Monty Python and Philosophy (32 page)

No, it’s not alright. Any discussion about words or gestures must respect the use-mention distinction, the difference between using a sign or word to communicate and merely mentioning it. When Palin first introduces his two signs, he does not use them—thankfully, for his audience would not know what they are intended to
mean. Instead, he first mentions them so that he may explain the meanings they will have later on when he uses them. Yet someone at the BBC supposes that Palin mentions
and
uses this second sign. For just as he folds his arms “The End” appears and Palin lurches into linguistic damage control:

It doesn’t look good. Palin’s being sucked into a self-referential whirlpool of qualifications and explanations. But he refuses to be beaten. He takes a deep breath and begins again.

This time, all goes well until Palin reaches his eighth word, “about.” That’s when the BBC shuts him down: “We interrupt this program to annoy you and make things generally irritating.”

After the episode was over, most philosophers would have returned to their nightly reading. Devotees of ordinary language philosophy, specifically, may well have opened Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951)
Philosophical Investigations
to read passages like this:

Or this:

With Palin’s performance fresh in their memory, at least a few of these philosophers must have looked up from their books and thought, “hey, wait a minute!” Palin’s joke, at least in part, was on them. Beneath the silliness of his character and the quality of his performance there lay the outlines of a pointed critique of Wittgenstein and his philosophical legacy, ordinary language philosophy.

This critique is first suggested by Palin’s strikingly Wittgensteinian character and style. Both focus like a laser on words and their use, and both urge us to appreciate the complexities of this “whole process of talking.” Like Wittgenstein’s prose, moreover, Palin struggled to contain his rapid fire thoughts in the form of a dialogue with himself, in which he makes assertions, interrupts himself, offers objections or corrections, and poses questions and answers. Second, there is something deeply wrong with this Wittgensteinian performance precisely because it has no effect. Consider the Pythons’ better known satire about England’s Ministry of Silly Walks. Humor aside, this sketch offers a disarmingly
accurate
interpretation of bureaucratic life as a whirlwind of
insignificant techniques and pointless procedures (in this case, involving walking). These silly styles of walking are plainly silly and pointless to us, but to the bureaucrats that cultivate and oversee them, they are serious business indeed. Palin’s obsession with linguistic precision, his dedicating all his concentration and intelligence to reducing ambiguity and clarifying meaning, is serious business as well. His skills and acuity make him a model ordinary language philosopher. Yet, like the bureaucrats in the Ministry, he never really achieves anything. For all Palin’s tortured efforts and analysis, he tell us exactly
nothing
about Holland’s most famous
aperitif
.

“That’s not a critique,” ordinary language philosophers might reply. “That’s the whole point!” Indeed, Wittgenstein argued persuasively that the proper subject of philosophy was not
aperitifs
or anything else amenable to empirical or scientific study. Rather, the subject of philosophy was language. This is because, Wittgenstein argued, our so-called philosophical problems about nature, ethics, epistemology and so forth are really just tangles or confusions in our language and our linguistic habits. Through proper philosophical analysis they can be untangled and, once they are, they disappear and cease to perplex us. For the philosopher of ordinary language, therefore, philosophy is really a struggle of our own making, “a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (§109).
¹⁰⁸
Much as flies find it difficult to find their way out fly bottles designed to catch them, we find it difficult to extricate ourselves from our verbal bottles. Wittgenstein asked himself, “What is the aim of your philosophy? And then he answered: “To shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (§309).

Wittgenstein was not alone in promoting this linguistic revolution in philosophy in Britain. Others such as Gilbert Ryle
(1900-1976) and J.L. Austin (1911-1960) took philosophy to be the study of our words and linguistic actions. There were differences and controversies about the proper methods and goals of philosophical analysis. But agreement was at hand that philosophy had found its calling in the analysis of language. A.J. Ayer, for example, who was no champion of ordinary language philosophy, wrote of the perennial problem of truth that “there is no problem of truth as it is ordinarily conceived.” He explained in his influential book
Language, Truth, and Logic
that “the traditional conception of truth as a ‘real quality’ or a ‘real relation’ is due, like most philosophical mistakes, to a failure to analyze sentences correctly.”
¹⁰⁹

One important consequence of this turn to language is that philosophy became increasingly disconnected from other areas of inquiry, both inside and outside of philosophical tradition. History, sociology, and the natural sciences, for example, were taken to contribute nothing to philosophical understanding. In his famous passages exploring the semantics of “seeing” and “seeing as”—made famous by his line drawing of a figure which may be seen
as
a duck or a rabbit—Wittgenstein insists that we keep psychology and physiology out of it: “Above all, don’t wonder ‘What can be going on in the eyes or brain?’” “Our problem is not a causal one but a conceptual one” (§II, xi).

Ordinary language philosophy became popular on campuses during and after the 1940s (other approaches to philosophy, existentialism most notably, were more popular off-campus). In the wake of a devastating world war, it provided a new, modern, and promising framework for philosophy as a professional activity. University departments in the United States grew dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s and departments of philosophy routinely hired experts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to round out their offerings. Of course, this is not to say that all philosophy departments and philosophers spoke with one voice (like one famous department in Australia) or that the rise of ordinary language philosophy was not without important philosophical critics. Heavyweights such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper insisted
that philosophy involved much more than solving linguistic puzzles. Decades after his work with the Pythons, John Cleese made a similar point when paraphrasing the British philosopher P.F. Strawson. These postwar years dominated by ordinary language philosophy were a kind of “backwater,” a time when philosophers “weren’t dealing with anything important.” Besides some overstatement—the study of language is hardly
unimportant
, after all—Cleese recognized the professional rewards that ordinary-language philosophy held for many. It allowed them “to shine” and “to look tremendously bright, and everyone thought ‘Aren’t they clever! My God, what brilliant minds!’”
¹¹⁰

This kind of brilliance came at a cost, after all. A philosophical program that ignores existentialism, phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy risks becoming disconnected from those areas of life and culture that (arguably) give rise to philosophical problems and curiosity in the first place. We may show, or even shew, the fly out of the bottle, after all, yet remain variously uninformed, perplexed or disturbed by the problems that lead us to philosophy.

So it goes in the sketch, “No Time to Lose.” Palin, once again, portrays a man deeply concerned with language and its ordinary use. Seeking some expert advice and training, he finds it at the
No Time to Lose Advice Centre
where Eric Idle sits behind his desk and counsels would-be users of this popular phrase.

Palin’s marriage, it appears, is in a semantic rut:

What this sad relationship needs are things to talk
about
. Yet Palin and Idle care only about the phrase and the proper technique for using it. In Idle’s first lesson, he pretends to be an alarm clock that wakes Palin up only minutes before he needs to be at work.

Palin is confused by the complexities of pausing and ending and can’t get the hang of the expression. As a last resort, Idle turns to phonetics. When used properly, he explains, the words “to lose” sound like the name of the city in France, Toulouse. With Idle and Palin now chanting in unison “No Time Toulouse, No Time Toulouse . . .,” the sketch becomes even more detached from the problems that led Palin to seek some help. He may have learned, finally, how to pronounce the phrase. But, just as we learned nothing about Holland’s most famous
aperitif
, he learned nothing about how to solve those underlying problems in his marriage. Thus the sketch is free to segue into something similar, but completely different: “No Time Toulouse: The Story of the Wild and Lawless Days of the Post-Impressionists.”

The analysis of everyday language and our use of it to solve philosophical problems again takes center stage when the Pythons present their famous department of philosophy in a fictional Australian university. These philosophers, however, look more like officers or soldiers. They dress alike (in khaki), they talk alike (loud and ill-mannered) and, as a simple theory of descriptions would have it, they’re all the same. Each is named Bruce.

The Bruces are fascinated by language. When one says, “It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum,” another remarks, “That’s a strange expression, Bruce.” “Well, Bruce, I heard the Prime
Minister use it.” When the department chair makes a joke, most of the other Bruces
use
laughter to express their delight. While they laugh, however, another—Palin (there is a pattern here)—instead
mentions
laughter and bellows, alongside his laughing colleagues, “Howls, howls, of derisive laughter, Bruce!”

Yet when Cleese, the Chairbruce, brings this meeting to order, another aspect of the Pythons’ critique of ordinary-language philosophy comes into view. First, he introduces the department’s visiting philosopher, Michael Baldwin (played by Terry Jones), whose presence challenges the uniformity and conformity that the Bruces seem to crave. Immediately, they begin to call him “New Bruce” and they impress upon him their departmental rules: They must all drink regularly, Cleese explains, and they must all be heterosexual (No pooftas!). This regimentation and uniformity extends to politics and academic freedom, as well. New Bruce, we learn, will be free to teach “any of the great socialist thinkers provided he makes it clear that they were
wrong
!” The old Bruce’s heartily agree as they unleash their nationalistic passion and yell, in unison, “Australia, Australia, We Love You, Amen!” The sketch ends with post-meeting refreshments and a close-up on Cleese, looking increasingly savage and crazed, gnawing a large slab of raw meat.

The joke here is the vast cultural distance between the refined, polite Michael Baldwin and his new fascist-philosopher colleagues. But the sketch is not merely whimsical. It involves kernels of historical truth about the institution of philosophy which, for all its lofty ideals and intellectual refinements, has been affected by these baser social forces and prejudices that animate the Bruces. In the 1970s, for example, many philosophers were scandalized to learn about Martin Heidegger’s professional, party-sponsored ascent in Nazi Germany. Others were upset by allegations about Wittgenstein’s homosexuality and his mistreatment of persons and colleagues he did not like.
¹¹¹
Recent studies have focused less on
individuals and more on how curricula and pedagogy in philosophy were affected by anticommunism (or McCarthyism) in the United States and Europe during the cold war. Politically engaged styles or programs of philosophical activity and research that once dominated philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s—Marxism, most prominently—fell into disfavor and survived, at best, as niche specialties.
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