Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  4 Bullshit as Unclarifiable Unclarity

  Unlike Frankfurt’s bullshitting, lying is identified in terms of the defect at which it aims, namely, falsehood. We clarify what a liar is by reference to falsehood, rather than the other way around; we do not, that is, when asked to characterize what falsehood is, say that falsehood is what a liar aims to say. In parallel, we might, unlike Frankfurt, seek to clarify what a bullshitter is by reference to what he aims at, to wit, bullshit. We might start with the shit, not with the bull. And that would induce us to consider OED definition 1 (“nonsense, rubbish”) the one that fits the bullshit that interests me, rather than the bullshit that interests Frankfurt. My bullshit belongs to the category of statement or text. It is not primarily an activity but the result of an activity (whether or not that activity always qualifies as an activity of bullshitting.92)

  A liar who tries to say something false may inadvertently speak the truth, whether or not he is then lying, and whether or not what he then says is a lie. And there is also the opposite case in which an honest person, by mistake, speaks falsely. The bullshit that interests me is relevantly parallel. I countenance a bullshitter who has tried, but failed, to produce bullshit—what comes out, by accident, is good sense—and I also countenance a lover of truth who utters what he does not realize is bullshit. A person may avow, in full honesty, “I’m not sure whether what I’m about to say is bullshit.” These are not possibilities for the bullshit that interests Frankfurt. But they are possibilities. So the bullshit that interests Frankfurt doesn’t cover the waterfront.

  A person who speaks with Frankfurtian indifference to the truth might do so yet happen to say something true, and, in at least one sense of the term, the one that interests me, what he says could not then be bullshit.93 And, oppositely, an honest person might read some bullshit that a Frankfurt-bullshitter wrote, believe it to be the truth, and affirm it. When that honest person utters bullshit, she’s not showing a disregard for truth. So it is neither necessary nor sufficient for every kind of bullshit that it be produced by one who is informed by indifference to the truth, or, indeed, by any other distinctive intentional state.

  The honest follower, or the honest confused producer of bullshit, may or may not count as a bullshitter,94 but she is certainly honest, and she certainly utters (one kind of) bullshit. There exists bullshit as a feature of utterances that does not qualify as bullshit by virtue of the intentional state of the utterance’s producer (although that state may, of course causally explain why the bullshit is there, and/or why what’s there is bullshit).

  But what is that feature of utterances? One thing it can be, at least to a first approximation, is what the OED calls it, to wit, nonsense. But what particularly interests me is a certain variety of nonsense, namely, that which is found in discourse that is by nature unclarifiable, discourse, that is, that is not only obscure but which cannot be rendered unobscure, where any apparent success in rendering it unobscure creates something that isn’t recognizable as a version of what was said. That is why it is frequently an appropriate response to a charge of bullshit is to set about trying to clarify what was said. (Think of attempts to vindicate Heidegger, or Hegel. The way to show that they weren’t bullshitters is not by showing that they cared about the truth, but by showing that what they said, resourcefully construed, makes sense. Those who call them bullshitters do not doubt that they cared about the truth, or, at any rate, it is not because of any such doubt that they think Hegel and Heidegger were bullshitters. 95 That Frankfurt issue isn’t the issue here.)

  Something is unclarifiable if and only if it cannot be made clear, but I shall not try to say what “clear” means in this essay. (I’m inclined to think it’s not possible to do so, in an illuminating way.) Note, however, that there are relevantly different forms of unclarity, all of which have bearing here. There is the unclarity of a sentence itself, and then there is the unclarity as to why a certain (possibly perfectly clear) sentence is uttered in a given context: So, for example, the meaning of Wittgenstein’s “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him” is in one way perfectly clear, but it might nevertheless be judged obscure, and unclarifiably obscure, by one who doubts that it carries, in context, a graspable point. There is also the unclarity of why one statement should be taken to lend credence to another statement. And there are no doubt other pertinent unclarities too.

  Note that it is not an objection to the proposed sufficient condition of bullshit that different people might, in the light of different background beliefs, impose different standards of clarity, and, therefore, identify different pieces of texts as bullshit. Some of the people might, of course, be wrong.

  I emphasized “one thing it can be” three paragraphs back because defects other than unclarifiable unclarity can suffice to stigmatize a text as bullshit. I focus on this variety of the phenomenon because it commands a greater academic following than other varieties do. In the various varieties of bullshit, what is wanting, speaking very generally, is an appropriate connection to truth, but not, as in Frankfurt’s bullshit, as far as the state of mind of the producer is concerned, but with respect to features of the piece of text itself. Unclarifiably unclarity is one such feature. Rubbish, in the sense of arguments that are grossly deficient either in logic or in sensitivity to empirical evidence, is another. A third is irretrievably speculative comment, which is neither unclear nor wanting in logic, such as—David Miller’s excellent example—“Of course, everyone spends much more time thinking about sex now than people did a hundred years ago.”

  I focus on unclarifiable unclarity in particular in preparation for a further inquiry into bullshit that addresses the question why so much of that particular kind of bullshit is produced in France. This kind of academic bullshit, unlike the two contrasting types of bullshit, be they academic or not, mentioned in the previous paragraph, comes close to being celebrated for its very unclarity, by some of its producers and consumers. What some of them certainly celebrate is a disconnection with truth: in what perhaps ranks as the consummation of the development of unclarity-type bullshit, a consummation that Hegel might have called “bullshit risen to consciousness if itself”, truth is, in much post-modernism, expressly disparaged.

  Although I foreswear a definition of ‘clarity’, I can offer a sufficient condition of unclarity. It is that adding or subtracting (if it has one) a negation sign from a text makes no difference to its level of plausibility:96 no force in a statement has been grasped if its putative grasper would react no differently to its negation from how he reacts to the original statement. The deliberate bullshit published by Alan Sokal97 no doubt comes out as unclarifiable, by that criterion. Note that this test does not apply to the different sorts of bullshit reviewed a couple of paragraphs back, and, being a merely sufficient condition of unclarifiability, it does not characterize all cases of the latter either.

  An objection that faces my account is that it appears to classify good poetry that isn’t bullshit as bullshit, since a piece of good poetry may be unclarifiable. A tempting way of acquitting such poetry of the charge of bullshit is by reference to its designation as poetry, rather than as some sort of contribution to knowledge in a more straightforward sense. But then the same text would be bullshit or not according, Frankfurt-like, to its, as it were, intentional encasement, and I am trying to characterize an intention-independent sense of the term.

  An unclarifiable text can be valuable because of its suggestiveness: it can stimulate thought, it can be worthwhile seeking to interpret it in a spirit which tolerates multiplicity of interpretation, and which therefore denies that it means some one given thing, as a clarifiable piece of text does. So let us say, to spare good poetry, that the bullshit that concerns me is not only unclarifiable but also lacks this virtue of suggestiveness.98 (I am sure that many academic bullshitters get away with a lot of bullshit because some of their unclarifiabilia are valuably suggestive, and therefore not bullshit. Their readers then mistakenly expect more, or most
, of it to be so.)

  So much by way of a preliminary attempt to identify the bullshit that interests me. But what reading of ‘bullshitter’, if any, corresponds to the bullshit that I have tried to identify? Producers of Cohen-bullshit are clearly not by nature bullshitters, in Frankfurt’s sense, though Frankfurt-bullshitters often produce Cohen-bullshit, at least in the academy. Rather, I would say that the word ‘bullshitter’ that corresponds to my bullshit has two readings. In one of its readings, a bullshitter is a person who is disposed to bullshit: he tends, for whatever reason , to produce a lot of unclarifiable stuff. In a second acceptable reading of the term, a bullshitter is a person who aims at bullshit, however frequently or infrequently he hits his target.99 (Notice that other nouns that signify that their denotations engage in a certain activity display a similar pair of readings: a killer may be a being that tends to kill, with whatever intention or lack of it (a weed-killer, for example, is a killer, and a merely careless human stomper on flowers is a (flower-) killer); or he may be a being who intends to kill, whether or not he ever does). Aim-(Cohen)-bullshitters seek and rely on unclarifiability, whereas innocent speakers of bullshit are merely victims of it. Aim-bullshitters resort to bullshit when they have reason to want what they say to be unintelligible, for example, in order to impress, or in order to give spurious support to a claim: the motives for producing bullshit vary. (And just as a person might sometimes kill, without being a killer in either of the senses I distinguished, so a person who is in neither of the senses I distinguished a bullshitter might, on occasion, produce bullshit.)

  What about the verb, ‘to bullshit’? Does the producer of my bullshit, always bullshit when she produces bullshit, as Frankfurt’s does? I see no reason for saying that an innocent does, especially if she’s not even a disposition-bullshitter. But an aim-bullshitter who produces bullshit indeed bullshits.100

  5 Bullshit as Product and Bullshit as Process

  It matters that bullshit can come in the non-intention-freighted form by which I am exercised. For there is, today, a great deal of my kind of bullshit in certain areas of philosophical and semi-philosophical culture, and if, as we should, we are to conduct a struggle against it, the sort of struggle that, so one might say, Alan Sokal has inaugurated,101 then it is important not to make false accusations, and not, therefore, for example, to charge possibly innocent traffickers in bullshit of lacking a concern for truth, or of deliberately conniving at obscurity.102 Our proper polemical target is bullshit, and not bullshitters, or producers of bullshit, as such. So while it’s lots of fun, for people like me, who have a developed infantile streak, to talk about bullshit, and even just to write ‘bullshit’, over and over again, in an academic article, there is nevertheless, in my opinion, something important at stake here, and the character of what is at stake makes the bullshitter/bullshit distinction important.

  To prevent misunderstanding, let me add that I do believe that there is quite a lot of aiming at obscurity in the production of philosophical bullshit, and a lot, to boot, in this region, of lack of concern with truth.103 But these moral faults should not be our primary focus. For reasons of courtesy, strategy, and good evidence, we should criticize the product, which is visible, and not the process, which is not.104

  9

  The Unity of Bullshit

  GARY L. HARDCASTLE

  Our topic is bullshit, of course, and it goes almost without saying that in reflecting on our bullshit-rich practices, and on the various concepts we use to describe them, we’ll be making use of philosophy. Since reflection and tinkering with concepts is part of our practice as well, in thinking philosophically about bullshit we have every chance (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’) of actually engaging in bullshit (that is, “bullshitting”). Perhaps without even knowing it, or, perish the thought, caring. So there’s not just philosophy afoot, but irony as well. Fair warning.

  Yet think about bullshit we must. Not just because this is a volume of essays on bullshit, and not just because I’m a contributing editor to that volume facing, for this very paper, a ridiculous deadline, the missing of which will obligate me to purchase a very expensive French dinner for another of the volume’s contributors (nor has it escaped my attention that these conditions are themselves ideal for the promulgation of bullshit, so the bullshit-risk I’m running in even attempting this essay is, shall we say, immense).

  No, the reason we must talk about bullshit is simply because (a) it’s a fixture in our lives, and (b) we’d rather it wasn’t. That is, we find bullshit—not always, but often enough—obnoxious and, occasionally, intolerable. And under exactly these conditions arises, inexorably, that oldest genre of talk: complaint. As in, “What’s with all this bullshit?!” (but in Sumerian).

  Fortunately, not all our bullshit talk is complaint. Everyone, from me to all but the most cynical among us, nurses the hope that with a bit of care, a bit of insight, a bit of resolve, and a bit of luck, we could reduce, nay, eliminate, the amount of bullshit in our own lives, nay, in the lives of everyone we deal with, nay, in everyone. Or, if not eliminate, maybe overcome the bullshit. And it’s that hope that sends us off, personally, in our families, and occasionally in our communities, on anti-bullshit campaigns of various scales, with limited success but nearly unlimited expectations of success. Preliminary to these campaigns, and usually in conjunction with them as well, we settle on what it is exactly we’d like to eliminate. And that involves a certain amount of talk very different in kind from complaint. It involves marshalling examples, crafting definitions, designing a strategy, anticipating resistance, measuring success, and articulating some sort of exit strategy (that last one optional in the United States).

  The talk is usually just thought, of course—talk to ourselves. But occasionally someone climbs on stage, takes a deep breath, and lets the rest of the world, or at least everyone who is listening, in on her plan. When one too many “Customer Service Specialists” consigned the earnest and hard-working Laura Penny, a Canadian writer and writing instructor, to one too many “Automated Customer Service Facilities,” the result was an anti-bullshit declaration pedestrian in sentiment but celestial in eloquence. The ending of Penny’s Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit genuinely touches me:

  You, Gentle Reader, are probably not one of the powerful malefactors of great bullshit, so all of this huffing and puffing is kind of like chastising kids for poor attendance at school. The kids who are congenitally un-there aren’t around to hear you chew them out.

  But in the event you are a perpetrator (and you know in your heart of hearts if you are), I say unto you: Shame. Shame! Have you no sense of decency? You take names in vain, and send legions of vain names into the world. And when you fuck with English, you are money-changing in my temple.105

  How much bullshit do you suppose it takes to get a writing instructor to write that? A lot, I’m imagining. Go Laura!

  It’s been some time since a philosopher worked up a comparable head of steam, but let’s note that this sort of talk about bullshit—devising definitions, crafting strategies, countering resistance, and so on—is one thing philosophers do regularly, as a matter of profession and sometimes as a matter just of professional habit. And every so often one philosopher makes such headway against bullshit, or at least comes to believe that such headway has been made, that his or her particular anti-bullshit project attracts the attention not just of other philosophers but of regular people. This happened most recently with Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, a bona fide bestseller.

  On Bullshit is a charming (if skinny) book with a catchy title, and partly because of this, no doubt, it enjoyed twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, where dashes demurely obscured its title’s naughty bit. And since Frankfurt’s book had circulated as a paper for some years before its promotion to book, other philosophers—notably G.A. Cohen, whose “Deeper Into Bullshit” is included in this volume (pp. 117–135)—had something to say about bullshit. Philosophically speaking, 20
05 was a very good year for bullshit, and so was 2006.

  We should celebrate both On Bullshit’s enormous success, and the immanent delivery of yet more related philosophical work (including the book you’re holding right now), to the public that professional philosophy all too often forgets. We should celebrate it not as the long-awaited return of the philosopher kings to the public debate (or even to Rolling Stone) but simply as an occasion for philosophy to join the discussion taking place more or less all the time outside the realm of philosophy departments, classrooms, and conferences. If Frankfurt’s book shows anything, it’s that philosophers, as much as anyone else, want to know what’s with all the bullshit. Actually, we even have a few ideas.

  Frankfurt’s idea (as many, if not all, the chapters in this volume will point out) is that bullshit is a certain kind of negligence, specifically, negligence of truth. This notion is well-expressed in a distinction Frankfurt draws between bullshit and lying: the liar cares about the truth (and wants to steer us away from it), while the bullshitter doesn’t give a hoot about the truth so long as she can bullshit her way through to the promotion, the donation, the grade, the vote, the sale, or sometimes—let’s be honest—just the end of the conversation. The bullshitter’s utter disregard for the truth Frankfurt deems more offensive than the liar’s perverse regard for the truth. “Bullshit,” as Frankfurt puts it, “is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (On Bullshit, p. 61) because, Frankfurt seems to believe, our living together in relative peace and harmony demands of each of us that we mind the truth.

  Incidentally, this leaves Frankfurt with the puzzle of why we seem, at a first glance at least, to be so much more tolerant of bullshit than lying (a puzzle several others take up in this very volume). If bullshit is so corrosive, one would think it would get the blunt end of our moral cudgel; yet we let a lot of bullshit slide. As to the different question of why there is so much bullshit, Frankfurt suggests that we in the democratic West have backed ourselves into having to have a view about everything, no matter how little informed we might be, and that under these conditions a disregard for the truth becomes a rather attractive strategy for getting through the day (for an extensive discussion of this point, see Mark Evans’s contribution to this volume). Democracy, it appears, breeds bullshit.