Harry Frankfurt identified what may be the quintessential phenomenon of contemporary culture
Philosophers, as a rule, like to stay in our own bubbles. When we aren’t at conferences for our small circle of peers, we’re writing arcane articles on topics that most people don’t care much about. The most contact we make with the world is through our students. And many of us pride ourselves on maintaining a certain distance from the muck of public affairs.
It wasn’t always like this. In ancient Greece, our intellectual forebears were publicly sentenced to death for being a nuisance. They tutored Alexander the Great and wrote constitutions for city-states. In classical Rome, figures studied in philosophy departments were often best known for their careers as statesmen — and sometimes met dire personal ends. (Cicero, for example, was executed by order of Mark Antony.)
Harry Frankfurt, who died last Sunday at 94, didn’t meet such a grisly fate. But, in some ways like Cicero, he was a philosophical amphibian. He was an accomplished scholar: He taught at Princeton for many years and wrote influential works on free will, moral responsibility, and the philosophy of René Descartes. But he also held a keen interest in more, shall we say, down-to-earth matters. He was, in addition to all his ivory-tower efforts, a philosopher of bullshit. And he thought about it with ruthless precision.
What is bullshitting, really? It seems like it’s different from lying. We might call someone who perjures herself on the witness stand to save her child from prison a liar, but it seems wrong to call her a bullshit artist. The archetype here is the used car salesman, the real estate magnate. Sure, all these people say untrue things. But there’s something beyond saying untrue things that turns them into flimflammers.
What makes a bullshitter a bullshitter is that they don’t care about the truth. This, to Frankfurt, was the essence of bullshit — a “lack of connection to a concern with truth.” What marks off a bullshitter from a liar is that a liar is very concerned that you believe something false. That mother on the witness stand conceals the fact that she knows she’s misleading us. But the politician is hiding something entirely different. He’s hiding the fact that he’s completely indifferent to the truth. What he says may be true, or it may be false, and either would suit his purpose. The bullshitter, according to Frankfurt, isn’t sensitive to truth or the way things really are. He just says whatever seems useful at the time.
We encounter this kind of bullshit constantly. We see it on television, or in the newspaper, or on a blog. When a pundit needs to pound out 800 words to meet a deadline, in some sense she may not even care whether she knows very much about what she’s talking about. From Substack to your favorite podcast, in the world of opinions, truth-aversion abounds.
Frankfurt also thought this is just as true (perhaps unfortunately) for the ordinary public as for pundits. If you’re anything like me, there are great tracts of public policy you know nothing about. But there’s a sense that being an engaged member of a democracy means having an opinion on just about everything your country does. And so when we hem and haw at a barbecue or at a dinner party on the finer points of military aid to Ukraine, we are often engaged in this kind of bullshitting. We feel the need to appear engaged or informed, regardless of whether we really are. And so we flock to bullshit like pigs to — well, you get the idea.
You probably guessed that my choice of bullshitter archetypes a few paragraphs ago (specifically, that of real estate magnate) was not accidental. And it wasn’t. Donald Trump affords an excellent example of the bullshitter. Forget for a second whether you think his policies are good, bad, dangerous, or practical — just focus on his delivery. He’s a deal-maker.
And at bottom, a deal-maker à la Donald is part entertainer, part con artist. He didn’t care whether the Mexican government really was ever going pay for the wall. What he wanted was to close the deal — which, in this case, meant getting your vote. He’d say just about whatever he needed to say to make that happen. Frankfurt himself recognized this. With more than a little understatement, he wrote in Time that “it is often uncertain whether Trump actually cares about the truth of what he says.”
Harry Frankfurt is gone. But before he left, he won half the battle against bullshit: He called it what it is. Whether it comes from Trump or Biden or anywhere in between, we’re up to our necks in it. And if that’s his legacy, if articulating the perfect concept for our little political moment is how he gets remembered, well, that’s probably better than the rest of us philosophers will get.