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

true Messiah denies his divinity,” a woman explains, typifying the way that the crowd reinterprets everything he says to support the conclusion they want to hear. This response reaches its peak when, in frustration, Brian says, “All right. I am the Messiah.” The crowd is relieved. “Now, fuck off !” says Brian. The crowd is quiet. Finally, one man asks, “How shall we fuck off, O Lord?” Their desperate desire to have rules to follow prevents them from critically assessing the commands they receive.

Brian highlights this point in a later scene where his followers have grown tremendously in numbers. After accidentally exposing himself (in one of the best uses of male full-frontal nudity in film history), Brian tells the huge crowd “Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” The crowd replies, reverently, “Yes, we’re all individuals!” The one rule we cannot follow blindly is the rule that requires us to think for ourselves. The influential eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a devout Christian, made the injunction to think for ourselves—autonomy—the basis of his version of deontology. Even a divinely inspired set of rules must be thought through carefully and critically to serve as an appropriate guideline for living our lives.

Knowledge and Nihilism: Science and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

If we want to think critically, we may be tempted to turn to science to provide answers. However, unlike the other institutions that we have considered, science does not provide any particular advice for living a good life. The great power of science is that it aims simply to describe the world, not to determine what ought to be. Scientific work, unfortunately, often threatens to undermine traditional sources of meaning and value. The result is nihilism, the destruction of all values. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), famous for declaring that “God is dead,” put it this way in Book 1, Section 1 of his Will to Power: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.” The challenge that science poses for value is an important theme in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Some of the most powerful points are made, in typical Python fashion, in song.

Consider our sense that our individual lives are significant, that the projects we engage in are meaningful. Listen to “The Galaxy Song,” following along in your imagination. We start on earth, looking down at a revolving planet, then back away and to see our sun, then our galaxy, the Milky Way (with its “hundred billion stars”). We aren’t even in the center of our own galaxy—“We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.” Our entire galaxy itself is just part of a much larger universe (though “millions of billions” of galaxies is probably excessive.) Our best understanding of the universe, in short, is that it is unimaginably vast in both space and time, and we play a role in it that is beneath trivial.

In some ways, however, the picture is even worse. The song that begins the film (also called “The Meaning of Life”) poses a question that has troubled many people since the modern synthesis combined Darwin’s evolutionary theory with the understanding of our genetic code: “[A]re we just simply spiraling coils of self-replicating DNA?” Our drives and goals and hopes and dreams may all just be products of evolution. Our very sense of purposiveness—our sense that there is something worth pursuing—may itself be a product of evolution. An animal that is not driven to pursue goals will not reproduce, and so will not leave descendents. But the goals themselves have no greater significance.

The threat of nihilism, then, is quite real, and is perhaps the most pervasive theme in the work of the Pythons. Part of their response is to revel in the absurdity—think of the scene in the middle of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which several bizarre characters try to “Find the Fish,” with shouts of encouragement from the audience. Throughout all stages of their work, the Pythons take a gleeful pleasure in the collapse of meaning and the limitations of human institutions.

But the Pythons have another response to the challenge of nihilism as well. At the end of the film, suddenly and unexpectedly, the meaning of life is revealed: “try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” While this line is presented in a very nonchalant fashion and is immediately buried in a series of jokes about censors and modern audiences, it bears closer scrutiny. This is pretty sound advice for living a good life. Take care of yourself, be sure to continue learning and growing, be decent to other people as individuals and be tolerant of others as members of groups.

A person following this advice could recognize the limitations of the marketplace while also recognizing the contributions it can make for overall happiness. While she might not find a glorious quest to participate in, she would have appropriate grounds for developing a virtuous character in the context of her cultural tradition. Although her religion cannot provide her with simple rules to follow blindly, she can draw on it reflectively to develop a set of rules that she can autonomously endorse. Finally, and above all, by keeping a sense of humor, she can cope with the threat of nihilism and the challenges of the scientific picture of the world while leading a worthwhile and meaningful life.

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Existentialism in Monty Python: Kafka, Camus, Nietzsche, and Sartre

EDWARD SLOWIK

Unlike any other comedy troupe, Monty Python presents its viewers with a bizarre, unpredictable, and seemingly meaningless world. If one were to try and locate a philosophical message in the shows, recordings, and movies of Monty Python,