On Bullshit
Why we need a theory of bullshit
Description
In 1986, a philosopher at Yale named Harry Frankfurt published a short essay in a journal called Raritan. It carried a title most academic journals would not have printed: "On Bullshit." Frankfurt worked on the big questions — free will, love, what it means to care about anything at all — and here he was, roughly nineteen pages, treating a piece of barnyard slang as if it deserved the same rigor as the problem of moral responsibility. The essay circulated quietly for years. Then, in 2005, Princeton University Press reissued it as a tiny hardcover, and the thing became a genuine bestseller — the kind of book people bought two of, one to keep and one to leave on a colleague's desk.
The joke, if it was a joke, has a serious premise underneath it. One of the most conspicuous features of the world we live in, Frankfurt writes, is that there is so much bullshit. We all know this. We each produce our share. And yet we take the situation almost entirely for granted. Most of us walk around fairly confident that we can spot the stuff and avoid being fooled by it — which is exactly why nobody stops to ask what it actually is.
That confidence is the problem. We have no clear account of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what it does to us. We have no theory. And a thing we cannot define is a thing we cannot really defend ourselves against. Frankfurt set out to give the concept the analysis it had never received — to say, precisely, what separates the bullshitter from every other kind of person who fails to tell the truth.
The question we’re asking : What exactly is bullshit — and why does a phenomenon everyone recognizes deserve a philosopher's full attention?What we’ll see : How Frankfurt takes an everyday word apart, finds a surprising culprit at its center, and turns a small essay into a diagnosis of something much larger.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The most familiar thing we've never examined
Frankfurt begins where any careful thinker would: by admitting he does not really know what the word means, and neither do we. This is the strange thing about bullshit. It is one of the most common features of our lives, and one of the least understood. We deploy the term constantly, with total confidence, and if pressed to define it we fall back on gestures and examples. There is, Frankfurt notes, a substantial body of philosophy on lying — lying has been analyzed for centuries. About bullshit, almost nothing. The concept had never been given a serious theory.
He is careful about method. Rather than surveying every loose use of the word, he wants to isolate what the phenomenon essentially is — the thing that makes bullshit bullshit and not merely careless talk or exaggeration. To get there he tries out related words: humbug, balderdash, claptrap, hokum, bunkum. Each circles the same territory without quite naming the center. Humbug comes closest — an early writer, Max Black, had defined it as deceptive misrepresentation short of outright lying, especially about one's own thoughts and feelings. Useful, but not enough.
02Chapter 2 — The liar respects the truth more than the bullshitter does
The heart of the essay is a comparison, and it is the part people remember. To understand bullshit, Frankfurt argues, we have to set it beside lying — because our instinct is to lump them together, and that instinct is wrong. The liar and the bullshitter are doing genuinely different things, and the difference is where the whole analysis turns.
Consider what a liar must do. To lie well, you have to know the truth, or at least believe you do, and then work carefully in the opposite direction. The liar is oriented toward the truth the entire time; he tracks it closely, because he has to say something specific that contradicts it. In that odd sense the liar is a servant of the truth. He accepts that there is a fact of the matter, and he cares about it enough to conceal it. His whole enterprise is organized around the authority of the way things actually are.
03Chapter 3 — Where the stuff comes from
If bullshit is indifference to truth, the next question is obvious: why is there so much of it? Frankfurt does not pretend to a complete answer, but he sketches the conditions that produce it, and the sketch is unsettling precisely because it does not blame bad people. Bullshit, on his account, grows out of ordinary situations that most of us pass through constantly.
The first condition is being required to speak beyond your knowledge. Bullshit is unavoidable, he writes, whenever circumstances demand that someone talk about things he does not really understand. We are forever obliged to have opinions — about policy, about products, about events on the far side of the world — and the demand for our views far outruns anything we actually know. Faced with the obligation to say something and the impossibility of saying something informed, we improvise. We produce speech shaped to the occasion rather than to the facts. That gap between what we are expected to pronounce on and what we can genuinely know is, for Frankfurt, the natural home of bullshit.
04Chapter 4 — Sincerity as the last refuge
The final turn of the essay is the one that lifts it beyond wordplay. Having traced bullshit to a loss of faith in objective truth, Frankfurt looks at the consolation we reach for — sincerity, authenticity, being true to oneself — and refuses to grant it the dignity we assume it has. If we cannot be honest about the world, at least, we tell ourselves, we can be honest about who we are. Frankfurt calls the bluff.
His argument is quietly devastating. Sincerity is honesty about the self — a faithful report of one's own nature, feelings, convictions. But the self is not some stable object sitting there waiting to be accurately described. We are, he suggests, at least as uncertain and shifting and hard to know as anything in the external world, and probably more so. There is no more solid fact of the matter about what we truly are than about what the world truly is. So the attempt to substitute sincerity for correctness does not escape the problem of truth — it relocates it to even shakier ground.
05Conclusion
The essay that began as an unlikely academic curiosity — nineteen pages on a rude word, published in 1986 and reborn as a bestseller in 2005 — ends somewhere no one would have predicted from the title. It starts by promising to define an everyday nuisance and finishes with a claim about the ground under all our talk: that the bullshitter, indifferent to truth, has quietly become more dangerous than the liar who at least still bows to it, and that our favorite escape hatch, sincerity, offers no way out.
