Early in 1991 I wrote an article about the Gulf War in which I explained that “friendly fire” is “the bomb mistakenly tossed at you by some shit wearing the same uniform.” After the recent case of Nicola Calipari, the Italian military intelligence officer killed by American soldiers, readers are perhaps more aware that people die from friendly fire. But in response to my article there was a great deal of protest not about the immorality of friendly fire but the immorality of the word “shit.” As well as many letters from readers, I was also criticized by other newspapers so severely that I had to write another article about how many eminent writers had used words of a similar kind.
Practices change over time, and publishers can now print without fuss a translation of On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University.
“Bullshit” is generally applied to something claimed, said, communicated: “What you’ve said is bullshit,” “That film is real bullshit.” Frankfurt considers the eminently semiotic interpretation of “bullshit” by starting off with a definition that another philosopher, Max Black, had given to “humbug”: “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of someone’s thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.”
American philosophers are generally sensitive to the problem of the truth of what we say, so they question whether it’s true or false to say that Ulysses went back to Ithaca, even if Ulysses never existed. Frankfurt therefore sets out to determine, first, in what way bullshit is stronger than humbug and, second, what it means to provide a “deceptive misrepresentation” of something short of lying.
The only way of dealing with the second problem is to examine thoroughly all the authorities on the question, from Saint Augustine until today. Anyone who lies knows that what he’s saying isn’t true, and says it to deceive. Anyone who says something untrue without knowing it’s untrue is not lying, poor thing, but is simply mistaken or mad. Let’s say that someone claims, and believes, that the Sun goes around the Earth. We’d say he’s talking humbug, or even bullshit. But according to Black’s definition, anyone who talks humbug does so to provide a deceptive misrepresentation not only of external reality but also of his own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.
This also happens to those who lie. If someone says he has a hundred euros in his pocket and it’s not true, he is doing so not just to make us believe he has a hundred euros in his pocket, but also to persuade us that he believes it. But Frankfurt explains that the main purpose of a humbug, unlike a lie, is not to create a false belief in relation to the state of things, but rather to create a false impression about what is going on in the speaker’s mind. Since this is the purpose of a humbug, it never reaches the level of a lie. To use an example given by Professor Frankfurt: a president of the United States can use bombastic expressions about the Founding Fathers being guided by God, and he does so not to spread beliefs that he knows to be false, but to give the impression of being a pious man who loves his country.
The chief characteristic of bullshit, as opposed to humbug, is that it’s a false statement proffered to make us believe something, but the speaker has no interest in whether what he’s saying is true or untrue. “The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides . . . is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest.” Our ears immediately prick up at statements such as this, and indeed Frankfurt confirms our worst suspicions: “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.” The aim of bullshit isn’t even to misrepresent states of affairs; it’s to create an impact on listeners barely capable of distinguishing between true and false, or those who have no interest in such subtleties. I think those who talk bullshit also rely on the poor memory of their listeners, which allows them to talk a continual and contradictory stream of bullshit: “However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds . . . he is also trying to get away with something.”
2005