Bullshit and Philosophy

by Reisch, George A. ; Hardcastle, Gary L.

  This is why Nietzsche carefully distinguished Truth from a belief system that only professed to contain the Truth. Ken Gemes notes that Nietzsche co-ordinated the question of Truth around the pragmatics of survival,182 an observation echoed by Kennedy, who provides examples of animals that deceive for self-preservation. Camouflage, for example, can be seen in plants and animals. Many birds imitate the calls of rival species to fool them to distraction and away from their nests or food sources. Deception, it seems, is common in nature. But Nietzsche took doctrinal Truth (note the “T”) to be one of the most insidious deceptions to occur in human culture, especially as it is articulated in religions. It is not a basic lie that is being promulgated, but rather a lie masquerading as the Truth and, according to Nietzsche, performing certain functions. Truth, that is, is a ritualized fiction, a condition manufactured for institutions and the individuals who control them to maintain their power.

  Rhetoric and Bullshit

  Truth, deception, control over others. This survey of rhetoric thus brings us close to the territory that Harry Frankfurt explores in On Bullshit. For Frankfurt, however, bullshit has little to do with these complexities about truth and Truth that rhetoric helps us identify. Indeed bullshit, for Frankfurt, has little do with truth at all, insofar as it requires an indifference to truth. Does this mean, then, that language that is not bullshit has settled the matter of truth and has access to truth (or Truth)? Does this lead us to a dichotomy between truth and bullshit that is similar to the dichotomy between truth and falsity that postmodernism criticizes? It may seem that postmodernism has little place in Frankfurt’s view, insofar as he rejects “various forms of skepticism which deny that we have any reliable access to objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are” (p. 64). Indeed, postmodernism is often vilified as the poster child of relativism and skepticism.

  Yet postmodernism is far subtler than a mere denial of “objective reality.” Postmodernism claims, rather, that reality is as much a construct of language as it is objective and unchanging. Postmodernism is less about rejecting beliefs about objective reality than about the intersection between material reality and the human interpretations of it that change, mutate, and shift that reality to our own purposes—the kind of small-t truths that Nietzsche addressed. The common complaint about post-modernism, for example, that it denies “natural laws,” forgets that humans noticed and formulated those laws. Postmodernism attempts to supply a vocabulary to describe this kind of process. It is not just “jargon,” as is so often charged; it is an effort to construct a metalinguistic lexicon for dealing with some very difficult and important epistemological questions.

  And, not surprisingly, so is rhetoric. Constructing language that deals with the nature of language is a unique human problem. It is meta-cognition at its most complicated because it requires us to use the same apparatus to decode human texts that is contained in the texts themselves—that is, using words to talk about words, what Kenneth Burke referred to in The Rhetoric of Religion as “logology.”183 In no other area of human thinking is this really the case. Most forms of intellectual exploration involve an extraneous phenomenon, event, agent, or object that requires us to bring language to bear upon it in order to observe, describe, classify, and draw conclusions about its nature, its behavior, or its effect. For example, scientific inquiry usually involves an event or a process in the material world that is separate from the instruments we use to describe it. Historical analysis deals with texts as a matter of disciplinary course, yet most historians rarely question the efficacy or the reliability of the language used to convey an event of the remote (or, for that matter, recent) past. Even linguistics, which uses a scientific model to describe language structure, deals little with meaning or textual analysis.

  Law is one of the closest cousins of rhetoric. Words are very much a part of the ebb and flow of legal wrangling, and the attention given to meaning and interpretation is central. Yet, even here, there is little theoretical discussion about how words have meaning or how, based on such theory, that meaning can be variously interpreted. Law is more concerned with the fact that words can be interpreted differently and how different agents might interpret language in different ways. This is why legal documents are often so unreadable; in an attempt to control ambiguity, more words (and more words with specific, technical meanings) must be used so that multiple interpretations can be avoided. If theoretical discussions about how language generates meaning were entered into the equation, the law would be impossible to apply in any practical way. Yet, to understand legal intricacies, every law student should be exposed to rhetoric—not so they can better learn how to manipulate a jury or falsify an important document, but so they understand how tenuous and limited language actually is for dealing with ordinary situations. Moreover, nearly every disciplinary area of inquiry uses language, but only rhetoric (and its associated disciplines, especially philosophy of language and literary /cultural criticism, which have influenced the development of modern rhetoric considerably) analyzes language using a hermeneutical instrument designed to penetrate the words to examine their effects—desired or not—on the people who use them.

  What, then, qualifies as “bullshit”? Certainly, as I hope I have shown, rhetoric and bullshit are hardly the same thing. They are not even distant cousins. When a student begins a paper with the sentence, “In today’s society, there are many things that people have different and similar opinions about,” it’s a pretty good guess that there is little of rhetorical value there. About the only conclusion a reader can draw is that the student is neither inspired nor able to hide this fact. This is the extent of the subtext, and it could conceivably qualify as bullshit. In this sense, Frankfurt’s characterization of bullshit as “unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (p. 63) is a useful differentiation.

  But aside from these rather artificial instances, if bullshit does occur at the rate Frankfurt suggests, we have an arduous task in separating the bullshit from more interesting and worthy rhetorical situations. We have all met people whom we know, almost from the moment of acquaintance, are full of bullshit. It is the salesman syndrome that some people just (naturally, it seems) possess. In one sense, then, poor rhetoric—a rhetoric of transparency or obviousness—can be construed as bullshit. For the person with salesman syndrome is certainly attempting to achieve identification with his audience; he may even be attempting to persuade others that he is upright or trustworthy. But he fails because his bullshit is apparent. He is a bad rhetorician in the sense that he fails to convince others that he should be taken seriously, that his words are worthy of attention and, possibly, action.

  Bullshit is something we can all recognize. Rhetoric is not. My remedy for this situation is simple: learn rhetoric. While students are required to take first-year composition at most colleges and universities, the extent of their training in rhetoric is usually limited to the rhetorical “modes”—yet another curricular misnomer which forces students to write preordained themes that reflect “skills” like definition, comparison and contrast, process analysis, and narrative.184 This is a far cry from teaching the extent of rhetorical analysis. At best, this method creates an artificial environment in which to generate predetermined papers and ideas. At worst, it perpetuates the illusion that this is how real writers really write. A better approach is to offer hypothetical situations that require a rhetorical response (for example, ask students to imagine that they are the principal of a high school with low test scores and are required to explain the problem to the parents). Having students read model essays and deconstruct, edit, critique, or imitate these essays is also good. Yet another approach is to have students watch for occurrences of interesting rhetorical situations—to produce a “commonplace book” of rhetoric. No matter how students learn to think about the language they use and the language that dominates their lives, as long as they are thinking about language, the
y have a better chance of not falling victim to bullshit. In this age of the Internet, this is an important skill. However, since not everyone is a teacher or a student, the common citizen must be diligent on her own.

  If the trend in graduate humanities programs favoring rhetoric is any indication, interest in a theoretical knowledge of language is on the rise. Likewise, since Frankfurt has opened the door for considering an issue that we can only conclude by its sheer popularity has some cultural currency in American society, we can also conclude that people have some genuine interest in the topic of language. His is not the last word on the subject, however. Nor is it the first. Thinkers have been discussing and writing about bullshit for millennia, and the service that Frankfurt has supplied is an opportunity for the general public to think about bullshit on more than just a casual, colloquial level. However, it is equally important to bring rhetoric to the table, if only because there is a remarkably vast gray area between what passes for Truth, truth, and what can be dismissed as bullshit, and this is the domain in which rhetoric thrives. Without some ability to navigate this area, without some understanding of how language works, we can only hope to avoid the pitfalls of bullshit by sheer chance.

  16

  Just Bullshit

  STEVE FULLER

  On Bullshit is the latest contribution to a long, distinguished, yet deeply problematic line of Western thought that has attempted to redeem the idea of intellectual integrity from the cynic’s suspicion that it is nothing but high-minded, self-serving prejudice.185 To their credit, some of history’s great bullshit detectors—though not Harry Frankfurt nor his role model Ludwig Wittgenstein—have pled guilty as charged without hesitation. Friedrich Nietzsche and his great American admirer, the journalist H.L. Mencken, who coined the euphemism “bunk,” come to mind. It helped that they were also cynics. They never held back from passing moral judgment on those they debunked. Moreover, both even tried to explain the adaptive advantage of specific forms of bullshit: Bullshitters may be craven but they are not stupid. Jews, Christians, and Muslims—or, more precisely, their clerics—may lack any definitive proof of a transcendent deity, but the sheer possibility of its existence does wonders to focus the mind and discipline the body in often politically effective ways.

  Nietzsche’s and Mencken’s multifarious pronouncements invited others to judge them: Does either the mentally unstable Nietzsche or the hard-drinking Mencken inspire confidence in our ability to live in a bullshit-free world? More generally, does the dogged pursuit of bullshit refine or coarsen one’s sense of humanity or, for that matter, raise or lower one’s likelihood of recognizing the truth if confronted with it? For everyone who saw Nietzsche and Mencken as exposing false prophets, there were others who viewed them as the ultimate Doubting Thomases. If bullshit is too easily found, and found to run too deep, the bullshit detector’s own judgment is reasonably called into question. Henrik Ibsen’s classic dramas, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, explored this prospect in terms of the need for a “life lie.” For their part, both Nietzsche and Mencken have been dubbed “nihilists” by their detractors, who reverse the harsh light of truth to reveal the bullshit detector as a self-appointed absolutist who happens to take an unhealthy interest in people whose minds he is incapable of either respecting or changing. Scratch a nihilist, and you get a dogmatist in exile.

  The bullshit detector aims to convert an epistemic attitude into a moral virtue: Reality can be known only by the right sort of person. This idea, while meeting with widespread approval by philosophers strongly tied to the classical tradition of Plato and Aristotle, is not lacking in dissenters. The line of dissent is best seen in the history of “rhetoric,” a word Plato coined to demonize Socrates’s dialectical opponents, the Sophists. The Sophists were prepared to teach anyone the art of winning arguments, provided you could pay the going rate. As a series of sophistic interlocutors tried to make clear to Socrates, possession of the skills required to secure the belief of your audience is the only knowledge you really need to have. Socrates famously attacked this claim on several fronts, which the subsequent history of philosophy has often conflated. In particular, Socrates’s doubts about the reliability of the Sophists’ techniques have been run together with a more fundamental criticism: Even granting the Sophists their skills, they are based on a knowledge of human gullibility, not of reality itself.

  Bullshit is sophistry under this charitable reading, which acknowledges that the truth may not be strong enough by itself to counteract an artfully presented claim that is not so much outright false as, in the British idiom, “economical with the truth.” In stressing the difference between bullshit and lies, Frankfurt clearly has this conception in mind, though he does sophistry a disservice by casting the bullshitter’s attitude toward the truth as “indifference.” On the contrary, the accomplished bullshitter must be a keen student of what people tend to regard as true, if only to cater to those tendencies so as to serve her own ends. What likely offends Frankfurt and other philosophers here is the idea that the truth is just one more tool to be manipulated for personal advantage. Conceptual frameworks are simply entertained and then discarded as their utility passes. The nature of the offense, I suspect, is the divine eye-view implicated in such an attitude—the very idea that one could treat in a detached fashion the terms in which people normally negotiate their relationship to reality. A bullshitter revealed becomes a god unmade.

  The theological overtones are deliberate. In the hierarchy of Christian sins, bullshit’s closest kin is hypocrisy, the official target of Nietzsche’s and Mencken’s ire. However, as Max Weber famously observed with regard to the rise of capitalism, Christians were not uniform in their condemnation of hypocrisy. Some treated it more as an unfortunate by-product in the efficient pursuit of ends. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography developed this position with striking explicitness.186 Indeed, Franklin modeled his understanding of “economical with the truth” on the economy one might exercise in the use of any valuable resource. A lesson he claimed to have learned in life is that one’s truthfulness should always be proportional to the demands of the speech situation. It’s always possible to say either too much or too little, speaking truthfully in each case, yet end up appearing as incompetent or dishonest. Such verbal misfirings benefit no one, though it may have served to represent some abstract sense of “truth.”

  Franklin’s advice is often read as a counsel of cynicism, but it marked a crucial transition in the conception of the human mind from a passive receptacle to a creative agency. Like many of the US founding fathers, Franklin’s Christianity veered toward Unitarianism, according to which the person of Jesus signifies that the human and the divine intellects differ in degree not kind. Just as the Biblical God communicated with humans on a “need-to-know” basis without total revelation, in part to stimulate our own God-like powers as free agents, so too should be the ethic that governs secular human communication. The result is that we elicit from each other our own creative potential. The success of this injunction can be measured by advertising’s colonization of corporate budgets in modern times: What sells is ultimately not intrinsic to the product but one’s idea of the product, which advertising invites the consumer to form for herself.

  Whatever one makes of Franklin’s theology, it’s clear that bullshitters qua hypocrites are rough cognitive equals of liars and truth-tellers, not people who lack a specific competence that, were they to possess it, would inhibit their propensity to bullshit. I stress this point because bullshit detectors gain considerable rhetorical mileage by blurring the epistemic and ethical dimensions of the phenomenon they wish to root out. Often this involves postulating a psychologically elusive state of integrity. To be sure, in these democratic times, bullshit detectors are rarely so overt as to declare that bullshitters lack “good character,” which might suggest something objectionable, let alone unprovable, about the bullshitters’ upbringing or even genetic makeup.187

  But the same impression can be conjured by oth
er means. For example, ten years ago, Alan Sokal notoriously argued that French literary philosophers and their American admirers would not have so easily inferred postmodern conclusions from cutting-edge mathematical physics had they been scientifically literate: If you knew more, or were better trained, you would behave better.188 But notice what “behave better” means: It is not that the Francophile philosophers should have derived anti-postmodern conclusions from cutting-edge science. Rather, according to Sokal, they should have refrained from drawing any conclusions whatsoever, since the science does not speak directly to the wider cultural issues that interest the Francophile philosophers. (This position is harder to maintain with a straight face when such great scientists as Bohr and Heisenberg seem to have crossed the line themselves.)

  Thus, while it is convenient to focus on the lightly veiled incompetence of bullshitters, bullshit detectors are ultimately disturbed by what they take to be the lack of self-discipline revealed by the bullshitter’s verbal camouflage. When venturing into terrain yet to be colonized by a recognized expertise, where “true” and “false” are not clearly signposted, bullshitters assert authoritatively rather than remain silent. What accounts for this difference in attitude? A distinction borrowed from Kant and conventionally used to understand the history of early modern philosophy comes to mind: Bullshitters and bullshit detectors examine the same uncertain knowledge situation from, respectively, a rationalist and an empiricist perspective. Bullshitters see the resolution of uncertainty in terms of selecting one from a number of already imaginable alternatives, whereas bullshit detectors seek some externally caused experience—a.k.a. evidence—to determine where lies the truth. I shall argue that the scientific method is largely a “dialectical synthesis” of these two attitudes, by which I mean that each cancels out the excesses of the other to produce a more powerful form of knowledge than either could provide alone.