“Unveiling a seamless life-style” proclaims a placard beside a building site. An article in the science magazine Nautilus reports that “groundbreaking experiments” by the evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano “suggest that plants have the capacity to learn, remember, and make choices. [She] talks to plants. And they talk back.” “The term biologically female or biologically male is completely nebulous. It has no defined or agreed meaning in science, as far as I’m aware,” attested a trans-identified male doctor in a recent lawsuit. “Because you’re worth it,” gushes the cosmetics company L’Oréal.
What bullshit in each case! Yet one could say of bullshit what St Augustine said of time—that you know what it is until someone asks you, and then you’re stumped for a definition. You might, of course, add that no one cares anyway.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who died in 2023, cared enormously. His 1986 essay “On Bullshit” deplored how “loosely” the term was used—that “what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of” the stuff, and what function it actually serves, remained unclarified. Such terminology may sound like a spoof of the sometimes pompous style of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but it is serious. Frankfurt was an exemplar of how—far from being “at best a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst a tea-table diversion”, the charge levelled by Bertrand Russell against “ordinary language philosophy” when it began in the 1950s—the philosophical analysis of concepts aims at getting to grips with reality and unravelling our confusions in living.
In developing “a theoretical understanding of bullshit”, Frankfurt was diagnosing a malaise of our era; one that, he said, was developing exponentially due to the increase “in communications of all kinds” and the widespread conviction that democratic citizens should have opinions on everything—and this was at the dawn of mobile phone usage and before the advent of social media. Inveighing against our “indifference to how things really are”, and urging the vital importance of the strict pursuit of truth, Frankfurt could almost have been prophesying the rising proliferation of duplicity, doublespeak and obfuscation perpetrated not just by demagogues like Trump (the standard example of a bullshitter) but by our academic and social institutions. “On Bullshit” has become a classic. In 2005 it was published as a book, and this has now been republished in a 20th-anniversary edition.
“Deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feeling, or attitudes”: that, in the year before Frankfurt’s essay, was how the philosopher Max Black had defined the perhaps-antiquated concept of “humbug”. It also applies, says Frankfurt, to the vernacular, unsanitised “bullshit”; but he offers an anecdote to illustrate the latter’s particularity. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s close friend Fania Pascal recounted how, when she had her tonsils out and he visited her in hospital, she said she felt just like a dog that had been run over. “He was disgusted: ‘You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.’” It’s possible, says Frankfurt, that Wittgenstein was after all “only teasing”, but unlikely. Pascal’s assessment accords with the humourlessly sincere, judgemental, pedantic conscientiousness recorded in biographies of Wittgenstein and which was also, of course, part of his gloriously adamant, passionate, unremitting search for truth. Frankfurt aptly quotes lines of Longfellow that Wittgenstein once said could serve as his motto:
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere
According to Frankfurt, what irked Wittgenstein was that Pascal’s account—rather than being “wrought with greatest care” (as medieval workmen carved gargoyles which they assumed to be forever unseeable)—revealed a disregard for accuracy. He contrasts the discipline and austerity required for pursuing truth with how bullshit is “not… crafted at all”, just cavalierly “dumped”. It is this frivolous carelessness, says Frankfurt, that epitomises bullshit, and that makes it, even though (like “humbug” in Black’s definition) it is “short of lying”, a far worse enemy to truth. In order to lie, the liar needs to believe that there are determinate and knowable facts, for it is these that he intends to deny or misrepresent; the distinction between what is true and what is false is as crucial to him as to the truth-teller. “Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them,” writes Frankfurt. The liar inadvertently respects truth even as he disrespects the telling of it. The bullshitter, on the other hand, intends “neither to report the truth nor to conceal it”—rather than rejecting and opposing truth’s authority (as the liar does), she simply doesn’t bother about it. Her focus is on the effects, not the content, of her utterance, how it makes her seem. Bullshit, then, is not necessarily false, but (Frankfurt implies), if true, it is true only fortuitously. Phoniness, not falsity, is the essence of bullshit, he says; and the counterfeit’s flaw is not what it is like—it may not even be inferior to the real thing, if perhaps an exact copy—but “how it was made”.
Yet to create a counterfeit of any sort, let alone a convincing copy, requires skill and deliberation—the very sort of care that Frankfurt declares bullshit characteristically to lack. What reconciles this apparent contradiction is that, for Frankfurt, the danger of bullshit lies in its infectious lack of concern for truth—which, whether what she perpetrates be indiscriminately splattered or carefully crafted, is the bullshitter’s defining mindset.
Are motives, though, the essential factor in determining an instance of bullshit? Frankfurt was perhaps concentrating on the shitter at the expense of the shit. In “Deeper into Bullshit”, his riposte to Frankfurt’s essay in 2002, GA Cohen argued that, when bullshit is defined, it is the product not the process that should take precedence, and that Frankfurt’s definition was unduly “activity-centered”. The agent’s motives and mindset are irrelevant (said Cohen); they may indeed be perfectly honest and conscientious but nonetheless produce “discourse that is by nature unclarifiable”. But what, demanded Frankfurt, is to count as “clear”? (His response to Cohen’s response serves as the book’s postscript.) By specifically refusing to define that term, Cohen is “hoist by [his] own petard”, Frankfurt argued. In any case, how great and how consistent, for a discourse to qualify as bullshit, must its unclarity be? How, too, are we to determine what is “by nature [that is, intrinsically] unclarifiable”? If a text initially seems absurd and obscure, that may be due to its originality and a complexity that scholarship will in due course illuminate; after all, Cohen had admitted as much in referring to Hegel.
In practice, both philosophers had the same purveyors of bullshit in their sights. It was appropriate, said Frankfurt when interviewed after On Bullshit’s publication in 2005, that he had written the original essay at Yale; the university—a hub of postmodernist literary theory when Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man taught there—could be called “the bull-capital of the world”. He alluded to “people pretending to have important ideas when they don’t, and obscuring the fact by using a lot of impenetrable language”—exactly those whom Cohen aimed to discredit in “Why One Kind of Bullshit Flourishes in France”, a paper that was virtually samizdat until a version was published posthumously.
Frankfurt (defending his own motive-focused stance on bullshit) argued that Cohen was overly worried about the influence of academic bullshit outside academia—which unfortunately underestimated how far, thanks to it being regurgitated, adulated and imitated, literary theory and postmodernism would spill over into common currency. In the essay itself, though, Frankfurt did acknowledge the impact of the academy when (tantalisingly, only in the last two paragraphs) he diagnoses the “deeper sources” of the bullshit epidemic. He cites the “anti-realist” scepticism in recent philosophy, which not only proclaims that we cannot gain reliable access to truth, but disputes that it makes any sense even to try. As impartial efforts to determine what is true and what is false have been devalued, says Frankfurt, the discipline demanded by “the ideal of correctness” has been abandoned for one “imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity”. Iris Murdoch had similarly lamented, in 1961, that “for the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity”. She urged a reversion “from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth”.
Unfortunately, Frankfurt underestimated how far literary theory and postmodernism would spill over into common currency
Frankfurt might have indicted Søren Kierkegaard, as well as contemporary anti-realism, for promoting the preference for sincerity over truth. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Kierkegaard urged that, instead of treating truth objectively, as if it were “an object to which the knower relates himself ”, one should reflect on the relation itself, acknowledging that one’s view is not somehow sub specie aeternitatis but situated in time and subjectivity. “As long as this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.” It is (apparently) irrelevant, then, whether or not what one believes, or says, is objectively true: the crucial thing is the trajectory and strength of how one comes to believe.
But what ivory tower did Kierkegaard inhabit? The smug platitude that the journey not the arrival matters rarely applies in real life. For the invalid, the citizen, the soldier and the wayfarer, what and why the doctor, politician, brigadier or giver of directions believe is irrelevant except in so far as they efficiently cure, govern, command or guide; their sincerity is purely instrumental. If “truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness, of subjectivity” for those practitioners themselves, that could be counterproductive to their practice.
In the case of abstract thought, dispraising objectivity in favour of what Kierkegaard calls “the subjectivity of truth” is even less applicable. It only works in the third person. I can say of someone else that her earnest attempts at truth entitle her to count as “in the truth”, but to state it first personally—of myself—renders the statement ridiculous by cancelling out the virtue it advocates. It is not sincerity but truth that I should be seeking. Sincerity is a sine qua non, and if it, not truth, is my primary goal, then I am not sincere.
Kierkegaard is surely a progenitor of child-centred education. This, by focusing the child, as well as her teachers, on how, not what, she learns—rather than on “the other-centred concept of truth”—is almost like encouraging her to focus on the nature of her visual images rather than (automatically and unconsciously) using them as a means to reveal reality. And, sadly, thanks to teachers’ constant—and much-copied—worksheets, child-centred education, far from producing autonomous learners, often results in the very rote-learning that it seeks to obviate. Worse, though, Kierkegaard’s anti-objectivism has surely been conducive to “my truth”, a notion that gives us licence to lean back into immediate, facile opinions rather than strictly pursuing accurate knowledge, and that provides a haven for special pleading and subterfuge. Allied to it is “standpoint theory”, which assumes that the “lived experience” of someone with a particular “identity” somehow embodies that of everyone similarly classified and, in any argument, outranks all efforts at impartial objectivity.
Civilisation (now often disprized) depends on acquiring knowledge of reality. Because we suppose that the truth about it is unattainable, we instead try to be true to ourselves, says Frankfurt. But what, in theory or experience (he demands), makes us think that the truth about ourselves is what it is easiest to know? “As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them.” Our natures are less inherent, more insubstantial, unstable and indeterminate, than those of anything else, says Frankfurt. “And,” in his amusing yet deadly serious conclusion, “insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit”.
