On bullshit

Harry G. Frankfurt’s article “Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility” is still relevant for the freedom of the will debate 54 years after its first publication. Still as relevant outside academic circles is his essay “On bullshit”, first published in a journal in 1986, and as a book in 2005. Then it got much attention in the media and it appeared for 27 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List. When asked why he had written this essay, Frankfurt answered:“Respect for the truth and a concern for the truth are among the foundations for civilization. I was for a long time disturbed by the lack of respect for the truth that I observed ... Bullshit is one of the deformities of these values”. The phrase “I was for a long time disturbed by the lack of respect for the truth that I observed” might suggest that Frankfurt has changed has view on the presence of bullshit since he first published his essay, but look around: Isn’t bullshit everywhere around us, inside and outside politics?
But what actually is bullshit? You can say that bullshitting is telling nonsense, falsehoods, misrepresentations, especially with pretentious or big words. However, bullshit is not lying as such. In lying the untruth is central: Giving a false interpretation of what is the case as such. I must think here of Kant. According to Kant, lying is absolutely not allowed. Suppose now that you live in a dictatorship. You are hiding a resistance fighter in your house. Then someone rings your doorbell. It’s a policeman who wants to know whether that person is in your house. Ignoring Kant, you say “No”: You are lying. In this case you explicitly say an untruth hoping to save the resistance fighter. You have no personal interest in lying in this case. According to Frankfurt, you are not saying bullshit, for bullshit has two essential remarks: 1) What a person says when saying bullshit is often, if not usually – but not necessarily – not true. However, that his or her words are false or true is not what counts for the bullshitter, for 2) what s/he says is meant to represent him or herself in a certain way. As Frankfurt himself says it: “[B]ulshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing … than to telling a lie. … Unlike plain lying … [bluffing] is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what counts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” (italics HF) Now it is so, so Frankfurt, “that a fake or a phony need not be … inferior to the real thing. … What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” (pp. 128-9)
Bullshitting is not about the truth of facts and about the truthfulness of what the bullshitter says, but about the bullshitter him or herself. Bullshitting is a way of presenting yourself. It is often seen as more “innocent” than lying, and therefore bullshitters often are not punished when caught telling a lie. Moreover, bullshitting gives more freedom. A bullshitter “does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point”, which can be quite complicated, but “he is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires.” (p.130) And this is all done by the bullshitter for the project s/he has in mind. For bullshitting is not done for hiding the facts, for hiding how things stand, but in view of a project: “What [the bullshitter] does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.” What the facts are, what is true and what is false is not important for the bullshitter. “[H]e 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 picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” (pp. 130-1)
Now it is so that everybody is saying bullshit from time to time, for example, when you want to save your face. Often it is relatively innocent. However, bullshitting can become dangerous when politicians use it, and then not only for saving their faces, when they have made mistakes, but for manipulating the people in view of their own projects. And, look around, how many politicians are not behaving that way? Bullshitting is more dangerous than lying, as Frankfurt makes us clear.

Sources
- Wikipedia “On Bullshit”.
- For this blog I used the version of “On Bullshit” in , Harry G. Frankfurt, The importance of what we care about; pp. 117-133. Here you can find the essay online.