Monty Python and Philosophy (35 page)

So I sat down a full two days before the talk and . . . well, I don’t know how to put this, but . . . it all came together. In fact, it all came together
wonderfully
. I had on the one hand the memory of my favorite Python skits and movies (which at that time included a few dozen episodes of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
,
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
,
Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
, and portions of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
). And, on the other, I had my particular take on the themes of analytic philosophy, which amounted to some very general notions about language, rationality, and philosophy itself. And, lo and behold, many of those skits
really did
reflect, somehow, many of those themes.
¹¹⁸

In “International Philosophy,” for example, a football team of German philosophers (“led by their skipper ‘Nobby’ Hegel,” the announcer tells us) play their Greek counterparts (“there’s Plato, always the man in form!”). The members of both teams quietly pace the field in thought until it occurs to one of them, near the end of the match, to actually
kick the ball
(this is, remember, the game Americans call ‘soccer’). This I used to comment on philosophers’ frustration with philosophy itself, which seems to involve, to put it plainly, excessive pondering. “Nudge Nudge,” in which the randy Norman pelts his fellow pub-goer, a staid Englishman, with innuendoes (“your wife . . . she likes
sport
, does she? Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more?”) I presented as an embodiment of the notion that people could have very different ways of looking at the world—different conceptual schemes, we might say—and that this could go
undetected
in everyday interactions, like, well, having a drink in a pub. And everyone’s favorite, the Dead Parrot sketch, in which a Mr. Praline attempts to return a clearly dead Norwegian Blue parrot to the pet shop where he “bought it not ’alf an hour ago” only to be confronted by a shop-owner who insists, by means of successive mental contortions, that the parrot is alive (“It’s sleeping! It’s stunned! It’s . . . pining for the fjords!”), struck me as a dead-on enactment of
holism
, the notion that
any
belief can be held in the face of any experience
whatsoever
so long as one is willing to make adjustments in one’s
other
beliefs. I used “The Argument Clinic,” the “Cheese Shop,” and “Burn the Witch” (from
Monty Python and The Holy Grail
) to similar purposes, and planned to close the whole affair with a sing-along of the “Bruce’s Philosophers Song” (“Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram . . . ”); I offered that as Monty Python’s non-trivial contribution to the
history
of philosophy. Excited as much by the fact that it was
done
as by the fact that I
had
managed to weave analytic philosophy together with Monty Python, I gave the talk. Just as the flyer had promised.

But that’s just the start. That talk not only went well; people loved it. In fact, the club requested the talk for the following semester, and each year after that. And word traveled. I sent a videotape of its inaugural delivery to my Ph.D. advisor (who, having braved uncountably many dry-as-dust dissertations, himself pined for the fabled Monty Python tome), and he showed it to
others. Soon I was giving the talk at other universities, sometimes to their philosophy department and sometimes to their philosophy club. Its text showed up on the internet (Python fans, truth be told, are a bit geekish) and I began receiving email from Pythonites and fellow philosophers. A few years later, when I found myself in the great American Midwest (aka Wisconsin) I asked the Wisconsin Humanities Council if ordinary Wisconsinites might enjoy this sort of thing, and soon I was showing Monty Python clips and talking about holism, rationality, and philosophy in libraries, schools, and the occasional church basement across the Dairy State. It continues; as I write, I’m scheduled to talk about philosophy and Monty Python in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, next week, as part of an Honors Lecture Series. This sixtieth or so delivery will be as much fun as the others. I may do this well into retirement.

So here’s a question: what has made this talk such a hit? It’s not, I think, merely that it offers a way to see some Monty Python clips; these are readily available without the trouble or expense of having me show them. Nor do I think it’s anything to do with
me
, since nearly all the people that come to see the talk don’t know me from Professor Gumby. What is it, then, about this talk’s juxtaposition of philosophy and Monty Python that makes it appealing to so many? Here’s a successful mix of popular culture and something quite definitely
detached
from popular culture, analytic philosophy. What’s behind the success? And what might that tell us about philosophy, or about Monty Python?

That gap that I just mentioned between popular culture and philosophy has been around, it appears, for some time. It’s the starting point the Scottish philosopher David Hume chose for his 1748 essay,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
, although Hume described it as a gap as between two “manners” of philosophy. The first of these, the “easy and obvious philosophy,” Hume said, devotes itself to getting people to feel and, thus, to act. Such philosophy, according to Hume (feel free to read this in a rich Scottish brogue), “make[s] us
feel
the difference between vice and virtue; [it] excite[s] and regulate[s] our sentiments” (p. 1). Now this sort of
thing is still with us; indeed, attempts to excite and regulate our sentiments are nearly
everywhere
, from TV to radio to books and magazines to advertising to greeting cards. Make no mistake; it is thoroughly entertaining stuff, gripping, even, and (in moving us to act—to laugh, cry, applaud, protest, vote, or spend money) stunningly successful. We love it. Of course, we don’t call it ‘philosophy’ anymore; we call it
popular culture
. And it includes Monty Python.

Hume’s
other
manner of philosophy
is
the sort of thing that today goes by the name ‘philosophy’. This “accurate and abstruse philosophy,” as Hume called it, “regard[s] human nature as a subject of speculation; and . . . examine[s] it, in order to find those principles, which regulate our understanding, excite our sentiments, and make us approve or blame any particular object” (p. 1). In a nutshell, then, the “accurate and abstruse” philosophy is about figuring out
why
people get excited and move, while the “easy and obvious” philosophy is about
actually
exciting and moving them.

Given that description, it’s no surprise when Hume goes on to note that all the excitement (not to mention the fame and wealth) attaches itself to the easy and obvious philosophy. After all, that’s the sort of thing that, as Hume put it, “enters more into common life; molds the heart and affections; and by touching those principles which actuate men, reforms their conduct, and brings them nearer to the model of perfection which it describes” (p. 2). And the hard and abstruse philosophy? It, by contrast, is “found on a turn of mind, which cannot enter into business and action, [and] vanishes when the philosopher leaves the shade, and comes into open day; nor can its principles easily retain any influence over our conduct and behavior” (p. 2).

That description may sound a bit extreme—harsh, even—but I think we have that very same gap today, right now. In the role of the easy philosophy witness the avalanche of popular culture and its unvarying sentimental assault. The hard and abstruse philosophy, what came to be called simply “analytic philosophy,” lives in the offices and classrooms of our colleges and universities. And never the twain do meet.

For me, this gap is
very
familiar, and not just because I’m a philosopher. Imagine a comedian on stage in a packed house, doing really well. The audience is roaring. And offstage, next on
in fact, is an analytic philosopher with a few comments on, oh, the relation of indexicals to Goodman’s new riddle of induction (if you have
no
idea what that means, well, then, that’s the point). Maybe the philosopher has an overhead transparency or two, each displaying a full page of quotations from
other philosophers
in a flashy nine-point font. Here there is a gap, literally, between popular culture and philosophy. Closing it—which the philosopher must do, or try to do, when it’s time to head out on stage—is no small feat. In giving my talk, I’ve been in that same position. That is, I’ve all but
been
that philosopher at stage right, waiting to say something about empirical research on human rationality or the existentialist predicament, while the audience loses itself in the looniness of the “Burn the Witch!” scene or the impeccable absurdity of the Cheese Shop sketch. The fact that it all turned out okay—that I was able to go out on stage and close that gap—is good news not just for me but, I think, for philosophy itself.

In light of this gap between popular culture and philosophy, then, let’s pose the obvious questions. Chief among them, perhaps, is the question that passes through the head (if not over the tongue) of every student not sleeping through
Introduction to Philosophy
: why do we have philosophy at all? And given that we do have it, what should we
do
about the huge gap between it and, well, nearly everything else, including popular culture?

Hume offered one and a half answers to these two questions. For the first one, the one about why we have philosophy at all, he gave a psychological answer: he claimed that it was simply part of our psychological make-up that we aim not only to excite and move the people and things around us but to
understand
the true principles that govern our own excitement and movement. He writes that “man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment” (p. 3). But hold on; Hume adds, right away, that human understanding is so very limited that we are inevitably
unsatisfied
by science alone. Actually, it’s worse than that. Man, Hume writes, “is a sociable, no less than a reasonable being: But neither can he always enjoy company agreeable and amusing, or preserve the proper relish for them. Man is also an
active being; but the mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry” (p. 3). Apparently, we can’t win. We are driven to seemingly incompatible ways of living—the active, the social, the philosophical, maybe there are more—but none
by itself
satisfies us.

In fact we’ve just managed to pose the second of our questions, in slightly different terms. Having cast the first question—the question of why we have philosophy at all—in terms of our psychological make-up, it’s hardly surprising when he casts the
second
question in psychological terms as well. The gap between philosophy and popular culture is, for Hume, the difference between the philosophical and the active disposition in all of us. Notice that this makes the gap between philosophy and popular culture a
personal
problem—for you, for me, and for everyone else. Having managed to make the question so, well,
personal
, a good answer to it might be all the more pressing, no? How are we to manage these competing tendencies? Hume’s advice is to seek them all,
in a suitable balance
. Cue the brogue . . .

Eloquent prose. But rather incomplete advice, isn’t it? Seek a balance. Of course! But . . . what is the balance? And how do we find it?

Some, confronted by the gap between popular culture and philosophy, will shrug their shoulders and offer the Nirvanian mantra, “Whatever.” Maybe conflicting tendencies and a fragmented culture—philosophy in this corner, popular culture everywhere else—is just the way it is. But I think we don’t need to settle for that. We can fill in what Hume left incomplete. Remember what I said earlier about my talk on Monty Python and philosophy. It
offers a way to think about philosophy and popular culture so that they fit together. To see how it does this, though, we need to learn something about
conceptual schemes
.

All of us see the world (metaphorically, but not just metaphorically) in different ways, if only because of the rather trivial fact that none of us are ever in exactly the same place at exactly the same time. But two people who see the world differently might nevertheless use similar
categories or concepts
in their seeing. You believe that Californians are the secret controllers of the world and read the news accordingly, spotting the devilish Californian hand in every market fluctuation and weather report. I think you’re nuts, because I know its the
Texans
who
really
run things, calling all the shots. For all our differences we have much in common, insofar as we both see the world by means of the same categories—
secret oppressor
,
oppressed
,
news report
, and so on. Conceptually-speaking, we are pretty much a match; we use the same concepts and have the same conceptual scheme. And for our purposes, this is all we need to understand by ‘conceptual scheme’.

I invite you to venture beyond the safety of this book and read more about conceptual schemes. (Though you should do so with care; much of the discussion is hard going and some of it is not just confusing, but confused. It’s also a bit dull, but more about that later.) You’ll find much more to read, because conceptual schemes—and they go by many names, among them ‘linguistic frameworks’ and the overused ‘paradigm’—have been all the rage, inside as well as outside the world of college professors. In fact, it’s become popular to regard philosophy as a sort of manufacturing and testing facility for conceptual schemes. This is actually a rather radical idea, since it departs from the notion of philosophy that Hume, for example, had in mind. Hume thought philosophy was after various
truths
about, for example, how humans work. If we think of philosophy as the manufacturing facility for conceptual schemes, though,
truth
itself shows up as a part of one conceptual scheme among others, indeed, among many. So if philosophy is the construction and examination of conceptual
schemes—ways for us to think about the world—then it’s
not
a search for truth, whether it’s truth about us, the Holy Grail, or anything else.