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

content with simply repeating the same strategy of sketch writing that had succeeded in the past. When the episodes began to merely repeat themselves, such that the show was no longer evolving (“becoming more”), the cast members gradually began to leave the group for new projects. Like the ideal Nietzschean individual, Monty Python was not content with just existing. It strove to grow, to “overcome” its present condition and obtain new accomplishments, all under the control of a critical, artistic vision. For many Monty Python fans, it is this unmatched legacy in the annals of comedy writing that continues to resonate over the years.

15

“My Brain Hurts!”

ROSALIND CAREY

Imagine getting a cramp in your head—a cramp not in your body, but in your mind. That’s philosophy!

It’s the feeling that you ought to be able to answer certain (philosophical) questions but just can’t see how: a kind of mental cramp—or so says the great, strange, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

The following sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Spectrum: Talking About Things” (Episode 12, “The Naked Ant”), illustrates his point. The scene opens on the set of a talk show going on air. Cameras roll. To his audience and guests the presenter (Michael Palin) says:

PRESENTER: Good evening. Tonight Spectrum looks at one of the major problems in the world today—that old vexed question of what is going on. . . . Here to answer this is a professional cricketer. [Cut to cricketer.]

CRICKETER: I can say nothing at this point.

Not surprisingly, the cricketer (Eric Idle) is at a loss for words. After all, what kind of a question is “What is going on”? Can anyone answer it? Can you? Of course not! But he’s got to answer, right? Because it’s “one of the major problems in the world today”—and you don’t back down from a challenge just because of a little cramp in your ’ead.

Welcome to philosophy, Mr. Cricketer.

The presenter’s behavior is equally instructive. Since he’s stumped his guest, you’d expect him to back off, rephrase the question, e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e more clearly, that sort of thing. Instead, he steams ahead:

So . . . Where do we stand? Where do we sit? Where do we come? Where do we go? What do we do? What do we say? What do we eat? What do we drink? What do we think? What do we do?

The compulsive piling up of questions is another symptom of philosopher’s cramp, according to Wittgenstein. According to him, the philosophical mind needs to smooth out and relax, and as a kind of therapeutic mental massage he recommends engaging in philosophical exercises.

Hair of the Dog

We’ll return to “Spectrum: Talking About Things” in a moment. Let’s look more closely at what Wittgenstein says. First, why does philosophy give you mental pain? Second, if philosophy is what put your head in a twist, how can more philosophy unwind it?

To the first question, Wittgenstein has the following response. Our trouble, he thinks, comes from naively taking philosophical questions and statements at face value; they appear to be perfectly good questions and statements, and assuming that’s what they in fact are, we try to address them as such.

In a sense we’re right, says Wittgenstein: from the perspective of grammar and structure, philosophical sentences are exactly like other perfectly good sentences. However, from a different perspective, philosophical sentences are quite unlike other sentences and are in fact nonsensical—meaningless. Philosophical headaches, in short, stem from language.

To the second question, about how philosophy can be both the cause and the cure of mental distress, Wittgenstein says this. Properly understood, philosophy is an activity, not a set of Truths. Properly understood, that activity is an exercise, a therapy, that traces when language makes sense and when it’s nonsense. In the end this activity lets us shed the assumptions and habits about philosophy that gave us pain. That is why thinking about philosophy can sooth the distress caused by, well . . . thinking about philosophy.

In his work as a young man and in his later work Wittgenstein views philosophical headaches as a consequence of language, but his reasons for that view and his conception of the remedy evolve throughout his career. The young Wittgenstein’s account of philosophy, compared to his later view, is both more ambitious and more, um, peculiar. Let’s turn to the peculiarity first.

Making Sense

Consider the typical opener to episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the sentence “It’s . . . Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” We experience this sentence as a series of sounds. Specifically, the sound of Michael Palin, as “The It’s Man,” saying the word ‘It’s’, followed by a second voice, saying “Mon-ty Py-thon’s . . . ” and so on. These sounds form an auditory fact, the sentence ‘It’s . . . Monty Python’s Flying Circus’, and this fact depicts another fact: that an episode of a Monty Python’s Flying Circus is about to begin.

This is the position twenty-something Ludwig holds in his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. According to him, it is possible for sentences to mean facts because sentences are facts (relations among sounds, in the case above), and sentences must represent facts to have meaning.

Depicting facts is what sentences do. Period. Thus sentences make no sense when they (attempt to) depict what goes beyond the facts. Period.

So Show Us

This is bad news for philosophy. Sciences like physics, geology, and biology talk about the facts that make up the world, but philosophy talks about what makes any world, any fact, possible; and it talks about what makes any of them possible only by talking about none in particular, that is, by transcending the facts of this or any world.

Since on Wittgenstein’s view we make sense only when we talk about facts, it follows that philosophy make no sense in talking about what transcends facts and makes them possible. Sure, philosophers can move their lips and utter sounds, but if sentences make sense only when they concern other facts,