Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  The distinction between fiction and non-fiction has never been terribly popular in advertising circles. But professional advertising has at least always recognized the distinction between what is an advertisement and what is not an advertisement. Until recently, advertisements announce themselves on signs or billboards, and they remain confined between programming segments on radio or television—all of which helps us recognize them as advertisements. Two emerging trends, however, seem designed to blur this distinction and create advertisements that appear to be something else entirely. “Product placement” injects recognizable products or brands into movies or television shows, while “word of mouth advertising” takes the additional step of blurring the distinction between professional advertisers and ordinary citizens. On this model, individuals are compensated to “talk-up” specific products with others whom they may encounter in the course of ordinary life—at work, in the supermarket, at soccer practice, and so on. Here, advertising begins to seamlessly join ordinary life in ways that make it increasingly difficult to determine not only whether claims are true or false, but additionally whether a friend, colleague or family member is recommending a product because they honestly like it or because they are rewarded for recommending it.

  Perhaps the most striking and surprising of bullshit’s successes are the inroads it has made into the worlds of science and scientific research. The philosopher Karl Popper held that science deserves respect precisely because it seeks to falsify its own claims—actively eliminating, so to speak, its own bullshit. Yet that ideal seems to be fading behind headlines about scientific fraud and misconduct. Some of the more familiar examples:

  • Investigative panels determine that research purported to have established some result, taken as gospel by other labs, was fabricated.

  • Pharmaceutical corporations generously fund scientific studies and publish only those that appear to document the safety of their products.

  • Tenured university professors promote their religious convictions in the guise of scientific expertise.

  • Political appointees at federal science agencies insert special wording in agency-publications designed to promote religious criticisms of established scientific knowledge.

  There’s nothing new in the appeal to science by individuals, corporations, or governments seeking to legitimate and advance their specific interests and plans. What is new is the notion that this is very easy to do—that legitimate scientific knowledge consists merely in whatever claims may be hyped through an effective public relations campaign, or published without controversy in a magazine or journal.

  And then there’s “that word.” Though it has become as ordinary and common as these kinds of fraud and misrepresentation to which it usually refers, there remain some frontiers it has not yet conquered. While most academics (not those writing here, of course) shun its vulgarity, that politeness has not stopped the establishment of a new academic journal— Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication and Falsification—dedicated to analyzing and better understanding all such varieties of fraud and misrepresentation throughout modern culture. Others, if less polite, are more direct. The popular writer and radio commentator Al Franken has lately augmented the rules of his call-in quiz show “Spot the Weasel” with a new, fourth choice. Callers attempting to match wits with Franken and his guests can now identify recorded statements by politicians as either true, a lie, a weasel, or “BS.” While Comedy Central’s The Daily Show goes all the way with mentioning “bullshit,” the other major networks, as of this writing at least, continue to censor the word. Still, it’s hard to miss. When Bright Eyes (aka Conor Oberst) sang “When the President Talks to God” on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, he asked,

  When the President talks to God

  Does he ever think that maybe he’s not?

  That that voice is just inside his head

  When he kneels next to the presidential bed

  Does he ever smell his own [bleep]

  When the President talks to God?

  One could also ask whether these censors were effective. Did this audience, unlike Jon Stewart’s, remain unaware that Oberst had again used “that word” to point to that elephant? The answer was at the end of Oberst’s song, as he sang, “I doubt it. I doubt it.”

  It’s this sense of despair and cynicism, finally, surrounding our era of bullshit that most fundamentally explains the appeal of Frankfurt’s book. No doubt, some of those who picked up On Bullshit did so only for the novelty of reading an Ivy League philosophy professor expound on the topic. But for many that curiosity was connected to deeper worries about what lay ahead for a culture so knee-deep. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich put it when commenting on Ms. Winfrey’s theatrical defense of truth, the scandal surrounding A Million Little Pieces was larger than the question of “whether Mr. Frey’s autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes and Noble.” The genuine scandal is that “such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life.” In an age of bullshit, we all become politicians or white-collar criminals, able neither to confirm nor deny the veracity of what we see, or know, or think we know. “It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief,” Rich suggested as he put his finger on the potentially enormous social and cultural costs of bullshit’s dominance (New York Times, 22nd January, 2006). For constant, nagging suspicions—that political leaders are consciously deceiving the public, that your favorite teacher is bent on partisan indoctrination, or that your family doctor, your senator, stockbroker, or product-recommending neighbor is in some corporation’s pocket—would seem to be socially corrosive and destabilizing. The fear that simple, direct communication, free of hidden agendas and interests, is becoming impossible may have led many (including those television and radio producers who made Frankfurt a sudden celebrity) to seize Frankfurt as a popular guru with a prescient, prophetic warning—a Marshall McLuhan or Timothy Leary for the post-Enron, post-Iraq era. After all, the opening line of On Bullshit, that “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” was written in 1985. Twenty years later, there’s so much more.

  The Dream of a Bullshit-Free Culture

  If ours is a culture of bullshit, then why was it that a philosopher took center stage as America’s main bullshit-analyzer? Why not a novelist or sociologist? We don’t pretend to understand the vagaries of fashion and popular taste better than anyone else. But part of the answer, we think, is that Frankfurt is reviving a philosophical tradition. Philosophers have long sought to understand exactly how it is that certain statements or beliefs seem to deceive us, take us in, or make us not care very much whether they are true or false. Long before Frankfurt, that is, philosophers have been trying to determine exactly what bullshit is and how it works its magic.

  This may be a surprising claim. Philosophy itself, after all, is often regarded as part and parcel with the bullshit of popular culture. The person who survives a personal tragedy by reflecting on the mysteries of the universe, someone might say, is “taking things philosophically.” That’s more polite and respectful, after all, than pointing out that she’s distracting herself from unbearable loss or disappointment by almost absent-mindedly contemplating abstractions or pondering paradoxes—bullshitting herself. A walk through the “philosophy” section at your local bookstore may confirm the impression that philosophers’ interests are in that otherworldly arcana of the supernatural, the occult, and the “metaphysical.”

  Not so. Some of the most influential and enduring philosophy, dating back centuries, is devoted to identifying and understanding bullshit. This is not so that it may be indulged in further, but so that we may liberate ourselves from its delusions and deceptions. The archetypal sage-in-a-toga Socrates, for example, is justly revered for dedicating his life to the search for persons who were truly wise, rather than interested merely in passing on opinion, or hearsay, or beliefs o
f any sort bereft of evidence or simply good sense.

  Twenty centuries later, the French polymath René Descartes started off the first of his six Meditations on First Philosophy with the rather brave recognition that so much of what he learned in the best French schools of the time was just plain false. “Some years ago I was struck,” he wrote, “by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.”3 Descartes’s remedy was a program of self-discipline that began with the rejection of those beliefs that fell short of certainty and, that completed, proceeded with the construction of a system of beliefs that was “stable and likely to last.” It was a lonely, individualistic enterprise, but the very fact that Descartes recorded his progress in his Meditations reveals that it was something he believed others could, and ought, to do as well. It was, indeed, a common Enlightenment fantasy that everyone would follow along. The result would be a world with a lot less bullshit, maybe none at all.

  That vision was shared by the next century’s David Hume (who otherwise shared precious little with Descartes, but it was enough). Hume held that all real knowledge took the form either of mathematics and similar “formal” sciences (which he termed “relations of ideas”) or of natural science (for Hume, “matters of fact”), and he ended his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (a popularization, relatively speaking, of his two-volume A Treatise of Human Nature) with clear instructions for how to treat bits of speech that pretended to, but in fact did not, belong in either category:

  When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.4

  An Enlightenment call for book burning? Not quite. The books Hume would have us cast into the flames are books only in the most literal sense—they have pages, bindings, covers and words strung together into sentences and paragraphs. But they say nothing. Their offense, moreover, is that they are presented as though they do say something. That’s the illusion, and it’s perpetrated by the sophistry of printed words, pages, bindings, covers, blurbs, reviews, and the rest. Better to burn such sham books, such bullshit, says Hume. Burn it all.

  The Enlightenment passion that carried Hume to the end of his Treatise continued to inspire in philosophers visions of a bullshit-free world. You find them in the writings of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, though again you’d be hard-pressed to find much more in common among these philosophers or, for that matter, all the philosophers who have railed against bullshit. The twentieth-century apotheosis of the anti-bullshit crusade, however, is certainly the Vienna Circle, a collective of science and math-minded Germans and Austrians that shook a communal fist at the culture of their time and place, the intellectual free-for-all of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s (that culture, sadly, shook its much more powerful fist back, sending nearly all of the Circle flying to England and the United States by 1939). The Vienna Circle’s preferred term for bullshit was ‘metaphysics’, and so their 1929 manifesto, the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (“Scientific World-Conception”), led off with the worry that “metaphysical and theologizing thought is again on the increase today, not only in life but in science.”5 The “Scientific World-Conception” would be the antidote. It was an embrace of modern science and a scientific attitude toward things, as well as the “new objectivity” (or neue Sachlichkeit) pursued by many artists, designers and architects in European culture.

  The Vienna Circle’s target was not the intellectual diversity that surrounded them but the putative parts of it that were presented (even accepted) as meaningful—indeed, profoundly meaningful—but in fact amounted to nothing. In 1932 the Circle’s Rudolf Carnap criticized Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most prominent German-speaking philosopher of the time, on precisely these grounds.6 In his 1929 book What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger ruminated on the nature of Das Nichts (literally, “the nothing”), and inspired Carnap to figure out exactly what was wrong with such supposedly deep and insightful metaphysical inquiries. In statements like Heidegger’s ‘Das Nichts selbst nichtet’ (“The nothing nothings”), Carnap concluded, there was only the appearance of a meaningful statement. Behind that appearance, there was Nichts, leading Carnap to suggest that metaphysicians were like “musicians without musical ability.” Much as a tone deaf musician would likely misuse an instrument, metaphysicians misused language and presented things that could not be conveyed in words as though they could be. Carnap and others of the Circle argued and debated about just how dangerous this passing off, this bullshitting, was. But it was bullshit all the same, and it met with a similar response: if one wanted to express an attitude towards life, that’s fine, but don’t pass it off as science or something similar. Better to take up poetry, as Friedrich Nietzsche does, for example, in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (which Carnap cites, incidentally, with approval).

  It’s almost an intellectual tragedy that the Vienna Circle and its philosophical legacies, logical positivism and logical empiricism, came to be associated with stodgy, dispassionate, irrelevant logic-chopping. That characterization occludes the Circle’s rai-son d’être, which was nothing less than the cultivation of a critical attitude to concentrations of bullshit in pseudoscience and philosophy that would, when taken up generally, reduce bullshit in government, religion, the market, and everyday life. The Vienna Circle’s members thought of themselves not simply as professional philosophers who happened to live and work in Vienna, but as the keepers of a tradition of liberal, Enlightenment thinking that had made Vienna the cradle of progressive housing programs, adult education, architecture, art and design. Oh, and progressive philosophy.

  Which brings us back to Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. Perhaps by now it’s clear that we see Frankfurt as the latest carrier of the anti-bullshit torch in the Enlightenment Olympics, now several centuries running. In this light, the real significance of this bullshitmania is that an age-old impulse within philosophy to establish itself as a cultural, and not just an academic, enterprise may finally have found the right formula and the right language. If so, the best explanation for the popular interest in On Bullshit may have been that first one, about the novelty of the word itself. Indeed it may all come down to that word—understood not as a joke, but as a welcome point of connection between what goes on in philosophy seminar rooms and what goes on when the lights go out and philosophers join their fellow citizens in the marketplace, coffee shop, town hall, and voting booth.

  How This Book Came to Be

  These are the considerations that led us to put together the collection of chapters that is Bullshit and Philosophy. If it’s true, as we suspect, that the popularity of Frankfurt’s book signals a willingness among the public to see what philosophers have to say about bullshit, then we ought, we thought, to assemble some who were up to the task and tell them to let it rip. What that means, of course, will vary among our authors. That said, though, there are some things this book is not.

  For example, the chapters that follow are not a guided tour through various varieties of bullshit in modern culture. Nor does this book intend to equip you with a “bullshit detector” that you might use to finally shut Uncle Ned up about the wisdom of tax cuts or the alien bodies the government is storing at Area 51. Nor do we offer a collection of indignant would-be radio commentators angling for a guest spot on Rush Limbaugh. What this book does, instead, is offer discussions, interpretations, and criticisms related to Frankfurt’s essay and other philosophical work on bullshit. Since On Bullshit was originally written for academic philosophers, and our book is written for people intrigued by On Bullshit but otherwise only tourists in the halls of philosophy
, some chapters will help explain what philosophical essays like Frankfurt’s aim to do and how they work. What does it mean, for example, to propose a “theory” of bullshit, given that theories of this or that usually come from laboratories filled with test tubes and expensive instruments? What does it mean to articulate “the structure of a concept”—as Frankfurt intends to do for bullshit?

  In this regard, we could have called our book A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bullshit. But we didn’t. We’re not complete idiots, and we have no desire to go to court for copyright infringement. More importantly, the success of On Bullshit makes it plain that neither idiots nor Ivy League professors have a special claim to insights about bullshit. If bullshit is one of the defining marks of modern culture, then everyone has a stake in it, and everyone can benefit from thinking about it and understanding it. With this in mind, and recognizing that thought and understanding are the province of philosophers, we bring you Bullshit and Philosophy.