome the nonsense Heidegger offered and philosophize correctly, that is, not nonsensically. Carnap called Heideggerian nonsense “metaphysics” and thus sought to “overcome metaphysics” by looking at the conditions under which language made sense and limiting philosophers to sense-making contexts of language use.

We have disrupted Carnap’s picture by claiming that philosophers generally make the sort of nonsense that Monty Python makes, except that philosophical nonsense is typically not funny. Thus, on our view, it would be misguided to try to turn philosophy into a sense-making activity. But, we can continue to ask the sort of question Carnap was asking: If philosophy is what we say it is, is it worth doing? Once we ask this question, we have a way of understanding Monty Python as performing the sort of anti-philosophical service that Wittgenstein was hoping to perform.

Wittgenstein said philosophy has the depth of a grammatical joke. “Grammar” is a word Wittgenstein used often, and he didn’t use it to mean the rules of language of the school books. Anything with structure has a philosophical grammar for Wittgenstein. Thus, Wittgenstein is saying that certain jokes reveal the structure of our lives in particularly striking ways and are, thus, deep. Jokes like this are the most significant in the corpus of Monty Python’s humor.
¹⁰¹

Consider Michael Palin in the hijacking sketch again. Palin’s character bursts into the cockpit and demands that the pilot and co-pilot not make a move. Immediately, however, this demand becomes qualified in complicated ways: the pilot must move to fly the plane; certain bodily movements are involuntary and cannot be prevented; if the plane is moving then all their bodies are moving with it; and so on. The hijacker tries over and over again to come up with a precisely correct demand to make. Or, to take a different example, John Cleese, as Dennis Moore, endlessly qualifies his
claim that he and his victims know that if they try to resist, one of his victims is dead for sure; Moore seeks the precisely true account, even as the account becomes so long and complicated that he interferes with what he is really trying to do.

Such skits have a genuine poignancy for us analytic philosophers. One can easily imagine a philosopher of action trying to come up with an analysis of “movement” which requires that he reproduce the hijacking sketch—indeed, I rather think I read such essays as a graduate student. One can recognize in Dennis Moore the striving for precision that analytic philosophers accept as their goal and that does, in fact, sometimes prevent them from acting usefully in the world. We now can understand these skits: Michael Palin and John Cleese are comedians. They know that they are putting us on. Their characters are, however, not comedians. Michael Palin’s character is a hijacker. But, he is not a hijacker of the sort we meet in the real world. The notion of movement needed for the appropriate understanding of “nobody move!” is taken for granted in the real world and goes without saying. Michael Palin’s character is a philosopher as hijacker, inhabiting a world in which philosophers hijack planes. Dennis Moore is philosopher as robber. Similarly for all those peculiar Python characters: the man who gestures during pauses in his speech to indicate that he is pausing and not finished speaking; the man dictating a letter who puts on antlers to indicate when he is dictating and not simply speaking. These are all examples of what philosophy would look like if done in the world of ordinary life.
¹⁰²
The absurd worlds examined in these sketches are worlds in which people genuinely exhibit the sorts of puzzlement philosophers claim to be clearing up. But these puzzles do not appear in our world.

These skits are strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s writing at its very best. Throughout his
On Certainty
, for example, Wittgenstein places the philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958) into various real world scenarios in order to see if there was any sense to be made of Moore’s philosophical claims.
¹⁰³
The book is brilliant comedy
as Wittgenstein imagines conditions under which Moore (or anyone) might significantly say, as Moore did in his “Proof of an External World” that “I know this is my hand.” Moore was practicing philosophy. In trying to place this philosophy into the world, Wittgenstein creates a panoply of Pythonesque scenarios. Try it for yourself: Point to your left hand with your right index finger and say with passion that you know that this is your hand. Under what conditions could you imagine doing that with sense ?
¹⁰⁴

Wittgenstein remains puzzled throughout
On Certainty
. He keeps trying to imagine scenarios in which someone asserts the things Moore asserts in his philosophy, and he keeps finding these claims to be, in such circumstances, “nonsense.” At a moment of illumination in the text (§463), he writes “This is certainly true, that the information ‘That is a tree’, when no one would doubt it, might be a kind of joke and as such have meaning.” This is as close as he comes to recognizing that what he is doing is a sort of comedic imagining: imagine a situation in which someone asserts a claim of a philosopher, and you are
by that very fact
in the realm of jokes.

Wittgenstein does not quite release himself from the hold of the idea that there must be some sense to “I know this is my hand.” After all, Moore asserted it in all seriousness when doing philosophy. From our current perspective, we can see this “special scenario” in which the claim makes sense: as a philosopher, Moore is doing something like stand-up comedy. The standard rules of sense-making in the world are altered or suspended because we are in the realm of comedy. Here is the place at which the subversiveness of Monty Python’s humor comes to the fore: If philosophy is bad, unconscious comedy, then the philosopher seeks to make the world itself into the setting of his comedy. But, in skits like the hijacking skit, we discover that people who engage in the world in the ways philosophers claim to do not live in our world, and their actions in their worlds render those worlds less comprehensible to us than is our world. The search for clarity and precision that is the stock in trade for philosophers makes the
world harder to engage in and more opaque. On this view, Monty Python provides a potent argument by example against (analytic) philosophy. Philosophical engagement with the world makes of the world simply the setting for a joke. It would be better for philosophers to recognize that they are engaged in comedy and to reveal something about the nature of the world through self-conscious construction of comedic scenarios.

Wittgenstein wished in his philosophy to show “the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Philosophers have puzzled over this Wittgensteinian “philosophical therapy.” I suggest the following: One most misunderstands comedy if one believes that one must come to a peculiar and deep understanding of something in order to find it humorous. Rather, finding something humorous might in itself be an expression of the highest understanding you could have of it. (Don’t try to find the circumstances in which “I know this is my hand” makes sense; you best understand the specialness of that claim when you see that it makes sense only as a joke.) The peculiar intellectual and affective pleasure of the bizarre is the highest philosophical understanding you can have of the structure of our lives. The paralytic nature of attempting to get to the bottom of things in the world (like the Cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition episode (Episode 15, “The Spanish Inquisition”) who try over and over to express precisely the nature of the Inquisition) should be replaced by the pleasure of understanding ourselves outside the world of that skit and in a world in which the hijacker and his striving for precision are nothing more than a joke. A philosophy that reaches self-consciousness is a philosophy that simply becomes humor. In our world, that is philosophy enough.

A question has been raised as to whether I believe what I have said here. In response I offer this:

Do you believe it? However you answer that question, I answer the first one the same way.
¹⁰⁵

GEORGE A. REISCH

 

 

I
t would have been fascinating to be a fly on a wall (even in a bottle) near those philosophers who had watched
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
on November 9th, 1972. In that night’s episode, Michael Palin portrayed the host of a television program titled,
The Bols Story: The Story of Holland’s Most Famous Aperitif
.

As soon as Palin introduces the program’s topic, he becomes mired in precise linguistic analysis:

By the time he reaches his fourth word, “we’re,” Palin is derailed. The problem is that there is no “we” who will be talking. Rather, viewers at home will be listening. He alone will be doing all the talking. And is it true that Palin is
going
to talk about a subject (in a moment or two), or is he in fact already talking about it? No, he decides, he’s not talking about it yet, but he is talking.

But what, precisely, does talking consist in? There is room for confusion, here, too:

So, the initial assertion, now qualified to mean, “Good evening, tonight
I
will
in a moment or two
be talking about . . .” must be further specified as, “Good evening, tonight,
except for when I am pausing
, I will be
in a moment or two
talking about . . . ” This qualification is important, after all, for viewers may misinterpret these pauses not as integral parts of the “whole process of talking” but as something else. Palin continues,

Now that this ambiguity and its potential dangers have been identified, we need some procedure to distinguish the two cases. Palin knows just the thing: