Bullshit and Philosophy Read online

  In order to counter bullshit effectively—beyond just recognizing it—we need to turn it against itself. Bullshit, after all, has one significant weakness: it needs to be believed or accepted. Its assertion, though annoying, may not be a problem we can solve head on. To be believed or accepted, however, it does need us to co-operate. Bullshit doesn’t care about the truth, but bullshit has to care about whether we care about the fact that it doesn’t. Truth doesn’t matter to bullshit, but it matters to bullshit that bullshit can be made to matter to us. If we care more about the truth, then a fortiori we care less about bullshit. The less we care, the less hold it has over us—and bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is instrumental. It needs to find a way to be convincing and to make us care. If we care more about truth, bullshit will not succeed by not caring about truth. So if we resist caring about the assertions of bullshit—and being immune to its temptations—we might be able to undermine it, to no small degree.

  What we could use now—perhaps one lesson of l’affaire Frey—is a genuine inspiration. The history of philosophy has delivered plenty of examples of the intellectually rigorous, and the detachedly rational, but perhaps fewer examples of the kind of thing we’re looking for: a resolute carer about the truth and meaning. Luckily, both Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s discussions suggest some illuminating links to the early twentieth-century philosopher George Edward Moore (1873–1958). Moore, it turns out, is the philosopher specifically known for having introduced to philosophy precisely the “special concern” for the clarification of concepts that Frankfurt explicitly tells us he takes as his mission, and that Cohen could regard as a foil, in the right hands, to academic bullshit.

  G.E. Moore might never have felt that it was entirely appropriate to respond to a muddled formulation of some philosophical concept or argument by actually snorting the word “bullshit,” but Moore would be thoroughly opposed to anything so dishonorable as bullshit. Add to this Moore’s character and his passion for truth, and he emerges as a potent force against bullshit, one we can find ways to emulate.15

  “What Exactly Do You Mean?”

  Moore was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 1896; in 1898 he was awarded a six-year fellowship, which he held at Trinity until 1904. He left Cambridge until 1911, when he returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, retiring as Professor in 1939. Along with his contemporary as an undergraduate, Bertrand Russell, and with his colleague at Trinity from 1929 to 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Moore is credited with establishing what is now colloquially (if not entirely accurately) known as analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy is known, very roughly, for its approach to the problems of philosophy as problems of meaning. Clarification and analysis of meanings, or concepts, was held to be the key to solving philosophical problems, some of which, it was surmised, would even dissolve upon clearer formulation.

  Moore’s most important and long-reaching achievement in the history of twentieth-century philosophy, however, was his seemingly casual and sui generis demolition of the philosophical tradition frequently dismissed, if sometimes in caricature, as Hall-of-Fame-worthy bullshit: Absolute Idealism, the view that one way or another, the ultimate nature of reality is mental. Both Moore and Russell produced early work that demonstrates a leaning toward Idealism. But in 1899 Moore published a paper entitled “The Nature of Judgment,” in the journal Mind, which decisively repudiated any idealist metaphysics (particularly with respect to the nature of thought and its objects), and which opened up a new front against the problems of philosophy. Russell himself credited Moore with having initiated what he calls the ‘revolt’ against Idealism of their youth, and the approach introduced by Moore and Russell after 1899 in their work established a methodology still very much dominant today in analytic philosophy.

  In 1903 Moore published perhaps his most well-known work, titled Principia Ethica, a book whose effect was so profound on the young men who arrived as undergraduates at Cambridge in 1902, and who later formed the core of the Bloomsbury group, that they referred to it as their religion. Moore did not share Russell’s occasionally malicious flamboyance; and Wittgenstein early on wounded Moore so deeply with his impatience and prickliness that they did not speak for nearly twenty years. Moore has been described by Russell, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes as having a purity of character without comparison, a smile described as “lovable,” and a simplicity, ingenuousness, and directness that impressed itself completely and lastingly on those who knew him. Russell, in his autobiography, writes:16

  In my third year . . . I met G.E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza’s. He had a kind of exquisite purity. I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a lie, that was by a subterfuge, ‘Moore’, I said, ‘do you always speak the truth?’ ‘No,’ he replied. I believe this to be the only lie he ever told.

  Woolf, for his part, is fulsome about the aspects of Moore’s personality that resonate significantly here:17

  . . . Moore was a great man, the only great man whom I have ever met or known in the world of ordinary, real life. There was in him an element which can, I think, be accurately called greatness, a combination of mind and character and behavior, of thought and feeling which made him qualitatively different from anyone else I have ever known.... he had a passion for truth . . . Moore could never tolerate anything but truth, common sense, and reality . . . he had an extra-ordinary profundity and clarity of thought, and he pursued truth with the tenacity of a bulldog and the integrity of a saint.

  These personal qualities appeared to have been instrumental to the evolution of the method most associated with Moore, usually known as the method of common sense. Much of the evaluation of the effect of Moore, in the words of his friends, at least, makes reference to it. John Maynard Keynes,18 for example, writes:

  It was all under the influence of Moore’s method, according to which you could hope to make essentially vague notions clear by using precise language about them and asking exact questions. It was a method of discovery by the instrument of impeccable grammar and an unambiguous dictionary. ‘What exactly do you mean?’ was the phrase most frequently on our lips. If it appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever . . .

  In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction, and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method—greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative no violently that his hair shook. Oh! He would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.

  Now, Moore occasionally went, at least in his own estimation, a little too far. At the beginning of the third of a set of lectures that Moore delivered in 1898,19 he says:

  I believe I owe you a public apology for my behavior during part of the discussion last Thursday. To one gentleman, in particular, I do owe such an apology. In the heat of the moment I certainly entertained, and implied by my words, the belief that one question which he addressed to me was not due to any serious difficulty felt by him, with regard to the matter in question . . . My feeling was that the question was merely a vexatious one, was indeed only momentary, but that does not excuse it.

  Apparently, if anything could send Moore to immoderate lengths (for him), it was bullshit; here in the case of a question he believed was not intended as genuine. It was difficult for Moore, as we see here, to tolerate with too much equanimity even the possibility that someone would bother to raise a question without being seriously interested in its formulation or outcome. This, I think, is a key to adapting Moorean attitudes as resist
ance to bullshit. So let us analyze what form this immunity could take today and strengthen it against our susceptibility to bullshit.

  Let’s Stop Bullshitting Ourselves

  Moore’s friends and acquaintances were entirely unanimous on his goodness—the essence, after all, of one we look to for inspiration. But the descriptions of Moore’s character as ‘saintly’ and ‘pure’, though no doubt charming, may tempt the reader into suspecting they lack a certain practicality. Surely a Moorean attitude is impossible, today, to resurrect. After all, Moore and his cohorts were products of an era so entirely bygone that it might appear fruitless even to attempt to harness a Moorean attitude to anything, let alone something as seemingly steeped in the modern as bullshit, as least as far as its current pervasiveness goes. Keynes notes something of this in his memoir:20

  I have said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthamism. But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders. We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good . . . It did not occur to us to respect the extra-ordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life . . . It was not only that intellectually we were pre-Freudian . . . I still suffer incurably from attributing an unreal rationality to other people’s feelings and behavior . . . There is one small but extraordinarily silly manifestation of this absurd idea of what is ‘normal’, namely the impulse to protest . . . I behave as if there really existed some authority or standard to which I can successfully appeal if I shout loud enough . . . But this is why I say that there may have been just a grain of truth when Lawrence said in 1914 that we were ‘done for’.

  A sharp eye on the essence of the Moorean attitude directly connect us to Frankfurt’s charge that bullshit is a threat to civilization—note the melancholy ‘done for’ at the end of Keynes’s remarks, above. What the Moorean attitude has, and what we might think about deploying more explicitly, is his dispassionate respect for the truth such that it considers any attitude that falls short—such as disdain for truth—as a disgrace. Moore himself is the ideal, to be sure; someone in whom philosophical insight, character, and action were seamlessly blended; an emissary, perhaps, from that possible world where bullshit has withered for lack of collaborators. But I think there are elements of the Moorean attitude that are accessible and realistic and that now is as good a time as any to man up and face bullshit down. I suggested above that bullshit has an uncanny way of selling us on ourselves, so to speak. I will close by spelling this out more clearly, adding a sense of the Moorean attitude of common sense to counter it, as the title of this essay suggests.21

  People have been bullshitting one another since the dawn of time, to be sure, but something that both Frankfurt’s and Cohen’s analyses suggest, and that we could be more aware of, is that bullshit can be deflated. Bullshit, as we have seen, doesn’t care one way or another whether what it expresses is true, or even strictly meaningful. It does care, however, about getting us to fall in with it. Bullshit has to care about something: it has to care about us and what we care about. If we care more about the difference between truth and falsity, bullshit will find it easier to take hold. So, to resist it, all we need to do is make a resolute stand on the difference between what is true and what isn’t.

  Easier said than done, perhaps—which of us really thinks that our estimation of truth is shabby or questionable?. But it may come as no surprise here that the practical solution to this will be to adopt a philosophical attitude—in particular, a Moorean attitude. Consider this passage from Moore’s “A Defence of Common Sense,” where his asperity firmly conveys that when it comes to bullshit, even in philosophy, enough is enough:

  In what I have just said, I have assumed that there is some meaning which is the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions as ‘The earth has existed for many years past.’ And this, I am afraid, is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing. They seem to think that the question ‘Do you believe that the earth has existed for many years past?’ is not a plain question, such as should be met either by a plain ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or by a plain ‘I can’t make up my mind,’ but is the sort of question which can be prop-erly met by ‘It all depends on what you mean by “the earth” and “exists” and “years”: if you mean so and so, and so and so, and so and so, then I do; but if you mean so and so, and so and so, and so and so, or so and so, and so and so, and so and so, or so and so, and so and so and so and so, then I don’t, or at least I think it is profoundly doubtful’. It seems to me that such a view is as profoundly mistaken as any view can be.

  Moore didn’t suffer bullshit gladly, and we can do the same. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the platitude goes. What Moore’s resistance against forms of what we’d call bullshit takes as a priority is clarity. Moore shows us that a doggedness about getting clear about the content of an utterance or statement to get to the bottom of what it could really mean can really pay off—say, in the indisputable effect of revealing the characteristic scorn for the difference between truth and falsity that bullshit purveys. The scorn for truth that characterizes bullshit, after all, must be masked in various ways, or bullshit itself would run the risk of imploding. So, on top of disingenuous vagueness, equivocation, downright incoherence, and a whole host of other tactics for skirting the truth, what bullshit really needs is for us to be less inquisitive, less analytical, less determined to follow along and scrutinize its claims. Bullshit needs us, but we don’t need bullshit. So to thwart it, we must instead adopt the ‘tenacity of a bulldog’, that Woolf describes as the characteristic of a Moorean pursuit of clarity and truth; especially, it goes without saying, with respect to ourselves.

  So my suggestion for resisting bullshit is the adoption of the critical stance, characteristic of philosophy, toward any claims on our mental lives; our beliefs and certainties, including the ones that characterize our deepest convictions about ourselves and our ability to tell truth from falsity. G.E. Moore is an example of a philosopher who lived the method that he is best known for in his work and who connected a philosophical method to everyday life. Moore may have been iconic in this regard, to be sure, but his method is adaptable to us, and to now. It’s common sense that bullshit has to care about something. But it’s also just common sense to realize that caring about the distinction between what’s true and what’s false matters a lot to us. If we care more about the truth, then bullshit has to find another way. But now bullshit has to care whether we care about the truth, and so it more or less undermines its own position, withering away from the inside out, so to speak. This is the paradox of bullshit; both street and academic. Truth and meaning don’t matter to bullshit; but bullshit has to make itself matter to us. So what matters to us is going to have to matter to bullshit. If it matters to us not to scorn the difference between truth and falsity, and if it matters to us to take the search for clarity in our concepts and statements seriously, bullshit ends up on a short leash. And, thanks to Moore, we now have a strategy to keep it there. Enough, indeed, is enough. What exactly do you mean?

  3

  The Pragmatics of Bullshit, Intelligently Designed

  GEORGE A. REISCH

  Harry Frankfurt admits that his definition of bullshit leaves us with a puzzle. It has to do with the difference between bullshitters and liars. Liars, Frankfurt says, must pay attention to truth, if only to avoid speaking it. Bullshitters don’t. They are essentially indifferent to whether or not what they say is true. They just don’t care and their indifference may be infectious. That is why Frankfurt takes bullshit to be especially dang
erous and socially corrosive. It looms above modern culture as “a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” 22

  If that’s so, then bullshitters, more than liars, should be feared and punished in our culture. But that’s not the way it is. In fact, it’s the reverse. We are generally more tolerant of bullshit than lies. When he first wrote On Bullshit, Frankfurt posed this fact as a puzzle, an “exercise,” for his readers to figure out (p. 50). Today, some twenty years later, the puzzle remains unsolved. During a radio interview about On Bullshit, Frankfurt said:

  One of the questions I’m still puzzled by is that we seem to have a much more benign attitude toward BS than we have toward lying.... The liar is regarded . . . as a bad person; what he does is almost criminal.... Whereas BS we accept; we’re tolerant of it. We may turn away from it with an irritated shrug, but we don’t react to it with the same kind of vehemence and anger that lies frequently invoke and I really don’t understand just why that is.23

  In philosophy, an unsolved puzzle can be a good sign. It can mean that our understanding of things is rightly moving forward into new, unfamiliar territory. But it can also indicate that we’ve fallen into a trap, possibly one of our own making. That’s what has happened with Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit. He took a wrong turn in formulating his definition and the result has saddled him (and us) with this persistent, misleading puzzle.