Frankfurt’s Theory on Bullshit
In his most famous essay Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosopher who passed away last year, picked as a central theme the topic of…
bullshit.
I’m finding this topic highly compelling, because 1) I, too believe that we’re surrounded by an all-time-high pile of bullshit and 2) we’re not as conscious of this as we ought to be.
In theorizing on the characteristics of bullshit and why it has become so prevalent in our society, Frankfurt starts by quoting a poem from H.W. Longfellow (and apparently a favorite of Wittgenstein’s):
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.
In other words, craftsmen did not used to cut corners, things used to be of a certain quality, not just on the surface. Today it’s corners cut galore.
Bullshit, Frankfurt goes on to postulate, is a result of mindlessness. Our culture has become indifferent to producing and speaking truthfully. One might theorize that this is because being truthful has become disincentivized by our social and economic dynamic:
“[…] the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.”
I highly recommend the full essay, but to keep things short I will say this: We should all ponder that the proverbial gods, though they’ve been in hiding, might just be everywhere after all. That bullshit, when all is said and done, is met with a steep price.
And that we may be entering a phase of human history where the discipline of correctness once again pays off.
