Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  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 to crave. Immediately, they begin to call him “New Bruce” and they impress upon him their departmental rules: They must all drink regularly, Cleese explains, and they must all be heterosexual (No pooftas!). This regimentation and uniformity extends to politics and academic freedom, as well. New Bruce, we learn, will be free to teach “any of the great socialist thinkers provided he makes it clear that they were wrong!” The old Bruce’s heartily agree as they unleash their nationalistic passion and yell, in unison, “Australia, Australia, We Love You, Amen!” The sketch ends with post-meeting refreshments and a close-up on Cleese, looking increasingly savage and crazed, gnawing a large slab of raw meat.

  The joke here is the vast cultural distance between the refined, polite Michael Baldwin and his new fascist-philosopher colleagues. But the sketch is not merely whimsical. It involves kernels of historical truth about the institution of philosophy which, for all its lofty ideals and intellectual refinements, has been affected by these baser social forces and prejudices that animate the Bruces. In the 1970s, for example, many philosophers were scandalized to learn about Martin Heidegger’s professional, party-sponsored ascent in Nazi Germany. Others were upset by allegations about Wittgenstein’s homosexuality and his mistreatment of persons and colleagues he did not like.111 Recent studies have focused less on individuals and more on how curricula and pedagogy in philosophy were affected by anticommunism (or McCarthyism) in the United States and Europe during the cold war. Politically engaged styles or programs of philosophical activity and research that once dominated philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s—Marxism, most prominently—fell into disfavor and survived, at best, as niche specialties. 112

  The point is not that the Pythons anticipated these historical claims or investigations. Their sketch simply finds humor in the idea that philosophers, regardless of how accomplished or obscure, are nonetheless human and therefore susceptible to human foibles—be they the allure of nationalism or the joys of putting whoopee cushions in colleagues’ chairs (as Sartre, the Pythons elsewhere tell us, was fond of doing).

  Yet the humor leads us back to our critique. If the Pythons had in mind a real-world model for the Bruces, who could it have been but Wittgenstein and his followers at Cambridge and Oxford (where the Pythons began their careers)? Wittgenstein’s personal magnetism was legendary and helped cement nothing less than a tribal or cult mentality among his students. Critics may have described things in extreme terms, but they are surprisingly consistent. Cambridge philosophe
r C.D. Broad, a contemporary of Wittgenstein, complained in print about “the philosophical gambols of my younger friends as they dance to the highly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein’s flute” while Russell disdained the “cult of ‘common usage’” that grew up around Wittgenstein. Two recent historians note that this “passionately expressed allegiance to Wittgenstein” extended beyond philosophy into habits of lifestyle, dress, and diet. “How religiously the inner circle of the disciples followed the master has a comical air to it: sleeping in narrow beds, wearing sneakers, carrying vegetables in string bags to let them breathe, and putting celery in water when serving it for dinner. . . .”113

  None of Wittgenstein’s devotees changed his or her name to Bruce, so far as I know. But that is beside the point. The important question this historical research raises is whether social and political circumstances affect philosophers as thinkers. Is technical philosophical work—the premises on which dominant theories rest, the subjects philosophers find interesting, the arguments they construct, and the seminar reading lists they create, for example—affected by the forces and politics of professionalism and social life? For the Old Bruces, the answer is clearly ‘yes.’ They will do nothing without the approval of their colleagues and fellow patriots. New Bruce, on the other hand, presents a challenge. Will he teach socialism and condemn it as “wrong” because he has been ordered to? The sketch does not answer but frames the question effectively: New Bruce must either give in to this departmental pressure or put up a fight.

  A Knockout of an Argument

  So it goes in the sketch, “The Epilogue: A Question of Belief.” Here, Cleese is the host of a high-brow intellectual television program called “The Epilogue” and his two guests are a world-renowned Bishop and a popular professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Their topic is the perennial question, Does God exist? But tonight there is a twist. These two guests, Cleese explains, will employ a special method: they’re going to “fight for it—the existence or nonexistence of God is to be determined by two falls, two submissions, or a knockout.” Cleese transforms into a sports announcer (“Alright Boys. Let’s get to it!”) and the monsignor and philosopher begin tossing each other around the ring. As the sketch ends, there is yet no clear winner. Cleese tells the audience, “we’ll be bringing you the result of this discussion later on in the program.”114

  This discussion? As with the Bruces, this sketch juxtaposes two very different things not only for the resulting laughs and silliness. Those laughs take some root in the suspicion that these two very different institutions, violent sport and serious intellectual debate, may be fundamentally connected or not so different. Both sketches suggest that philosophical questions and styles are sometimes like prizefights and effectively settled by the power wielded by individuals, departments, or societies and nations.

  So understood, these two threads of commentary about philosophy that run throughout Monty Python’s Flying Circus—the parodies of ordinary language philosophy and the hardball politics involved in the life of the mind—come together in a one-two punch that lands squarely on Wittgenstein’s jaw. For if philosophers’ beliefs and arguments are to any extent influenced by fashions, politics, or overt bullying—whether of nations, professional academic departments, rival intellectuals, and so on—then it cannot be correct to say that philosophy consists exclusively in solving puzzles in everyday language. For in that case, what philosophers say and believe about philosophical subjects is affected by circumstances and pressures that exist outside of language. There is nothing in language or its analysis alone, for example, that makes sense of the Bruces’ co-dependencies. Nor do they explain the strong personal and emotional attractions (or aversions) that so many philosophers developed about Wittgenstein or the strategies philosophers adopted to navigate Nazism or McCarthyism. Yet these kinds of extra-linguistic factors (variously historical, sociological, and psychological) most likely contributed to the scope and nature of philosophy as it evolved through the twentieth century.

  If philosophy desires to understand and account for its own development and nature, it cannot embrace Wittgenstein’s dictum that philosophy consists in solving puzzles in ordinary language. It must instead open itself to perspectives and results offered by history, sociology, and other areas of intellectual life. With more open borders, there should be much more for philosophers to do than belabor the idiosyncrasies of ordinary language or pauses and endings. And for all that, there may be no. Time Toulouse.

  19

  Word and Objection: How Monty Python Destroyed Modern Philosophy

  BRUCE BALDWIN

  Some might say that a rather senior philosopher like myself has his creative days behind him.115 Indeed, some have actually said this. But I am finding, partly because of the circumstances I will discuss here today, that this conventional wisdom has it all backwards: I, even as I near eighty, am behind my most creative days. But then again, as most of you know, I’ve long been accustomed to being at odds and out of step with most of the “trends” and conventional “wisdoms” in philosophy! [audience laughter—Eds.]

  In My Day . . .

  Well, let me begin with a personal reflection of sorts. Many of you know that my heart, along with my intellect, is rooted in Great Britain. On my earlier visits to your department, you may have heard me speak of what went on in the drawing rooms of some of the finer British universities in the middle decades of the last century, in my dear youth. Ah, to be wandering room to room back then! One might spy down one corridor young men furiously debating something called sense data—the sight of a red lorry or the taste of an apple were common examples. You see sense-data around still, at least occasionally, by the way. And down another corridor, I recall seeing two rather gawky biologists of indeterminate intellect played giddily with chains of tinker-toys and x-rays (for some reason) and who, I later learned at High Table, discovered some important result about exactly how to hook-up or chemically combine two chains of such tinker-toys. And for this these men became Nobles! Every corner, every drawing room, contained some fascinating activity or one sort or other. Halcyon days!

  The philosophical excitement in those decades swirled dizzyingly, of course, around the great Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), with whom on several occasions I attempted to talk and dine. Permit me a bit more in the way of personal anecdote. As you all know, though we were not on intimate terms, I knew Wittgenstein quite well. And as I made quite clear to the authors of that recent book, Wittgenstein: Joker (though they chose not to respond to, or even acknowledge, my letters), I myself was even present at that philosophical tête-à-tête many years ago that has lately been attracting so much attention. This is the one, um, you’ve all heard about it I’m sure, in which Wittgenstein is rumored to have behaved poorly. Well, I can tell you that most of what is being said about this so-called affair has been thoroughly obscured by the intervening years or, as seems more likely, various agendas and postmodern machinationé implemented by those endeavoring to revise, downplay, or trivialize (and presumably popularize!) Wittgenstein’s singularly great and oft-misunderstood contributions. Now let me be clear that Witt, as I called him, was not joking around during that week’s discussion at the Moral Sciences Club. Far from it! The speaker, however—a nervous, funny-looking Austrian named ‘Popper’, I recall—I distinctly remember him waving around some stick or something as he talked. When Whitehead asked him to leave it alone, Popper claimed that the stick had nothing to do with philosophy, and that he was only gesturing, and I quote, “in philosophical fun”!

  Well, I needn’t tell you what happened next. Philosophical fun, indeed! Witt stormed out of that now-fabled assemblage, slamming the door in the process. This I remember vividly because I was sitting at the door, and Witt stepped on my foot on the way out, crushing three of my toes!

  And here, gentlemen, is my foot! [laughter, applause]

  Well, my foot has since healed, but philosophy, I’m afraid, has not. What Wittgenstein taught us
that day, as on so many others, was that philosophy is a most serious business, and a most serious business cannot be interspersed with anything else—be it science, literature, or play, even good old-fashioned poker play by the warm hearth. I do believe that I recollect those post-war years so fondly not because I was then in my prime (a little logical joke there, eh!), but because those times were special. In those days, we lived the philosophical homily, imbibed from the writings of Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), that everything, philosophy especially, has a place and, contrarily, that there is a place for everything. The human mind made great strides then (mostly, but not just, in England), but these strides were premised on the seriousness and intensity of research that comes with keeping intellectual life organized, well-structured, and . . . in its place. Everything is, we all agree with Parmenides. But I insist that everything not only is, but must also be in its right place. [applause]

  Scotus? Scotus? He is, sadly, a stranger to today’s university. He’s even more a stranger to today’s so-called philosophy. Like the proverbial toothpaste bled from its tube, philosophy has, over the course of my career, spilled out of its proper place to mix, meld, and just generally interlace itself with, well, everything—what is called “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