Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary Hardcastle (best novels for beginners .TXT) 📗

to people who, claiming to believe in them, nonetheless act as if the proposed answers are not worth a passing nod, let alone living by. And philosophy, supposedly the major vehicle for asking life’s fundamental questions, appears as an arcane, sophisticated domain for “cultured” people, initiates in command of a specialized, often formal, vocabulary.

Something needs to be done. Stale answers to life’s questions can make us forget the questions. If passed down through generations without consideration of the questions they are said to resolve, answers can become anaesthetizing. They can put us to sleep. In becoming merely conventional formulae, such dogmas render us spiritually unconscious, all in the name of awakening us to reality.

Liberating Laughter

The Pythons offer zany and irreverent comedy that can liberate us. We can distinguish the joyful laughter that comes over us when we feel happy from laughter that arises from the often sudden and intense recognition of an incongruity, the flash of awareness that “things don’t add up.” This is especially the case when words and actions move in different directions. In the space this opens up, a Pythonesque space, a newfound freedom becomes available.

Consider the following situation. Preaching abstinence, the minister, we discover, is attached to an intravenous tube that leads to a down-turned whisky bottle. Meaning in his sermon to say, “drinking is sinful,” he slurs “thinking is simple.” And in the course of his remarks he says a great number of all too simple things. We laugh, but at the same time we are opened to a space once closed. The minister’s bumbling benightedness and hypocrisy open a door previously shut, perhaps not even known to have been there, and we are liberated to think without fetters, or maybe for the first time. What is going on here? An unrecognized, but nonetheless stifling obligation to passive acceptance is lifted. The preacher’s slurred remark that “thinking is simple” invites open questioning. The minister and what he represents is all too simple, even simpleminded, and we come to believe that questioning itself—maybe a little drinking, too, who knows?—is liberating and not routine. This might well get us out of the trap of packaged solutions to problems that, however crucial to our lives, we didn’t quite know existed. We gave the problems away to supposed experts.

Liberation can, of course, be from and for. If freed from pieties and dogmas, we can become free for questioning. The latter is, perhaps, most important. According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the questions regarding life’s meaning define our humanity, and if we do not expose ourselves honestly to these questions we not only betray our humanity, we impoverish it. In part, and precariously, the Pythons understood this, making these questions (and their far more ridiculous, though conventional, answers) available to a larger audience. At times their laughter in its most delightful aspects was something simply for its own sake. This is, quite curiously, related to the thinking of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2005), whom we will discuss briefly.

For Kant, philosophy boils down to the pursuit of three questions: What can I know? What should I do? And, for what may I hope? These questions, further, come down to just one: What is it to be human? (More exactly, Kant asked What man is, but the word ‘man’ is now in disrepute for seeming to exclude large portions of the human race—women, girls, boys, infants, and sissies, just to mention a few.)

It is not hard to see that the closer these questions regarding knowledge, obligation and hope are fused, the more they become aspects of the one simple question we are asking: What does life mean? The meaning of life thus becomes a journey toward our most realistic hopes, reflecting what we know we ought to be doing.

But of course this very picture of life, the axial journey, itself turns out to be funny if in fact there is no intended goal to living at all. If there is no true destination to life’s journey, the various elaborate accounts of life’s meaning—and their attendant practices and rituals—look silly. And the Pythons often revel in this silliness, regardless of whether the laughter they provoke is an important cathartic on the way to “real meaning” or simply silliness for silliness’s own silly sake. Nietzsche and Derrida both counsel hearty, healthy laughter. Really enjoy life, it is suggested, and keep in mind that you don’t need God, a mission, or metaphysics to do this. Maybe what you actually need is to free yourself of these very notions. Maybe only then can you laugh wholeheartedly, without disappointment, false expectations or deluded hope.

And Now for . . . Comedic Eliminativism

We noted above that Python, as part of the counterculture, helped initiate a sort of questioning. But what about today, decades after the counterculture movement? Can the Pythons evoke the same questioning laughter in a much younger generation? Comedy is often disguised philosophical commentary, for it can vividly present the gap between what is, what makes sense, and what ought to be. Most comedic commentary, however, only states the is, leaving the rest to imagination. Such commentary pervades the Pythons.

But might the Pythons (along with other of postmodernism’s unwitting forerunners) have accomplished emotionally and in advance a major “postmodern” mission: the user-friendly—and also user-funny—domestication of “the death of God,” that is, the loss of God as a source for the meaning of life? This death could then be comfortably absorbed. And as “God” went down, so, as suggested above, would an inseparable companion and fellow-traveler: the notion of the meaning of life as a journey from here to someplace better.

The Pythons have zanily guided us along this path, across this delightfully shallow water, from the need for deep things to the shallows of neat-because-silly things. It is no secret that the Pythons played especially well to intellectuals. Could this have been because it brought them down to earth, but in vocabulary and