Monty Python and Philosophy Gary Hardcastle (mystery books to read txt) 📖

sample weren’t even packed up, and he himself wasn’t feeling particularly fresh and active.”73

Among the writers who have been influenced by Kafka, one of the most important is the French existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960). Not only did Camus write influential existentialist literature (most notably, the novel, The Stranger), but he also wrote a number of essays on the meaning of life that seem directly inspired by Kafka’s vision of a meaningless world. Camus famously defined the “absurd” as the confrontation between a rational person and an indifferent universe, and his use of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus has become a famous metaphor for this confrontation: “The gods have condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.”74 The punishment, as Camus goes on to describe, is a “futile and hopeless labor,” a pointless task that never can be completed. As soon as the rock reaches the top, it rolls down again, and Sisyphus must start the whole process once more, without any hope of completing his ultimate task of placing the rock on the mountain peak.

For Camus, Sisyphus’s fate reveals the long-term or overall meaning of our own lives. Like Sisyphus, we are “condemned” to a life of tasks and projects that seemingly don’t amount to any real, lasting worth or value. We go to work each day, raise our families, and eventually die. And the whole process starts over again with the next generation, an endless cycle that apparently has no ultimate goal or point. This is the problem of the meaning of life as understood by the existentialists.

There are no direct references to Camus or the myth of Sisyphus, but the often repetitive triviality of life is nicely captured in several reccurring characters or stereotypes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. My favorite examples include the tedium of an office worker’s existence, depicted in the aptly named “Dull Life of a City Stockbroker” sketch (Episode 6, untitled), where the joke is that adventure actually occurs all around the stockbroker without his noticing, or the chartered accountant who desires to become a lion-tamer (Episode 10, untitled). These characters share Sisyphus’s fate, although without Sisyphus’s defiance or heroism. The boring monotony of their occupations mirrors the boring monotony of their lives (which were, apparently, of interest to Michael Palin, who plays nearly all of them). The philosophically-inclined viewer may forever after view chartered accountancy as symbolic of the ultimate lack of significance of a person’s life, especially for individuals within our modern, regimented, industrial societies.

The Individual and the Meaning of Life

One might be tempted to counter Camus’s interpretation of life by inviting religion, society, or some great philosophical theory to rescue some meaning from our seemingly meaningless lives. For instance, someone might declare that God, or our nation, provides an overall meaning for our day-to-day existence, since our lives gain a meaning by being part of a divine plan or a larger process.

Yet the existentialists were for the most part very skeptical of the use of any higher “being” or universal plan to find meaning. The great German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) famously declared that “God is dead,” by which he meant that the modern scientific world had made belief in God no longer acceptable to the rational person, and so our purpose in life couldn’t come from a supernatural source. But the problem can also be stated more generally: What provides the meaning of these larger entities, like God or the State? If the answer is that God or the State provide their own meaning, such that nothing else is required to give them meaning, then why couldn’t our individual lives be just as meaningful all by themselves (and thus nothing else, like God or the State, would be required to give our own lives meaning, too)?

All told, one of the most important themes in existentialism is the fate of the individual in acquiring his or her own answer to the meaning to life. Camus called this quest, “living without appeal.” It can be understood as a rejection of the quick and easy answers that our societies, religions, and philosophies often use to resolve our existential worries. The celebrated French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) made the same point when he declared that our “existence precedes our essence.” We are not born with a pre-established essence (a definition, purpose, or goal) provided by some higher power or institution; rather, we must provide our own, freely-chosen purpose to life. We exist first, and we must then determine our meaning or essence.

This individual-centered component of existentialism is strongly endorsed by Monty Python, particularly in a well-known scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In an attempt to dissuade a horde of would-be disciples, Brian argues:

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 importance of this scene cannot be overemphasized in attempting to locate an existential message—or indeed any philosophical message—in Monty Python. It is without a doubt one of their rare moments of open and direct expression of a philosophical idea, although it fits naturally into the plot and scene. The Monty Python members have repeatedly stated that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is one of their finest achievements due to its consistent theme—and the theme, of course, is the (existentialist) plea for a little “critical thinking” on the part of the individual. In various interviews, they have made the following comments on the film’s message:

JOHN CLEESE: One of the themes of the film is, “Do make up your own mind about things and don’t do what people tell you.” And I find it slightly funny that there are now [1979] religious organizations saying, “Do not go and see this film that tells you not to do what you are told.”75

MICHAEL PALIN: There’s a real