Scott McLemee has a nice article on Harry Frankfurt's bullshit book here. My piece on the same topic appears in the current issue of Time Out. It's not available online, so I'm putting it up here.
We all know bullshit when we see it or hear it. And most of us would consider ourselves to be in possession of a functioning ‘bullshit detector’. We can smell the stuff a mile off and are often consoled by the thought that it’s always somebody else who perpetrates it – you rarely meet a cheerfully self-acknowledging bullshitter, after all.
But what is bullshit exactly? It’s a lot easier to identify than to define. It can’t be quite the same thing as lying, for instance, but it nonetheless seems to involve some kind of flirtation with untruth – it’s almost as wounding to be called a bullshitter as it is to be called a liar. Why is that the case? And why we are inclined to think that there’s more bullshit around than ever before? And what does it say about our culture that it contains so much bullshit?
These are questions raised in ‘On Bullshit’, a witty, intelligent and deceptively profound little book written by the septuagenarian American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. Such ‘basic and preliminary’ questions about bullshit, Frankfurt observes, have for too long languished ‘not only unanswered but unasked’. He has performed a great public service in dusting them off and applying his considerable analytical and forensic acumen to them. And, in doing so, Frankfurt ought to persuade the general reader of the value and wider relevance of the kind of obsessively attentive semantic and conceptual analysis that many academic philosophers still go in for these days. ‘On Bullshit’ is addressed, therefore, not only to Frankfurt’s colleagues, who will no doubt admire its virtuosity, but also to his fellow citizens, who should recognise the desirability, political as much as anything, of being able to tell the difference between a load of bullshit and a pack of lies.
Frankfurt is not quite a lone pioneer in this area, however. He acknowledges the work done by his predecessor, Max Black, who, in 1983, published an essay on the related concept of ‘humbug’. And it wouldn’t be hard to make a persuasive case for the claim, which Frankfurt himself takes quite seriously, that bullshit is just humbug for a less polite age. In 1866, for example, P.T Barnum looked forward to some ‘philosophic Yankee’ patenting a ‘Humbugometer’, an obvious precursor of the bullshit detector celebrated by, among other cultural luminaries, Ernest Hemingway and The Clash. Moreover, the dictionary definition of ‘bullshit’, which is 'to intimidate, deceive, or persuade somebody with deceitful or foolish talk', closely resembles Black’s definition of ‘humbug’: ‘deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes’.
Lying is a kind of a deception too, of course, but one in which the truth remains in view: the liar must know the truth in order to concoct his lie. But there are no such constraints on the bullshitter. Frankfurt’s insight is to see that ‘the essence of bullshit is not that it is false, but that it is phony’. And it’s because bullshit is not constrained by the truth that it proliferates so extravagantly. Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, has an ‘expansive’ and creative quality. Notwithstanding the association of shit with what is ‘merely emitted’ rather than designed, a lot of bullshit is exquisitely crafted and well-wrought – it’s no accident, for example, that we refer to the ‘bullshit artist’.
Unlike the liar, the bullshitter is entirely unconcerned with the truth. For this reason, Frankfurt thinks bullshitting is in fact more pernicious than lying. And bullshit spreads, he argues, when we start to believe that it is the ‘responsibility of the citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything’ and when we come to regard knowing oneself as more important than accurately representing the world; when sincerity trumps truth. But it’s mere prejudice to suppose that we can know ourselves better than we can know anything else. And if Frankfurt is right about that, then we’re bound to accept the most disconcerting and least consoling conclusion of all: that ‘sincerity itself is bullshit’.
‘On Bullshit’ is published in the UK by Princeton University Presss at £6.50
