Monty Python and Philosophy (28 page)

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?

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
:

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.

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:

Philosophers, no doubt, will tune in.

JAMES TAYLOR

 

 

S
ome 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.

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 the 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.

Not content with this, though, the Pythons also recognized that people might complain about the inclusion of such complaints into their sketches. To respond to this they had another character in the sketch “Complaints” (the “BALPA Man”) complain about “shows that have too many complaints in them as they get very tedious for the average viewer.” And, of course, including the BALPA Man’s complaint about shows with too many complaints in them itself added to the number of complaints in the show . . . and so Michael Palin then complained about people who hold things up by complaining about people complaining. Such a series of complaints about complaints about complaints could, of course, go on indefinitely, but fortunately a sixteen-ton weight fell on Michael after he’d made his complaint about people who complain
about the inclusion of complaints about the Pythons’ sketches, and the chain was broken.

So, what does all this have to do with the price of butter? Nothing! But it does have a lot to do with the common complaint that philosophers’ examples aren’t relevant to the moral issues that they are supposed to illuminate. In “Complaints,” the Pythons anticipate complaints about their sketches, and incorporate these complaints into their sketches—and then anticipate complaints about their incorporation of these complaints into their sketches, and so on. We find the Pythons thinking about what their audience are thinking, and including their audiences’ thoughts
about
their sketches
into
their sketches humorous. And it is the Pythons’ innovative abstraction from
writing
comic sketches to thinking about
why
sketches are comic in order to make them funnier that is the key to explaining the value of the apparently bizarre examples that philosophers use. Like the Pythons’ abstraction from complaining about their sketches to complaining about complaining about their sketches (and then complaining about the complaining about the complaining about their sketches!) the examples that philosophers use are supposed to get people to think
about
their thinking about an issue. Through this, such examples can help people clarify what their views are. It can also help them see if their views are well supported by their reasoning. And, if they are not, either to develop support for them or else to revise them. To see how philosophers’ examples can help people to think more clearly in this way, consider the following standard philosophical example:

When faced with this example most people would say that they would switch the trolley, justifying their decision by saying that switching the trolley would cause the least amount of suffering. In response to this a philosopher might then offer the following example:

In this case most people would object to throwing another person in front of the trolley to save the five miners. But at first sight the decision not to throw the coworker in front of the runaway trolley looks odd, since in Trolley Case 1 most people would say that you should sacrifice one person to save five. After all, it seems that the only difference between Trolley Case 1 and Trolley Case 2 is that in the first case one would be throwing a trolley at a person to save five miners, whereas in the second one would be throwing a person at a trolley to save five miners. And it doesn’t seem that what is thrown through the air to save the five miners should make so much moral difference, since in both cases your chosen actions would save five persons through sacrificing one.

Now, you might say that you will never be faced with the decision of whether to sacrifice one person to save five, and so rather than being useful in defending philosophers from the charge that their examples are impractical and irrelevant, the above discussion really confirms it. But to argue in this way would be to miss the
point of the above two Trolley Cases, which is to help people clarify their thinking about what makes an action morally right. To be sure, you are about as likely to encounter a runaway mine trolley as you are likely to be hit on the head by a rubber chicken wielded by a passing knight. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that through using such examples you can assess whether your original view of what makes an action right is correct or not. Like the Pythons’ thinking about the thinking of their audiences’ thinking when writing the sketch “Complaints,” then, your thinking about the Trolley Cases will lead you to think about your own thinking about what makes an action right.