Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar Read online

  PLATO AND A PLATYPUS

  WALK INTO A BAR . . .

  EDITOR: Ann Treistman

  DESIGNER: Brady McNamara

  PRODUCTION MANAGER: Jacquie Poirier

  Cataloging-in-publication data has been applied for and may be

  obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 13: 978-0-8109-1493-3

  ISBN 10: 0-8109-1493-x

  Text copyright © 2007 Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

  Illlustration credits: ©The New Yorker Collection 2000/Bruce Eric Kaplan/

  cartoonbank.com: pg 18; ©Andy McKay/www.CartoonStock.com: pg 32; ©Mike

  Baldwin/www.CartoonStock.com: pgs 89, 103; ©The New Yorker Collection 2000/

  Matthew Diffee/cartoonbank.com: pg 122; ©The New Yorker Collection 2000/

  Leo Cullum/cartoonbank.com: pg 136; ©Merrily Harpur/Punch ltd: 159;

  ©Andy McKay/www.CartoonStock.com: pg 174.

  Published in 2007 by Abrams Image, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

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  without written permission from the publisher.

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  To the memory of our philosophical grandfather

  GROUCHO MARX,

  who summed up our basic ideology when he said,

  “These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.”

  CONTENTS

  Philogagging: An Introduction 1

  I.

  Metaphysics

  II.

  Logic

  III.

  Epistemology

  IV.

  Ethics

  V.

  Philosophy of Religion

  VI.

  Existentialism

  VII.

  Philosophy of Language

  VIII.

  Social and Political Philosophy

  IX.

  Relativity

  X.

  Meta-Philosophy

  Summa Time: A Conclusion

  Great Moments in the History of Philosophy

  Glossary

  Philogagging

  An Introduction

  DIMITRI: If Atlas holds up the world, what holds up Atlas?

  TASSO: Atlas stands on the back of a turtle.

  DIMITRI: But what does the turtle stand on?

  TASSO: Another turtle.

  DIMITRI: And what does that turtle stand on?

  TASSO: My dear Dimitri, it’s turtles all the way down!

  This bit of ancient Greek dialogue perfectly illustrates the philosophical notion of infinite regress, a concept that comes up when we ask if there is a First Cause—of life, of the universe, of time and space, and most significantly, of a Creator. Something must have created the Creator, so the causal buck—or turtle—cannot stop with him. Or with the Creator behind him. Or the one behind him. It’s Creators all the way down—or up, if that seems like the right direction for chasing down Creators.

  If you find that infinite regress is getting you nowhere fast, you might consider the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—or, as John Lennon put it in a slightly different context, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.”

  But let’s lend an ear to old Tasso again. As well as being illuminating, his rejoinder—“It’s turtles all the way down!”—definitely has the ring of a punch line. Ba-da-bing!

  That’s no surprise to us. The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That’s because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.

  For example, consider the following classic joke. On the surface, it just sounds deliciously goofy, but on closer inspection it speaks to the very heart of British empiricist philosophy—the question of what sort of information about the world we can depend on.

  Morty comes home to find his wife and his best friend, Lou, naked together in bed. Just as Morty is about to open his mouth, Lou jumps out of the bed and says, “Before you say anything, old pal, what are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”

  By challenging the primacy of sensory experience, Lou raises the question of what sort of data is certain and why. Is one way of gathering facts about the world—say, seeing—more dependable than others—say, a leap of faith that accepts Lou’s description of reality?

  Here’s another example of a philogag, this one a riff on the Argument from Analogy, which says that if two outcomes are similar, they must have a similar cause:

  A ninety-year-old man went to the doctor and said, “Doctor, my eighteen-year-old wife is expecting a baby.”

  The doctor said, “Let me tell you a story. A man went hunting, but instead of a gun, he picked up an umbrella by mistake. When a bear suddenly charged at the man, he picked up the umbrella, shot the bear, and killed it.”

  The man said, “Impossible. Someone else must have shot that bear.”

  The doctor said, “My point exactly!”

  You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the Argument from Analogy, a philosophical ploy currently (and erroneously) being used in the argument for Intelligent Design (i.e., if there’s an eyeball, there must be an Eyeball-Designer-in-the-Sky.)

  We could go on and on—and in fact we will, from Agnosticism to Zen, from Hermeneutics to Eternity. We will show how philosophical concepts can be illuminated by jokes and how many jokes are loaded with fascinating philosophical content. Wait a second, are those two notions the same? Can we get back to you on that?

  STUDENTS wandering into a philosophy class are usually hoping to gain some perspective on, say, the meaning of it all, but then some rumpled guy in mismatched tweeds ambles up to the podium and starts lecturing on the meaning of “meaning.”

  First things first, he says. Before we answer any question, big or small, we need to understand what the question itself signifies. Listening reluctantly, we soon discover that what this guy has to say is wicked interesting.

  That’s just the way philosophy—and philosophers—are. Questions beget questions, and those questions beget another whole generation of questions. It’s questions all the way down.

  We may start with basic ones like, “What is the meaning of it all?” and, “Does God exist?” and, “How can I be true to myself?” and, “Am I in the wrong classroom?” but very quickly we discover we need to ask other questions in order to answer our original questions. This process has given rise to an array of philosophical disciplines, each delving into particular Big Questions by asking and attempting to answer the questions that underlie them. Any questions?

  So it follows that, “What is the meaning of it all?” is dealt with in the discipline known as Metaphysics, and “Does God exist?” in the one called, Philosophy of Religion. “How can I be true to myself?” falls to the school of Existentialism; “Am I in the wrong classroom?” to the new sector of philosophy called Meta-philosophy, which poses the question, “What is philosophy?” And on it goes, with each sphere of philosophy undertaking different kinds of questions and concepts.

  We’ve arranged this book not chronologically, but by those questions we had in mind when we wandered into that first philosophy classroom—and the philosophical disciplines that
tackle them. What’s so neat is that a whole bunch of jokes just happen to occupy the identical conceptual territory as these disciplines. (Pure chance? Or is there an Intelligent Designer after all?) And there is a big reason why this is all so neat: When the two of us wandered out of that classroom, we were so baffled and bewildered, we were convinced we’d never get our minds around this heady stuff. That’s when a graduate student sauntered up to us and told us the joke about Morty coming home to find his best friend, Lou, in bed with his wife.

  “Now that’s philosophy!” he said.

  We call it philogagging.

  THOMAS CATHCART

  DANIEL KLEIN

  August, 2006

  {I}

  Metaphysics

  Metaphysics tackles the Big Questions head on:

  What is being? What is the nature of reality? Do we have

  free will? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

  How many does it take to change a lightbulb?

  DIMITRI: Something’s been bothering me lately, Tasso.

  TASSO: What’s that?

  DIMITRI: What is the meaning of it all?

  TASSO: All what?

  DIMITRI: You know, life, death, love—the whole stuffed grape leaf.

  TASSO: What makes you think any of it has any meaning?

  DIMITRI: Because it has to. Otherwise life would just be…

  TASSO: What?

  DIMITRI: I need an ouzo.

  TELEOLOGY

  Does the universe have a purpose?

  According to Aristotle, everything has a telos, which is an inner goal it is meant to attain. An acorn has a telos: an oak tree. It’s what an acorn is “meant to be.” Birds have one; bees have one. They say that down in Boston even beans have one. It’s part of the very structure of reality.

  If that seems a little abstract, in the following story Mrs. Goldstein telescopes the telos down to earth.

  Mrs. Goldstein was walking down the street with her two grandchildren. A friend stopped to ask her how old they were.

  She replied, “The doctor is five and the lawyer is seven.”

  Does human life have a telos?

  Aristotle thought so. He thought the telos of human life is happiness, a point disputed by other philosophers throughout human history. St. Augustine, seven centuries later, thought the telos of life is to love God. To a twentieth-century existentialist like Martin Heidegger, man’s telos is to live without denial of the true human condition, particularly death. Happiness? How shallow!

  Meaning-of-life jokes have multiplied as fast as meanings of life, which in turn have multiplied as fast as philosophers.

  A seeker has heard that the wisest guru in all of India lives atop India’s highest mountain. So the seeker treks over hill and Delhi until he reaches the fabled mountain. It’s incredibly steep, and more than once he slips and falls. By the time he reaches the top, he is full of cuts and bruises, but there is the guru, sitting cross-legged in front of his cave.

  “O, wise guru,” the seeker says, “I have come to you to ask what the secret of life is.”

  “Ah, yes, the secret of life,” the guru says. “The secret of life is a teacup.”

  “A teacup? I came all the way up here to find the meaning of life, and you tell me it’s a teacup!”

  The guru shrugs. “So maybe it isn’t a teacup.”

  This guru is acknowledging that formulating the telos of life is a slippery business. Furthermore, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

  There is a distinction between the telos of life—what human beings are meant to be—and a particular individual’s goals in life—what he wants to be. Is Sam, the dentist in the following story, really seeking the universal telos of life or simply doing his own thing? His mom clearly has her own idea of the telos of her son’s life.

  A Philadelphia dentist, Sam Lipschitz, went off to India to find the meaning of life. Months went by and his mother didn’t hear a word from him. Finally, she took a plane to India and asked for the wisest man there. She was directed to an ashram, where the guard told her that she would have to wait a week for an audience with the guru, and at that time she would only be allowed to speak three words to him. She waited, carefully preparing her words. When she was finally ushered in to see the guru, she said to him, “Sam, come home!”

  Look up “metaphysics” in the dictionary and it tells you the word stems from the title of a treatise by Aristotle and that it deals with questions at a level of abstraction beyond (meta) scientific observation. But this turns out to be a case of what is known in Latin as post hoc hokum. In fact, Aristotle didn’t call his treatise “metaphysics” at all, let alone because it dealt with questions beyond the purview of science. Actually, it was given that name in the first century A.D. by an editor of Aristotle’s collected works, who chose the title because that chapter was “beyond” (i.e., came after) Aristotle’s treatise on “Physics.”

  ESSENTIALISM

  What is the structure of reality? What specific attributes make things what they are? Or as philosophers are wont to say, What attributes make things not what they aren’t?

  Aristotle drew a distinction between essential and accidental properties. The way he put it is that essential properties are those without which a thing wouldn’t be what it is, and accidental properties are those that determine how a thing is, but not what it is. For example, Aristotle thought that rationality was essential to being a human being and, since Socrates was a human being, Socrates’s rationality was essential to his being Socrates. Without the property of rationality, Socrates simply wouldn’t be Socrates. He wouldn’t even be a human being, so how could he be Socrates? On the other hand, Aristotle thought that Socrates’s property of being snubnosed was merely accidental; snub-nosed was part of how Socrates was, but it wasn’t essential to what or who he was. To put it another way, take away Socrates’s rationality, and he’s no longer Socrates, but give him plastic surgery, and he’s Socrates with a nose job. Which reminds us of a joke.

  When Thompson hit seventy, he decided to change his lifestyle completely so that he could live longer. He went on a strict diet, he jogged, he swam, and he took sunbaths. In just three months’ time, Thompson lost thirty pounds, reduced his waist by six inches, and expanded his chest by five inches. Svelte and tan, he decided to top it all off with a sporty new haircut. Afterward, while stepping out of the barbershop, he was hit by a bus.

  As he lay dying, he cried out, “God, how could you do this to me?”

  And a voice from the heavens responded, “To tell you the truth, Thompson, I didn’t recognize you.”

  Poor Thompson seems to have changed certain accidental properties of himself, although we recognize that he is still essentially Thompson. So does Thompson for that matter. In fact, both of these conditions are essential to the joke. Ironically, the only character in the joke who does not recognize Thompson is God, who you’d think would be essentially omniscient.

  The distinction between essential and accidental properties is illustrated by a number of other jokes in this vein.

  Abe: I got a riddle for you, Sol. What’s green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?

  Sol: I give up.

  Abe: A herring.

  Sol: But a herring isn’t green.

  Abe: So you can paint it green.

  Sol: But a herring doesn’t hang on the wall.

  Abe: Put a nail through it, it hangs on the wall.

  Sol: But a herring doesn’t whistle!

  Abe: So? It doesn’t whistle.

  The following version probably won’t garner you many yuks at Caroline’s Comedy Club, but it may win you a few points at the American Philosophical Association’s annual meeting.

  Abe: What is the object “X” that has the properties of greenness, wall-suspension, and whistling capability?

  Sol: I can’t think of anything that fits that description.

  Abe: A herring.

  Sol: A herring doesn’t have greenness.

  Abe
: Not as an essential property, Solly. But a herring could be accidentally green, no? Try painting it. You’ll see.

  Sol: But a herring doesn’t have wall-suspension.

  Abe: But what if you accidentally nail it to the wall?

  Sol: How could you accidentally nail a herring to the wall?

  Abe: Trust me. Anything’s possible. That’s philosophy.

  Sol: Okay, but a herring doesn’t whistle, even accidentally.

  Abe: So sue me.

  Sol and Abe turn to face the A.P.A. audience, which is totally silent.

  Sol: What is this, a convention of Stoics? Hey, Nietzsche got bigger laughs when he played the Vatican.

  Sometimes an object has properties that at first blush seem to be accidental, but turn out to be accidental only within certain limits, as illustrated in this gag.

  “Why is an elephant big, gray, and wrinkled?”

  “Because if he was small, white, and round, he’d be an aspirin.”

  We can picture an elephant on the small side; we’d call it “a small elephant.” We can even picture an elephant a sort of dusty brown; we would call it “a sort of dusty-brown elephant.” And an elephant without wrinkles would be “an unwrinkled elephant.” In other words, bigness, grayness, and wrinkledness all fail Aristotle’s test of defining what an elephant essentially is. Instead they describe how elephants are, generally and accidentally. The joke says, though, that this is true only up to a point. Something as small, white, and round as an aspirin cannot be an elephant, and confronted with such an object, we would not be tempted to ask, “Is that an aspirin you’re taking, Bob, or an atypical elephant?”

  The point is that bigness, grayness, and wrinkledness are not precise enough terms to be the essential qualities of an elephant. It’s a certain size range and a certain color range that, among other qualities, determine whether or not something is an elephant. Wrinkledness, on the other hand, may be a red herring, or perhaps a whistling herring.