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

Ayer, for example, who was no champion of ordinary language philosophy, wrote of the perennial problem of truth that “there is no problem of truth as it is ordinarily conceived.” He explained in his influential book Language, Truth, and Logic that “the traditional conception of truth as a ‘real quality’ or a ‘real relation’ is due, like most philosophical mistakes, to a failure to analyze sentences correctly.” 109

One important consequence of this turn to language is that philosophy became increasingly disconnected from other areas of inquiry, both inside and outside of philosophical tradition. History, sociology, and the natural sciences, for example, were taken to contribute nothing to philosophical understanding. In his famous passages exploring the semantics of “seeing” and “seeing as”—made famous by his line drawing of a figure which may be seen as a duck or a rabbit—Wittgenstein insists that we keep psychology and physiology out of it: “Above all, don’t wonder ‘What can be going on in the eyes or brain?’” “Our problem is not a causal one but a conceptual one” (§II, xi).

Ordinary language philosophy became popular on campuses during and after the 1940s (other approaches to philosophy, existentialism most notably, were more popular off-campus). In the wake of a devastating world war, it provided a new, modern, and promising framework for philosophy as a professional activity. University departments in the United States grew dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s and departments of philosophy routinely hired experts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to round out their offerings. Of course, this is not to say that all philosophy departments and philosophers spoke with one voice (like one famous department in Australia) or that the rise of ordinary language philosophy was not without important philosophical critics. Heavyweights such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper insisted that philosophy involved much more than solving linguistic puzzles. Decades after his work with the Pythons, John Cleese made a similar point when paraphrasing the British philosopher P.F. Strawson. These postwar years dominated by ordinary language philosophy were a kind of “backwater,” a time when philosophers “weren’t dealing with anything important.” Besides some overstatement—the study of language is hardly unimportant, after all—Cleese recognized the professional rewards that ordinary-language philosophy held for many. It allowed them “to shine” and “to look tremendously bright, and everyone thought ‘Aren’t they clever! My God, what brilliant minds!’”110

The Problem with Brilliance

This kind of brilliance came at a cost, after all. A philosophical program that ignores existentialism, phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy risks becoming disconnected from those areas of life and culture that (arguably) give rise to philosophical problems and curiosity in the first place. We may show, or even shew, the fly out of the bottle, after all, yet remain variously uninformed, perplexed or disturbed by the problems that lead us to philosophy.

So it goes in the sketch, “No Time to Lose.” Palin, once again, portrays a man deeply concerned with language and its ordinary use. Seeking some expert advice and training, he finds it at the No Time to Lose Advice Centre where Eric Idle sits behind his desk and counsels would-be users of this popular phrase.

Palin’s marriage, it appears, is in a semantic rut:

My wife and I have never had a great deal to say to each other. In the old days, we used to find things to say, like, “pass the sugar” or “that’s my flannel.” But in the last ten or fifteen years there just doesn’t seem to have been anything to say. Anyway I saw your phrase advertised in the paper and I thought, “that’s the kind of thing I’d like to say to her.”

What this sad relationship needs are things to talk about. Yet Palin and Idle care only about the phrase and the proper technique for using it. In Idle’s first lesson, he pretends to be an alarm clock that wakes Palin up only minutes before he needs to be at work.

IDLE: “Tick tock tick tock. RING! RING! RING! RING!”

PALIN: “No!” “Time to lose!”

Palin is confused by the complexities of pausing and ending and can’t get the hang of the expression. As a last resort, Idle turns to phonetics. When used properly, he explains, the words “to lose” sound like the name of the city in France, Toulouse. With Idle and Palin now chanting in unison “No Time Toulouse, No Time Toulouse . . .,” the sketch becomes even more detached from the problems that led Palin to seek some help. He may have learned, finally, how to pronounce the phrase. But, just as we learned nothing about Holland’s most famous aperitif, he learned nothing about how to solve those underlying problems in his marriage. Thus the sketch is free to segue into something similar, but completely different: “No Time Toulouse: The Story of the Wild and Lawless Days of the Post-Impressionists.”

Bruces

The analysis of everyday language and our use of it to solve philosophical problems again takes center stage when the Pythons present their famous department of philosophy in a fictional Australian university. These philosophers, however, look more like officers or soldiers. They dress alike (in khaki), they talk alike (loud and ill-mannered) and, as a simple theory of descriptions would have it, they’re all the same. Each is named Bruce.

The Bruces are fascinated by language. When one says, “It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum,” another remarks, “That’s a strange expression, Bruce.” “Well, Bruce, I heard the Prime Minister use it.” When the department chair makes a joke, most of the other Bruces use laughter to express their delight. While they laugh, however, another—Palin (there is a pattern here)—instead mentions laughter and bellows, alongside his laughing colleagues, “Howls, howls, of derisive laughter, Bruce!”

Yet when Cleese, the Chairbruce, brings this meeting to order, another aspect of the Pythons’ critique of ordinary-language philosophy comes into view. First, he introduces the department’s visiting philosopher, Michael Baldwin (played by Terry Jones), whose presence challenges the uniformity and conformity that the Bruces seem