Well, and Your Humble Blogger has finally got around to reading the full text of On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, and frankly, the irony must be pointed out. Mr. Frankfurt has done no serious research into the history of the term, or how it is actually used, or when it is used approvingly or disapprovingly. I understand that the article is twenty years old, and I’m not sure why I expected it to be expanded, or updated, or anything like that, but it isn’t.
His telling anecdote (which he admits probably didn’t happen) of Wittgenstein telling off Fania Pascal for claiming to feel like a dog that had been run over (when she had no way of making that comparison) is telling, in part, because like Pascal he has done no research nor seems to think he needs to do any. Yep, the whole thing is nothing but bullshit, all the way through. Real, old-fashioned bull-session dorm room shit, with nothing to even argue against.
What appears to have happened is that Mr. Frankfurt got hold of two separate ideas: the sense that statements have become divorced from any empirical correlation in terms of their value, and the sense that there’s a lot of bullshit around. He puts those two together, and makes the statement that what distinguishes bullshit from truth or lies is an indifference to accuracy. This is bullshit. No such definition exists. This is not how the word is used. It is not helpful to pretend that the word is used that way, since (in fact) it is not.
I must admit I am perplexed by the book’s (moderate) popularity. Yes, there’s a kind of kick from reading a philosophical essay on Bullshit, but wouldn’t it be better to read something, you know, accurate? Or does no-one care?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Well, see, that’s the meta-joke. A carefully research analysis would go against his premise that accuracy is irrelevant to the modern person. By adopting his topic in the course of discussing it, he provides both small examples and a large-scale example. And it’s one of the few philosophical texts which can easily adopt its topic in its explicatory style — On Fucking may repeatedly plunge into its subject matter after a properly lengthy introduction, but nobody will get the joke unless you point it out.