Monty Python and Philosophy (33 page)

The point is not that the Pythons anticipated these historical claims or investigations. Their sketch simply finds humor in the idea that philosophers, regardless of how accomplished or obscure, are nonetheless human and therefore susceptible to human foibles—be they the allure of nationalism or the joys of putting whoopee cushions in colleagues’ chairs (as Sartre, the Pythons elsewhere tell us, was fond of doing).

Yet the humor leads us back to our critique. If the Pythons had in mind a real-world model for the Bruces, who could it have been but Wittgenstein and his followers at Cambridge and Oxford (where the Pythons began their careers)? Wittgenstein’s personal magnetism was legendary and helped cement nothing less than a tribal or cult mentality among his students. Critics may have described things in extreme terms, but they are surprisingly consistent. Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad, a contemporary of Wittgenstein, complained in print about “the philosophical gambols of my younger friends as they dance to the highly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein’s flute” while Russell disdained the “cult of ‘common usage’” that grew up around Wittgenstein. Two recent historians note that this “passionately expressed allegiance to Wittgenstein” extended beyond philosophy into habits of lifestyle, dress, and diet. “How religiously the inner circle of the disciples followed the master has a comical air to it: sleeping in narrow beds, wearing sneakers, carrying vegetables in string bags
to let them breathe, and putting celery in water when serving it for dinner. . . .”
¹¹³

None of Wittgenstein’s devotees changed his or her name to Bruce, so far as I know. But that is beside the point. The important question this historical research raises is whether social and political circumstances affect philosophers
as thinkers
. Is technical philosophical work—the premises on which dominant theories rest, the subjects philosophers find interesting, the arguments they construct, and the seminar reading lists they create, for example—affected by the forces and politics of professionalism and social life? For the Old Bruces, the answer is clearly ‘yes.’ They will do nothing without the approval of their colleagues and fellow patriots. New Bruce, on the other hand, presents a challenge. Will he teach socialism and condemn it as “wrong” because he has been ordered to? The sketch does not answer but frames the question effectively: New Bruce must either give in to this departmental pressure or put up a fight.

So it goes in the sketch, “The Epilogue: A Question of Belief.” Here, Cleese is the host of a high-brow intellectual television program called “The Epilogue” and his two guests are a world-renowned Bishop and a popular professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Their topic is the perennial question, Does God exist? But tonight there is a twist. These two guests, Cleese explains, will employ a special method: they’re going to “fight for it—the existence or nonexistence of God is to be determined by two falls, two submissions, or a knockout.” Cleese transforms into a sports announcer (“Alright Boys. Let’s get to it!”) and the monsignor and philosopher begin tossing each other around the ring. As the sketch ends, there is yet no clear winner. Cleese tells the audience, “we’ll be bringing you the result of this discussion later on in the program.”
¹¹⁴

This
discussion
? As with the Bruces, this sketch juxtaposes two very different things not only for the resulting laughs and silliness. Those laughs take some root in the suspicion that these two very different institutions, violent sport and serious intellectual debate, may be fundamentally connected or not so different. Both sketches suggest that philosophical questions and styles are sometimes like prizefights and effectively settled by the power wielded by individuals, departments, or societies and nations.

So understood, these two threads of commentary about philosophy that run throughout
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
—the parodies of ordinary language philosophy and the hardball politics involved in the life of the mind—come together in a one-two punch that lands squarely on Wittgenstein’s jaw. For if philosophers’ beliefs and arguments are
to any extent
influenced by fashions, politics, or overt bullying—whether of nations, professional academic departments, rival intellectuals, and so on—then it cannot be correct to say that philosophy consists exclusively in solving puzzles in everyday language. For in that case, what philosophers say and believe about philosophical subjects is affected by circumstances and pressures that exist outside of language. There is nothing in language or its analysis alone, for example, that makes sense of the Bruces’ co-dependencies. Nor do they explain the strong personal and emotional attractions (or aversions) that so many philosophers developed about Wittgenstein or the strategies philosophers adopted to navigate Nazism or McCarthyism. Yet these kinds of extra-linguistic factors (variously historical, sociological, and psychological) most likely contributed to the scope and nature of philosophy as it evolved through the twentieth century.

If philosophy desires to understand and account for its own development and nature, it cannot embrace Wittgenstein’s dictum that philosophy consists in solving puzzles in ordinary language. It must instead open itself to perspectives and results offered by history, sociology, and other areas of intellectual life. With more open borders, there should be much more for philosophers to do than belabor the idiosyncrasies of ordinary language or pauses and endings. And for all that, there may be no. Time Toulouse.

BRUCE BALDWIN

 

 

S
ome might say that a rather senior philosopher like myself has his creative days behind him.
¹¹⁵
Indeed, some have actually said this. But I am finding, partly because of the circumstances I will discuss here today, that this conventional wisdom has it all backwards: I, even as I near eighty, am behind my most creative days. But then again, as most of you know, I’ve long been accustomed to being at odds and out of step with most of the “trends” and conventional “wisdoms” in philosophy! [
audience laughter—Eds.
]

Well, let me begin with a personal reflection of sorts. Many of you know that my heart, along with my intellect, is rooted in Great Britain. On my earlier visits to your department, you may have heard me speak of what went on in the drawing rooms of some of the finer British universities in the middle decades of the last century, in my dear youth. Ah, to be wandering room to room back then! One might spy down one corridor young men furiously debating something called
sense data
—the sight of a red lorry or
the taste of an apple were common examples. You see sense-data around still, at least occasionally, by the way. And down another corridor, I recall seeing two rather gawky biologists of indeterminate intellect played giddily with chains of tinker-toys and x-rays (for some reason) and who, I later learned at High Table, discovered some important result about exactly how to hook-up or chemically combine two chains of such tinker-toys. And for this these men became Nobles! Every corner, every drawing room, contained some fascinating activity or one sort or other. Halcyon days!

The
philosophical
excitement in those decades swirled dizzyingly, of course, around the great Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), with whom on several occasions I attempted to talk and dine. Permit me a bit more in the way of personal anecdote. As you all know, though we were not on
intimate
terms, I knew Wittgenstein quite well. And as I made quite clear to the authors of that recent book,
Wittgenstein: Joker
(though they chose not to respond to, or even acknowledge, my letters), I myself was even present at that philosophical
tête-à-tête
many years ago that has lately been attracting so much attention. This is the one, um, you’ve all heard about it I’m sure, in which Wittgenstein is rumored to have behaved poorly. Well, I can tell you that most of what is being said about this so-called affair has been thoroughly obscured by the intervening years or, as seems more likely, various agendas and postmodern
machinationé
implemented by those endeavoring to revise, downplay, or trivialize (and presumably popularize!) Wittgenstein’s singularly great and oft-misunderstood contributions. Now let me be clear that Witt, as I called him, was
not
joking around during that week’s discussion at the Moral Sciences Club. Far from it! The speaker, however—a nervous, funny-looking Austrian named ‘Popper’, I recall—I
distinctly
remember him waving around some stick or something as he talked. When Whitehead asked him to leave it alone, Popper claimed that the stick had nothing to do with philosophy, and that he was only gesturing, and I quote, “in philosophical fun”!

Well, I needn’t tell you what happened next. Philosophical fun, indeed! Witt stormed out of that now-fabled
assemblage
, slamming the door in the process. This I remember vividly because I was sitting at the door, and Witt stepped on
my
foot on the way out, crushing three of my toes!

And here, gentlemen, is my foot! [
laughter, applause
]

Well, my foot has since healed, but philosophy, I’m afraid, has not. What Wittgenstein taught us that day, as on so many others, was that philosophy is a
most
serious business, and a
most
serious business cannot be interspersed with
anything
else—be it science, literature, or play, even good old-fashioned poker play by the warm hearth. I do believe that I recollect those post-war years so fondly not because
I
was then in my prime (a little logical joke there, eh!), but because
those times
were special. In those days, we
lived
the philosophical homily, imbibed from the writings of Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), that everything, philosophy especially, has a place and, contrarily, that there is a place for everything. The human mind made great strides then (mostly, but not just, in England), but these strides were premised on the seriousness and intensity of research that comes with keeping intellectual life organized, well-structured, and . . .
in its place
. Everything is, we all agree with Parmenides. But I insist that everything not only
is
, but must
also
be in its right place. [
applause
]

Scotus? Scotus? He is, sadly, a stranger to today’s university. He’s even more a stranger to today’s so-called philosophy. Like the proverbial toothpaste bled from its tube, philosophy has, over the course of my career, spilled out of its proper place to mix, meld, and just generally interlace itself with, well,
everything
—what is called “popular culture.” There even appear to be many who nowadays promote, under the rubric of “popular culture,” the claim that serious philosophical life should be available for everyone, that every last jot and tittle of movies or plays or comic books or shows
on the telly
even somehow count as philosophically deep or important. There is even, I’m told, a book series dedicated to unearthing philosophical ideas or notions in
movies and television shows
!
¹¹⁶

Some of you will spot the irony afoot. For it was a certain youthful indiscretion on my part, with certain now-famous elements of popular culture (combined with, I admit, several pints), that first led me to your wonderful department and its uniformly underrated approach to matters
philosophie
. I refer—I can see some of you smirking already—to that BBC excrescence
non
puerile
known as
Monty Python’s Flying Grail
[audience: “Circus! Circus!”]. Right, right,
Circus
. Anyway, as we all know, it was upon encountering one of these so-called “Pythons” in a Twickenham Road pub that I learned (and how
he
knew, I haven’t the foggiest) that this very department was at that very time soliciting. Soliciting applications for a visiting scholar. And again as we all know, the result has been a long and most fruitful, if sporadic, intellectual camaraderie.

But let us be clear: if this Monty Python business inadvertently nourished my career, that was a mere accident attendant upon a substantial
disaster
for twentieth-century philosophy
proper
. The philosophy I . . . well, we . . . were taught to love, honor, and cherish became, in the course of Monty Python’s success,
popularized
—a circumstance all the more ironic given the fact that, I was once told, the Pythons themselves were once students at two of the greatest universities in the history of civilization, Oxford and Cambridge. Knowing something of the real, true philosophy, they apparently felt equipped to stun, even kill, it with an
Arbeitkorp
comprising not just a show on the telly but at least one full-length movie, the sheer popularity of which surely helped obscure, if not altogether erase, those crucial disciplinary and cultural borders I just mentioned. Indeed, Monty Python, I submit, paved the way for the utterly ridiculous idea that anyone anywhere can not only pass judgment upon philosophical matters, but do so on national television. Good Lord, I even witnessed a sketch in which two
washer ladies
discuss Sartre! [
laughter
]. Laugh if you must, but all this mucking about has had dire consequences. It has made it next-to-impossible to tell who is
really
a philosopher and who is not; who is a fraud and who has earned a place over Wittgenstein’s knee.

Some of my younger colleagues, back in Slough, dismiss my worries. They have their standard response about the status of
anything
: “Well, it’s all negotiable now, isn’t it? It’s all textual.” [
yelling
] WELL IT’S NOT! [
audience cheers
]. But, I ask you, is their attitude not the main reason why a walk through the drawing rooms of today’s universities resembles nothing so much as a muck-about in a postmodern zoo, where the animals have been let loose from their cages to wander amongst (and, inevitably, mount) each other, heedless to their heritage as natural kinds? If it is still a philosophical homily (as I, like so many others, learned from our
graduate advisors) that there can be no distinction without a corresponding instinction, then the present essay can be regarded as a tracing of one triumph of
instinct
over
distinct
.
¹¹⁷
Thus my title.