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

“popular culture.” There even appear to be many who nowadays promote, under the rubric of “popular culture,” the claim that serious philosophical life should be available for everyone, that every last jot and tittle of movies or plays or comic books or shows on the telly even somehow count as philosophically deep or important. There is even, I’m told, a book series dedicated to unearthing philosophical ideas or notions in movies and television shows!116

Some of you will spot the irony afoot. For it was a certain youthful indiscretion on my part, with certain now-famous elements of popular culture (combined with, I admit, several pints), that first led me to your wonderful department and its uniformly underrated approach to matters philosophie. I refer—I can see some of you smirking already—to that BBC excrescence non puerile known as Monty Python’s Flying Grail [audience: “Circus! Circus!”]. Right, right, Circus. Anyway, as we all know, it was upon encountering one of these so-called “Pythons” in a Twickenham Road pub that I learned (and how he knew, I haven’t the foggiest) that this very department was at that very time soliciting. Soliciting applications for a visiting scholar. And again as we all know, the result has been a long and most fruitful, if sporadic, intellectual camaraderie.

But let us be clear: if this Monty Python business inadvertently nourished my career, that was a mere accident attendant upon a substantial disaster for twentieth-century philosophy proper. The philosophy I . . . well, we . . . were taught to love, honor, and cherish became, in the course of Monty Python’s success, popularized—a circumstance all the more ironic given the fact that, I was once told, the Pythons themselves were once students at two of the greatest universities in the history of civilization, Oxford and Cambridge. Knowing something of the real, true philosophy, they apparently felt equipped to stun, even kill, it with an Arbeitkorp comprising not just a show on the telly but at least one full-length movie, the sheer popularity of which surely helped obscure, if not altogether erase, those crucial disciplinary and cultural borders I just mentioned. Indeed, Monty Python, I submit, paved the way for the utterly ridiculous idea that anyone anywhere can not only pass judgment upon philosophical matters, but do so on national television. Good Lord, I even witnessed a sketch in which two washer ladies discuss Sartre! [laughter]. Laugh if you must, but all this mucking about has had dire consequences. It has made it next-to-impossible to tell who is really a philosopher and who is not; who is a fraud and who has earned a place over Wittgenstein’s knee.

Some of my younger colleagues, back in Slough, dismiss my worries. They have their standard response about the status of anything: “Well, it’s all negotiable now, isn’t it? It’s all textual.” [yelling] WELL IT’S NOT! [audience cheers]. But, I ask you, is their attitude not the main reason why a walk through the drawing rooms of today’s universities resembles nothing so much as a muck-about in a postmodern zoo, where the animals have been let loose from their cages to wander amongst (and, inevitably, mount) each other, heedless to their heritage as natural kinds? If it is still a philosophical homily (as I, like so many others, learned from our graduate advisors) that there can be no distinction without a corresponding instinction, then the present essay can be regarded as a tracing of one triumph of instinct over distinct.117 Thus my title.

The Trouble With Dead Parrots, and Sketches About Them

How, precisely, did a comedy troupe with ill-advised access to a television camera create a fissure in the dyke capable of releasing these floodwaters? Well, the reason strikes me as quite plain: they ignored the master. As Wittgenstein says, language matters. But to watch these Pythons, you’d think Wittgenstein never even existed! It’s language on holiday with them, I tell you, and nary a care for the perspicuity, rigors, or quality with language that our profession claims as its very own! All of this is clearest in a sketch I recently chanced upon when preparing my talk to you and which happily remains obscure and, more importantly, largely unknown to my negotiation-intoxicated younger colleagues. I hesitate to even begin to—ahem!—popularize it here, not only because it tends to agitate me but . . . [inaudible comment from the audience]. Right, that’s a good idea. Thank you, Bruce. [sound of bottle opening, pause]. There. Alright, the sketch goes like this. A Mr. Praline angrily returns to his local pet store to complain about a bird he’d recently purchased. The pet shop owner. . . . Oh, I actually have it transcribed here . . . bugger, I’ll just read it.

MR. PRALINE: I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

OWNER: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue . . . What’s, uh . . . What’s wrong with it?

MR. PRALINE: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ’E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

OWNER: No, no, ’e’s uh, . . . he’s resting.

MR. PRALINE: Look, Matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

OWNER: No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

MR. PRALINE: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

OWNER: Nononono, no, no! ’E’s resting!

So, here we have in the Owner (who, it should be noted, does not own the subject of the sketch, the parrot—see how it’s language on holiday already?) a denial of the parrot’s very existence; it is, in fact, a bold parrot-denial. The stage is set, therefore, for philosophical debate; if it were in our hands, professional hands, a proper language would be set down, tending to syntax and semantics, and then by means of this language the dispute would be resolved effectively, that is, by way of a