Harry Frankfurt
Princeton University
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so
much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.
But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather
confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being
taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate
concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have
no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it,
or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed
appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory.
I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of
bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory
philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and
misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what
bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not, or (putting it
somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the
structure of its concept. Any suggestion about what conditions are
logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of
bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the
expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely —
simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal
meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous
that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being
procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something
helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most
basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not
only unanswered but unasked. So far as I am aware, very little work has
been done on this subject. I have not undertaken a survey of the
literature, partly because I do not know how to go about it. To be
sure, there is one quite obvious place to look — the Oxford
English Dictionary. The OED has an entry for
bullshit in the supplementary volumes, and it also has entries
for various pertinent uses of the word bull and for some
related terms. I shall consider some of these entries in due course. I
have not consulted dictionaries in languages other than English,
because I do not know the words for bullshit or bull in any other
language.
Another worthwhile source is the title essay in The Prevalence
of Humbug by Max Black. I am uncertain just how close in meaning
the word humbug is to the word bullshit. Of course, the words
are not freely and fully interchangeable; it is clear that they are
used differently. But the difference appears on the whole to have more
to do with considerations of gentility, and certain other rhetorical
parameters, than with the strictly literal modes of significance that
concern me most. It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say
“Humbug!” than to say “Bullshit!” For the sake
of this discussion, I shall assume that there is no other important
difference between the two, Black suggests a number of synonyms for
humbug, including the following: “balderdash”,
“claptrap”, “hokum”, “drivel”,
“buncombe”, “imposture”, and
“quackery”. This list of quaint equivalents is not very
helpful. But Black also confronts the problem of establishing the
nature of humbug more directly, and he offers the following formal
definition:
Humbug: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying,
especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own
thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.
A very similar formulation might plausibly be offered as enunciating
the essential characteristics of bullshit. As a preliminary to
developing an independent account of those characteristics, I will
comment on the various elements of Black’s definition.
Deceptive misrepresentation: This may sound pleonastic. No
doubt what Black has in mind is that humbug is necessarily designed or
intended to deceive, that its misrepresentation is not merely
inadvertent. In other words, it is deliberate
misrepresentation. Now if, as a matter of conceptual necessity, an
intention to deceive is an invariable feature of humbug, then the
property of being humbug depends at least in part upon the
perpetrator’s state of mind. It cannot be identical, accordingly,
with any properties — either inherent or relational —
belonging just to the utterance by which the humbug is perpetrated. In
this respect, the property of being humbug is similar to that of being
a lie, which is identical neither with the falsity nor with any of the
other properties of the statement the liar makes, but which requires
that the liar makes his statement in a certain state of mind —
namely, with an intention to deceive. It is a further question whether
there are any features essential to humbug or to lying that are
not dependent upon the intentions and beliefs of the person
responsible for the humbug or the lie, or whether it is, on the
contrary, possible for any utterance whatsoever to be — given
that the speaker is in a certain state of mind — a vehicle of
humbug or of a lie. In some accounts of lying there is no lie unless a
false statement is made; in others a person may be lying even if the
statement he makes is true, as long as he himself believes that the
statement is false and intends by making it to deceive. What about
humbug and bullshit? May any utterance at all qualify as humbug or
bullshit, given that (so to speak) the utterer’s heart is in the
right place, or must the utterance have certain characteristics of its
own as well?
Short of lying: It must be part of the point of saying that
humbug is “short of lying,” that while it has some of the
distinguishing characteristics of lies, there are others that it lacks.
But this cannot be the whole point. After all, every use of language
without exception has some, but not all, of the characteristic features
of lies — if no other, then at least the feature simply of being
a use of language. Yet it would surely be incorrect to describe every
use of language as short of lying. Black’s phrase evokes the
notion of some sort of continuum, on which lying occupies a certain
segment while humbug is located exclusively at earlier points. What
continuum could this be, along which one encounters humbug only before
one encounters lying? Both lying and humbug are modes of
misrepresentation. It is not at first glance apparent, however, just
how the difference between these varieties of misrepresentation might
be construed as a difference in degree.
Especially by pretentious word or deed: There are two
points to notice here. First, Black identifies humbug not only as a
category of speech but as a category of action as well; it may be
accomplished either by words or by deeds. Second, his use of the
qualifier “especially” indicates that Black does not regard
pretentiousness as an essential or wholly indispensable characteristic
of humbug. Undoubtedly, much humbug is pretentious. So far as concerns
bullshit, moreover, “pretentious bullshit” is close to
being a stock phrase. But I am inclined to think that when bullshit is
pretentious, this happens because pretentiousness is its motive rather
than a constitutive element of its essence. The fact that a person is
behaving pretentiously is not, it seems to me, part of what is required
to make his utterance an instance of bullshit. It is often, to be sure,
what accounts for his making that utterance. However, it must not be
assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its
motive.
Misrepresentation … of somebody’s own thoughts,
feelings, or attitudes: This provision that the perpetrator of
humbug is essentially misrepresenting himself raises some very central
issues. To begin with, whenever a person deliberately misrepresents
anything, he must inevitably misrepresenting his own state of
mind. It is possible, of course, for a person to misrepresent that
alone — for instance, by pretending to have a desire or a feeling
which he does not actually have. But suppose that a person, whether by
telling a lie or in another way, misrepresents something else. Then he
necessarily misrepresents at least two things. He misrepresents
whatever he is talking about — i.e., the state of affairs that is
the topic or referent of his discourse — and in doing this he
cannot avoid misrepresenting his own mind as well. Thus, someone who
lies about how much money he has in his pocket both gives an account of
the amount of money in his pocket and conveys that he believes this
account. If the lie works, then its victim is twice deceived, having
one false belief about what is in the liar’s pocket and another
false belief about what is in the liar’s mind.
Now it is unlikely that Black wishes that the referent of humbug is
in every instance the state of the speaker’s mind. There is no
particular reason, after all, why humbug may not be about other things.
Black probably means that humbug is not designed primarily to give its
audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the
topic, but that its primary intention is rather to give its audience a
false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the
speaker. Insofar as it is humbug, the creation of this impression is
its main purpose and its point. Understanding Black along these lines
suggests a hypothesis to account for his characterization of humbug as
“short of lying.” If I lie to you about how much money I
have, then I do not thereby make an explicit assertion
concerning my beliefs. Therefore, one might with some plausibility
maintain that although in telling the lie I certainly misrepresent what
is in my mind, this misrepresentation — as distinct from my
misrepresentation of what is in my pocket — is not strictly
speaking a lie at all. For I do not come right out with any statement
whatever about what is in my mind. Nor does the statement I do affirm
— e.g., “I have twenty dollars in my pocket” —
imply any statement that attributes a belief to me. On the other hand,
it is unquestionable that in so affirming, I provide you with a
reasonable basis for making certain judgments about what I believe. In
particular, I provide you with a reasonable basis for supposing that I
believe there is twenty dollars in my pocket. Since this supposition is
by hypothesis false, I do in telling the lie tend to deceive you
concerning what is in my mind even though I do not actually tell a lie
about that. In this light, it does not seem unnatural or inappropriate
to regard me as misrepresenting my own beliefs in a way that is
“short of lying.” It is easy to think of familiar
situations by which Black’s account of humbug appears to be
unproblematically confirmed. Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes
on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose
Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for
mankind.” This is surely humbug. As Black’s account
suggests, the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were
his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself
regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is
great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance,
and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for
mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks
about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our
country’s history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest
in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech. It
is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not
fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather,
just as Black’s account suggests, the orator intends these
statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying
to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is
what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a
patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the
origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance
of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose
pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.
Black’s account of humbug appears, then, to fit certain paradigms
quite snugly. Nonetheless, I do not believe that it adequately or
accurately grasps the essential character of bullshit. It is correct to
say of bullshit, as he says of humbug, both that it is short of lying
and that chose who perpetrate it misrepresent themselves in a certain
way. But Black’s account of these two features is significantly
off the mark. I shall next attempt to develop, by considering some
biographical material pertaining to Ludwig Wittgenstein, a preliminary
but more accurately focused appreciation of just what the central
characteristics of bullshit are. Wittgenstein once said that the
following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve him as a motto:
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.
The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did
not cut corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every
aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and
each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These
craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with
respect to features of their work which would ordinarily not be
visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite
right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing
was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps also say, there was no
bullshit.
It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in
some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way? Is the resemblance
that bullshit itself is invariably produced in a careless or
self-indulgent manner, that it is never finely crafted, that in the
making of it there is never the meticulously attentive concern with
detail to which Longfellow alludes? Is the bullshitter by his very
nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined?
The word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not
designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may
have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any
case certainly not wrought.
The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain
inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and
objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid
the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in
connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it
is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising
and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of
politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that
they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the
concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated
craftsmen who — with the help of advanced and demanding
techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of
psychological testing, and so forth — dedicate themselves
tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly
right.
Yet there is something more to be said about this.
However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it
remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There
is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some
kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested
and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated,
evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail. I shall
attempt in due course to locate it more correctly.
Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely
to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive
forms of “non-sense.” He was apparently like that in his
personal life as well. This comes out in an anecdote related by Fania
Pascal, who knew him in Cambridge in the 1930s:
I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling
sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just
like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted:
“You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels
like.”
Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary, almost
unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports
herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings —
so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a
dog” — is simply not provocative enough to arouse any
response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is
offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not
be? So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps
Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was
only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little
hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he
was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was only trying to cheer
her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing. In
that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all.
But if Pascal failed to recognize that Wittgenstein was only
teasing, then perhaps the possibility that he was serious was at least
not so far out of the question. She knew him, and she knew what to
expect from him; she knew how he made her feel. Her way of
understanding or of misunderstanding his remark was very likely not
altogether discordant, then, with her sense of what he was like. We may
fairly suppose that even if her account of the incident is not strictly
true to the facts of Wittgenstein’s intention, it is sufficiently
true to her idea of Wittgenstein to have made sense to her. For the
purposes of this discussion, I shall accept Pascal’s report at
face value, supposing that when it came to the use of allusive or
figurative language, Wittgenstein was indeed as preposterous as she
makes him out to be.
Then just what is it that the Wittgenstein in her report considers
to be objectionable? Let us assume that he is correct about the facts:
that is, Pascal really does not know how run-over dogs feel. Even so,
when she says what she does, she is plainly not lying. She
would have been lying if, when she made her statement, she was aware
that she actually felt quite good. For however little she knows about
the lives of dogs, it must certainly be clear to Pascal that when dogs
are run over they do not feel good. So if she herself had in fact been
feeling good, it would have been a lie to assert that she felt like a
run-over dog.
Pascal’s Wittgenstein does not intend to accuse her of lying,
but of misrepresentation of another sort. She characterizes her feeling
as “the feeling of a run-over dog.” She is not really
acquainted, however, with the feeling to which this phrase refers. Of
course, the phrase is far from being complete nonsense to her; she is
hardly speaking gibberish. What she says has an intelligible
connotation, which she certainly understands. Moreover, she does know
something about the quality of the feeling to which the phrase refers:
she knows at least that it is an undesirable and unenjoyable feeling, a
bad feeling. The trouble with her statement is that it
purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her
characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively
particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her
account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is
run over. To the Wittgenstein in Pascal’s story, judging from his
response, this is just bullshit.
Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal’s
characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does
it strike him that way? It does so, I believe, because he perceives
what Pascal says as being — roughly speaking, for now —
unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane
to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she
knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her
description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is
merely making up. She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it
from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any
regard for how things really are.
It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides
her. What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her
statement is correct. There is every likelihood, of course, that she
says what she does only in a somewhat clumsy effort to speak
colorfully, or to appear vivacious or good-humored; and no doubt
Wittgenstein’s reaction — as she construes it — is
absurdly intolerant. Be this as it may, it seems clear what that
reaction is. He reacts as though he perceives her to be speaking about
her feeling thoughtlessly, without conscientious attention to the
relevant facts. Her statement is not “wrought with greatest
care.” She makes it without bothering to take into account at all
the question of its accuracy.
The point that troubles Wittgenstein is manifestly not that Pascal
has made a mistake in her description of how she feels. Nor is it even
that she has made a careless mistake. Her laxity, or her lack of care,
is not a matter of having permitted an error to slip into her speech on
account of some inadvertent or momentarily negligent lapse in the
attention she was devoting to getting things right. The point is rather
that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a
certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the
constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of
reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right,
but that she is not even trying.
This is important to Wittgenstein because, whether justifiably or
not, he takes what she says seriously, as a statement purporting to
give an informative description of the way she feels. He construes her
as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true
and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether
what she says is true or false. It is in this sense that Pascal’s
statement is unconnected to a concern with truth: she is not concerned
with the truth-value of what she says. That is why
she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she
knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating
a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded
neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief
that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern
with truth — this indifference to how things really are —
that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
Now I shall consider (quite selectively) certain items in the
Oxford English Dictionary that are pertinent to clarifying the
nature of bullshit. The OED defines a bull session as
“an informal conversation or discussion, esp. of a group of
males.” Now as a definition, this seems wrong. For one thing, the
dictionary evidently supposes that the use of the term bull in bull
session serves primarily just to indicate gender. But even if it were
true that the participants in bull sessions are generally or typically
males, the assertion that a bull session is essentially nothing more
particular than an informal discussion among males would be as far off
the mark as the parallel assertion that a hen session is simply an
informal conversation among females. It is probably true that the
participants in hen sessions must be females. Nonetheless the term
hen session conveys something more specific than this
concerning the particular kind of informal conversation among females
to which hen sessions are characteristically devoted. What is
distinctive about the sort of informal discussion among males that
constitutes a bull session is, it seems to me, something like this:
while the discussion may be intense and significant, it is in a certain
respect not “for real.”
The characteristic topics of a bull session have to do with very
personal and emotion-laden aspects of life — for instance,
religion, politics, or sex. People are generally reluctant to speak
altogether openly about these topics if they expect that they might be
taken too seriously. What tends to go on in a bull session is that the
participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how
it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover
how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to
what they say: It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the
statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really
believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a
high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to
the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying
a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey
what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held
to it.
Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words,
upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be
understood as being what he means wholeheartedly or believes
unequivocally to be true. The purpose of the conversation is not to
communicate beliefs. Accordingly, the usual assumptions about the
connection between what people say and what they believe are suspended.
The statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that
there is no pretense that this connection is being sustained. They are
like bullshit by virtue of the fact that they are in some degree
unconstrained by a concern with truth. This resemblance between bull
sessions and bullshit is suggested also by the term shooting the
bull, which refers to the sort of conversation that characterizes
bull sessions and in which the term shooting is very likely a
cleaned-up rendition of shitting. The very term bull session
is, indeed, quite probably a sanitized version of bullshit
session. A similar theme is discernible in a British usage of
bull in which, according to the OED, the term refers
to “unnecessary routine tasks or ceremonial; excessive discipline
or ‘spit-and-polish’; = red-tape.” The dictionary
provides the following examples of this usage:
“The Squadron … felt very bolshie about all that bull
that was flying around the station” (I. Gleed, Arise to
Conquer vi. 51, I942); “Them turning out the guard for us,
us marching past eyes right, all that sort of bull” (A. Baron,
Human Kind xxiv. 178, 1953); the drudgery and
‘bull’ in an MP’s life.” (Economist
8 Feb. 470/471, 1958)
Here the term bull evidently pertains to tasks that are pointless in
that they have nothing much to do with the primary intent or justifying
purpose of the enterprise which requires them. Spit-and-polish and red
tape do not genuinely contribute, it is presumed, to the
“real” purposes of military personnel or government
officials, even though they are imposed by agencies or agents that
purport to be conscientiously devoted to the pursuit of those purposes.
Thus the “unnecessary routine tasks or ceremonial” that
constitute bull are disconnected from the legitimating motives of the
activity upon which they intrude, just as the things people say in bull
sessions are disconnected from their settled beliefs, and as bullshit
is disconnected from a concern with the truth.
The term bull is also employed, in a rather more widespread and
familiar usage, as a somewhat less coarse equivalent of bullshit. In an
entry for bull as so used, the OED suggests the following as
definitive: “trivial, insincere, or untruthful talk or writing;
nonsense.” Now it does not seem distinctive of bull either that
it must be deficient in meaning or that it is necessarily unimportant;
so “nonsense” and “trivial,” even apart from
their vagueness, seem to be on the wrong track. The focus of
“insincere, or untruthful” is better, but it needs to be
sharpened. The entry at hand also provides the following two
definitions:
1914 Dialect Notes IV. 162 Bull, talk which is
not to the purpose; “hot air.”
I 932 Times Lit. Supp. 8 Dec. 933/3 “Bull” is
the slang term for a combination of bluff, bravado, “hot
air” and what we used to call in the Army “Kidding the
troops”
“Not to the purpose” is appropriate, but it is both too
broad in scope and too vague. It covers digressions and innocent
irrelevancies, which are not invariably instances of bull; furthermore,
saying that bull is not to the purpose leaves it uncertain what purpose
is meant. The reference in both definitions to “hot air” is
more helpful. When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what
comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor.
His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language,
accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve.
No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely
exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement,
incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable
equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has
been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from
which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded
as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in
food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a
representation of death which we ourselves produce and which, indeed,
we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives.
Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so
repulsive. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance,
any more than hot air can serve those of cummunication.
Now consider these lines from Pound’s Canto LXXIV, which the
OED cites in its entry on bullshit as a verb:
Hey Snag wots in the bibl’?
Wot are the books ov the bible?
Name ’em, don’t bullshit ME.
This is a call for the facts. The person addressed is evidently
regarded as having in some way claimed to know the Bible, or as having
claimed to care about it. The speaker suspects that this is just empty
talk, and demands that the claim be supported with facts. He will not
accept a mere report; he insists upon seeing the thing itself. In other
words, he is calling the bluff. The connection between bullshit and
bluff is affirmed explicitly in the definition with which the lines by
Pound are associated:
As v. truns. and intr., to talk nonsense (to);
… also, to bluff one’s way through (something)
by talking nonsense.
It does seem that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is
closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied
concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than
it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here
between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of
misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the
distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially
someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is
typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying,
however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery.
This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of
bullshit is not that it is false but that it isphony.
In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake
or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself)
inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be
defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What
is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was
made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential
nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the
truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this
does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
In Eric Ambler’s novel Dirty Story, a character named
Arthur Abdel Simpson recalls advice that he received as a child from
his father:
Although I was only seven when my father was killed, I still
remember him very well and some of the things he used to say.
… One of the first things he taught me was, “Never
tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.”
This presumes not only that there is an important difference between
lying and bullshitting, but that the latter is preferable to the
former. Now the elder Simpson surely did not consider bullshitting
morally superior to lying. Nor is it likely that he regarded lies as
invariably less effective than bullshit in accomplishing the purposes
for which either of them might be employed. After all, an intelligently
crafted lie may do its work with unqualified success. It may be that
Simpson thought it easier to get away with bullshitting than with
lying. Or perhaps he meant that, although the risk of being caught is
about the same in each case, the consequences of being caught are
generally less severe for the bullshitter than for the liar. In fact,
people do tend to be more tolerant of bullshit than of lies, perhaps
because we are less inclined to take the former as a personal affront.
We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely
to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the
sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of
understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign
than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave
as an exercise for the reader. The pertinent comparison is not,
however, between telling a lie and producing some particular instance
of bullshit. The elder Simpson identifies the alternative to telling a
lie as “bullshitting one’s way through.” This
involves not merely producing one instance of bullshit; it involves a
program of producing bullshit to whatever extent the
circumstances require. This is a key, perhaps, to his preference.
Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a
particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs,
in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the
truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of
the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be
the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In
order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And
in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under
the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes
to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is
panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to
inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not
constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He
is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires. This
freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not
necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of
the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less
analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying.
It is more expansive and independent, with mare spacious opportunities
for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter
of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit
artist.” My guess is that the recommendation offered by Arthur
Simpson’s father reflects the fact that he was more strongly
drawn to this mode of creativity, regardless of its relative merit or
effectiveness, than he was to the more austere and rigorous demands of
lying.
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of
affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning
that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of
being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in
its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or
even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the
facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is
his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is
that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both
he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to
communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us
about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he
is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality;
we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to
be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the
other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no
central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his
intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it. This does
not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive
guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about
which he speaks truly are.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the
truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who
lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent
respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he
believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly
indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the
bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side
of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts
at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except
insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with
what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe
reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit
his purpose.
In his essay, “Lying,” St. Augustine
distinguishes lies of eight types, which he classifies according to the
characteristic intent or justification with which a lie is told. Lies
of seven of these types are told only because they are supposed to be
indispensable means to some end that is distinct from the sheer
creation of false beliefs. It is not their falsity as such, in other
words, that attracts the teller to them. Since they are told only on
account of their supposed indispensability to a goal other than
deception itself, St. Augustine regards them as being told unwillingly:
what the person really wants is not to tell the lie but to attain the
goal. They are therefore not real lies, in his view, and those who tell
them are not in the strictest sense liars. It is only the remaining
category that contains what he identifies as “the lie which is
told solely for the pleasure of lying and deceiving, that is, the real
lie.” Lies in this category are not told as means to any end
distinct form the propagation of falsehood. They are told simply for
their own sakes — i.e., purely out of a love of deception:
There is a distinction between a person who tells a lie and a
liar. The former is one who tells a lie unwillingly, while the liar
loves to lie and passes his time in the joy of lying. … The
latter takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself.
What Augustine calls “liars” and “real lies”
are both rare and extraordinary. Everyone lies from time to time, but
there are very few people to whom it would often (or even ever) occur
to lie exclusively from a love of falsity or of deception. For most
people, the fact that a statement is false constitutes in itself a
reason, however weak and easily overridden, not to make the
statement.
For St. Augustine’s pure liar it is, on the contrary, a reason
in favor of making it. For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a
reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the
truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are.
These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world
correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies
does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way
that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter
activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to
anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit
of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on
opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the
facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is
guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other
defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter
ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of
the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no
attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy
of the truth than lies are.
One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts
assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both
determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying
presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and
getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to
tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility
of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have
only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell
the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from
making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative
is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way
things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.
Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure
that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There
is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but
the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without
assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will
mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it
is currently so great.
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has
deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can
have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore
reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These
“anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value
of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false,
and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One
response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the
discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness
to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of
an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking
primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the
individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of
himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might
hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being
true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes
no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead
to be true to himself.
But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate,
and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions,
while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has
been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in
response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without
knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly
nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is
the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts
about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical
dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial —
notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other
things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is
bullshit.
