Monty Python and Philosophy (34 page)

How, precisely, did a comedy troupe with ill-advised access to a television camera create a fissure in the dyke capable of releasing these floodwaters? Well, the reason strikes me as quite plain: they ignored the master. As Wittgenstein says, language
matters
. But to watch these Pythons, you’d think Wittgenstein never even
existed
! It’s language on holiday with them, I tell you, and nary a care for the perspicuity, rigors, or quality with language that our profession claims as its very own! All of this is clearest in a sketch I recently chanced upon when preparing my talk to you and which happily remains obscure and, more importantly, largely unknown to my negotiation-intoxicated younger colleagues. I hesitate to even begin to—ahem!—popularize it here, not only because it tends to agitate me but . . . [
inaudible comment from the audience
]. Right, that’s a good idea. Thank you, Bruce. [
sound of bottle opening, pause
]. There. Alright, the sketch goes like this. A Mr. Praline angrily returns to his local pet store to complain about a bird he’d recently purchased. The pet shop owner. . . . Oh, I actually have it transcribed here . . . bugger, I’ll just read it.

So, here we have in the Owner (who, it should be noted, does
not
own the subject of the sketch, the parrot—see how it’s language on holiday already?) a denial of the parrot’s very existence; it is, in fact, a bold parrot-denial. The stage is set, therefore, for philosophical debate; if it were in our hands, professional hands, a proper language would be set down, tending to syntax and semantics, and then by means of this language the dispute would be resolved effectively, that is, by way of a method that provides in a finite number of steps the correct answer and no incorrect answers. Such would be the
proper
philosophical resolution of this all-too-philosophical moment.

Yet what these bloody Pythons provide is something quite different—something as disturbing as it is, nowadays at least, familiar. No philosopher enters.
No philosopher is even summoned!
Instead the hapless Mr. Praline takes matters into his own hands and, by an argument that consists, contrary to Occamian precept, in insistences multiplied, he denies the denial of the parrot. Any user of Wittgenstein’s slab language, or for that matter any licensed contractor, could predict the outcome. There is no parrot, no refund, and, of course, no resolution. Left to their own untrained amateur language, these reckless non-philosophers simply drift on the open sea to which they have banished themselves.
Bon Voyage
.

Read as a chilling morality play, this Dead Parrot sketch could suffice. But by enacting and promoting this and other philosophical situations into (so-called) popular culture, Monty Python has folded philosophy into the warp and woof of the everyday, the mundane, and the vulgar. This pet shop, of course, reminds us of man’s less-than-proud heritage among Thomas Hobbes’s “untamed beastes.” Need we more of an indication that we are being presented with degeneration incarnate? If so, notice that this scene is presented in a public forum—namely, television—characterized aptly by the eminent Spiro Agnew, the Greek shipping
tycoon and later Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter, as a “vast wasteland.” To those properly tuned to the message, it can hardly be avoided: philosophical issues should be tossed into this wasteland to be shat upon by, among others, dead parrots. The mocking laughter of the studio audience, recruited no less from the very British citizenry who would go on to invent
punk rock
. . . Well, let me just say that this sketch alone likely damaged real and true philosophy more than
any
event of the twentieth century, and in saying that I include the publication of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. [
sustained applause, cheering
]

There is, I admit, a potential terminological puzzle. Wittgenstein showed us that “language games” and “forms of life” were proper foci for philosophical analysis. But his mere usage of those words does not, of course, license entertainers to concoct silly exchanges that run roughshod over the categorical distinctions they put in play. Is this parrot alive or dead? The poor viewer is left with the suggestion—nay, it’s not even a suggestion, but just an assertion or implication against which they can have no argument—that it may
or may not
be dead. Every test and analysis of the situation—if the bird is merely sleeping, for instance, then it should be able to be woken up—is deconstructed as some negotiation-rich tug-of-war. When Mr. Praline yells at the bird to see if it can be roused (“’Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I’ve got a lovely fresh cuttlefish for you if you show . . . ”) the Owner jostles the cage and proclaims, “There, he moved!” Negotiation triumphs again, for now the argument is shifted to whether he jostled the cage:

As these winds of negotiable ambiguity continue to push these two hapless non-philosophers out to sea, this perverse view of philosophy as some kind of game, some kind of solving of puzzles—a bourgeois pastime, perhaps, like Parcheesi, to be played by philosophers or pet-store owners alike—becomes plain.

Having sailed out of even
potentially
philosophically responsible waters, the sketch goes to its inevitable end—to a shouting match, a noisy string of synonyms and clichés meant to establish,
per impossibile
, some truth of the matter. This parrot, Mr. Praline says (now yelling at the top of his lungs) is

What is all this then? What have we got in this sorry excuse for a philosophical discussion? Nothing but a litany of bald assertions, not even an attempt at an argument, and, plainly, the utter absence of real philosophical analysis. And I’ll have you know that, after all the shouting, this pair decides to go home together in the fashion of pooftas?! [
murmurs and disapproval from the audience
] It’s these Monty Pythons who have taken us down this path. So who, I ask, shall grab the wheel and steer things right?

Some things cannot be shown (Wittgenstein, again, obviously) and must therefore be said, even belabored, because they are so insidious and complicated. So forgive me for running on but I want to impress upon you how complicated things have become and what is at stake.

First and foremost, despite Pythonic appearances, philosophy is no game. Careers are at stake! Publishing royalties! These depend upon our ability to responsibly analyze things philosophically and thus to distinguish correctly the
real
philosophers from the frauds and charlatans. Now that the Pythons have so turned poor Witt on his head and let this parrot out of its cage, it’s nigh impossible to know who’s who and what’s what. Your own department, as you well know, is revered as a band of genuine pioneers in the theory of identity and naming. Yet—I dare say only because some of you mentioned it earlier today—there are some, well many, I’ve run across who question whether your department remains
in existence
today, or whether it
ever
existed beyond those
few moments long ago when it was put in front of Monty Python’s cameras. [
laughter from the audience
] Need I say more, then, to illustrate the widespread confusions?

What, then, is to be done? I daresay the answer is obvious. We must
boycott
all these avenues and institutions that have so far promoted this popularization, and we must begin with Monty Python. This means a number of things. First, of course, we must simply assert ourselves. Let us prove that we do indeed exist [
cheers from audience
] and that we must be taken seriously by the philosophical establishment!

That’s the easy part. Much harder, I fear—though not impossible, let’s hope—is the task of refuting or at least obscuring this notion that Monty Python has anything philosophically interesting or genuine to say. Now, in this case, we can kill two emus with one stone [
cheers and laughter from audience
] simply by organizing ourselves and like-minded (that is, real) philosophers and publishing our own book—say, something like,
Real Philosophy Is Not Popular Philosophy
—in which we can illuminate the pitfalls of the current fashions.

Indeed, that is what I’ve begun to do in my talk today. Of course, here I am preaching to the converted. So what
I
shall do—and I implore you all to join me—is send round my essays and papers to publishers in hopes that at least one is not yet intoxicated with this blasted
popularization
business. I am quite serious that with the right kind of organization and a publication or two we may inaugurate, really, a
movement
for the
depopularization
of philosophy. [
Cheers and commotion in audience
]

I see that beer and fresh meat are being brought in now, so if you’ll all just calm down for yet another minute while I . . . [inaudible above cheering and commotion in audience]. Alright, thank you. I’m almost done here, so . . . just quickly . . . I, I think the most important thing, as each of us plays our role in this anti-popularization movement, is to
downplay
the popularity of Monty Python itself. Really, unless it’s absolutely necessary, we must not even
mention
Monty Python in these efforts and obviously not take part in projects or books or conferences that take these mere entertainers seriously as philosophers, popular or unpopular—of any kind
at all
. [
More cheers and calls for food
] Alright, then. Let’s have a drink!

GARY L. HARDCASTLE

And though a philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.

—David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
, §1

Philosophy [is] on the whole no laughing matter.

—W.V. Quine,
Quiddities
, Preface

 

H
ere’s a true story. In the early 1990s, as a junior philosophy professor, I was invited to talk to the undergraduate philosophy club at the university where I had recently been hired. I accepted of course, and I even offered a rather promising title: “Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python.” That title—inspired by a nervous joke we traded back and forth in graduate school, that the dissertations we were all laboring on, each an example of the painstaking conceptual analysis for which
analytic
philosophy was named, were
in fact
on the philosophy of Monty Python—showed up almost immediately on flyers around campus, above a date, time, place, and—in large letters—my name. One got the distinct impression that
I
would
give
the talk by that name.

Now, I had the title, but not what one might call “the actual talk.” If we are going to talk in actualities, I didn’t even have an actual idea for the actual talk beyond that suggested by the actual title. It was entirely conceivable (in fact I could conceive it, clearly and distinctly) that I would be introduced and then, at the podium, proceed to repeat that title in various formulations until, somehow, fifty minutes passed. “Well, then [
ponder
] . . . what are the themes of contemporary philosophy, and [
long ponder
] . . . how . . . are they analytic? And what is it to reflect these things I have suggested we call [
extended ponder
] . . . themes [
medium ponder
] . . . in Monty Python? [
extended drink of water
]” That would be a passable Monty Python skit but
terrible
philosophy and, more importantly, an altogether disastrous introduction of me and my work to my new colleagues and students. I had to do something, well, completely different.

As the day approached I staved off panic and thought about it. I needed to show some clips from Monty Python; I had enough sense to know that putting ‘Monty Python’ in the title and then
not
showing clips from Monty Python would lead the several dozen Python fans in attendance to stone me (though they would don fake beards and unusually low voices for the stoning, a charming but ultimately insufficient consolation). But I also had to say something sensibly philosophical. As we put it in the philosophy biz, I had to
do
some philosophy. It was, after all, a philosophy club, and I a philosopher.