Ep. 327: Harry Frankfurt on Bullshit and Authenticity (Part One)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 327 is something like what are alternatives to truth telling? And we read Harry Frankfurt's essay on from 1986. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. And while I do care that what I say is true, there are other competing, often compelling interests at play.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, not susceptible to the liberation which volitional necessity can provide in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, centrally interested in the truth values of my statements in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, blowing hot air with no concern for the truth at all in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Wes: All right. We had to have one, at least one person who's on the side of bullshit.

1:03 Mark: Mine was ambivalent taking stand. So we just recorded, or rather you all just recorded, a single week ago. Dylan and I are both about to go traveling, so we wanted to fit in one more episode before this all happened. And this was a short essay. It had been often requested. As we actually got into it, I felt like I want to know a little more about him and not just this article that I saw him talking about on Jon Stewart in 2006, I guess was when it got re released as a little bible like book. But it's the same essay exactly. And so I looked at a few other things and looked at some videos online and I understand he's most famous actually for stuff on in the free will debate from the late 60s, but maybe we'll return to him in a future episode as an introduction to him.

I was kind of sold. I really like this guy. He writes so clearly, so directly and about in a very humanistic way. Kind of what we were looking for when we were reading Grice and we were saying, is this the right way to do analytic philosophy? Well, Frankfurt is giving us a different way to do analytic philosophy. That's understandable by everyone. Still, I think pretty rigorous and very insightful.

2:16 Wes: Yeah, he's great. Although I do admit that when I started reading I thought, oh no, I don't know. I think we're in for another super analytic philosophy episode with lots of fine distinctions and boredom and so on. But as I read, he's a really sophisticated thinker and it really grew on me. Although it is, you know, it's. It's very precise. He's very precise. You know, it is ironic that a 20 page essay on Bullshit was turned into a. What was presented as a 70 to 90 page book was definitely not a book. It was sold as such. But in any case, really great. And the other essay that we read for the day, superb. You know, the importance of what we care about 1982.

3:07 Mark: I didn't even want to mention that because I wasn't sure if everybody got to it.

3:10 Dylan: There's a little bit of a discovery here. I remember seeing the book show up in St. John's Bookstore and I picked it up and I saw this little book. And in fact, it was a little book. And when we got the essay, which was 20 pages long, I didn't believe it because the book I remembered being like 60 pages long. I was like, how could it possibly be? Except for the magic of margins, even

3:35 Wes: the letters are spaced far, really far apart.

3:38 Mark: Which.

3:39 Dylan: It really is funny. It is funny that it's not bullshitted. I completely agree about the clarity. One of the things after the first few pages that made me enamored with his style of analytic philosophy is his choice of examples are lively in a way that makes it much more interesting to read. Like, so at the beginning of On Bullshit, he starts engaging with humbug, which I just thought was served both purposes of being precise and something he could unpack from previous analyses. You know, this guy, Max Black, but starting out talking about bullshit by talking about humbug, it just was delightful in a certain kind of way.

4:22 Mark: Yeah, I mean, that's not an example. He gets into examples and he actually

4:26 Dylan: says, fair enough, it's not an example, Mr. Precise.

4:29 Mark: Well, he says, I'm not going to get into here varieties of humbuggery, trying to get the phenomenon. And so he's like doing his. He says, it's a very limited literature search here. Here's one book I found, Max Black's the Prevalence of Humbug, which I did download for us. I did not look, I felt like we got enough of it out of this.

4:50 Wes: Yeah, we shouldn't ever read anything with the word humbug in the title ever. It's bad enough that it was in the body of this essay. It made it seem like that was one of the first things that made me cautious. It made it seem like this might be outdated or something like that. But, you know, Black's account of humbug is a really useful pivot point for him. It gives him a good starting point for talking about the structure of something which is similar to lying, but is not lying. And maybe bullshit, maybe. Maybe the Same thing or maybe a bit different. So it's a good pivot point and it provides him with a list of criteria that we can get into. And then at a certain point it starts off modestly right by treating of humbug and Black's account. And then it just kind of explodes into something quite fascinating.

5:42 Seth: Yeah, I will say, while I generally agree with the assessment, I don't think I was quite as enthusiastic as Mark was about. There are points at which it gets a little. Both essays we read were a little repetitive, which is maybe, just maybe it's stylistic and maybe it was just me getting a little fatigued. But I did think that he does a very nice job of parsing, which is what Wes is pointing to, of saying, like, here's this thing, it's important bullshit. In our society, it seems to be everywhere. Nobody's bothered to actually try to define what it is and get an understanding of it.

That seems worthwhile. I've looked around the literature and here's what I found, this guy's Humbug essay. And he does a really great job of parsing it and then saying, here's where it's deficient with respect to what we want to explore. And boom, off he goes. If the greats could only get away with needing their 20 pages or their 67 page books instead of their 900 page, three volume critiques, we'd all be much better off.

6:45 Mark: All right, we need to actually give the thesis. I know we want to work toward it, but let's just get it out there so it's on the table. That bullshit is an attitude that is unconcerned with the truth of what you're saying, that you are.

6:59 Wes: Spoiler alert, Mark, you have some other

7:02 Mark: agenda, probably showing how knowledgeable you are, showing that you have something to say and so you're saying things. But it is, as Dylan's intro, merely hot air. It has no informational. Well, this is a question.

7:21 Dylan: Bullshit can have all kinds of information. It could be true or false. But the bullshitting is unconcerned with the truth of what they're saying. I mean, you gave examples, I think, of what would be the aim, but I think you come up with a long list of them.

7:38 Wes: It's important also that. Because he starts out right, so in starting with Black's definition of humbug and saying so, it's a kind of deception. It involves deceptive misrepresentation, which Frankfurt takes to mean it's deliberate and has something to do with the perpetrator's State of mind, which is to say it's a misrepresentation of. Of the perpetrator's state of mind. So when we lie about something, it's not just that we're deceiving people, oh, there's a quarter in my pocket. It's not just that we're deceiving them about some fact of the matter.

There isn't a quarter in my pocket. We seem to also be lying about what our state of mind is. And this is going to become important later on. It seems nitpicky, but we seem to be lying about what our state of mind is, that we believe that there's a quarter in our pocket. And that, according to Frankfurt, is the particular thing that Black has kind of seized upon, I think, with humbug. I think the idea is that humbug, regardless of whether it's trying to deceive us about a fact, is focused about giving us a false impression of our state of mind.

8:48 Dylan: Humbug has a specific intent.

8:50 Wes: Just jumping into this Fourth of July example will make it much clearer than talking about it abstractly. So when someone gives a big grand speech at the fourth of July, a public figure, and says, maybe we should read it.

9:04 Dylan: Yeah. Consider a Fourth of July orator who goes on bombastically about, quote, our great and blessed country, whose founding fathers, under divine guidance, created a new beginning for mankind. This is surely humbug.

9:19 Wes: Yeah. The important thing is not that they're lying. They don't care what the audience thinks about the Founding Father. They're trying to create an impression of themselves as a patriot. So this becomes kind of the key to bullshit, even though it really is just the beginning of the account. But, you know, as Mark pointed out in the very beginning, lack of concern for the truth, as opposed to the desire to create a belief in something false in another involving some factual matter. The thing he says right after that is this doesn't really quite capture the essential character of bullshit.

9:53 Mark: Yeah, I'm not thinking of this in linear terms. I'm wanting to just jump ahead to another example that he gives because this is one that he shares in common. This is Black's example, and this is going to also be bullshit, according to Frankfurt. Another example that I think we could relate to in real life, because that one is just like any politician talking anytime ever.

10:15 Dylan: Yeah, It's a kind of overstatement.

10:17 Mark: Yes. It's. Yes, hyperbole. I think Frankfurt is going too far in that case by saying the speaker is not concerned either to inform you of the things that happened. Or he's only concerned with just giving you the impression that he is a patriotic person. Right. So he's not even concerned with either showing that he believes this stuff or that making you believe this stuff, which would be the normal intention connected to Grice of making a factual statement that it has some intended perlocutionary effect to bring in a fancy word from Austin that is over and beyond that, I don't know.

I would think that you could speaking in that way, you are actually, in addition to trying to, you know, look impressive, you could actually be, you know, this is the kind of thing like singing the national anthem or something that saying these inspiring words is supposed to be the kind of thing that inspires group pride, a civic patriotism. And yes, we're going, it's a ceremony of sorts. But does that mean it is purely a self serving ceremony or could it actually have a real function that is maybe not so concerned with the literal truth, but also not intentionally lying and it has this civic purpose?

11:35 Seth: Absolutely it could. The examples he uses, as I was reading them, did not strike me as excluding other variations. And this is what Wes pointed to when he talks about this analytic method, right, that we're going to be like, well, what about this variation on the trolley problem? Or what if it's 10 thin men versus 10 fat men, you know, or there's two switches on the track or the track is laced with, you know, chicken fat. All the kinds of things that they do to try to tease out your intuition. What he was trying to do in the example of that speaker is to basically tease out the distinction between concern with the truth of their assertions and the belief systems of the hearer versus not. But that's not the extent to which the examples can be made. And I don't think it covers the full gamut of the discourse in which this could potentially take place.

12:30 Wes: He gives the example of bull sessions, right?

12:32 Seth: I had a little bit of trouble understanding that.

12:35 Wes: Yeah, what he's doing is he's looking at a little bit, doing a bit of etymology, right, to tease out our intuitions about what we're getting at with. And he's looking at various different kinds of meanings that we get, you know, so one of them involves shooting the bull or having bull sessions. And in that case it's not a case of bullshit. It's actually a case in which people go into a situation and they know they want to talk about these personal, emotional laden aspects of their life, religion, politics, sex. And we get a certain amount of leeway because we, we go in knowing we're not going to be taken seriously.

The way Frankfurt puts it is that we can try, kind of try out various thoughts and attitudes and see how other people respond, see what it's like to feel ourselves saying those things. And the purpose in that case is not to communicate beliefs. And there's no pretense of that. It's not bullshit because we're not pretending like we're trying to communicate our sincerely held beliefs. It's the same thing if you're doing stand up comedy or it's the same thing if you're in any kind of play frame, let's call it in life, if you're at play as opposed to doing something literal.

If you're doing something more figurative, then the same standards don't apply and the accusation of can't apply. And so what Mark is suggesting is that this fourth of July example really is more like the bull session example, falls more within the play frame exception to the accusation of which I think is a legitimate possible critique, as we saw from the Nietzsche essay and then from other episodes, you know, Nietzsche's on truth and lie and a lot of other thinking about Nietzsche and other figures untruth pervades social life. And it doesn't necessarily do that in a pernicious way.

It's necessary in a way for the very reason that the bull session example highlights.

14:31 Dylan: I mean, I think that the example of a frame of play is a good one as an alternative. But Even for the 4th of July example, thinking about what would feel like a typical politician, unless they're one possibility, is that that politician is just bullshitting in the way that Frankfurt would say, right, that's one possibility. I think another one of a frame of play is possible too, but something closer to an encomium or some kind of, I'll call it, even if it's overstated praise or primarily focused on the positive right, or a particular interpretation, those ways of speaking, it's not that they're unconcerned with the truth at all. In fact, I think that they are concerned with the truth. It might be not the whole truth.

15:20 Wes: Right.

15:21 Dylan: It's not like, you know, a kind of speaker for the dead kind of thing where I'm going to speak the whole truth in some kind of balanced way about a person that's passed, but it's still intended to reflect something truthful about the person. And that particular overstatement might not go all the way that far. But it's completely possible that the person speaking that is intending to frame something praiseworthy on purpose. In that way, we should keep in

15:50 Wes: mind that Frankfurt is elaborating on Black's account and giving it a charitable reading, trying to reinforce it, only to say that, in fact, this doesn't capture the essential character of bullshit, and it doesn't capture the essential character of bullshit, because it turns out at the end of the essay that the misrepresentation at stake is not so much about the state of mind of the speaker, and in this case, whether or not they're trying to misrepresent themselves as, for instance, as a patriot, it's really about misrepresenting what it is they're up to.

He'll say it's misrepresenting the project that they are engaged in. So as long as everyone is on the same page and there's misrepresentation of what if an activity is really figurative or rhetorical or whatever you want to call it, as long as that's not being misrepresented as being factual or something like that, then the accusation of bullshit, I don't think will will land.

16:50 Mark: I wonder about this play exception, because I had originally read you reminded me that he actually says these bull sessions are not bullshit, that they're just bullshit adjacent for the reason that you just gave, that they allow flexibility with the truth, allow a certain not caring whether you're saying is true or not. But it's within a particular context. And I had written in my notes next to that locker room talk that is this the reason that the infamous, you know, grab him by the pussy, you know, was taken as they were just having a bull session.

It should be within the play exception. And it would be very ironic if, given that the whole reason that this is still a very vibrant article is because of Trump is if we ended up giving Trump a pass because he's always engaged in the play exception. Oh, I'm just talking to my audience and. But I got to think that, no, from Frankfurt's point of view, it is a paradigm case of bullshit.

17:49 Wes: Trump, I think, transcends the distinction between bullshit and play.

17:53 Dylan: I think it is bullshit. But the excuse that he's giving is exactly what you say. So the excuse being given of locker room talk is saying that falls in the play exception. But this is the way in which a complete and utter inveterate bullshit artist works, is that they're completely unconcerned with the truth of the matter of anything. And so, as Frankfurt will say later, they'll say whatever they need to say to serve the purposes of the moment at any given time. And so there it's a read of the moment that the way in which that comment during that interview would be acceptable socially is if it fell into the play exception of a bull session. And so that's, that's what's said. That claim is bullshit.

18:44 Wes: So I think, you know, a better example is his rallies, or his rallies where he is manifestly involved in play in a certain sense. He's joking around, he's saying outrageous, literally untrue things which he takes to be true at some emotional level. But the point is that, you know, he does display this disregard for the literal truth. It's not about that, but he clearly is trying to create a certain impression or belief about what is or what is not the case in his audience. So I think in a way he's exploiting the play frame, which you can do for the sake of bullshit. In a weird way, you can take the play frame and subordinate it to the project of bullshit. So it gets very complicated.

19:33 Dylan: That's what I was trying to say about that locker room talk excuse is exactly that he's exploiting the play frame for his bullshit.

19:42 Mark: Well, I think it might be the case that even in these so called bull sessions that the ambiguity is there. I think we talked about this recently in terms of irony, that you can use irony just as sarcasm or you could use it as. Well, I'm not sure if I really mean this or not. I'm just going to say it to see how it sounds. I'm going to maybe draw out the logical consequence. Maybe this is what Plato is doing in the Cratylus and other circumstances. And maybe you don't know till you're done. And maybe the different. The people in the discussion have different opinions about whether this was all in play or not.

20:15 Dylan: I guess I never thought of irony being play. I thought that in its intention. But we'll have to have another episode on what actual irony is. Right.

20:24 Wes: You take a kind of distance from what it is you're asserting. Right. So it's much like being in the.

20:30 Mark: Yeah, so yeah. And that is something that bullshit is definitely doing, that you're saying, I'm trying to achieve some purpose, whether it is a ceremonial purpose, whether it is giving lip service to something that somebody else has told you you have to do, but you really don't see the point of doing it. There's many different reasons. And so, you know, it's not a dedication towards truth, it's dedication towards some other purpose such that what you say is not to the point. And this is what I was trying to say before. He actually says in here on, you know, this next page here, 13 in our PDF, that it's one of the ways of interpreting this is it's hot air.

It is. 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. So Dylan, you're absolutely right that he also said before, well, you can't actually say true things. You can say, you know, blatant lies. It's not that it's nonsense, but that it is not to the purpose. And so I think the hot air thing is just a way of saying it is not on point.

21:40 Seth: Yes, I struggle with a sense in which the speaker, the bullshit artist, versus, let's say, the ironist. I struggle understanding the level at which intention or self awareness comes into play between those two. Because it does seem in the same way that a liar is aware that what they're saying is untruthful and is in some sense aware of and has, I don't want to say fidelity to the truth, but at least the existence of truth and is trying to, you know, somebody who's speaking ironically is certainly aware of what the actual facts on the ground are, and they are trying to say something in distinction to that or set up some kind of frame where what they're saying, I'm just not sophisticated enough to be able to define irony.

But my point is, you get, I hope that there's an awareness of reality or truth or the as is or the state of affairs that what he's saying is for the bullshit artists, it's irrelevant. It doesn't really matter what's actually the case because what they're saying is said as a function of trying to project or accomplish something about themselves. It's not about some shared environment that we would call the world that they're trying to convey, but instead it's about them.

23:09 Wes: That's the humbug black example. But it's really going to turn out to be not exactly to be a misrepresentation of them, but as he puts it, a misrepresentation of what it is they're up to. So it's not the state of affairs. Let me, you know, we can read the part if you want, but basically it's not about the state of affairs. It's not about the speaker's beliefs, what he's attempting to deceive us about is his enterprise. He misrepresents what he's up to, which is to say, and this goes back to the idea of hot air and purpose. There's kind of a telos to be pretentious, another variant of bullshit, but there's a telos to the conversation, to the discursive activity.

There's an innate purpose, or at least a represented purpose. And bullshit misrepresents the purpose of the particular discursive activity. One is engaged in something that bull sessions do not do. They are explicitly within the playframe. The playframe is advertised, so they're not bullshit or bullshit adjacent. It's that misrepresentation of the goal of one's speech which is really important.

24:16 Dylan: And this is where things can get complicated depending upon, say, a public figure who is manifestly, it sounds like they're in an overstated play frame kind of speech, but for lack of a better term, they're clearly intentions at play. And there are things being persuaded of that are maybe not associated with the content directly. And there's a funny kind of splatter effect, right? You say, in being unconcerned with the truth of the whole of what you're saying, you say enough things that might touch enough people in a particular way that you're able to be persuasive in some way. And to me, that's one of the characteristics of a bullshit artist, right, is that they're in being unconcerned with the truth of things and it being sort of the conditions under which they're hiding their concern for what the aim is at. I forget how exactly you put it, Wes, but what the aim of the conversation.

25:22 Wes: Misrepresenting the purpose of the.

25:24 Dylan: Misrepresenting the purpose. So it's not just being unconcerned, but actually they are in their speech, lying about the purpose for which the conversation is going to.

25:32 Mark: Are there not activities, ceremonial activities, that it's ambiguous what the purpose actually is, even to the people engaged in it. So if you, you know, have to recite your prayers every day, the official purpose is to directly praise God in a way that you feel it and stuff. But a lot of times, you know, if it's a routine, you're not going to be in the mood, you're not going to feel it. So what is the purpose? Is it bullshit every time it comes out of your mouth, or is it in fact a conscious habit of trying to get yourself, oh, if you don't Feel it. Just fake it till you feel it. You know, even to every time you say I love you to someone in your house, maybe you don't feel it at that moment. Is it bullshit? Should you only say it when you are actually feeling it?

26:18 Wes: Right.

26:19 Dylan: Then I think that's an interesting case. Like, let's take the prayer case, right? I think that people who do engage in that would talk about that as being a habit, that the purpose of that isn't necessarily entailed with the explicit praising of God only. It would be very sensible to talk about that as a habit that has an intention that's other than the content of the words. Right. And I think people would say that about other kinds of social activities. Right. This goes into the untruthfulness of social interactions, which aren't the same thing as lying interactions that Wes was referring to from untruth and lies.

26:58 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think, Mark, you know, the example of saying I love you to someone you don't love would be a lie, not bullshit. But then there's the case of saying I love you to someone who you do love, but not.

27:11 Dylan: You may not be feeling it that second.

27:13 Wes: You're not feeling it in that particular moment. That's a very subtle case. And I don't know how to.

27:18 Mark: I guess the word love is ambiguous enough.

27:21 Wes: Yes, it's an ambiguous word. So I think you and Dylan are getting at something really important, which is this possible intrusion of the playframe or bull session exemption, you know, or excuse, and many cases in which they're hard to distinguish. Even the person giving the Fourth of July speech can say, look, I know the Founding Fathers weren't under divine guidance. My audience knows that we're not that stupid. We're trying to get ourselves into a certain state of mind, into a certain worshipful emotional state towards our country. And those words reflect a kind of emotional truth, even if they don't reflect a literal truth.

And that's the type of excuse you can make. And that may be true to some extent. It may be true for some of the audience and not for the others or some speakers. And not. And so there is always an ambiguity. And then when you get into, say, mythology and religion and even fiction and any other creative activity, no one thinks, right, that the novel is meant to be taken as the literal truth. Possibly it's meant to convey some deeper truth to us. But we all know what the deal is with that. We all know what the activity. You know, what the novelist is purportedly up to.

He's not disguising being a rug salesman as being a novelist so that we end up why am I buying all these rugs after read this amazing novel that told me what the meaning of life was, Right? So the crucial thing is there's not a misrepresentation of the discursive activity that

29:00 Mark: James Joyce was just trying to show us how smart he was.

29:03 Dylan: I mean, this just might be another, just another example. But if someone says, I have the best kids that ever lived, my parents are the best parents ever, right?

29:13 Mark: Actually, I took a survey,

29:17 Wes: right? So when are we bullshitting and when are we just being figurative or I

29:22 Dylan: would adamantly say the person who says those things isn't bullshitting, but it's also not true that they're lying. This is where the whole thing about truth and lying, well, I mean, you gave the example with novels, right? It's more complicated about what you mean by it.

29:35 Wes: And it takes two to tango. You know, it really depends in part on who your audience is, whether you can be construed as misrepresenting what it is you're doing. And so, I mean, this type of thing happens all the time where people are getting offended because they don't actually understand that someone is in the play frame. They don't understand what the other person is up to, or they pretend not to understand, which I think is often what's going on. The other thing that Frankfurt will challenge here after he kind of gets out of this humbug section, is the idea that bullshit necessarily involves some sort of carelessness.

Because, you know, look at advertising, look at public relations, exquisitely crafted. Whether even if bullshit is, yeah, you know, it involves a lack of concern for the truth. It's not a lack of concern in general and it's not the liar's concern, which is to make you believe something that's false for whatever reason. I mean, some fact, you know, something that's not the case, but it is concerned with something and it can be done with great craftsmanship. Just like novel writing. You can be a bullshit artist of incredible talent.

30:41 Seth: I was put in mind of the experts on TV, you know, now that we have this 24 hour news cycle and they're constantly bringing in former chief of staff for so and so, former defense, blah, blah, blah, to comment on the situation. And this is a person who's potential, I mean, possibly credentialed, possibly those credentials are relevant to the situation at hand and whose job is simply to fill some portion of time and respond to speculative and meaningless questions from a news person. And I guess perpetuate their own career so that they can come back again at some point in the future.

I mean, to me, that's actually exactly what it's almost like. That's the bullshit cycle or the. That's a career in bullshitting, is to be, you know, or just maybe previously an expert witness in court. Although you would think there would be some stronger connection to evidence there than you would have in the, like on MSNBC or CNBC or whatever.

31:53 Dylan: I just want to say it depends. Right? And so then you immediately want to get into, well, what's a bullshit detector? When. When do you know it's bullshit? How does bullshit reveal itself? It's not the case that everybody who is an expert witness, or even, even anybody who is on, interviewed on a news show is a bullshit artist. Right? But it's also true that not everybody who has the named credentials that you ought to believe them is not bullshitting you.

32:24 Seth: By the way, I wasn't claiming that everybody who does this, it just seems like it's a bullshit job because your job is to come on like, hey, we just got news that something happened. We don't have any details, we don't have any evidence. We've not heard from the local people on the ground. But 20 years ago you served in a capacity where you might have seen something like this. So please tell us your opinion about what might be happening right now. What could be going on in their mind? What possibilities are being. You know, that's a bullshit job.

32:55 Wes: Could be bullshit in the sense that it purports to be informative, right? When its function really is to fill airtime, might be informative, and then maybe everyone knows it's just for entertainment, in which case, is that still bullshit? But it reminds me of what Frankfurt says when he asked the question why there is so much bullshit towards the end of the essay. And the answer is that people are required to talk about things that they don't actually know about. And part of that is a function of a democratic society in which we're all supposed to have opinions about everything and what's right and wrong and good and bad and about political issues.

So it becomes a part of our public life. And so naturally, you would see it on television a lot on news shows, but it reminded me of Plato. I'm surprised that Frankfurt never talks about Plato and the Gorgias and rhetoricians and Sophists, because this is precisely the claim that Plato is making about rhetoric, which is that it is basically pandering to an audience by people who are not guided by the knowledge of the thing that they're purportedly giving an account of. They have some other aim, which is ultimately to manipulate the audience.

34:15 Dylan: This is why I am skeptical, certainly, of the novelty of bullshit, which, I mean, Frankfurt doesn't make a strong argument for the novelty of bullshit. He acknowledges that, well, it might just feel like there's more bullshit than there used to be just because you get old and curmudgeonly or whatever. I don't know, you feel like everything was better in the past than it is now. But then he brings up something like, maybe it has to do with the proliferation of modes of communication or democracy. But Gorgias is a great example. But even Odysseus, there's all kinds of things where even just in the. I haven't read a lot of Cicero, but I'm sure that you can find Roman orators who are clearly bullshitting. Right? And I'm just thinking about just market interactions on the street. It just doesn't feel like bullshit is in any way new or novel.

35:06 Seth: No, I think you're right. I don't think he never. I don't think, makes the claim, but he does make the claim that it seems to be more prevalent, and that's probably a function more of mass media, mass forms of communication. I do think there's something to the idea that culturally, people feel more.

35:26 Mark: Meh.

35:26 Seth: Maybe not. I was gonna say used to be, right. They'd say, like, you know, opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one. I feel like nowadays there's a pressure to have an opinion about everything that gets thrown in your face. It used to be that we read the news because we didn't know what was going on and we wanted to learn something about it. And maybe we would take in several different sources of information before we would try to form an opinion. But there was a perspective that. I don't know. I'm just thinking about when I was growing up and I used to read the newspaper and be like, okay, tell me.

Give me a perspective on what's happening. You know, stuff overseas. Now it feels like there is an implicit, at least, if not explicit pressure to not just pass judgment on everything that's happening everywhere in the world, but to have some kind of emotional or moral response to it. And then it's actually, I think he says it in the essay or somewhere where, you know, it's like, it's okay to say, I don't know, or it's okay to say, I have no opinion. I don't have enough evidence to make a decision about this. And that almost is the minority opinion now.

That's the thing that's held. If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention. Surely you've seen that bumper sticker and I'm sorry, I'm sorry if that's the case.

36:47 Dylan: I'm skeptical that that's any different. The level of gossip and you know, since the printing press was invented, you know how many pamphlets and tabloids, I mean, I feel like the tabloid was invented the day after the Gutenberg Bible was printed on the printing press. And that wasn't because somebody invented had paper and all of a sudden they could come up with a gossip rag. That's just because the way people interacted all the time anyway. And there's nothing new about that now. It might be that there's a kind of proliferation that's happened because of the way media has proliferated, that there's more of it in our lives.

And so therefore the experience with it is heightened because there's a higher volume that might be true. And maybe there's something to think through about the toll that takes on us and the way it affects our lives. Just the change in volume, the way in which the change of rate of technology affects us.

37:44 Mark: Sure. But you would also think that there's an inverse effect or at least of certain kinds of bullshit. You're going to get caught on the Cliff Clavins of the world, the sitting with your friends pretending that you are know it all and you're making shit up. And anybody can google what you're saying right there and call you an asshole. Like either you are seriously in the play mode and that is just a bull session. But it seems like somebody like that is actually no presenting themselves like this is how their self esteem works. So immediately shooting them down should have some deleterious effect.

Somebody on a political podcast talking about the way Joe Biden because he's so old, like it used to be that you could just go from town to town and when somebody asks you a question, you could just like, oh, here's an anecdote and it's complete bullshit, but nobody's going to be able to fact check you right then. And you know that that is something that is. I don't know if it's actually lessening, but it's much more embarrassing when people do that.

38:44 Wes: Now let me tell you about the time I stood up to Corn Pop.

38:47 Dylan: It's a bunch of malarkey.

38:49 Wes: The other thing that points to that Frankfurt points to, like Plato, is the link between and relativism, although Frankfurt uses the word skepticism. But the idea is that you can be so unconcerned with the truth as to deny that the truth matters, or that we have reliable access to the objective truth, or that the truth is worth seeking. So there's this rejection of the possibility of knowing how things are anti realism. That kind of relativism gets coupled with this retreat into the ideal of sincerity. So the idea we can be honest about ourselves instead of external reality to speak our own particular truth goes along with the kind of therapeutic culture we live in and the idea people have of what therapy is.

So I thought this was kind of a cool way to end the essay by suggesting that that sort of sincerity itself is bullshit, because it is not the case that it's easy to know ourselves or that we have this easy access to our own inner truth and inner lives while we don't have access to what is the case about the external world. In fact, the inner world is harder to know in many ways than the external world. So that you know when you represent yourself as being authentic by talking about yourself and by despairing of talking about what is the case outside of oneself, that that in a way is bullshit.

40:25 Dylan: I get it. And when I read that, it felt a little too cute by half when he ends the essay. Insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. I get it. Right? But you know, in this case, it is a form of sincerity, right? It's sincerity as opposed. In which case it's sincerity as that's insincere. It's insincere sincerity. And then so I thought that that was sort of.

40:51 Wes: Well, sometimes people believe their own, which is a new wrinkle.

40:55 Dylan: It's a new wrinkle.

40:56 Wes: It's.

40:57 Mark: Well, that seems a good place to stop. Let's come back next week and talk about the 1982 essay, the Importance of what We Care about or become a Partially Examined Life citizen. Partially examinedlife.com support and you can hear it right now. See ya.