Harry Frankfurt Quotes

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

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.

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself. But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

Civilizations... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires.

To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know—and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of—a great many truths.

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?

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. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a particular point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to have that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who takes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as is required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist'.

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 are more extensive than 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.

Yale philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, “One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.

Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of understanding why our attitude towards bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one...

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.

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 are more excessive than 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. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

Morality, as I understand it, has to do particularly with how we ought to conduct ourselves in our relations with others.

So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus, Yale University (From his book, On Bullshit)

From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

It is in this sense that Pascal’s statement is unconnected to a concern with truth: she is not concerned with the truth-value of what she says. That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false. Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

We cannot think of ourselves as creatures whose rationality endows us with an especially significant advantage over others—indeed, we cannot think of ourselves as rational creatures at all—unless we think of ourselves as creatures who recognize that facts, and true statements about the facts, are indispensable in providing us with reasons for believing (or for not believing) various things and for taking (or for not taking) various actions. If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted “rationality” good-bye.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt famously differentiates between lies and bullshit. Lies, he claims, are untruths deliberately intended to deceive. Bullshit, on the other hand, comes about when someone has no real interest in whether or not something they are saying is true or false at all.

The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.

Understanding media alone will not bring about a better world (the Kingdom of God?), but ought to be the foundation of good works that may bring it about: constructing an environment of truly free-flowing and uninhibited information, to be sure, but also reaffirming and supporting the structures of thought that allow us to identify error and falsehood, and empowering us to label bullshit as bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt suggests. The global village, with its “rich and creative mix” full of “creative diversity” can be the perfect venue to put bullshit on an equal footing with truth. I see nothing in this situation that is either constructive or Catholic.

What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.

The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who — with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. —HARRY G. FRANKFURT

When a honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.

If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say. It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not—or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept. Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely - simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked.

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.22

Inasmuch as it is based on a complete rejection of the significance of the truth and the moral duty we owe to it, Harry G. Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is actually more corrosive, a more destructive social force, than good old-fashioned lying. Harry G. Frankfurt has considerably fewer followers on Instagram than my wife does.

Rudi Dutschke summed up his strategy in 1967 with the famous phrase, “the long march through the institutions,” which Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described as “working against the established institutions while working within them” and building “counterinstitutions.

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.

First man: "How are your children?" Second man: "Compared to what?" Harry Frankfurt, Equality as a Moral Ideal

First man: "How are your children?" Second man: "Compared to what?" Equality as a Moral Ideal

Perhaps we may be, for a time, blissfully ignorant or happily deceived, and in those ways, despite all of the difficulties that endanger us, we may temporarily avoid being especially upset or disturbed. In the end, however, our ignorance and our false beliefs are likely just to make our circumstances worse.

First man: How are your kids? Second man: Compared to what?

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death which we ourselves produce and which, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.

The doctrines of egalitarianism and of sufficiency are logically independent: considerations that support the one cannot be presumed to provide support also for the other.

That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true, not, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

pleonastic.

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.

from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough.

When working out energetically, people frequently feel more completely and more vividly alive than they do before exercising, when they are less fully and less directly aware of their own capacities, when they are less brimming with a sense of their own vitality.