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Believing Your Own Bullshit
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For an academic text written by an academic philosopher, Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit has had a very unusual reception history. Published as a short essay in 1986 in The Raritan Quarterly, and then part of his collection of articles The Importance of What We Care About in 1988, Frankfurt’s editor at Princeton University Press suggested in 2005 that “On Bullshit” be published in stand-alone book format. It became an unexpected hit. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for 27 weeks, and even earned Frankfurt a short spot on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. It is rare indeed for a philosopher to get that kind of exposure, and rarer still not to see it go to his head and tempt him into being a “thought leader” or intellectual huckster. Deep praise, then, to Prof. Frankfurt.
As is often the case when an academic talking-point hits the airwaves, On Bullshit acquired an extended half-life, and provided a framework for all manner of political analyses. Brexit, Trumpism, televised debates, were understood to be events that fed on bullshit as if it were ambrosia, the food of the gods. Bullshit was everywhere as an explanatory device. Whenever this happens it is advisable and often fruitful to ask oneself whether such an omnipresent phenomenon is all it is cracked up to be. This goes double for philosophers. As J.L. Austin is said to have observed, overgeneralization…
