Monty Python and Philosophy (27 page)

None of this has to be
said
, because language inevitably
shows
it. Since what philosophy does is talk about what makes any world, or set of facts, possible, it follows that philosophy is unnecessary—its job is already done by language itself.

In short, if philosophers persist in talking philosophically they utter nonsense, but in any event they also aren’t needed.

Ouch!

Looking back at “
Spectrum
: Talking About Things,” it seems that our presenter and his guest need to consider whether the (purported) question ‘What is going on?’ is about any particular fact, or whether it amounts to a philosophical attempt to use language to transcend all the facts. And if the latter, it seems that both characters need to stop what they’re doing—they need to stop asking
these questions and stop thinking there ought to be answers for them.

Perhaps if Wittgenstein explained to them what I’ve just relayed to you, they’d sit up and start talking sense. But can Wittgenstein explain this to anyone? Can
I
?

Follow me carefully here.

First
, recall that Wittgenstein believes sentences are nonsense if they attempt to talk about what makes facts—of language or the world—possible.

Next
, go back to the second line of the second paragraph of the section “Making Sense,” which repeats Wittgenstein’s view that “it is
possible
for sentences to mean facts because sentences
are
facts.”

Now
ask yourself: Isn’t this assertion a statement about the conditions under which meaning is possible? But what did Wittgenstein say about such statements? He said that they’re nonsense.

Do you see it? The problem, I mean?

That’s right: by his own accounting of it, Wittgenstein’s theory of sense and nonsense is nonsense—it can’t be said. According to his view of sense and the limits on what we can say, he cannot express that very view itself without speaking nonsense.

Now THAT’S a philosophical cramp-and-a-half!

So what’s a guy to do? How can Wittgenstein make his point if he can’t say what he means?

Imagine yourself in his shoes. You can’t just waggle your eyebrows at people, affecting a
mysterioso profundo
expression. Well, you can, but they won’t get your point,
and
they’ll think you’re an ass. Seeing this, Wittgenstein bites the bullet and admits that he cannot say what he means to say without speaking nonsensically. Yet he seems to assume we can learn from his nonsense, or at least he seems to hope
someone
will get behind his mode of speaking to his point. The assumption that we can somehow understand nonsense is evident in the penultimate line of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
:

You’ve just witnessed what’s
peculiar
about (the so-called “early”) Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy. Let’s see why his hope to cure philosophy is
ambitious
by contrasting that aim with the more modest one he expresses in mid-life. To do so we need to get into the head of the so-called “later” Wittgenstein by returning to “
Spectrum
: Talking About Things.”

Consider the presenter’s “vexed question.” How might we evaluate the query, ‘What is going on?’

Is it grossly ungrammatical?

—No. It’s fine.

Is it full of obscure words?

—No. It contains just four words, each of which is perfectly commonplace.

Does it make sense?

—It depends! Or so says the mature Wittgenstein, with his eye on the way meaning exists in our
use
of language. Here are two ways to use the words ‘What is going on?’ and make perfect sense:

Used in this situation, the sentence ‘What is going on?’ means something like: “You can’t fool me, you guys; what are you up to now?” In this context the sentence ‘What is going on?’ makes perfect sense. It makes equally good sense used in quite different ways, too:

The words ‘What is going on?’ have meaning used in this context too! [What meaning exactly is left as an exercise for the reader.]

Now suppose that instead of asking, you’re asked, out of the blue, ‘What is going on?’ Even then the question makes sense so long as you can guess how the questioner intends it to be understood. Here are two examples:

By wondering this, you indicate that you take your questioner to be using ‘going on’ in the sense of happening at a place, as in the question, “What’s going on at Jean-Paul Sartre’s tonight?”

This question shows that you’ve understood your interlocutor to mean
going on
in the sense of
being placed on (to)
, as in: “What’s going on (top of) the telly?”

As the four situations illustrate, the meaning of the sentence ‘What is going on?’ depends on its use, so that its meaning changes as its use changes. Nevertheless, we can make sense of the question used in these ways, whereas we can’t make sense of ‘What is going on?’ as it occurs in “
Spectrum
: Talking About Things.” On this both the twenty- and the forty-something Wittgenstein are likely to agree (for different reasons); where they differ is in their conception of and response to nonsense.

Suppose we agree that as the presenter uses it, the sentence ‘What is going on?’ makes no sense. If it doesn’t, and we can figure out
why
it doesn’t, can we apply that diagnosis to philosophical statements in general and perhaps
avoid
doing whatever it is that leads to nonsense?

Yes, says the young Wittgenstein. Philosophical nonsense is something distinctive; it is something we can spot and throw away once and for all, after climbing “through it, on it, over it.”

Nope, says the older Wittgenstein; sad to say, philosophy isn’t like dog-doo. One can’t avoid it by stepping over it.

In denying this possibility, Wittgenstein admits that his earlier ambition to wash his hands of philosophy amounts to wishful thinking. Why? Because to be able to avoid nonsense, we’d need to know its characteristics, what it looks like. And as we just saw, the details of context matter to whether the sentence makes sense and what kind of sense it makes. It’s easy to see how these contexts might be varied—and so the meaning of sentences occurring in them—in infinitely many ways. Given this, who can describe the contexts that will yield philosophical nonsense. Who can say what nonsense looks like?

From the later Wittgenstein’s perspective, the presenter and guests on “
Spectrum
: Talking About Things” can’t predict the ways their conversation might lapse into nonsense. Since their (and our) uncertainty in this regard is inevitable, philosophy has no cure.

With this in mind, the later Wittgenstein reshapes both his practice of philosophy and his goals. As in the
Tractatus
, he continues to use philosophical language to subvert it, but instead of attempting to solve the problem of philosophical nonsense once and for all, Wittgenstein’s later practice is to test particular classes of expressions (color words, for instance) in this and that context in order to reveal the variety of ways sense passes into nonsense. He aims to:

Exactly how is this practice—this new way of engaging in philosophy—carried out? Let’s use
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
to make a preliminary point about the very fine line between making people laugh and liberating them from philosophical headaches.

We have, again, a talk show, but now instead of a guest several corpses are “slumped motionless in their seats.” The topic is different as well. The host, Roger Last (John Cleese), asks the question:

Despite ourselves, we laugh to see corpses dangling off chairs. Why? Perhaps the impiety of laughing at death is a relief, given society’s unrelentingly solemn attitude towards death; or perhaps we laugh because the bodies are the remains of an aristocrat, an academic, and a clergyman, and who thinks they have much of a pulse to begin with? Plato himself laughs at this in the
Phaedo
, where he lets fly the quip that you must be dead already if you’re a philosopher. If we reflect also on the attempt to interview dead men on the subject of life after death, we may laugh at the idiotic appropriateness: Who could be better to ask? Who could be worse?

Why else do we laugh at the skit? Some of the humor of the sketch comes from using language in ways it normally doesn’t get used. For example, we don’t expect corpses to speak or people to speak to them, so the concepts of speaking and asking is out of place here, and it’s incongruous and funny when the host expects an answer, just as it is would be to talk to a lamppost or a mannequin. Similarly, we know that while
people
use silence meaningfully all the time, in wounded silences, compassionate silences, and so on,
corpses
do not—in this sense, corpses are not
silent
—so it’s funny to see someone mistakenly treat the two cases as the same.

So Monty Python derives some of its funniness from incongruous and absurd uses of language; how is this like or unlike Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Certainly, Monty Python’s sketches raise (implicitly or explicitly) the kinds of questions about language that the later Wittgenstein poses.

But there is an important difference between the nonsense on which their comedy depends and the nonsense Wittgenstein thinks pervades philosophy. We
know
that comedy misuses language. We know that we are to
laugh
at these misuses. To use Wittgenstein’s expression, we understand how the “language game” of comedy is played. In practicing philosophy, however, we’re never entirely sure how seriously to take
what
we’re doing—indeed, we’re often not sure what we’re doing!

Remember this difference as we begin to engage in philosophy as Wittgenstein does, that is, by investigating our uses of concepts taken from specific areas within our language.

Let’s focus on our language about animals. Monty Python occasionally gives us vicious animals—witness the killer sheep in
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
. But the sheep kill only after they become intelligent and human-like, and it’s more typical to find animals appearing supremely indifferent to us. This indifference is, moreover, charming. At least, this is the case in “A Duck, a Cat, and a Lizard (Discussion)” (
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 5, “Man’s Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”). Here a “chairman” (Terry Jones) attempts to engage his animal “experts” in a discussion of police force:

What is it that’s so absurdly dear about the image of a duck, lizard, and cat sitting in chairs, being queried? And why is it that their absolutely unchanging expressions appear so sweet and goofy in this context?

What is endearing about the duck, cat, and lizard, I think, is that they haven’t
got
anything to say. What is utterly lovable about these animals is their muteness and indifference. They are
not
human; they do
not
babble endlessly. Surrounding them with chairs and microphones, placing them before a television camera-crew, the very incongruity of these things, of putting animals in this situation turns what isn’t exactly front-page news—animal muteness—into something absurd and laughable.
At the same time
, however, the incongruity and absurdity shows how what we mean by
sitting
,
talking
,
thinking
, and even
having a face
shifts from sense to nonsense depending on use.

Take our concept of
sitting
, for example. We say that people, books, and paper
sit
, that they
sit on
desks or chairs, and that people and not books or papers
sit down
. But what does a lizard do? Does it sit on a chair like a book or like a person or neither?