Remember Bullshit?
In theory we need On Bullshit more than ever; after all, look at that idiot, the guy who’s president. Donald Trump’s a world-class, champion bullshitter; when he praises Sojourner Truth, he doesn’t care if she’s a hero or a racehorse. Yet Trump’s also a humongous liar. To say that here Trump lied (“violently, willfully, and viciously ran over”) and that here he bullshitted (“a beautiful tribute… so many other really incredible heroes... amazing”) will leave us slightly more aware but not by much. Harry G. Frankfurt, who wrote On Bullshit, says at the end that “antirealist doctrines” have caused a “contemporary proliferation” of bullshit, so there we have the book’s connection with a big meaning. But two pages before, on page 62, he says we don’t really know if nowadays there’s a greater tendency to bullshit—“impossible to be sure that there is relatively more.” So, the big meaning doesn’t seem to have the book’s full attention.
On Bullshit was a hit a while back, a best-seller during the Bush years. Its idea is simple: there’s lying, which is where someone wants you to believe some particular thing and the person knows it isn’t true; and there’s bullshitting, where the person doesn’t know or care if what they’re saying is true or false. Frankfurt first presented this idea in the essay “On Bullshit,” published in the fall 1986 issue of Raritan Quarterly Review. Nineteen years later Princeton University press put out the book version. Frankfurt was a professor of philosophy at Princeton after a run at Yale, where he was chairman of the department. On Bullshit added a new dimension to his distinguished career by hitting number one on The New York Times list. My library copy, looking worn and much-handled, fits in a shirt pocket and contains just 68 pages. These are small but have wide margins, so that each page looks like a white pool with the book’s distinguished serif font floating in the middle of it.
I suspect the book was given with shaving kits on dad’s birthday and slipped into stockings for Christmas (along with shaving kits). I also suspect the term lived on more as a thing to be explained than a word to be used. Whatever light bullshit threw on a situation, the pleasure of explanation matched or outdid it. Pundits looked for opportunities to apply Frankfurt’s term, which they’d introduce and carefully spell out. I don’t say I saw it often, just now and then across the years. Still, I did see it. Now here’s Olivia Nuzzi with a book slammed for its cryptic bluff and exalted fecklessness. Frankfurt and bullshit don’t appear in articles about American Canto or the Nuzzi mess, which makes me think an era’s gone by.
When something recondite comes down to my level, I wonder how much of the original is still hanging in there. So it is with this piece of analytic philosophy. I remember being pleased when I read “On Bullshit,” the essay. That was in Xeroxed form and loaned to me by someone who had it for class. I was pleased I could get through some pages of philosophy and pleased that the author worked with an everyday topic. He laid out a particular kind of annoyance that crops up; he did so with long, thatchy, comfortable sentences and an air of bemused pondering. Possibly his definition had broad implications for society, given that bogusness is always afoot. (These were the Iraq years.) Add a shaving kit and hard binding and you’ve got the On Bullshit experience.
Reading the book now, I’m much more hardnosed. Frankfurt was a professor and spent his time around people who felt obliged to talk about a parade of different topics. I suspect this feeling of theirs produced a lot of time-filling, pseudo-informed, pseudo-thoughtful bullshit meant to convince no one of any particular point being spoken; instead, the idea was to give an impression, namely that the speaker could talk about a given subject without falling on their face. If this type of bullshit did loom large in Frankfurt’s life, it’s no wonder he singled it out. A different meaning might occur to a commuter making their second bus change in crappy weather. Lucy Van Pelt stands beneath the snow and shouts, “This is bullshit!” She doesn’t mean the snow was generated by a being that doesn’t care what’s true and what’s false. She means she doesn’t want the goddamn snow and there it is, the dumb crap’s falling on her. I could multiply examples, most of them taken from irate posters at Urban Dictionary (“My grade on my economics midterm”). But none of those posters taught philosophy, so their version didn’t become a book.
Frankfurt lays out his definition this way: bullshit’s any statement “grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—the indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” On Bullshit warns that many people use the term “quite loosely—simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific meaning.” But the next sentence says, “the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean.” Unless the term’s attached to some particular definition, its use is meaningless. But any definition will be so narrow that important parts of the phenomenon have to be cut off. If so we need a few more definitions if the topic’s really going to be covered. But after his to-be-sure, Frankfurt proceeds as if his definition were the one and only. I find it all to be a fast shuffle. On Bullshit opens by saying “our culture” sure has a lot of bullshit, implication being that we’d better pin down what this prevalent thing might be. His one preferred meaning is then presented as the pinning down, but with a disclaimer that’s attached to be ignored.
The Lucy definition of bullshit is this: something’s put before you and you’re expected to take it, but it’s grossly at odds with some accepted standard (that is, accepted by you and therefore ironclad). “It isn’t fair” is a term that comes to mind, or “What a ripoff” or “That’s not true” or, at bottom, “It isn’t supposed to.” It isn’t supposed to work like this, with the weather dumping snow on you, or the ink costing more than the printer, or the pretty girl getting the raise. Or a sentence giving you untruths (so there’s lying covered) or a pile of words standing in for a point. That last example marks a place where Lucy’s approach and Frankfurt’s overlap. Talk without caring about true or false and you wind up just talking, and that’s an affliction to listeners. “Jesus, what bullshit,” people mutter, and they’re thinking about all they had to sit through and how little it meant. The Frankfurt angle, how little the talker cared about being right or wrong, would be present but secondary, a cherry on top (“You know, I don’t think he even cares,” and so on).
A blogger named Mac points out that On Bullshit has just two examples, neither well chosen. One is a verse about taking care with details even if the boss won’t see them (I’m paraphrasing); it’s against shoddiness in general, not the particular shoddiness of saying what the hell regarding truth versus fiction. The other’s an anecdote that shows Ludwing Wittgenstein having trouble with figurative language. A woman who wanted very much to communicate a pressing reality—namely that she felt terrible—used hyperbole to get across her experience’s intensity. She did so to Wittgenstein, who was both a landmark thinker and a person known for being irritable and dense. Accordingly, a story resulted. (She: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He: “You have no idea what a dog that has been run over feels like.”) Frankfurt presents this story as his exhibit A even though it doesn’t involve a speaker indifferent to truth, just a listener flummoxed by human communication. The choice seems offhand for somebody honestly trying to lay out an idea.
His description of bullshitting in action also seems slapdash. Frankfurt tells us bullshit tends to be freewheeling, “more expansive and independent” than lies and “with more opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play.” When I was a student, I saw students trying to pass without studying and that situation involves bullshitting if anything does. “Shovel, please,” says Robert Klein, recalling essay questions from his college days. But the students I saw didn’t appear lively and charged with inspiration. More than anything they seemed nervous.
Frankfurt takes truth to be the shore. Steer toward the shore or away from it and you’re keeping your eye on the shore. The bullshitter doesn’t steer toward or away; therefore, the bullshitter is paying as little attention to the shore as possible and must instead be doing their own thing. When actually the boat’s trying to run up alongside the shore without touching it. The bullshitter wants to sound like they know what they’re talking about—that’s staying in sight of the shore. But they don’t want to cite any particular facts without knowing the things are facts, and usually they don’t know. So the bullshitter’s condemned to skirt a line-up of rocks and deadly riptides.
Freewheeling this isn’t, nor is it “expansive and independent.” I had a boss who was new to his job and he had to chair a panel about our publication’s subject matter. How did he do this? Very carefully, and all the while trying to act offhand. I don’t know if he made any mistakes, but the sight of him was still funny. Frankfurt says a bullshitter’s chief aim is to hide that “the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him.” But my boss was worried that people would catch sight of a fact: that he didn’t know much about municipal bonds. That ignorance was the chief thing he wanted to hide; then, I guess, he worried about being caught fudging and squirming. Hiding his attitude about truth versus fiction would at best be number three.
A bullshitter doesn’t have to be nervous and circumspect. A tenured professor with the gift of gab might hold forth and let the facts go hang. But there are a lot more lazy students than expansive professors. I say the sludge-like efforts of undergrads—of tuition payers, specifically those tuition payers who underperform—didn’t get onto Frankfurt’s radar. (Believable, since Frankfurt appears to have been a major name in his field.) But there’s the confident professor wagging his pipe and indulging in color and imaginative play, a man free to hold forth; also, there’s the “conscientious” senior grad student reviewing world situations before a knot of watchful faculty members. Those guys made an impression and Frankfurt wrote up the impression when he thought he was describing bullshit. He never noticed what he was up to, and he never noticed “expansive and independent” versus “conscientious,” or page 62 (“impossible to be sure”) versus page 64 (“contemporary proliferation”).
Mac the blogger appears familiar with philosophy and philosophers, and he approaches On Bullshit feeling little awe. He finds Frankfurt’s definition to be worthwhile but says the book itself “often reads as perfunctory, repetitive, or padding.” With Mac as cover, I’ll say that On Bullshit seems flung together; not in haste, since it barely changed from 1986 to 2006, but with a throughgoing absence of thought. Writing it was a romp, I suppose. When holiday’s declared, you hang up whatever burdensome habit that typically gives your life shape. For the professor of philosophy, it was thinking things through, and the result of ditching this habit was a slow-motion bout of free association conducted by means of incompetent analytic philosophy.
Frankfurt pins down something we definitely call bullshit, and it’s good to have that thing defined. He also produces a rule that will stand forever: “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.” (Consider those kids with their essay questions.) But overall his book doesn’t deliver. It never gives you a clear look at what it’s talking about, it doesn’t ask why its chosen definition should be the one that’s singled out, and its description of the phenomenon in action seems arbitrary.
At the start Frankfurt tells us, “we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.” We can’t get the understanding without a theory, he says. By book’s end his theory has proved to be more of a semi-definition, which may be why two of the three blank spots haven’t been filled in. What’s bullshit for and why is there so much? Well, those moments arrive where something has to be said and there’s nothing to say. Here’s one: advertising a product when it has no particular advantages and the law won’t let you say otherwise. Other situations occur simply because people find themselves stuck with each other for a while. Getting yourself off the hook when everyone’s looking at you and an opinion seems called for. Covering when you’re amazed by the inanity of the opinion you just heard. Honoring causes that everyone knows are good but which no one is necessarily feeling at that moment. Talking about someone’s nephew you’ll never see. All this is bullshit. The words come out but a minimum gets said. A bullshit experience if the listener’s expecting substance; also, if the speaker’s hoping to talk without doing a tap dance. But people can’t stare at each other; there must be words. Like many short-term solutions, bullshit becomes a pain quite fast; the foam piles up until you can’t see the runway. But we can’t talk to each other without keeping a supply on hand.
Why bullshit? Because we’re us and this is how humans get by. Is there more bullshit nowadays? Maybe. When all you knew was your village, maybe silence could fall without creating such a problem. Now you’re thrown in with odd lots of people, people you definitely haven’t known since birth. Everybody has to cast about, try to convince themselves and each other that they’re all humans and instead of shifty beings that occupy the same floorspace. The more society complicates itself, the more bullshit must be called into play. Perhaps standards are degraded and bullshit becomes the thing people expect to hear if they’re not hearing some outright lies. If so, that’s 2026 explained. If not, whatever. As noted, Frankfurt’s two ways about the question.
You’ve been waiting for the inevitable. But I won’t say it. Frankfurt wrote a book about one type of shoddy verbalization, and his book itself appears shoddy. It spends pages saying not very much and it contradicts itself without noticing. So, what is On Bullshit? It’s forgotten, that’s all.