Analytic philosophy, the kind of philosophy that has dominated the English-speaking universities, is sometimes caricatured as nit-picking and of no practical use. Analytic philosophers (and they are 10 a penny in Oxford, Cambridge, and London universities) often have high IQs and sophisticated critical skills, but on this view, they while away their days trying to solve crossword puzzles of their own making. They publish dry, jargon-filled essays in obscure journals and write footnotes to one another’s footnotes, calling this research. The rest of us are left untouched by their labours.
As with many caricatures, there is a smidgen of truth in this, even though many analytic philosophers today do have interesting and important things to say, and some communicate their ideas with great clarity. The best analytic philosophers are driven by a desire to give an accurate description of how things are, and to understand the limits of what we can meaningfully say about this.
They have state-of-the-art bullshit detectors, honed in a discipline that specialises in testing ideas to destruction. But perhaps the most direct way these philosophers have benefited humanity is through the transferable thinking skills, argumentative rigour and demand for precision they have taught and modelled to generations of students.
Occasionally, though, distinguished analytic philosophers have looked beyond the universities and written for a wider public. Harry G Frankfurt, who died in Santa Monica last week aged 94, did this with great aplomb.
Although within the discipline he is best known for his imaginative work on free will, this gently spoken professor who taught at Yale and Princeton hit the big time with his very short book On Bullshit, published by Princeton University Press in 2005, but based on an essay he had published in 1986.
The book remained on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 27 weeks. No mean feat. It’s one of the most read works of public philosophy ever, and not just because at 67 pages it’s one of the shortest.
Frankfurt opened his book with the lines: “One of the most salient features of our culture is there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.”
True. The lead-up to Brexit and the years after the referendum have produced more bullshit than any other period in our political history. In retrospect, this decade will be remembered as the bullshit years, the time when bullshitters got into power, causing immense suffering and economic decline with their skeins of words and their cavalier attitude to the truth.
But do we even have a clear idea of what bullshit is? Frankfurt can help us here.
Frankfurt’s main contribution was distinguishing bullshit from lying. Bullshit artists sometimes lie while bullshitting, but bullshitting is a different sort of activity from lying. The mark of a bullshitter (and Boris Johnson springs to mind here) is a lack of concern for truth, an indifference to it. That is a bullshitter’s distinguishing and most dangerous feature. They’ll say whatever suits them. It’s a kind of bluff that floats away from reality.
Contrast this with a liar. A liar knows, or thinks they know, the truth. The whole point of lying is that you deliberately deceive people about how things are by saying things you know or suspect to be untrue. Liars still have a respect for the truth – they think the truth matters. They just don’t want you to discover it.
Bullshitters, in contrast, couldn’t care less about it. It’s for this reason that Frankfurt declared bullshit “a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
When Johnson lied to parliament about parties in Downing Street during lockdown, he was intent on concealing the truth about what he knew had taken place. But when he’s in full bullshit mode, the truth or falsity of what he is saying is irrelevant to him.
He may lie, he may tell the truth, but he doesn’t care one way or another. He’s just blathering, sometimes in a creative and entertaining way. It’s the story that matters, the web of words, filling the silence, getting away with it.
Bullshitters like him, and there are too many in politics today, don’t want you to know what they’re up to. They want you to think they’re talking intelligently about how things are and to convince you they are interested in the truth. Frankfurt’s clarity about bullshit can help us spot them and call them out.
