by Laurence Peterson
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with. —Richard Rorty
Truth is nothing but a bad excuse for a poor imagination. —Unknown
Some things in life are very hard to give up. For me, I hope in a most singular manner, it is bullshit. I have spent nearly twenty years reading whatever literature I can find on what bullshit might be. Since the publication of Professor Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) as a book, his view, in a way almost unknown in philosophy, has generated absolutely no strongly dissenting accounts in the score of years that have elapsed since its publication.
As I write these lines, I have before me a Wired piece from June 19th, 2024, “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine”, which itself links to another piece, published a mere 11 days earlier in Ethics and Information Technology, called “ChatGPT Is Bullshit”. Both articles pretty much ratify Frankfurt’s view of bullshit in a wholesale manner, which suggests to me that Frankfurt’s original position maintains its utter dominance in discussions of bullshit, and retains a vigorous wider relevance up to the present day. In my mind, there is something unusual, something exaggerated about the bullshit phenomenon that says something unique about the way we all live today. In this piece, I would like to attempt to subject Frankfurt’s view to a more fundamental critique than any I have seen in the last twenty years.
The peculiar volume hit the shelves early in 2005. Miniature in size, the $10.00, 67-page book, hard bound in somber colors and featuring an imposing font, immediately elicited in my mind associations with a prayer book or perhaps a modern edition of a long-venerated tome, rather like those put out as part of the Loeb Classical Library series or something. Naturally, this was intended by the marketing people, who, I suspect, were trying to playfully juxtapose the book’s status as being one put out by Princeton University Press with the decidedly lowbrow nature of the topic, in the hope that some consumers might be strongly attracted by the idea of pursuing a literary discussion of something that they would only with difficulty be able to type into Google or social media. And who knows? Maybe the book could serve as an accessible introduction to philosophy for generations more likely to look at philosophy as an archaic practice, like wearing neckties, than a possible guide in the art—if that’s what anyone would want to call it anymore—of living.
Anyway, the book created something of a sensation at the time, with gushing reviews coming fast and furious, like one from Germany’s Welt am Sonntag, which acclaimed Frankfurt as no less than someone who “leads a campaign against the heedless association of speech and truth”, and this gem from Brian Appleyard from The Sunday Times, calling the book “a model of what philosophy can and should do…a small and highly provocative masterpiece”. But Frankfurt, in the interview mentioned above, confessed to embarrassment because he had not been very happy with the article when it had been originally published in the ‘eighties in a literary magazine. Very early on, a picture started to form in my mind, not of a theoretical breakthrough, but of a kind of literary, if not socio-cultural act of purging or pre-emptive redemption. According to this view, modern society, especially much of its educated class, is choking on its own capacity to manufacture and consume PR, propaganda, legalese, marketing, advertising, bureaucratese, jargon of all sorts, scams, spin and everyday dissimulation, and finds itself desperately seeking a savior to deliver it; but Frankfurt, far from seeking or acknowledging even a forerunner role like John the Baptist’s, resembles more the title character from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, heralded by crowds of benighted souls who insist on investing the words he himself looks back upon with a kind of quizzical suspicion with all the trappings of divine revelation.
Frankfurt begins his discussion by recognizing the existence of bullshit as a phenomenon worthy of philosophical investigation, both on account of its ubiquity and its peculiar intentional stance: as a form of communication in which concern with the truth is not so much effectively denied, as in the case of lying, as simply considered a matter of indifference by the speaker. He attempts to structure his inquiry by appealing to hints of it in the literature, from a piece on humbug by Max Black, and an anecdote about Wittgenstein, in which thoughts about the curious interplay of intentions involves misrepresentation that stops “short of lying;” (p.9) and this leads Frankfurt to the essential distinction that takes him beyond his distinguished predecessors to provide a first step in the development of what might be called an autonomous theory of bullshit. This involves specifying exactly what it is that distinguishes lying from bullshit: the bullshitter “offers a description of a certain state of affairs without submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes;” this, in turn, is why [the bullshitter] cannot be regarded as lying; “for she does not presume to know the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a position she knows to be false.” Hence “[i]t is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are-that I regard as the essence of bullshit.” (pages 33-4)
Now this is an interesting thought, and immediately suggests-to me, anyway-the posing of another question if we are to understand things like the conditions under which we are motivated, if not compelled, to tolerate bullshit, or even actively produce it ourselves. This sort of treatment would take us away from the inquiry in a much better position than if we stay satisfied with a merely insightful definition. The second question is as follows: why and under what circumstances do we tend to feel pressured to adopt or adapt ourselves to this curious communicative strategy, even and especially when we feel enraged or violated by doing so, as so often and obviously happens?
Unfortunately, Frankfurt goes of target at this point in his treatment of the issue, tangentially considering issues of etymology (“bull”, “bull sessions”, “bullshit artist”) before returning to what differentiates the bullshitter from the liar. On page 62 he actually confronts the question of why there is so much bullshit, and makes the point that: “[b]ullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to the topic.” (p.63) He then notes that “this discrepancy is common in public life, where people are impelled—whether by their own propensities or the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant”, before briefly considering sources of skepticism regarding an objective reality like Postmodernism, or the “contemporary proliferation of bullshit”(p.64). But none of these discussions, in my view, provides anything close to theoretical construction; they serve as mere commentary hearkening back to what has been said before.
And that’s it: Frankfurt has given us some insight into what bullshit is, and seems to be the first person to explicitly recognize that this is something that philosophy-not to mention the wider culture-must articulate an understanding of, only to stop as soon as he touches on questions which might allow us to comprehend not just what it is, but why it’s so pervasive in our lives, often drives us so crazy, and is, hence, so important to us in the first place. And this is because Frankfurt does not seem ready to look seriously beyond the intention of the bullshitter to consider what it is about our social relations themselves that makes bullshitting an attractive option in so many varied settings. Consequently, what seems required, first and foremost, is a kind of “critique” of what we may perhaps playfully call, “pure” bullshit.
The place to begin such an inquiry, I would venture, is by taking on the position of the person or persons being bullshitted, or who believe they are being so treated. Frankfurt does acknowledge the existence of a power-play in the final pages of his essay; but what is the basis of that power? And who, exactly, is worse off for it, or, at least, must exit the encounter feeling like s/he is in a subordinate position, carrying all the emotional baggage that entails? What seems to make bullshit so exasperating is precisely the reliance of the bullshitter on accepted (though not necessarily well understood) norms, laws and conventions that effectively protect the bullshitter from objection, even and especially when such a reliance clearly clashes with different beliefs of the bullshitter that should also be clearly evident to the wider community, not just the person/s being bullshitted. And I would submit that the thing that provides the word with the emotive power of forbidden fruit, and installs it in its rightful place as one of the language’s most cherished obscenities, consists in the fact that it is felt that there are no effective means of appeal which might allow the contested statement-or deed-to be challenged.
In consequence, we are forced to walk away from situations we find somehow unsatisfactory without enjoying recourse to any more developed discursive or more binding devices to tease or tear out of the statement, deed or outcome, more acceptable ones, or simply a better explanation why we must ultimately submit in the first place. Indeed, it is worse than this: we feel that these means are, to a not insignificant degree, already available; and that we must submit precisely on occasions when clear-cut conventions or rules should automatically generate objections from the wider community of listeners or witnesses surrounding us. It is this visceral sense of casually enforced rules and subsequent illegitimate isolation from a community who, according to their own publicized standards of behavior and communication, would seem to be committed to an enthusiastic hearing of our objections, that seems to characterize bullshit and take it out of the realm of normal discourse and provide it with the emotional power that has always been the wellspring of the profane. Ultimately, it seems that an identification of the posture of the bullshitter as being indifferent towards truth can only be a preliminary first step in getting to the heart of the matter where bullshit is concerned: there must be a subsequent establishment of what makes this motivation sensible and effective in real social settings if any account of bullshit is to be set in motion coming from the direction of Frankfurt’s efforts. It is precisely because the bullshitter can be so aggressively and manifestly confident that the truth condition of her/his statements will not be investigated, or deeds interrogated, or that adverse consequences cannot follow upon conclusion of such efforts, that the bullshitter can possibly feel at all indifferent to the “truth” Frankfurt speaks of; the social setting provides the indispensable condition for the attitude towards truth; and no account of bullshit can be considered complete before that has been holistically integrated into said account.
And this assertion can be supported when we consider cases in which the aforementioned appeal confronts the potentially considerable obstacle that is our own powerlessness, lethargy or indifference: even when we simply could not be bothered to rebuke the bullshitter ourselves, and may have the power to do so, we still feel a sense of grievance inasmuch as we have had to, often unnecessarily, be subjected to the whole pantomime in the first place; we feel that someone in the community should have put a stop to the whole thing before it reached the point it did.
But if what I just wrote can be said to adequately capture the sense of violation we feel when we are the victims of bullshit, what can explain why, in turn, we so often employ it ourselves? One reason, of course, is that bullshit can often be an effective means of countering, well, bullshit. There are many instances in life in which we feel we are unjustly called upon to provide rationalizations which we know will never be adequate, sometimes because we do not know the answers ourselves, but feel we are right, or at least on the right track. On other occasions, we know we possess neither the time, nor can expect the appropriate level of attention from likely listeners, or are too tired or depressed to give what we feel nears an appropriate account of what we ourselves have said or done. Under these circumstances, the simple indifference towards truth that Frankfurt designates as capturing the essence of bullshit shows its inadequacy to the point of potential inversion: in these cases, who exactly is being indifferent to the truth? The listener? The speaker? Both? Everybody? Such cases are not only many, but might constitute by far the majority of instances: how often do we just say “alright” when someone asks how we are, when the fact that the interlocutor’s ultimate indifference, not to mention our own inability to articulate what is of frustratingly vital importance to us, results in yet another occasion for sorrow and disappointment? On such occasions it is as difficult to separate the bullshitter from the bullshitted as it is to unravel the hag from the beauty in the famous Rorschach sketch.
Indeed, I would venture that we can all acknowledge the existence of a “liberatory” bullshit: we all know, and content producers of various sorts have made a fortune depicting, how the fast-talkers and yarn spinners always attract their sweethearts, almost always against the latter’s will. There is something irresistible about being able, in some small way, to convincingly render-if only for a couple of seconds, and in a harmless way-that the factors that condition the day-to day reality that oppresses us are trivial, uninteresting and even not worthy of our humanity, singularly unable to represent our existential predicament. And here bullshit often serves as the reliable palliative, far from always, in a harmful way, producing a potentially destructive indifference to those very conditions that Frankfurt indicts.
For reasons of space, I must conclude this piece here. I intend in future to expand upon the kind of bare-bones treatment of my subject in future installments, where I hope to write about the shifting roles bullshit is playing in our society, and I will suggest that the act of calling bullshit’s fundamental role as a defense mechanism in our culture is being chipped away at to the point of becoming obsolete. But, until then, anyway, I retain, I hope more or less contentedly, my grip on something I just won’t give up.