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Retail & Wholesale Bullshit: Criticism & Quotes on Frankfurt's On Bullshit
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt I finished Frankfurt's little philosophical essay On Bullshit. Here are some preliminary thoughts on why I think the book is misconceived. But don't mistake my intent. The essay is fun to read and can lead to thoughtful discussion. Basically, I think that Frankfurt ignores the current social conditions that make "bullshit' prominent in our society. "Bullshit" is transformed in modern society from a shoddy phenomena into a phenomena which has its own standards of excellence because it is sustained by a market for bullshit. Frankfurt states correctly that, "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit." (p.1) But then he goes onto say "we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And why 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." This is where I begin to disagree with Frankfurt. It seems to me proper to ask why bullshit is such a pervasive part of our culture. I think that the basis for bullshit, bluff, puffery, humbug, hokum, quackery, etc is part of the human need for gaining the confidence of the other, even in circumstances when the person who needs the confidence and trust does not deserve it. Thus people imitate the qualities that gain personal confidence in any particular society at any particular time. But we are the only culture that has developed a whole industry called 'public relations' or 'advertising' that is dedicated to nothing but 'bullshit.' That industry is one of the biggest in our society and spends much time and research trying to produce better and less detectable bullshit.
Frankfurt starts off from the wrong point. I don't think that it is helpful to begin a philosophical analysis of 'bullshit' with conceptual analysis. To ask "what is 'bullshit'?" from a conceptual-analytic starting point seems to me about as fruitful as to ask "what is 'Rome'?", without reference to Roman history at any particular point. I propose three starting points in order to begin thinking about 'bullshit' : First, 'bullshit' as a cognitive phenomena; Second, as an historical phenomena; Third, as an institutional phenomena. Of course one cannot hope to have a scientific or theoretical point of view of a phenomena such as bullshit, in the first place because we don't know how 'bullshit' as a folk concept may relate to the cognitive phenomena of producing or recognizing 'bullshit.' Perhaps the best service Frankfurt could have provided was a simple analysis of how the concept is used in folk psychology along with an analysis of whether the English word 'bullshit' has some equivalent in all or most languages. In other words how universal is the concept of 'bullshit' among homo sapiens?
I can't answer these questions, nor can I provide a larger framework to discuss the notion of bullshit. As far as our own cognitive processes are concerned in detecting bullshit, we all like to believe that we know it when we see it, but I suspect that that is largely self-flattery, like the belief that we are good at detecting lies or are good judges of character. So let me suggest that on a very low level the problem of 'bullshit' is a 'perceptual problem' of trust and skepticism, of detection of fakery and puffery. Let me further suggest that such a problem exists in all societies. Yet as societies grow complicated and more populous the problem of bullshit becomes more pronounced. These are societies where people come in contact regularly with unknown quantities and qualities, whether unknown people or claims about unknown things and events from 'known' non-personal sources, that cannot be judged in the context of regular everyday reciprocal relations. In sub-cultures based on commodity trade the problem becomes crucial. A merchant needs to be able to judge the 'value' of products unknown to him by detecting the amount of a traders puffery. In societies based completely on commodity production, and the the resulting industry of advertising bullshit, it seems to me that bullshit tends to dominate most forms of non-personal communication.
Frankfurt, certainly deserves praise for doing something that today's philosophers should engage in more - analyzing particular problems of everyday life that are intractable to the (so called) human sciences. There are broad hints that we can gain from the cognitive sciences and from evolutionary psychology about the phenomena of bullshit and bullshit detection but these hints are by necessity incomplete. We are only now making a beginning at understanding these phenomena in everyday life. How bullshit operates in ordinary language and how it is understood by folk psychology are also good questions. There are also other problems of everyday life that should be considered philosophically. For instance one of the most important human problems is gossip and how the development of language has dovetailed with the cultural phenomena of gossip as a verbal substitute for grooming and distribution of hierarchy. Again there are some broad hints that we can draw from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology on this phenomena. We could also analyze the phenomena of gossip from the point of view of ordinary language and folk psychology, but ultimately I think the problem is one that is not conducive to theory or categorization. But again we run into some of the same social developments with gossip as I described with 'bullshit.' No matter what function gossip may have served in the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural community that function has now been transformed. Gossip in today's capitalist society is a commodity and must be analyzed as such. And yet such phenomena as "bullshit", "bullshit detection", and "gossip" (in both its bonding and vindictive aspects) has been traditionally ignored by philosophical inquiry, as have so many other aspects of our everyday lives, aspects of life that once formed the integument of the human community. Let me suggest that one reason that these aspects of everyday life have been ignored is that the subject of philosophy has rarely received the kind of self-criticism that accepts "philosophizing" as just another aspect of everyday life. Every human has an implicit philosophy of the world, society, and of life, as Gramsci was fond of pointing out. To put it bluntly, much of philosophy is about 'bullshit' or is bullshit or is about 'gossip' or is gossip. To analyze 'bullshit' or 'gossip' as part of human relations, to try to understand these phenomena from a philosophical point of view is to inevitably dismiss most of philosophy and practically all of philosophy as practiced in our academies. I do believe that there are exceptions through-out history and today. And just because a particular philosopher is gossiping when he propounds his philosophy does not mean that he can't write something interesting and strong. A good example would be Nietzsche's reflections on Socrates ugliness in "Twilight of the Idols." But all of these divagations only point to what is wrong with Frankfurt's way of conceiving of the phenomena of 'bullshit.' It is not possible to have a well worked out 'theory' of 'bullshit'. More precisely, it is not possible to have a non-trivial model-description and/or theoretical explanation of 'bullshit' as an everyday phenomena, that allows us to see anything that is not intuitive or not already generally understood. All that is needed to understand "bullshit', in the best way that it can be understood is, normal intelligence combined with rational thought and skepticism. So to begin with I am skeptical of Frankfurt's theoretical intentions. I am also skeptical of the need for conceptual analysis. The fact is that each person from her own point of view thinks or believes that she knows bullshit when she hears it. But nobody is quite sure if their particular bullshit detectors are accurate, at any particular time, and some of us ignore the warnings in our heads. I suppose some conceptual analysis of the term "bullshit" is not a bad thing, since it hasn't been dealt with as a philosophical phenomena before. Frankfurt points to Max Black's book The Prevalence of of Humbug (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) as an approximation to a study of "Bullshit." Frankfurt quotes Black's definition of humbug as an approximation of 'bullshit.' "Humbug: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes." quoted at Frankfurt p. 6. My own first reaction to this definition is that it is very close to the idea of 'puffery', a word often used by judges in their opinions about why someone has not lied when making a contract. The person offering the contract 'fell short of lies' and has engaged in 'mere puffery'. If the contract was for the sale of a product, there is no necessary implication that the product itself is shoddy, but certainly the product was represented as something more than it actually turned out to be. Puffery is certainly a kind of bullshit. Frankfurt later gives an example of what Black means by Humbug. "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 that 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 the 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" (Frankfurt, p. 16-18).
Is this true? I am happy to agree that this particular Fourth of July orator is offering us a load of bullshit. The effect of this kind of oratory on the victim is most likely boredom, so not only is it bullshit, it is also ineffective bullshit. I also admit that the orator is concerned with putting himself over on his audience. But there is also something else going on here, a form of indoctrination that we think of as ideology. The orator is surely trying to get his audience to buy into patriotism, but it is just as possible that the orator is trying to convince himself of the mumbo-jumbo he is reciting. Frankfurt immediately goes into a discussion of bullshit as part of the shoddy. "It does seem fitting to construe carelessly made, shoddy goods as in some way analogues of bullshit. But in what way?" p.21. "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 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 advance 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." pp.22-23. Yet "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 that resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline." p. 23 I think that the flaw in Frankfurt's kind of analysis is clear in the confusion of these passages. The personal may often be political but institutional norms, constraints, and demands are not the same as psychological motives or the actual products that are surrounded by bullshit. Or to put my thought with a bit of bullshit like Hegelian pretentiousness, there is a qualitative, and not simply a quantitative, difference between retail bullshit and wholesale bullshit . The difference is in (1) how bullshit is produced, (2) how bullshit functions, and (3) the art put into the production of bullshit. And the crux of the difference between merely psychological bullshit, which usually allows little room for excellence and thrives in retail, and institutional bullshit, which thrives in wholesale and has produced its own norms of excellence, is the the fact that our society has established a well elaborated division of labor of bullshit mass production. Retail bullshit is always a bit shoddy; wholesale bullshit can have its own excellence. Or as Gore Vidal once famously told us in an essay on Hollywood, "Shit has its own integrity." It is the very fact that there is a division of labor between industrial production of shoddy commodities and the industrial craftsmen of bullshit, that allows for the production of high quality bullshit, that distinguishes bullshit in modern (post)industrial society from the bullshit of the Sophist or Rhetor in fifth century B.C.E. Athens or the bullshit of the slave-seller in first century C.E. Rome.
In our society bullshit is so prevalent because it is produced with no connection with what is actually being referred to. Wholesale bullshit is allowed its excellence because the producers of such bullshit can look at it as a craft in and of itself. On a micro level the public relations industry produces bullshit for bullshit's sake. The product is not what is being promoted. In fact bullshit is the product. In our society it is a frightening fact that bullshit has its own integrity. Bullshit is the air we breath. It is not simply marketing but it exists in every single institution that bases itself on modern capitalist production. Every time a manager talks to you about 'team work', or is trying to get you to smile as you stand on your feet for nine hours a day at a cash register, you are certainly encountering bullshit and the forced institutional production of bullshit. There is no truth value which adheres to "excellent" bullshit. In other words wholesale bullshit has its own integrity and is neither true nor false. It functions to confabulate, to provide a narrative, to provide a set of associations, but those connotations are neither true nor false. It is a category mistake to ask if wholesale bullshit has any truth value. It is like asking whether cheering for the Boston Red Sox instead of the New York Yankees has any truth value. The difference is that with wholesale bullshit we are supposed to believe that there is a truth value where there is none. We are supposed to believe in what wholesale bullshit propounds like we are supposed to believe in the Catholic Church. The shoddiness of bullshit can be on the speakers end or the hearers end. But what ever the shoddiness is it is not in what is being referred to or promoted (though it certainly can be) but rather it is the shoddiness of not thinking through. Frankfurt states, "Wittgenstein devoted his philosophical energies largely to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of 'nonsense.'" then he relates an anecdote from Fania Pascal: "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." p. 24. "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 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." pp. 30-31. "What disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement is correct." Now this gets at some something essential about bullshit. And in fact it is part of the excellence of wholesale bullshit. Retail bullshit doe not bother to take into account whether a statement is true or false, or accurate. The art of wholesale bullshit is to create statements that are neither true, nor false, and cannot be tested for accuracy. If it were possible to construct a statement that was all connotation and no denotation and made you feel pleasure or fear and then you associated your fear or your lack of pleasure with your lack of what the bullshitter wanted to dish to you that would be the consummate art of wholesale bullshit. It's not failing to get things right it is failing to try. Bullshit "is unconnected to a concern with .. truth-value ..." p. 33 "[Wittgenstein] 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 difference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." pp. 33-34. "This crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] 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 to conceal it. This dos 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." pp. 54-55. "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction." p.55 The bullshitter is more likely to to construct a story that is neither true nor false.... "Why is there so much bullshit...There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit many not have increased." p. 62. "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing that he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligation or opportunities to speeak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepency is common in public life,...." p.63 I think here the distinction between retail bullshit and wholesale bullshit would be apropos. "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any relaiable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possiblity of knowing how things truly are. These 'antirealist' doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested effeorts to determine what is true and what is false and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry." p. 64-65. Though I am in complete solidarity with the point of this statement I think again that he gets things a little upside down I think that an objective inquiry would lead to the conclusion that 'these "antirelaist" doctrines' are in many ways mirrors of the advertising, and propaganda industry that surround us at every turn. Later Frankfurt says that insead of correcteness as an ideal the antirealists turn to sincerity. This I think is a rebellion from the obvious feeling that everything one does when one participates in consumer culture has to be insincere. Jerry Monaco New York City Revised - 9 December 2005 -- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/ His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/ Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
Selected by Philosophers' Carnival XXIII @ Right Reason. Philosophers' Carnival homepage.
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Selected by Philosophers' Carnival XXIII @ Right Reason. Philosophers' Carnival homepage.
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