Monty Python and Philosophy (36 page)

I once believed that philosophy was the search for truth. In fact, I went on and on about it in my Ph. D. dissertation, and I remember around the same time that when non-philosophers sidled up to me and said “Hey, Gary, what is philosophy?” I’d say back, “Well, it’s the search for truth.” But now I think philosophy is the presentation and elaboration of conceptual schemes,
not
a search for truth. This
doesn’t
mean I have anything
against
truth; I don’t. I just see it as part of a conceptual scheme that we can adopt or not, as we choose.

One reason I like the conceptual schemes idea, and not the only one, is that it explains why that particular mix of Monty Python and philosophy worked, and still works. Believe for the moment the notion that philosophy consists in the construction and elaboration of, and reflection upon, conceptual schemes. Think if you will of philosophy as a remarkably elaborate and often ridiculously precise exercise of describing how, in general, we can look at things, in general. And though it
presents
this or that conceptual scheme, it is not the
adoption
of this or that conceptual scheme. Philosophers build the conceptual glasses, but they don’t actually wear them or even, perhaps, put them on. They look
at
them, not
through
them.

Even people who love to do this recognize it is rather dry and removed from everyday life. All of us, though, are driven to do this sort of thing to some degree; we are inclined not just to see the world but to reflect upon how we see the world. Hume didn’t know anything about conceptual schemes, but I think he would have appreciated that constructing and examining conceptual schemes is in this respect akin to the search for truth he imagined philosophy to be.

And Hume would have appreciated what a difference there is between such reflection and
actually seeing
, or at least being shown, the world in some new way—that is, actually taking on, or being shown, some new conceptual scheme.
The latter
is far more exciting,
for one. So we can cast Hume’s philosophy-popular culture divide in terms of conceptual schemes. It is just the difference between, say,
skiing
and
talking about
skiing, between
eating
great Indian food and
discussing
Indian food, between
visiting
a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese and
talking about
visiting such a cheese shop.

And
that’s it
.
That’s
the connection between Monty Python and philosophy. What we have in philosophy is the discussion of conceptual schemes. What we have, so often and so well, in Monty Python is a glimpse of what some new conceptual schema
would be like
if we, or those around us, actually lived in it. In philosophy you
talk
the aesthetics of skiing, the nature of the taste of Indian food, and the meaning of life in a world of disappointment. What Monty Python gives you is the conceptual scheme
in action
, as it were, animated, brought to life. You’re on skis headed toward the cheese shop, Indian food in mouth. Well, not really of course; but at least you’re not
just talking
anymore.

From the philosophy-as-examining-conceptual-schema point of view, my talk on philosophy and Monty Python looks something like this: Philosopher talks about philosophy and how philosophy has been understood by philosophers. Philosopher shows Monty Python clip of philosophers playing football. Philosopher talks about the notion that any belief could be held in the face of any evidence at all
if
one is willing to make adjustments in one’s
other
beliefs. Philosopher shows clip of “Dead Parrot” sketch. . . .

This works because the philosophy and the popular culture are in the right balance; as you have had enough of one, the other takes its place (not always precisely when everyone would like though; a few complain that there’s not enough Monty Python in the talk, and fewer complain that there’s not enough philosophy). But what is in balance involves conceptual schemes—we have the construction and examination of some conceptual scheme, be it holism or existentialism or whatever, and then the nearest thing we might expect to the world with that scheme in force. We have a shopkeeper insisting a dead parrot isn’t dead, for example, and a man determined to find cheese in a plainly empty, albeit very clean, cheese shop. I don’t think we can make sense of this talk without reference to conceptual schemes. We certainly, at any rate, can’t make sense of it as Hume would have wanted, as an alternation
between laughter, say, and a search for truths about what makes us laugh.

Of course I’m still a philosopher, so my inclination is to keep on writing about what I suggested in the previous section. But you are probably eager to stop reading about all this and start actually visiting some of these conceptual schemes, that is, actually participate in some Monty Python . . . you know, laugh at it. Me too, actually. But hang on; I have one last thing to draw your attention to. Why is it that we
laugh
at these alternative conceptual schemes? Why are they funny?

This is not as deep a question as it sounds, or at least it isn’t if we regard Monty Python as being in the business of enacting different conceptual schema. We laugh for many reasons, but one reason is because we encounter something unexpected, that is, unfamiliar or surprising. And one thing that a new conceptual scheme is, by definition, is unfamiliar or surprising. So we laugh when we are shown a way the world
isn’t
, but
could be
. And that’s what Monty Python does; they present genuinely new conceptual schemas for us to participate in vicariously. And we laugh because, well . . . imagine a world that includes an
All-England Summarize Proust Competition
. See, you laughed.

Now I’m not so interested in this fact as part of a theory of humor, or laughter, as I am in what it suggests about laughter’s connection to the intellect or, as we might say, to being smart. Laughter has been treated like an emotional reaction just like the other sentiments (disgust, envy, attraction and so on) for centuries. But laughter is more than that. Laughter and humor have a connection to intelligence, to intellect, that disgust, for example, doesn’t have. Being witty isn’t just a
sign
of intelligence, moreover; being witty
is
being smart. Laughter’s connection to the intellect is rather puzzling
unless
we think of laughter in the way I’ve suggested, as the natural byproduct of partaking in new conceptual schemes, something which itself comes on the heels of inventing those conceptual schemes. I quoted W.V. Quine at the very start of this essay, and Quine was right; philosophy itself is no laughing
matter. But Hume, who I also quoted at the start of this chapter, was right as well. Philosophy, done well, is surrounded by our culture, and by laughter particularly: the laughter of contemplating the things philosophy suggests. And either one of these things
by itself
is not much fun at all.

If I’m right about this, you’re probably more than ready to stop reading and put some Monty Python in the DVD player. Do it. And while you’re at it, invite a philosopher over to join you. I’m, uh, probably able to make it . . . especially if you’re showing
Life of Brian
.

GARY L. HARDCASTLE

 

 

M
y aim in this talk
¹¹⁹
is to present a comprehensive overview of each and every one of the main themes endured by analytic philosophy in the last sixty years or so, and to argue the bold historical claim that the whole lot is well represented—indeed, often best represented—in the work of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, collectively and henceforth referred to as “Monty Python.” Since I have all of fifty minutes to make my case, I expect we’ll have time for a song at the end. So let’s get to it.

Analytic philosophy has spent the last seventy years engaged in two successive revolts. If you didn’t know this, don’t feel bad—philosophers engaged in revolt look pretty much exactly like philosophers not engaged in revolt. They go to the office, teach introduction to philosophy, make a few phone calls, have office hours, work on a rough draft, and head home. There’s no storming
of the parliament building, ripping up of city streets, or lobbing of Molotov cocktails for your revolting philosopher, or, I should say, the philosopher in revolt. To see philosophical revolt you have to go to the philosophical journals, and indeed that’s where you find the first revolt, the famous revolt against metaphysics. This occurred in the 1920s and 1930s and was carried out by the logical positivists, who are now regarded in analytic circles as something like folk heroes. If you have been conditioned by college life to feel guilty if you have not yet written something down, then write down the names of the leading logical positivists: ‘Moritz Schlick’, ‘Rudolf Carnap’, ‘Hans Hahn’, ‘Otto Neurath’, ‘Herbert Feigl’, ‘Philipp Frank’, and ‘A.J. Ayer’.

The positivists’ revolt against metaphysics was really successful. Really, really, successful. It was so successful that even now, when everyone agrees that (a) logical positivism is dead, and that (2) even if it isn’t dead, its arguments against metaphysics, to use the technical phrase, suck pond water, upper-level courses in metaphysics taught in universities throughout the analytic world—indeed, in this very university—typically begin with self-conscious, multi-week, probing reflections on whether or not it’s really okay to now do metaphysics.

There’s a wonderful irony behind this revolt against metaphysics. It’s that the logical positivists, whose basic complaint against metaphysics was that it was all irretrievably confused and fuzzy, themselves had a notion of metaphysics that was, you guessed it, somewhat confused and fuzzy. The fuzziness was manifested in a couple of now-famous technical glitches in the positivist program. Whenever anyone came up with a means of sorting out the good philosophy from the metaphysical, some young upstart logic whiz always pointed out that the proposed means either ruled out some clearly good philosophy or ruled in some ghastly bit of metaphysics. Even worse, nobody could ever find an acceptable way to defend the main sail on the positivist’s ship, the verifiability criterion. The verifiability criterion said that the meaning of a meaningful statement was conveyed completely by the means by which it is verified. The criterion was enormously useful in accomplishing sort of an end-run around metaphysics; since metaphysical statements couldn’t be verified, the criterion told you they were meaningless. The positivists were pretty happy
about all this until it sank in that the verifiability criterion itself couldn’t be verified. Think about it—to verify the verifiability criterion, you’d have to sort out all the meaningful statements beforehand, and that you couldn’t do without first assuming the verifiability criterion! So the verifiability criterion is not verifiable. If it’s not verifiable, then, according to itself, it’s meaningless. So the verifiability criterion might as well be a bit of metaphysics. In the possible world in which Homer Simpson is not only a real person but a logical positivist living in Vienna in the 1930s, Homer just said “D’oh!”

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m going to stop rambling on about logical positivism and show something from Monty Python. Hang on, I’ve got one more thing to say. It’s now pretty clear that the positivists weren’t revolting against metaphysics
per se
, but against philosophy itself. Really, they were quite upset that philosophy had not made much progress. Other sciences had, of course; consider, for example, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, metallurgy, geology, geography, archeology, agriculture, mathematics, genetics, political science, poultry science, economics, anthropology, horticulture, nutrition, medicine, psychology, sociology, forestry . . . well, you get the idea. It seemed like philosophy had even had a head start over all the other intellectual enterprises, but had somehow forgotten to keep in touch with the real world. Instead it spiraled off into bizarro metaphysics, where you could say anything at all and get away with it because there was no way to determine the truth of what you said or indeed if you even really said anything at all in the first place. This is really the first, and the biggest theme, of contemporary analytic philosophy—the contempt for innumerable philosophers of yore, who managed to get nothing done while everyone else was off figuring out neat things like natural selection and the heliocentricity of the solar system. Now let’s look at our first clip.

Notice a few things. First, not one of the players is a logical positivist. That’s because all the logical positivists are in the stands (if they’ve come to the game at all), screaming something like “Kick
the ball already, you silly nits!!” Okay, there is Wittgenstein, playing for Deutschland, but you can tell by the tweed that it’s the later Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein who wrote
Philosophical Investigations
, and who was reviled by Russell, for example, for having abandoned good (in other words, analytic) philosophy. Notice also that it’s not even a philosopher who starts the ball rolling, so to speak, but Archimedes, an engineer. You saw all the others wandering around—isn’t it annoying? Well, the positivists were annoyed too, and that’s why they revolted.

The positivists’ version of the Molotov Cocktail, you’ll recall, was the verifiability criterion. I have a good clip for that, too, but I have a thing or two to say first. Despite its troubling aspects, the verifiability criterion became the cornerstone of verificationism, which is roughly the position that the only way to say something meaningful about the world is to say something that can, in principle, be determined to be either true or false in light of experience. Central to verificationism is the notion that for each statement about the world there is a definite set of experiences that by itself determines whether the statement in question is true or false. This is sometimes called “semantic reductionism” at the level of statements, as in: any meaningful statement can be reduced to a set of experiences (more correctly, statements about experience, if you favor the brand of philosophy I call “annoying particularism”). If you’re out to verify the statement ‘The cat is on the mat’, for example, then presumably you’re in search of certain experiences—like seeing the cat on the mat. Having the experience guaranteed the truth of the statement, or at least that is what verificationism told you. A really important spear that felled the mastodon of positivism—more important, perhaps, than the embarrassing bit about the verifiability criterion not itself being verifiable—was the discovery that reductionism simply wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true! To determine the truth or falsity of a statement you not only need a set of special experiences, but you need to know the truth or falsity of a host of other different statements as well. That is, verifying that the cat is on the mat is not a matter of experience alone, but of accepting all sorts of other different statements, all the way from ‘Light rays travel in straight lines’ to ‘I am not having another one of those darn flashbacks.’