Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

No Ambition

As the four situations illustrate, the meaning of the sentence ‘What is going on?’ depends on its use, so that its meaning changes as its use changes. Nevertheless, we can make sense of the question used in these ways, whereas we can’t make sense of ‘What is going on?’ as it occurs in “Spectrum: Talking About Things.” On this both the twenty- and the forty-something Wittgenstein are likely to agree (for different reasons); where they differ is in their conception of and response to nonsense.

Suppose we agree that as the presenter uses it, the sentence ‘What is going on?’ makes no sense. If it doesn’t, and we can figure out why it doesn’t, can we apply that diagnosis to philosophical statements in general and perhaps avoid doing whatever it is that leads to nonsense?

Yes, says the young Wittgenstein. Philosophical nonsense is something distinctive; it is something we can spot and throw away once and for all, after climbing “through it, on it, over it.”

Nope, says the older Wittgenstein; sad to say, philosophy isn’t like dog-doo. One can’t avoid it by stepping over it.

In denying this possibility, Wittgenstein admits that his earlier ambition to wash his hands of philosophy amounts to wishful thinking. Why? Because to be able to avoid nonsense, we’d need to know its characteristics, what it looks like. And as we just saw, the details of context matter to whether the sentence makes sense and what kind of sense it makes. It’s easy to see how these contexts might be varied—and so the meaning of sentences occurring in them—in infinitely many ways. Given this, who can describe the contexts that will yield philosophical nonsense. Who can say what nonsense looks like?

From the later Wittgenstein’s perspective, the presenter and guests on “Spectrum: Talking About Things” can’t predict the ways their conversation might lapse into nonsense. Since their (and our) uncertainty in this regard is inevitable, philosophy has no cure.

How to Patent Nonsense

With this in mind, the later Wittgenstein reshapes both his practice of philosophy and his goals. As in the Tractatus, he continues to use philosophical language to subvert it, but instead of attempting to solve the problem of philosophical nonsense once and for all, Wittgenstein’s later practice is to test particular classes of expressions (color words, for instance) in this and that context in order to reveal the variety of ways sense passes into nonsense. He aims to:

teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. (Philosophical Investigations, §464)

Exactly how is this practice—this new way of engaging in philosophy—carried out? Let’s use Monty Python’s Flying Circus to make a preliminary point about the very fine line between making people laugh and liberating them from philosophical headaches.

“Is There Life After Death?”

We have, again, a talk show, but now instead of a guest several corpses are “slumped motionless in their seats.” The topic is different as well. The host, Roger Last (John Cleese), asks the question:

Gentlemen, is there a life after death or not?

Sir Brian?

(Silence)

Professor? . . .

Prebendary? . . .

Well there we have it, three say no. (“ ‘Is there’ . . . Life After Death?,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 36, “E. Henry Tripshaw’s Disease”).

Despite ourselves, we laugh to see corpses dangling off chairs. Why? Perhaps the impiety of laughing at death is a relief, given society’s unrelentingly solemn attitude towards death; or perhaps we laugh because the bodies are the remains of an aristocrat, an academic, and a clergyman, and who thinks they have much of a pulse to begin with? Plato himself laughs at this in the Phaedo, where he lets fly the quip that you must be dead already if you’re a philosopher. If we reflect also on the attempt to interview dead men on the subject of life after death, we may laugh at the idiotic appropriateness: Who could be better to ask? Who could be worse?

Why else do we laugh at the skit? Some of the humor of the sketch comes from using language in ways it normally doesn’t get used. For example, we don’t expect corpses to speak or people to speak to them, so the concepts of speaking and asking is out of place here, and it’s incongruous and funny when the host expects an answer, just as it is would be to talk to a lamppost or a mannequin. Similarly, we know that while people use silence meaningfully all the time, in wounded silences, compassionate silences, and so on, corpses do not—in this sense, corpses are not silent—so it’s funny to see someone mistakenly treat the two cases as the same.

“Language Games”

So Monty Python derives some of its funniness from incongruous and absurd uses of language; how is this like or unlike Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Certainly, Monty Python’s sketches raise (implicitly or explicitly) the kinds of questions about language that the later Wittgenstein poses.

But there is an important difference between the nonsense on which their comedy depends and the nonsense Wittgenstein thinks pervades philosophy. We know that comedy misuses language. We know that we are to laugh at these misuses. To use Wittgenstein’s expression, we understand how the “language game” of comedy is played. In practicing philosophy, however, we’re never entirely sure how seriously to take what we’re doing—indeed, we’re often not sure what we’re doing!

Remember this difference as we begin to engage in philosophy as Wittgenstein does, that is, by investigating our uses of concepts taken from specific areas within our language.

“I’d Like to Put This Question to You, Please, Lizard”

Let’s focus on our language about animals. Monty Python occasionally gives us vicious animals—witness the killer sheep in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But the sheep kill only after they become intelligent and human-like, and it’s more typical to find animals appearing supremely indifferent to us. This indifference is, moreover, charming. At least, this is the case in “A Duck, a