When the shit hits the fan
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
On Bullshit has proved a surprise hit in the United States, and briefly made its author, Harry G. Frankfurt, an unexpected celebrity and talk show tart. By day the Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, Frankfurt is the author of The Reasons of Love and The Importance of What We Care About and has argued forcefully for the necessity of caring and love in order to establish values in the sceptical modern world.
His latest offering originated as a lecture given twenty years ago at Yale, which proved so popular that Frankfurt was persuaded to re-publish it in its current format. Like all good truth-tellers, Frankfurt lays his cards on the table right from the start: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” he argues. What the book offers is not so much an explanation as a definition and thus, by implication, a method.
In doing so, Frankfurt distinguishes himself from all the bullshitters he rebukes. The nub of Frankfurt’s analysis comes halfway through the book, when he recounts an anecdote about Wittgenstein, the man famously concerned with watching one’s words. Visiting a sick friend, the great philosopher was appalled at the invalid’s statement that “I feel just like a dog that has been run over”, and retorted “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like”.
In Frankfurt’s opinion, the comparison is bullshit because the speaker is concerned neither with communicating an objective truth, nor with promulgating a view that she believes to be false: the speaker is indifferent to truth altogether. Her only concern is to convey an impression of herself, and in the process distinctions between truth and falsity become irrelevant.
By virtue of this, Frankfurt argues, bullshit is worse than lies, because the liar, like the blasphemer, at least attends herself to the authority of truth; the bullshitter, by contrast, is a philistine of veracity. It’s a compelling argument, and one with contemporary resonances that hardly need mentioning (another four years, folks).
This, it is clear, is a book of philosophy that is aimed not just at specialists, though it is written with considerably more élan than most others crowding the popular field, and it is one that tackles a dauntingly amorphous topic with clarity and good sense. At the end, the author proposes a few reasons why bullshit has now become so inescapable in acts of communication.
Could it be that modern democracy places so much pressure on the individual to have opinions on the state, that hot air is the only possible response? Or is it that the media has become so omnipresent that speech necessarily precedes information? And why is it, given the toxic nature of bullshit, that we are so much more accepting of it than we are of bare-faced lies? Could we actually enjoy the spectacle of being befuddled by those around us? The response offered by Frankfurt’s book appears to be that only through caring about knowledge itself will we come any closer to answering these questions.
17th Nov 2005