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

possibly matter whether you were making dinner, looking to get drunk, or doing anything else. ‘Besides Being, there is Nothing’ is more like saying “Ni! Ni! Ni!” than like saying there is only beer in the fridge. As you can see, then, the importance of having an account of nonsense for some philosophers was precisely to find good grounds upon which to accuse other philosophers of speaking nonsense. If you have taken philosophy classes, you may well feel the pull of this maneuver; if you teach philosophy classes, you certainly feel the pull.

Where do we meet nonsense in our everyday lives? Most manifestly in certain comedic moments. A man with a thick foreign accent enters a tobacconist’s shop, consults a book, and says, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. Certainly, however, the state of this man’s hovercraft is not something a tobacconist is much interested in or can really help with. A blancmange finds itself contesting for the All England Lawn Tennis Championship. Karl Marx finds himself competing for fabulous prizes on a TV game show. Neighborhood women gather round to find out whether the son of one of them—a grown son, who is Minister of Overseas Development—can talk yet. These situations are at best silly and, if taken seriously, would be absurd or nonsensical.90

So, on the one hand, there is a certain form of comedy—a form which many of the greatest moments from Monty Python exemplify—that exploits the absurd and the nonsensical for comedic effect. And, on the other hand, we have a clear twentieth-century philosophical drive on the part of some philosophers to accuse other philosophers of purveying nonsense. Attention to these two facts can change our attitude toward philosophy entirely. Comedy, I shall argue, when viewed as something other than a repository of example, can effect a decisive transformation of a vision of philosophy by which we are possessed.91

Let us return to the philosophers. We have a vision, offered by Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), for example, of Martin Heidegger as engaged in the following sort of activity. Heidegger stands before hundreds of students in a lecture hall and proclaims “I’ll have the spam, spam, spam, baked beans, sausage, and spam.” To this, the students rise in rapturous applause, as both their existence and their German destiny are revealed to them. Heidegger publishes a book in which he reveals that “the human brain is like an enormous fish; it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see.” This book is greeted as the profoundest statement of the place of humanity in the world.

Why, according to Carnap, would Heidegger be engaging in this ludicrous behavior? Carnap’s view is that when philosophers go on this way they are “expressing an attitude toward life” in somewhat the same way that Beethoven or Mozart is expressing an attitude toward life in his music. But, the Ninth Symphony is not nonsense; even Mozart, the Requiem notwithstanding, did not write nonsensical music. Carnap’s view was that one got nonsense if one tried to express an attitude toward life in the form of a theoretical understanding of the world. Thus, Heidegger ought to have offered us music (most likely involving oompah bands and Lederhosen, in Heidegger’s case, sad to say) and came up with nonsense instead because he thought he was giving an account of the world. This leads Carnap to conclude that “metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.”92

We can dig deeper than Carnap does, though. Let us grant that some philosophers, perhaps even Heidegger, unwittingly purvey nonsense. The offering of nonsense in the world is, however, not a mistaken attempt to turn an attitude toward life into a theory—it is an expression of a particular attitude toward life. Heidegger does not seek to be Beethoven or Mozart and misfire; he seeks to be Professor I.H. Gumby and misfires. Moreover, he misfires not by making more sense than does Professor Gumby, but by being less funny than Gumby. That is to say, Heidegger, unwittingly to be sure, expresses a comedic attitude toward life in offering nonsense as his contribution to the world, but he is a terrible comic; his nonsense is not amusing. We can alter our lesson from Carnap accordingly and say that we have conjectured that philosophers are comedians without comic ability.

This is a profound conclusion that explains many heretofore inexplicable phenomena. For example, among philosophers, the following is a common, all too common occurrence: scores of philosophers gather for a learned talk by a distinguished philosopher on the topic of, say, philosophy of physics; the speaker expresses a desire to be understood by all in the room, but then gives a talk so technical that only three people in the world could understand it. After the talk, two members of the audience meet in the foyer and this conversation ensues:

DR. A.R.: That was like a Monty Python skit.

DR. G.H.: Yes, a bad Monty Python skit.

Exactly so! On my diagnosis the talk really was bad absurdist humor. The speaker, just like Heidegger, missed the boat right from the start. He didn’t even realize he was doing comedy. Lacking such self-awareness, he offered up comedy of the worst sort; comedy that mocks rather than amuses or enlightens his audience.

Another important consequence of my view is that we have an explanation of why many philosophers of the sort who are drawn to Carnap (so-called analytic philosophers) find Monty Python particularly amusing, even to the point (witness this book) of thinking that Monty Python has some secret wisdom about philosophy. These philosophers are, on my view, drawn to the very same thing in philosophy and in Monty Python: a sort of pleasure that derives from “getting the joke.” What is it to understand the work of Spinoza or Descartes or Kant, anyway? It is not to learn something about the world, but to learn a style of telling stories about the world. To be sure, these stories are not funny (we are dealing