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“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
Here is the definition of BULLSHIT and its distinction from an honest to god LIE by Harry Frankfurt, who claims that bullshit identifies as a very specific deformity of discourse.
His analysis prompts us to focus attention on the serious and important question of why politics, in particular, produces such torrents of the stuff. The key distinction he draws is that between the ‘bullshitter’ and the ‘liar’ is that Frankfurt’s liar aims to deceive as to the truth and does so by consciously uttering a falsehood.
I hits me how bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity, to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Now, it is of course very familiar to call politicians ‘liars’; some indeed seem to assume that they constitute a strange sub-species of humanity defined by a congenital inability, to be honest.
“Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
Frankfurt also established the grave danger of bullshit, and why there is so much bullshit around. Spoiler alert:- bullshit is unavoidable when people are convinced that they must have opinions about “events and conditions in all parts of the world”, about more or less anything and everything – so they speak quite extensively about things they know virtually nothing about. Frankfurt is non-committal as to whether there is more bullshit around now than before, but he maintains that there is currently a great deal.
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.”
Here is the definition of BULLSHIT and its distinction from an honest to god LIE by Harry Frankfurt, who claims that bullshit identifies as a very specific deformity of discourse.
His analysis prompts us to focus attention on the serious and important question of why politics, in particular, produces such torrents of the stuff. The key distinction he draws is that between the ‘bullshitter’ and the ‘liar’ is that Frankfurt’s liar aims to deceive as to the truth and does so by consciously uttering a falsehood.
I hits me how bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity, to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Now, it is of course very familiar to call politicians ‘liars’; some indeed seem to assume that they constitute a strange sub-species of humanity defined by a congenital inability, to be honest.
“Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
Frankfurt also established the grave danger of bullshit, and why there is so much bullshit around. Spoiler alert:- bullshit is unavoidable when people are convinced that they must have opinions about “events and conditions in all parts of the world”, about more or less anything and everything – so they speak quite extensively about things they know virtually nothing about. Frankfurt is non-committal as to whether there is more bullshit around now than before, but he maintains that there is currently a great deal.
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.”
