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

characters in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a crusty Colonel who stopped sketches when they became too silly. This Colonel stopped the sketch “Hell’s Grannies” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity”), for example, when the Pythons moved from joking about Hell’s Grannies attacking people to having “vicious gangs of keep-left signs” attack a vicar. “Right, right, stop it,” he interrupted. “This film’s got silly. Started off with a nice little idea about grannies attacking young men, but now it’s got silly. . . .”)

Unfortunately, philosophers tend not to be as self-aware as Pythons, and so they often fail to think about how their methods of thinking are perceived by others. And given the oddity of their examples and thought experiments, this often leads people to dismiss them as irrelevant and impractical. Since this is so, philosophers should take a leaf out of the Pythons’ book, and not just think about thinking but also think about how their thinking will be perceived by others—and, after doing so, work to explain to non-philosophers why their examples and thoughts experiments are relevant. And showing how the Pythons use techniques that are very similar to those used by philosophers would be a good place to start.

So, What Have Philosophers Ever Done for Us?

Appearances can be very deceptive, as the milkman-psychiatrist from “Jersey Cream Psychiatrists” might have said to the housewife who thought that he was just a regular milkman. Although philosophical discussions of runaway trolleys and people being attached to violinists might seem irrelevant to the issues that philosophers use them to address, they’re actually extremely useful tools for clarifying thinking about these issues. We can see this by comparing the use of such examples to the humorous techniques used by Monty Python. The Pythons’ references to their own show within their show parallels philosophers’ aim of thinking about how they (and others) are thinking by means of examples that are designed to identify how to think about such abstract issues as what makes an act morally right. Similarly, the Pythons’ use of bizarre examples to undermine humorously our unreflective everyday beliefs parallels philosophers’ use of similar examples to address such practical moral issues as, for example, abortion. Once we understand what philosophers are up to when they argue using bizarre examples, then, we can see that criticizing philosophers for their use is a bit like Reg (played by John Cleese in Monty Python’s Life of Brian) criticizing the Romans for not having done anything for the people of Judea. In that film, Reg, the leader of the militant revolutionary People’s Front of Judea, asks what the Romans have ever given the people of Judea. This leads one of his men, Xerxes, to reply “The aqueduct.” After Reg admits this, the following dialogue ensues:

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?

REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

MATTHIAS: And the roads.

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads . . .

—and then the other members of the People’s Front start listing all the other things that the Romans have given the people of Judea: irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths, public order, and peace. Similarly, if we ask “What have philosophers ever done for us?” we get involved in the following dialogue: “Well, their examples help us to decide what we think about issues we haven’t thought about before.” “Oh, yeah, well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?” “And their examples help us discover whether we really believe what we say we believe, or not.” “Yeah, all right. I’ll grant you that their examples help us to work out what we think, and to think better. But apart from helping us work out what we think, clarifying our views, and helping us to solve hard problems, what do philosophers ever do for us?!” “Well, their examples are amusing…!”

And now I’ll obey Reg’s command at the end of this scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian and shut up.87

Pythonic Aspects of Philosophy

“There’s Archimedes, and I think he’s had an idea!”

17

Tractatus Comedo-Philosophicus

ALAN RICHARDSON

What is the aim of your philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §309

A Senseless Waste of Human Reason

In the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, philosophers rediscovered an important idea, the idea of nonsense.88 Throughout the next few decades, philosophy was rife with discussions of nonsense. Indeed, an awful lot of philosophers through the first half of the twentieth century thought that an awful lot of other philosophers were speaking nonsense. (Very few philosophers thought that they themselves were speaking nonsense; nonsense was routinely understood to be what they spoke at the next café over, especially if that café was in Paris or the Black Forest.)

Why was nonsense so useful to philosophers at that time? Because those philosophers were coming to understand that much of what passed for philosophy really was, at the end of the day, difficult to understand not because it was deep but because it really did not make any sense at all. Anyone might find occasion to say “Besides the beer, there is nothing in our fridge,” but it takes a philosopher to write, with a show of great profundity, something like, “Besides Being, there is Nothing”—and then go on to investigate, as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) did, the precise nature of that Nothing.89 The claim about the state of the fridge is either true or false—and if you are interested in making dinner, it matters if it is true or false. It began to dawn on a number of philosophers back in the 1920s that the claim about Being and Nothing, on the other hand, was neither true nor false—and the claim couldn’t