by Nate Sheff
Harry Frankfurt died on July 16, 2023. As a philosophy student I came to appreciate him for his work on freedom and responsibility, but as a high school word nerd, I came to know him the way other shoppers did: as the author of one of those small books near the bookstore checkout line. That book, On Bullshit, had exactly the right title for impulse-buying, which has to explain how Frankfurt became a bestselling author in a field not known for bestsellers.
Happily for all of us, On Bullshit turned out to be philosophically rich, not just by impulse-buy standards, but by the standards of academic philosophy. I like to imagine that when members of the book-buying public got home and sat down grinning with the funny little hardcover in their bag, they cracked it open and read straight through to the end, not even realizing that an hour or two had slipped through their fingers.
I’ve taught On Bullshit to intro philosophy students. The title makes them laugh (they can’t believe what they’re getting away with in college), but things get real quickly. Frankfurt is having fun, but he isn’t messing around. He takes his topic seriously, and even if you find his analysis unconvincing, the problem of bullshit lingers. It’s a platitude that we seem to be up to our necks in the stuff, but hardly anyone ever thought to say what this stuff is. Characteristic of the best philosophy, Frankfurt asks a question that seems obvious in hindsight, but if it was so obvious, how come nobody asked it? Light chuckling gives way to nervous laughter, which gives way to furrowed brows. This is the legacy of Socrates.
Good philosophy has a tendency to keep on giving. It furnishes you with new tools, new ways to see the world. Good philosophy is productive and fruitful because it allows you to ask questions you didn’t know how to ask before.
Earlier this year, I filled a gap in my cultural knowledge and finally read 1984. Even after decades of spoilers, the book had a few surprises in reserve for me, especially with how the regime of Big Brother can be characterized as much by omnipresent Frankfurtian bullshit as by constant lies. [Spoilers ahead – but you probably know most of the book by now.]
Frankfurt points out in On Bullshit that liars typically take themselves to know the truth about whatever they lie about. If someone lies to you, they are telling you something they take to be false. As Frankfurt sees it, liars care a lot about the facts, which is why they go to such lengths to prevent others from learning them. Liars understand that truth matters.
In 1984, up until O’Brien entraps him, Winston willingly participates in the Ministry of Truth’s rewriting of history. He throws inconvenient evidence of the past into the memory hole, and, despite his desire to rebel, he dutifully revises records and news items. In other words, Winston is a professional liar. He understands the significance of what he’s concealing, but conceals it anyway to stay out of trouble. His care for the truth gives him a guilty conscience, but it also makes him good at his job, because liars must be sensitive to the truth.
If we think of communication as a game of giving and asking for reasons, where norms of honesty and informativeness define fair play, then liars are cheaters whose success depends on knowing the rules in order to break them. Bullshit artists do not share these concerns and have no such scruples, and Frankfurt considers this the essence of bullshit. As he puts it, “Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. … [The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all.”
During O’Brien’s torture of Winston, we see how amateurish Winston’s former work appears when compared with O’Brien’s commitment to the Party. Winston had assumed all along that truth mattered, which is why the Party had to suppress it, but O’Brien shows him that Party rule depends on playing another game altogether: replacing the earnest attempt at knowing reality with submission to the Party’s will. In this sense, O’Brien is Frankfurt’s perfect bullshit artist, since, as Frankfurt puts it, “His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
At one point, O’Brien tells Winston, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.” His purpose in denying gravity isn’t really to convince or persuade Winston of anything, since that would imply that he wants Winston to believe what he says. Belief aims at truth – to believe something is to try to get it right. O’Brien’s purpose is to get Winston to buy his bullshit. Party indoctrination is not indoctrination in the strict and literal sense, where the indoctrinated come to believe a doctrine. Big Brother’s victory over Winston comes when Winston gives up. When memories come to him, he sets them aside as false. Which ones are false? It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t believe anything, because he’s not even trying.
Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, incorporates bullshit as a regulative ideal. In the appendix, Orwell explains that, if all goes according to plan, native speakers of Newspeak will eventually have such an impoverished conceptual scheme that Shakespeare will be incoherent to them. What could “freedom” mean, if you only know it in the sense of freedom from sugar, fat, or gluten? Syme, an architect of Newspeak, foreshadows Winston’s fate when he tells him, “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” Party orthodoxy is empty – it is bullshit.
For Frankfurt, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are,” by virtue of its peculiar disconnect from truth, and Orwell shows us its empire-building potential. Fooling all of the people all of the time is a tall order – Winston Smith is a busy man. But the success of Big Brother’s regime does not depend crucially on tricking everyone. More important is passive obedience and widespread acquiescence to bullshit.