On Bullshit

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.

Thus opens the small--but very important--book by Harry G. Franfurt, On Bullshit.

Philosophy is about exploring the mundane in complex and disciplined ways. It is the science of apprehending truth behind space and time, love and good, meaning and meaninglessness. It is also about definition. What do we mean when we use the word "bullshit"? Why is there so much of it and what function does it serve? These are the main questions this book attempts to answer.

First of all, the book is ridiculously short. It really amounts to a short essay forced between hard covers. It can easily be read in an hour, but, with most philosophy, one reading won't be enough to thoroughly make sense of the argument. Don't be fooled, though, this IS philosophy at its best. Frankfurt is not a Hegel, Heidegger or Kant, but tackles his subject with a keen mind, philosophical methods and refreshing brevity. It is not meant to be funny (even though some of Frankfurt's observations and examples are), so if you're looking for a joke-book, I'd pass on this one.

So, what exactly is bullshit? Frankfurt enlists the help of Max Black, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, even, St. Augustine (in an interesting treatment of his eight categories of lying) to define and explain the phenomenon in question. What Frankfurt comes up with is no big surprise: Bullshit is speech that is not exactly lying. It is "hot air", empty, substanceless speech designed to enhanced the image of the speaker rather than advance the cause of truth.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false . . . . He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purposes.

This is why, according to Augustine, bullshit is more dangerous than a lie, because the liar does not reject the authority of the truth. A liar unwillingly lies to achieve some goal or avoid consequences, while a bullshitter is indifferent to how things really are.

So, if it is so bad, why does there seem to be so much of it. Frankfurt believes that the world we live in makes bullshit almost unavoidable. Because we are so often required to speak about things we know little or nothing about (maybe we know "just enough to be dangerous"), especially in political and technical (don't I know it!) arenas, we can't help but sling a little. We're not lying and maybe we even care about the truth of a matter, but the image we want to project becomes more important than reality. This is especially true in our fast-paced democracy where there is immense pressure to have an opinion on everything.

There may be deeper reasons for the rise of bullshit in our society. The deeply held and popular metaphysical anti-realist assumptions concerning the seat of reality informs a highly mutable epistemology. That is, the modern belief that so much of reality exists in our heads as subjective experience ("brains in a vat") leads to heightened skepticism concerning what we can really know. People substitute the pursuit of correctness (reality) with a pursuit of sincerity, as Frankfurt puts it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. All in all, this is an important book that fills in a gap between informal logic and every-day common sense.

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