Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  Bullshit and Truth

  If I’m right, bullshit results from the adoption of lame methods of justification, whether intentionally, blamelessly or as a result of self-deception. The function of the term is to emphatically express that a given claim lacks any serious justification, whether or not the speaker realizes it. By calling bullshit, we express our disdain for the speaker’s lack of justification, and indignation for any harm we suffer as a result.

  Although everyone who calls bullshit is concerned with justification, they aren’t always concerned with truth. A person’s values inevitably inform his perception of what counts as a lame justification. Thus, because he values truth so deeply, Frankfurt calls bullshit whenever he sees truth disregarded. But many people call bullshit when other values than truth are threatened. For example, a bottom-line oriented businessman will reject discussions of business ethics as bullshit. If the government investigates his dodgy accounting practices, he’ll indignantly condemn the investigation as bureaucratic bullshit. Truth is not the issue for him. Rather, he directs his disdain and indignation toward obstacles impeding his cash flow.

  The same dynamic explains why so many people think philosophy is bullshit: they may only be interested in money, or in entertainment. Bullshit and Philosophy excluded, philosophy rarely entertains. Even those who do care about truth may be interested in more narrowly technical questions, like how to develop medical therapies using stem cells. For such people, philosophical and ethical questions constitute an annoying distraction from the truths that interest them. And the endless cycle of debate within philosophy frustrates people who just want to know the answer and get on with their lives. Finally, it must be admitted that a lot of philosophy obscures the truth rather than capturing it. At the very least, proponents of different methodologies within philosophy will direct that accusation at each other. I’m guessing the Althusserians think Cohen’s brand of Marxism is bullshit, too. Likewise, a linguist might reject this essay (and Frankfurt’s) as bullshit on the grounds that any serious investigation of words must be based on empirical methods rather than the philosophers’ armchair method of reflecting on a few examples.

  Given all this disagreement about what’s bullshit and what’s not, should we adopt a subjective definition of bullshit, according to which bullshit is whatever elicits the emotional reactions of disdain and indignation? I don’t think so. In the end, although Frankfurt is wrong to neglect unintentional examples of bullshit, he is right that bullshit results from a lack of connection with truth. Methodological disagreements may be difficult to resolve, but they are among the most important disagreements. Likewise, there are few more serious arguments than arguments over what goals we should be seeking. Frankfurt rightly notes that skepticism about justification in these areas is one reason there is so much bullshit (On Bullshit, p. 64). He goes on to deftly show that retreating to subjectivism can’t work, ending his essay with the memorable line, “sincerity itself is bullshit” (On Bullshit, p. 67). We can also put the point this way: the idea that truth doesn’t matter is bullshit. However, it doesn’t follow, as Frankfurt assumes, that the proper response is to eradicate every instance of bullshit. Rather, bullshit must be recognized for what it is, and restricted to truly justifiable uses.

  How do we do that? Not by just bullshitting our way through. Justifying the preference for bullshit over truth in a given situation requires an ability to tell the difference between the two. Likewise, we’ve already seen that effective use of bullshit for instrumental purposes, as in advertising, presupposes a lively respect for truths about the attitudes of one’s target audience and suchlike. Thus, there can be no justification for wholesale indifference to truth, even if one’s primary goals are instrumental. Furthermore, to pretend that no justification need be offered for adopting purely instrumental goals, like the bottom-line oriented businessman considered above, is itself unjustifiable. If we conceal the lameness of our reasons from ourselves, we end up self-deceptively believing our own bullshit, or manipulated by the bullshit of others. In both cases, it’s our own goals and interests that are endangered. Orwell recognized as much: his quest to reverse the decline of the English language stemmed not from a grammatical puritanism, but from deep concerns about abuse of power and exploitation. His crusade against bad writing is a contribution to ethics more than literary criticism. I’ll close my chapter by endorsing Orwell’s advice:

  If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. (p. 139)12

  2

  A Defense of Common Sense

  CONSUELO PRETI

  When it comes to bullshit, we know it when we hear it. But that’s not good enough for philosophers. Philosophers don’t roll eyes—shrug—move on when it comes to getting to the bottom of something.

  When confronted with something both as familiar and widespread as bullshit—when something looks as if there isn’t much more to be said about it—that’s when philosophers kick into gear. When it comes to bullshit, it’s not that we don’t get it; we get it alright, every day and from all corners. But the way in which we are acquainted with it falls short of being the whole story. We know bullshit when we hear it, but that doesn’t mean we are pro-bullshit. There is certainly something about bullshit we could do without. So the trick is to give a clear set of distinctive characteristics for something to be bullshit, and, at the same time, reveal what it is about bullshit that we could lose, and, maybe, what we can do about it.

  In his seminal essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt—who reminds us that an analytic philosopher, in particular, has a special concern for the clarification of concepts—says that he aims, as a philosopher in that tradition, to clarify the concept of bullshit. Frankfurt argues that the difference between bullshit and lying is that bullshit doesn’t care about distorting the truth. Distorting the truth is, after all, a way of respecting and keeping a relation to the truth, so as to steer us away from it. Instead, according to Frankfurt, it is all the same to bullshit whether or not what it asserts is true. Bullshit’s lack of concern for truth and falsity is at the heart of its nature and represents its threat to core values of civilization; its insidiousness comes from the way it depends on scorning the difference between what is, or is not, the case.

  G.A. Cohen, in his analysis of Frankfurt’s essay (Chapter 8 in this volume), adds to Frankfurt’s conception the category of specifically academic bullshit, which, he claims, differs from lay bullshit in its disregard for meaning rather than in its disregard for truth. Cohen resists the view that there is one criterion for bullshit, and argues that the difficulty in giving a consistent criterion across all the cases of what we can and do call bullshit rests on the difference between what constitutes bullshit in itself and what constitutes the production of it. Bullshit in itself, Cohen argues, is characterized by semantic obscurity. The bullshitter, on the other hand, disregards or disdains the truth. The former type of bullshit is independent of the intentions of a speaker; the latter is characterized essentially by the speaker’s intentions.

  Both Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s analyses, I believe, leave out a third element, essential to bullshit: its audience. Bullshit needs our compliance, and there is something about bullshit that succeeds in getting that compliance; bullshit, I think we all know, has a sneaky appeal. After all, bullshit, as Frankfurt points out, is in it for something—and so, it needs us to go along. I think that academic bullshit, by Cohen’s criterion, is also in it for something, and it also needs us to play along. So: what is bullshit in it for, and how do we end up playing along? It seems pretty clear that bullshit tries to sell us something: but not, I think, just the things it is used to promote (Prada shoes, a date, an A, a reputation, the buzz). Bullshit, rather, employs indirect but powerful means: what it tries to do, I would suggest, is sell us on our own estimation or judgment of what matters.

  Getting the D
ior handbag or the invite to Mar-a-Lago matters. The guy who bullshits us into going to bed with him, or worse, giving him tenure, has made himself matter. Our own estimation of things matters to us, of course, for many reasons. When bullshit succeeds, it succeeds, mainly, by making our own estimation of what matters matter more than anything else.

  We can see how this would cover bullshit in the academy as well. Academic bullshit also tries to sell us on significance: the intellectual import and status of its pronouncements. Anyone who slogged through graduate school is familiar with the psychological tension Cohen describes: the hours spent poring over some obscure text, justifying the hours of work by believing—even arguing—that the work in question is deeply important and terribly profound; the more so, because of its obscurity.

  There is another type of bullshit in the academy, by the way, that Cohen doesn’t discuss: the type that characterizes the decision-making process. This isn’t unique to the academy, of course, but there does seem to be something particularly fetid about the atmosphere there, which tends to characterize the kinds of justification that academics give for their decisions, particularly with respect to the merit of the work of others. A disdain or disregard for the truth would seem to be precisely the right way to describe it, consistent with Frankfurt’s analysis.

  Bullshit is definitely a drag. It’s even more of a drag now that it looks as if it involves, for its success, our own shameful desires to be flattered, feel important, and be made much of as arbiters of significance. But does bullshit really undermine the ‘core values of civilization’? Is this a call to arms? I’m going to argue that (1) bullshit is a menace, in the street and in the seminar room; (2) it does undermine one of the core planks of civilized society; but that (3) that we can identify it and oppose it; and, moreover, that we should. Neither meaning nor truth may matter to bullshit, on the face of it, but what I would like to investigate here is the possibility that something does: what matters to bullshit is that it should make something matter to us.

  For the incentive to resist bullshit we can reach back to one of the pioneers of early twentieth-century philosophy, G.E. Moore, and the philosophical common sense he has come to represent. Moore, in person and in deed, shows us in unexpected ways what it is about bullshit that is the most dangerous, and how we might resist it. Much of the history of Anglo-American philosophy through the twentieth century has built on aspects of Moore’s method; here, I will single out one element of it: his commonsense and uncompromising commitment to caring about truth and meaning. This concern, we will argue, is probably the best tool that we can deploy today against the various forms of bullshit that importune us, both in the culture and in the seminar room.

  The Truth Matters

  But wait. Isn’t all this just a little quaint? Nobody ever thought that academics were exactly plugged into the real world, after all; and the irony of a group of card-carrying eggheads holding forth on bullshit, of all things, is unmistakable. Easy does it, everybody. Surely bullshit is just one of the costs of doing business; we get it, we’re not that threatened by it; it’s not such a big deal. Isn’t it a bit much to call it a threat to civilized society?

  Well, no, as a matter of fact. It is just that kind of attitude that seems to illustrate the kind of menace we join with Frankfurt and Cohen to plant a flag against. If we have gotten to the point—and there are many ways in which it seems we might have—where we think that it’s silly or quixotic (at best) even to think in terms of truth, respect for truth, credibility, or even related concepts like character and integrity, the disease has taken hold. So, if this is so, and this is bad, is there anything we can do about it? And where, exactly, should we start?

  We can start with an example. Consider the case of James Frey, a pitiful (and frankly boring) substance abuser, who wrote up an account of his addiction and recovery. The account was shopped around as fiction, found no takers, and was reconsidered—and marketed—as a memoir. Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces, did a respectable business, but then, when Oprah Winfrey—perhaps the closest thing to the Zeitgeist in human form—chose it for her Book Club in October, 2005, sales went into the stratosphere. Everybody felt good about supporting and being a part of a story arc that in American culture, particularly, has legs: surrender, degradation, realization, recovery; and, of course, inspiration.

  Except not much of it was true. But if what Frey wrote was sold as a memoir, then the issue of its truth is important, since—philosophical aside—if it didn’t happen, you can’t remember it, though you can pretend to, or think you can. So far, so good. But isn’t this just lying? Fraud? Stupidity? Greed? Where’s the bullshit, specifically, in this? Recall that Frankfurt claims that bullshit lies (so to speak), mainly, in intention. If x just doesn’t care whether what he says is true, then x is bullshitting. A liar cares about the truth, honors it, so to speak, by intending to steer us away from it. So if Frey and his publishers’ intent was to palm off a series of made up events as truth, he lied and they committed fraud; but if it didn’t matter to them one way or another, then they were bullshitting (and, as Cohen makes clear, you can both bullshit and lie).

  But we don’t know, beyond question, what their intentions were. We do know, however, what Oprah’s were—when she said, memorably, that it was irrelevant whether Frey’s story was true. What mattered was that it stood as an inspiration, that it affected people, that it was an important story.13

  Whether the story was true was irrelevant? It didn’t matter? It didn’t matter that the things that were meant to be an inspiration didn’t actually happen? Or, if they did, they didn’t happen quite the way they were inspiring us? Pause for philosophical reflection. Maybe something doesn’t have to be true to be inspiring. We could find strength and example from all sorts of sources, and the fact that the examples stand as sources of inspiration is distinct from whether they have to be true (the Bible, say). So Frey gave us an inspiring account of dragging himself back from the brink of addiction, and just because it wasn’t true doesn’t mean it wasn’t inspiring.

  But that doesn’t seem entirely right. The key question in a case like this is: what inspires us? If the inspiration I cull from your story is tied to the assumed truth of the account, then to discover that the account was made up means that the organ of inspiration is corrupted. I can be inspired by a tale of woe to be a better person, say, but if what inspires me in your tale of degradation and recovery is that you were degraded and did recover, then to discover that you weren’t degraded or didn’t recover sabotages the inspirational effect of your story on me. In other words, if I know that Prince Charming didn’t really awaken Sleeping Beauty with a kiss, but am inspired by the story to continue to believe in true love, I have, by my own lights, adapted the story to something about which I am motivated independently to believe anyway. But if I think that your specific story S is true, and I am inspired by it, then to discover it isn’t true, is to discover that there is nothing in it by which to be inspired.

  The issue here, therefore, isn’t that Frey made his story up; it was Oprah’s own avowal that it didn’t matter whether or not he had been lying. The volte-face that occurred when she went head to head on her turf with Frey, holding him to account, and chastising him for his deception, was as good an example as any of the menace of bullshit.14 When Oprah said “I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not is what I believe,” she summed up the core of the problem with bullshit: the truth matters, and it should matter. If bullshit threatens to turn Oprah’s head, after all, we are in deep shit. Apparently, it did matter: his deception made her look like a bullshitter. Her own credibility suddenly became the story, as she belatedly seemed to realize. And loss of credibility should matter.

  There is a philosophical question running under this discussion, which, a little uncharacteristically for a philosophical subject, made a national splash, thanks to Oprah: is disdain for truth worse than distorting
it? Frankfurt and Cohen, who both argue that it is, seem vindicated by the train-wreck that Oprah narrowly avoided with her eleventh-hour grab at moral high-mindedness in the face of the growing scandal. If both Frankfurt and Cohen are right, the menace wrought by bullshit takes place on the inside, where any kind of respect for what’s true and what’s false starts to look downright expendable. Accepting, or being complacent to (or worse, colluding with) a disdain for a distinction between truth and falsity is not so innocuous—becoming inured to it is to stop caring about what’s true and what’s not, or even worse, to stop caring that it’s not OK to stop caring about what’s true and what’s not. So the danger of bullshit is that it will grow increasingly resistant to treatment, so much so that we won’t even notice that we stopped caring about truth and falsity. And this starts to look more and more like something we should be worried about.