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

0:07 Seth: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 327 part 2. We've been discussing Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Going to move pretty quickly here to another essay, the Importance of what We Care about. Just as one example of what is the alternative. If he's warning us against bullshit, then what is this moral core? I mean, he did write a later essay called On Truth, right? At the point that On Bullshit got really famous. I listened to the audiobook of that last night, and it is not necessary. Like, I've been so impressed with everything else I heard from Frankfurt, but it's just like, why is truth important to us?

Well, because you have to get around in the world and you have to know true things because we're dealing with other people and you have to be sincere, you have to be honest with each other to have a sense of intimacy. Except in the. You know, in a play zone or something where everybody knows that you're lying. Just, you know, but it's not. It's not actually deceptive. You know, it was very. Just obvious, things like that. I mean, I guess there's something that we could come up with in terms of Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie. You could read it as a response to that, that Nietzsche says there are limits to what we would want out of truth.

You know, that there are some maybe fundamental things about our being maybe we wouldn't want to know. And Frankfurt, you know, directly says against all that stuff. So anyway, this Importance of what We Care about is one of the essays where another one of his is called Taking Ourselves Seriously. And he, you know, he's just known as a. A philosopher who cares about moral psychology. And, you know, it was written about free will and things like that and moral luck and just takes moral considerations very seriously and trying to make them just as perspicacious.

Is that the right word? As. As he did with bullshit here.

1:49 Dylan: So he starts off the Importance of what we care about by setting it up as a kind of triumvirate in philosophy, which I think he's. He's sort of asserting this, that in epistemology, we worry about what to believe. In ethics, we worry about how to behave. And then he holds out a third branch of inquiry concerning. About the question of what to care about that he's asserting is a fundamental preoccupation of human existence, which I think in some ways the essay is really aimed at persuading you of that fact and unearthing a little bit about. The richness of thinking about what to care about in the beginning of the essay is mostly, I think, distinguishing from what to care about from ethical and moral questions.

That just because you knew something about the moral question about how to behave, that's not going to answer the question about what you should care about. And what you should care about, he'll argue, is more fundamental to. About how we conduct our actual lives.

2:53 Mark: Yeah.

2:54 Wes: He points out that most of us don't just care about ethics. We care about our personal projects. We care about people in our lives. We care about groups with which we identify and we care about our ideals, even our moral ideals. The way we care about them is not necessarily in and of itself something that's ethical in the sense of obligated. We may want to devote ourselves to a life of selflessness and go way beyond what, you know, obligation might require. And that the impulse to do that is not, strictly speaking, a moral impulse. It is based in this concept of care. So care, in a way, is a category that is more fundamental than ethics. It is prior to it in some sense, as we'll see.

3:39 Dylan: Yeah. And there's in fact, he goes as far to say that understanding moral obligation doesn't not in fact inform at all what you ought to care about or why you would care about it. Even when people would sometimes assert that they care about their they're doing X or Y or Z because it's their moral obligation, he's going to assert that that's not actually informing really what's going on. They're not caring about their moral obligation because it's an obligation.

4:07 Mark: Yeah. I remember in trying to teach ethics, I would get responses from students like, well, why would we always choose the ethical things? Couldn't other considerations override that? And I was interpreting that as you misunderstand. When I say ethical, I mean all of normativity. So whenever you determine what I should do, you're engaging in an ethical pursuit. But Frankfurt acknowledges, no, no, we have a certain set of obligations and considerations that we consider to be moral ones. And then we have other ones that could be very legitimate things that we care about.

And we could just decide, I'm just going to not even pay attention to what the moral thing to do is now, because, you know, this might be an answer to sort of utilitarian thing like your child is in trouble or versus two other children. Who do you save? Well, it's not that you make the moral judgment, I'm going to save my child based on proximity or something like you actually ignore the moral facts and just pursue what you care about, and that that might be justifiable is what Frankfurt says.

5:09 Wes: I love this variation on the trolley problem. This is really good. What if it's my child versus all the other children in the world? Which will I choose?

5:19 Mark: Well, my child is the best child

5:20 Wes: in the world, but this implicates love, which we'll talk about, and family and loyalty and all these sorts of values that, strictly speaking, fall outside of ethics and can, of course, lead us to do very unethical things. I mean, the Mafia is the paradigmatic example of that. It's an organization that is run on the concept of loyalty and the concept of the extension of familial relationships to others who aren't literally part of your own family. And loyalty to your compatriots, to your comrades, is more important than any other ethical consideration.

So this type of dilemma, I think is actually quite common for all of us, or I don't even know if it's a dilemma. I don't even think most of us have to think about it, you know, when it comes to making a decision about whether we are going to do something altruistic for a friend or family member versus devoting our time to larger causes that affect more people. I don't even know if for most of us that actually even represents a dilemma.

6:30 Dylan: I mean, I think that Frankfurt would assert that caring about having a value, that you should be ethically concerned is something that you would orient yourself to care about. So in that way, it's a prior question, just like being concerned about the truth is caring about that. So when he doesn't use the word values, but I wrote that in the margin in my book. I think you're right to use that. This whole realm of what to care about is what are the values by which you make, by which you care about things? Do you care about the truth? Do you care about behaving ethic? Do you care about what you ought to do from a sense of moral obligation or not? And when? Don't you?

7:19 Mark: Well, we usually think of those as the truth and the ethics thing as separate questions that what is the internal normativity of caring about truth? Well, because we can't even talk to each other if we don't. You can get at these sort of fundamental. You're somehow contradicting yourself. If you don't care about truth, everything that comes out of your mouth is in a sense also an assertion that you care about truth.

7:43 Dylan: Not unless you read the bullshit article truth.

7:45 Mark: Well, that is at least a claim that has been made and then comparably by.

7:50 Wes: By Aristotle. Let's. Let's go ahead and give him credit where credit's due.

7:54 Mark: Yeah, so Aristotle builds in. Why should you be ethical as well? Well, it's just. That's the definition of happiness is virtue. It being a good representative, a healthy and strong and actualized representative of the kind of creature you are is to be virtuous. So you don't need a further argument. Why should I be virtuous? It's Just sort of built into the concept. And I think Frankfurt thinks that Aristotle is wrong on both of those, that we clearly do need, that the truth and ethics are optional as far as our actual valuing goes.

8:30 Dylan: And I think that he would say about Aristotle, just thinking about the bullshit article that we talked about, just been talking about, is the level at which you are concerned with truth. So as your words communicate is not high enough to be concerned with truth at a level that matters about what you're communicating. So the existence of bullshit means I can still communicate in the sense of you understand the words that I'm saying and you can even make a judgment about whether or not what I'm saying is bullshit or not. And that's totally possible. The level of concern for truth that enables communication and speech does not rise to the level of truth that's at concern with wanting to know the truth of the matter.

9:13 Wes: Let's talk about his analysis of caring in terms of the concept of importance starting in section three, unless anyone else has anything in section two, which I think we covered. How do we cash out this concept of caring? What is it that makes something care worthy? He starts out by asserting that what we care about is what we take to be important. And we can't define importance in terms of what makes a difference to us because we'd have to say that those differences are important. The account he gives cashes out caring in terms of something that guides us to behave in certain ways rather than others, but in a way that involves our identification with the thing that we care about.

So he'll say he identifies himself with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced. So it's not the same thing as liking or wanting something. It's not simply the same thing as desire. And as we get into this, we'll see agency. It's not even the same thing as making some kind of existential decision about something. It involves this concept of identification. It's still about agency, but not about free will.

10:33 Mark: That is an existential. It's not existential in terms of.

10:36 Wes: He's.

10:37 Mark: He's arguing against Sartre, that his focus is on the freedom and the choice. You just make it the choice. And he wants to emphasize that, well, even if you made a choice with something about something, unless you sort of do it with your whole being, then that's just your mouth moving, right? You can say, I'm going to just be a saint. I'm going to be a Christian saint from now on. I made that choice. But like, you're going to find in the first five minutes, like, oh, no, I guess I don't really want to do that. I guess I'm not. My constitution is not set up to be able to do that. So if that's what Sartre meant by choice, and he's arguing against Sartre, I think it's a bad interpretation of Sartre. I think that you could probably make Sartre compatible with this. That talking about identification is fundamentally like that is an existential concept.

11:20 Wes: I think with the Sartre example is just you can't decide to do something that you don't care about. If you're making this existential decision, you're not going to succeed unless care comes into the picture.

11:31 Dylan: And this becomes even more clear later on the essay.

11:34 Wes: As you pointed out, his criticism is that we might. We might find out that we don't have the required attitudes and interests and emotional stability, let's say, or whatever it takes to do the great thing that we said we are going to end up doing. What is the determinative factor about what, you know, as to whether we or not we can succeed? Whether we really care about is a big deal, not whether we have this moment of willpower, you know, where, yes, I have made a. I have made a decision, therefore it will be so. I mean, the way he describes caring is a lot like the Aristotelian conception of virtue that you mentioned, Mark, which is, you know, he says it's a complicated, complex state of cognitive, affective, volitional dispositions and states.

So it almost sounds like it could be conceived of in terms of virtue or habituation, a set of habits that will lead me to engage in the activity that I say I'm going to engage in.

12:33 Dylan: And like virtue, caring itself is an action, but it also propels action. So there's always, in talking about virtue with Aristotle, there's the challenge that to be virtuous, you do virtuous things. And so the process of being virtuous is an activity and also, I guess, in some ways propels that activity. I think caring here is even stronger than that. Is caring indicates a kind of vector on which you're going to be moving. And the caring itself is an action.

13:10 Seth: I hate to do this, but I have to make a call back to Heidegger. Mark, you know, you were talking about existential, you were talking about Sartre. But if you remember from when we did Being in time, the structure of Dasein is Care. And I think a not dissimilar and certainly. Well, in a not dissimilar way. Heidegger was pointing to the same thing that Frankfurt's pointing to here, which is we are creatures that care. And even explicitly in this essay relates it to time. He says care is intimately connected with time in the sense that care is concern about the future to some extent, or an outcome in the future that you can plan for and try to drive towards achieve or not achieve.

And so he makes the distinction about having some kind of like in the moment, attention to something versus care, which acknowledges the unity and of your being over time and its persistence in the future and all these sorts of things. He's really getting at something fundamentally very existential.

14:21 Dylan: The continuity and persistence of our identity are linked to our caring, what we care about.

14:28 Mark: You've provided an answer to the love example that I brought up before that even if you say I love you and you don't feel it that second. Well, no, because love is a form of care. It's an ongoing project. And so if I to technically say I tend to love you, I love.

14:44 Wes: Subscript. See, you should do an analytical version of that. But honey, I had. There was a subscript on there.

14:51 Dylan: I really.

14:52 Wes: That's what I meant.

14:54 Dylan: It's continuous and persistent.

14:57 Wes: Honey, I care you. I carry you too.

15:02 Seth: But most possible worlds.

15:06 Mark: I was wondering, adding the care about the preposition, introduce a division. You want it to be not merely caring about. I'm in the neighborhood. I care in the neighborhood of you. No, I care you.

15:18 Wes: You know, it's interesting because we go from this idea that it's not just something you can decide, although you may be able to bring about. He says at the end of section three, make decisions that lead you to care about certain things or not care about certain things. But it's not the same thing. You know, making such decisions is not the same thing as actually caring. And then in section four, we get this idea that it's odd because caring will turn out to be this great liberating thing. But it feels in a way like compulsion. It feels like not having a free will. So he calls this an obscure kind of necessity, I think. I guess he brings up Martin Luther example where. What does Luther say exactly?

16:02 Dylan: He says, here I stand, I can do no other.

16:05 Wes: He's standing on principle. He's not talking about being unable to. Honey, I can do no other. But you know, he's doing something which one might think of as an act of. Ultimate act of agency, ultimate act of Freedom. But the way he's describing his experience of it is as a kind of necessity. He's bound by something, as Frankfurt puts it. Every alternative seems to be unthinkable. But that is not the same thing as being compelled by one's desires or being subject to heteronomy, you know, so it's not that kind of necessity. The necessity involved in. What is it that Schiller called it? The material drive. It's a different kind of necessity to be impelled by care, even though you're impelled by it.

16:58 Dylan: And you commented there's something constraining about it. It's also tied directly to feeling free. Right. Especially in sort of giving into that necessity comes along with a sense of being free.

17:15 Wes: Yeah. This account that he gives of volitional, what he calls volitional necessity, and this fourth part is really ingenious and really complicated. I mean, it starts with the idea that, right, it's not like, again, we're weak in will. We're like an addict. That's not why we feel impelled to do something. It's that we are unwilling to do otherwise, right? So it's not because desire, us. Desire is leading us down a path we don't want to go down. It's a matter of the way our will is actually structured.

17:46 Dylan: It's not incontinence. And calling it volitional necessity is why it's associated with freedom, right? We can't do anything else. And therefore it comes along with an experience of being free. When you. When you give in, having fallen in love with somebody, right. It's a kind of ultimate freedom, right? You have that volition of yourself that you are taking on your own action. I think that's exactly how. The way you would. Martin Luther would. He can't do anything else, but in so doing that he's acting with his individual freedom.

18:20 Mark: The question is, is he acting out of his individual will, which would make it his freedom, or is he acting about. Out of his care? On page 10 of our. It says it must be an essential feature of volitional necessity that is imposed upon a person involuntarily. Otherwise it will be impossible to account for the fact that the person cannot extricate himself from it merely at will, I. E. The fact that it is genuinely a kind of necessity. So if you're really in love with somebody, then it does have some things in common, you know, with weakness of the will. Parts of me don't want to do this, but I just. I love you so much that you know, it's. It's not being all of one will. It's not being all. So how you get freedom out of it is a little tricky. If there's, as he's saying, something that is actually involuntary out.

19:06 Dylan: So you're making me think about care. When care is an activity. I want to say that it is an act of will. But you're pointing out that the way Frankfurter is. Sorry, Frank, and Frankfurter is talking about it is that care and that activity of caring is in some ways distinct from willing, because in forming, in being, a volitional necessity, it's constraining the will. So it feels complicated now, right?

19:38 Wes: What's critical though, is that we don't want to overcome the constraint.

19:42 Dylan: We don't have the will to overcome the constraint. Yes, that's.

19:45 Wes: But we don't want to. It's not that we don't have the will to, it's just that we. That's not what we will, it's not what we want. It's not like we're trying to overcome some constraint that we can.

19:54 Dylan: What's the difference here? It's like parsing two parts of our own wills, right? It feels like we have two ways

20:01 Wes: of acting because it's not something we've willed, right? If we do care about something, if we fall in love with someone or with an ideal, it's not like I said, I will myself to be in love with this person or this idea. Like he said, we might make decisions, we might will certain steps to that. We might find ourselves in love with someone because of certain decisions we've made leading up to that. But the devotion itself, the care itself is not simply an act of will. It's something that constrains us and it's a form of necessity. It doesn't feel alien, it doesn't feel external.

He says, because we are in part because it's constituted by our desires, things that, you know, we ourselves identify with. The other factor is that it's self imposed. So it comes from us. And that's why, you know, he'll make this claim that it's liberating. So he'll say, when someone is tending to be distracted from caring about what he cares about the most, the force of volitional necessity may constrain him to do what he really wants to do.

21:09 Dylan: So he says on 265, right after, in the case of the person constrained by volitional necessity, there is also something which he cannot do, but only because he does not really want to do. It. That's what you just said, Wes. The reason a person does not experience the force of volitional necessity as alien or as external to himself then, is that it coincides with and is indeed partly constituted by desires which are not merely his own, but with which he actively identifies himself. The necessity is in a certain extent self imposed. And he goes on then.

So whatever the pertinence and validity of these considerations, they do not explain how it is possible for a person to be constrained by a necessity which is imposed upon him only by himself. So this is what we're struggling with right at this second, is how is it that it's not part of our will that we're willing. This constraint in terms of one part of our care is what we're calling the thing that we're trumping some other part of our desires, of our action, right? And that we're having a hierarchy, right. Maybe it's our key to our identity that we refuse to.

We do not really want to do it because that's part of what we care about. We care about something else. And so we're self imposing that. Why is that not Muslim gradation?

22:30 Wes: I mean, the rest of the section is, is focused on answering that question, on trying to figure out how do we solve this seeming inconsistency between necessity and involuntariness and the idea that something is, can be self imposed. So how can something be self imposed involuntarily? And what he says is that. So it's a little opaque, but the account is that what we care about is in a way constitutes the very structure of our will. Right? So when we make free decisions about things, we're willing things, but our will itself is not under our voluntary control.

We may use our will to do things that are voluntary, but that doesn't mean the nature of our will. The structure of our will as it's determined by what we care about is under our voluntary control. So it's still our will, but its structure, right. Is something that's imposed upon us. So when I'm will, you know, to do something based on what I care about, the willing is, you know, could be free, might be, might be a free thing that I'm doing, but what I care about is not a result of the willing. We could read from.

23:42 Mark: Yeah, I get a quote here.

23:44 Wes: Let's do that towards the end of section four. So this is page 266. So in the paragraph, the, the first full paragraph, it may seem difficult to understand how volitional necessity can possibly Be at the same time both self imposed and imposed involuntarily, or how it is possible to avoid the conclusion that an agent who is constrained by volitional necessity must be simultaneously both active and passive with respect to the same force? The resolution of these difficulties lies in recognizing that A the fact that a person cares about something is a fact about his will.

This is what I'm calling the structure of his will. So this is my interpretation of Frankfurt. So the fact that a person cares about something is a fact about his will, B a person's will need not be under his own voluntary control, and C his will may be no less truly his own when it is not by his own voluntary doing that he cares as he does. Thus, volitional necessity may be.

24:46 Seth: The last sentence doesn't make sense to me. So is the intent here to say the fact that a person cares about something is a fact about his will? Is that another way of saying that someone cares about something is a fact about that somebody can care about something, or that somebody does care about something, is that the voluntary aspect that we

25:06 Wes: care about one thing or another in particular is not voluntary in the same way that character. My. You know, the facts about what he calls the facts about my will, or what I'm calling the structure of my will, is not something that's under my voluntary control. I think it's helpful to take. There are parallel examples in the history of philosophy that we've dealt with many times, right? When it comes to the question of free will, it's not the standard position of people who say there's such a thing as free will, that it's just something that we pull out of our ass, right?

That we are just unmoved movers, that we're not beholden to anything. It is always the case that we are subjected to something thing in order to have free will, right? So Leibniz, for example, or St. Augustine or other philosophers, the idea is that we are reason responsive, that when we are truly free, we're being responsive to reasons or to our awareness of what is good for us, or to write for Kant laws that we ourselves have issued to ourselves. There's always some form of subjection involved in the concept of freedom here. I think, then this is what I think makes this essay so fabulous.

He's coming up with another alternative to that idea of reason responsiveness. And for Nietzsche, by the way, it's being responsive to who we are, to our identity, to our character. But he's coming up with another alternative, which is to Say that we are in some sense beholden to what we care about, but in the same way that being beholden to reasons doesn't deprive us of freedom, but actually grounds freedom. Being beholden to what we care about can also ground freedom. It's a parallel case.

26:47 Mark: I don't know if this is an evolution or a restatement of the thing that he is most famous for before on Bullshit is this 1969 article, Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. I did not read it, but I listened to a whole YouTube thing about it and there are just two things that I got out of it that might help clarify matters here. We have lots of different desires. The one that wins in any given case is our will, right? So the will is not something spooky, an uncaused thing. It's just one among a number of desires and it's the one that happens to have won out.

That's the thing that we actually do. Was that willing a free willing or not? That depends on second order desires. About the first order desires. So I have the desire to eat the cake. I have the desire to stick to my diet. If I then have a second order desire that I want to stick to my diet and I nonetheless eat the cake, that means I was overwhelmed, I was not acting freely. If I am able to make the one that I actually desire come out on top and become my will, then that's a free will. So that's, I think that's the whole thing.

27:54 Wes: I mean, the second order desire, right, arbitrates between the two conflicting desires and decides that one is more important than the other. So the concept of importance in care actually I think is quite relevant there.

28:05 Mark: I don't know, maybe this, this stuff about care is in the older article, or maybe this is what's being added is specifically like, well, how do you determine what the second order desire is going to point to? Is this something you can, just as Sartre might say, decide? Probably not. We come built in. This is why it's a compatibilist thing that we might not be able to choose what we want to want. We just value things. I do value my diet, or I don't value my diet. And so my character is determining which one it is. But nonetheless, whichever way that comes down, we're just going to count it as a free action if that one, that second order desire wins.

28:45 Wes: This is actually quite similar to Nietzsche's conception of autonomy, right? He makes fun of the idea of free will as involving all kinds of absurdity metaphysical baggage. The kind of unmoved mover stuff. But his idea is that there is a kind of autonomy or freedom of spirit in what you might call drive integration. So you have, again, it's just what Mark was saying about Frankfurt's previous essay. You have all these conflicting drives. And it's important that the right drive win out and harmonize and kind of subject the other drives, but in a way that produces an inner psychological integration and harmony. So that's what I've called on previous podcasts, the psychological version of freedom or agency. And I think there's something quite similar here going on, but it's tied up with this.

29:38 Dylan: It feels like the unifying aspect is this question of identity and the integrity of the whole. That would be the framing bucket. That would be how you would say, I feel impelled. I can't not do this because, or I can't not stand here because to do anything else would be a violation of the integrity of who you are. And so you don't want to do that. You don't want to be who you are not. And so then the strength of that character comes into play. Right? He calls it at the beginning of six. He says the formation of a person's will is most fundamentally a matter of his to care about certain things and is coming to care about some of them more than others.

That's building your character, right? That is saying that the forming of the will to care about the right things is involved in the development of an identity that is a whole. And maybe you would go so far as an identity that does the right things. Now, Nietzsche wouldn't go so far as to say, put the word right in there, but I think he would agree about cultivating a will to care about certain things. Right. And so that freedom would be a kind of secondary act of the will to form a whole that is a

31:01 Seth: willed whole trying to bring these things together. So suppose I say I really care about.

31:09 Dylan: I really care about my parents.

31:11 Seth: I really care about my parents. But I've never asked myself the question, why do I care about my parents? And do I choose to continue, do I consciously make the choice to continue to care about my parents? That it's just sort of something that's done in my culture that I'm pre installed software.

31:30 Wes: It's not your choice.

31:33 Seth: So is the second order decision that Mark was talking about and that what you were just referring to, Dylan, is it that? No. I'm going to take the moment to examine why I am willing this or why is it about saying I'm going to consciously choose to will.

31:51 Dylan: So I don't think Frankfurt is going that direction. I think Nietzsche would go that direction. But I think Frankfurt would just say that those things that you are caring about, regardless of where they came from, is the thing that he's thinking about. Right. And it could be that you came to care about them through all kinds of reasons. For instance, the caring about your parents. There might be a beginning of that that has to do with your biology, Right. You're being raised in proximity. But we have all kinds of other reinforcements regarding filial piety and forces of culture that make it so that, well, we're habituated to care about our parents, or we're habituated to care about our family, and we're habituated to care about all kinds of things.

Right? This is why the version of virtue ethics comes to play here, even for someone like Nietzsche. Right? Is that the things that you are habituating for excellence become the things that you care about.

32:47 Mark: I feel like I have to read two paragraphs about Aristotle that are very relevant here from this other essay. Taking ourselves seriously, 2004, when I was looking around for what is the positive thing that he's proposing, as opposed to on bullshit, which is this. So some philosophers argued that a person becomes responsible for his own character as he shapes it by voluntary choices and actions that cause him to develop habits of discipline or indulgence, and hence that make his character what it is. According to Aristotle, no one can help acting as his virtuous or vicious character requires him to act.

But in some measure, a person's character is nonetheless voluntary because, quote, we are ourselves part causes of our state of character. In other words, we are responsible for what we are to the extent that we have caused ourselves by our voluntary behavior to become that way. And so then he responds, I think Aristotle is wrong about this. Becoming responsible for one's character is not essentially a matter of producing that character, but of taking responsibility for it. This happens when a person selectively identifies with certain of his own attitudes and dispositions, whether or not it was he that caused himself to have them.

In identifying with them, he incorporates those attitudes and dispositions into himself, makes them his own. What counts is our current effort to define and manage ourselves, and not the story of how we came to be in the situation with which we are now attempting to cope.

34:12 Dylan: So he's Nietzschean.

34:13 Seth: So that sounds to me like what I was just saying. Yes, exactly.

34:17 Wes: Yeah. Often the dilemmas that people face and the thing that might drive them to therapy, for instance, is not the trolley problem. But they don't know what they care about and they want to figure out what it is they care about. And that is not an easy process. But once you do figure that out and once you can go all in on that, right, which is another thing that probably a lot of us have trouble doing. We have trouble just inhabiting that position of devotion to what it is that we do care about. Because it seems like slavery, but in fact it is, according to Frankfurt.

And I think this is right, it is liberating, says he puts it in section five. And his two big examples are rationality and love. By the way, the idea that being rational and loving are ways of achieving freedom ought to puzzle us more than it does, given that both require a person to submit to something which is beyond his voluntary control and which may be indifferent to his desires. But in fact, when we are moved by rationality or love, when we're fully moved by that, we don't experience that as impotence. We don't experience that as powerlessness.

We experience that as freedom. And I, that might be the only, like, real freedom that we can, can actually enjoy. Not the, you know, I made a. I made a decision not to eat that piece of cake at that particular moment in time, but rather the liberation of caring deeply about something. So as he puts it, being liberated by being seized, by being made captive. We most fully realize when we have lost ourselves or when we've escaped from ourselves.

35:58 Mark: Like I was picturing a situation in which, let's say you're. You're in the closet and you're, you find yourself just drawn. I have to declare my love to the forbidden object. I don't want to. I want to be conventional, but I now I gotta be me. And then it seems like it's sort of a toss up what happens from there that you might think that, oh, this was the forbidden desire. This was, this was the cake that was calling me and I gave into the cake. Or you could say, wow, I express myself. Now I'm out of the closet. Now I can actually be honest with myself. It's like the very same action of being involuntarily overwhelmed by something that you do in fact, really care about, that you had not acknowledged that before. I mean, you could stay in denial or you could or could be liberating. And it just seems like this is so close to the. Akrasia. How do you say?

36:53 Wes: Yeah, I think it's yeah, akrasia. Akrasia. Yeah, to the. What is the translation of that?

36:59 Mark: I mean, the weakness of the will, Right?

37:01 Seth: Yeah.

37:02 Wes: Weakness of the will. But what's the other translation? Incontinence, I guess.

37:05 Mark: Incontinence, yes.

37:07 Wes: Yeah, I guess so.

37:08 Mark: Right. The difference is where you ultimately come down on is that if it ends up being a conversion experience where you had, you know, the thing that you in fact care about was not aligned with your will, but when it actually takes over and makes you involuntarily do the thing, then at that moment, maybe your will says, all right, let me go with this. Or maybe it doesn't.

37:33 Dylan: It becomes an alignment with what you really want. Whereas it seems like incontinence. It never is aligned with what you really want. Like when you're always falling away from what you really want and incontinence is sort of characterizing that effort that's required, it's hard to do what we really want. But this is another path, right? Is that we're resisting. In the case that you gave or other similar cases, we're actively resisting what we most care about. And then when there's an alignment there, then it's no longer. It's not incontinence, right? We're no longer resisting the very thing that we most want to do.

38:13 Mark: See, now I'm picturing a movie or something where the guy realizes, I've actually just wanted to eat cake all along. All this society pushing on moderation on me. No, actually, this is the real me, the cake eating me. I'm gonna fucking eat cake until I burst. That is really the only point of my life.

38:36 Wes: This is the example we brought up with Nietzsche, right? Where if our standard is the structure of our character, what if we are structured so as to get genuine fulfillment out of being a serial killer? If the telos simply in here is not in our humanness, you know, in our rationality qua human, but in our Ted Bundiness, right? He's just being. He's fulfilling, fulfilling. The telos of the Bundy. That's his name, right? Ted Bundy. I think that is a problem because, again, there's a lot of overlap between Frankfurt and Nietzsche and Aristotle. And he uses this word identified over and over again.

So what we care about is closely connected to what we identify with. And it sounds like, you know, if we're discovering our sexuality, our sexual identity, that's a really good example. But if we're discovering our identity as a serial killer and want to inhabit that identity because that's what we really care about, then we have a problem ethically. So care and ethics and I think Maybe flourishing, maybe start to come apart at that point.

39:43 Dylan: This is where that whole discussion. Well, I guess this is the whole relative. Partly the relativism discussion, the idea of authenticity. If you say, well, what I should really do is whatever is true to myself, then if what your true self cares about is being a serial killer,

39:59 Wes: then, well, section six is relevant. Right. Because here he gets into this idea that we ought to care about what we care about, which does not mean

40:09 Mark: that it's not a tautology. It means that we ought to care that there is some variation and we should be deliberate about which things we care about.

40:19 Seth: Right? Yeah.

40:20 Wes: Yeah, I thought that was clear, but I guess it's not.

40:25 Mark: You just gotta care about what you care about, man. No, that. No, that's not what he's saying.

40:30 Wes: Yeah, it's a good bumper sticker.

40:33 Dylan: Tone matters.

40:35 Seth: I like the way you phrased it, Mark. We should be deliberate and thoughtful about what we care about. This may be more so.

40:42 Dylan: I get why he was going after in the quote that you read from that other article about habits.

40:48 Wes: Right.

40:48 Dylan: Especially. Or the Aristotelian version. And he clearly comes down to kind of the Nietzsche version. But I guess we talked about this in Nietzsche, right. The way in which it's a kind of version of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Right. That you maybe you super. Add on the idea that it might be up a little bit more for grabs exactly what the constitution of those virtues are. But the idea that you do the things that constitute your excellence so that you care about the things to care about.

41:15 Wes: Well, you care about what's actually important to you. So that's the standard that, you know, when I say we care, we can care about what we care about. I'm paraphrasing his. I mean, I think I'm quoting his clever way of putting it. But the idea is not that anything goes. As he says, it's a personal thing. What we care about, but it's not doesn't mean that anything goes. Our ideals can be criticized. Even our choice and love partners could be criticized. Legitimately criticized. So people often don't care about the things that actually are important to them. They often don't know what's important to them. There are things that are objectively important to them that they fail to recognize.

41:54 Mark: There's a quote here I want to read on 271 or page 15. Suppose, for example, that what a person cares about is avoiding stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. No doubt he is committing an error of some kind in caring about this. But his error is not that he cares about something which is not really important to him. Rather, his error consists in caring about it, thereby imbuing with genuine importance something that is not worth caring about. The reason it is not worth caring about seems clear. It is not important to the person to make avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk important to himself.

42:27 Wes: Makes everything so clear. You know, in that example, we get this bifurcation between importance to subjective importance, importance to me, and then importance, importance. It's important to me to not step on the cracks, but it's not actually important for me to not step on the cracks. And unfortunately, I made it important to me to not step on the cracks by caring about that. Caring can view things with subjective importance, but just because I imbue them with subjective importance doesn't mean they're actually important.

42:57 Dylan: We're to this kind of point where you were talking about the fact that people often, they don't know what they actually care about. So this is the source of their sort of existential confusion, and it causes all kinds of psychological challenges for them. But this seems to be like a different case, right? Somebody's actively caring about cracks in the sidewalk and they know they care about them. But now we're going to say, but actually that's not worth caring about. You're making a mistake in that. And so either that is in some ways a separate kind of hierarchy or normativity that we're going to impose on the things we care about, or we're going to lump that in with the psychological case that actually you're confused about what you actually care about.

You feel like you care about the cracks in the sidewalk, you feel like, you know, that you care about the cracks in the sidewalk, but actually that is not what you actually care about. So then we're brought back to the question of a kind of authenticity, right? You don't really understand yourself. And so therefore the way of understanding what to properly care about is still inward. It's still searching in yourself to find out what actually you care about. And not something to look out for and say, well, it's not actually that. The key to that is, you know, understanding sort of what the rank of things is to properly care about.

We have to, you know, talk about and argue about, well, are cracks in sidewalk worth caring about? No, actually, your mother's worth more caring about. But what about children dying in Africa? Was that more worth caring about? We're brought back to sort of this sort of objective question about what's worth caring about.

44:31 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think he seems clearly to be on the side that there are things that objectively are objectively worth caring about and others that are not. And I do think that, again, that gets us more into the realm of Aristotelian virtue ethics. All right. It's not that I can just be satisfied with being the serial killer, because that's what I care about. I shouldn't care about that. I have made that thing important to me by caring about it when it's not actually important.

44:59 Mark: I was trying to remember which romantic comedy where they're. They're saying, what's the most important thing in life? Well, it's one thing. I think it's Hope Floats maybe is the movie. You just got to pick one thing. So this is a certain kind of existentialism, is just subjugate yourself, become the serious man, right? Put yourself under a project, and that will give your life meaning. We have the power to give ourselves life meaning like this. And then I'm thinking, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, that's my one thing.

45:29 Dylan: And probably my favorite science fiction TV series, Firefly. You know, in the movie Serenity, there's this whole theme. You know, the preacher is dying, and he's telling Mal, I don't care what you believe in. You just have to believe. You have to have something to believe in. You got to care about something.

45:48 Wes: Flag with the swastika slowly raises. Oh, wait, no, I guess I'm wrong about that. But I think the cracks in the sidewalk thing is quite an extreme or odd example, and he must have chosen it for a reason. But, you know, I've dealt with a lot of people who have severe OCD and have rituals that they feel compelled to do, like turning on and off light switches, for instance, or else their parents are going to die or whatever it is. They know it's not rational and they don't want to do it. It's extremely distressing, but they feel like they have to do it in order to avoid something terrible happening. And trying to parse that out in terms of care and importance seems quite odd. I'd have to think through more. More about.

46:36 Mark: And do you combat that by giving them cake? Every time they. They give in to that turning on the lights. It's not just that you're avoiding your parents dying, you're actually getting cake. I don't know if that.

46:50 Wes: Wait, what?

46:51 Mark: That you get them so positive, really reinforced that it turns around the other way. It becomes, oh, I thought I was just doing this for irrational reasons, but now doing it for cake. Well, fuck that, I'm not going to do it anymore.

47:03 Dylan: Mark is just into reverse novel psychological

47:06 Mark: bullshit, bullshit psychology to wrap up here. I'm really dedicated to the bullshit. The bullshit is the one thing.

47:14 Wes: You're in the play frame.

47:15 Mark: Yeah. And I thought this was, this was part of bullshit that when we actually had the episode of philosophy versus Improv on this, I was trying to explore whether, yeah, what improv do is basically bullshit. But no, you've just pointed out they're just in the play frame. They don't get to be bullshitters. Be a certain kind of person.

47:30 Wes: Got to be borderline cases. Right. There are cases in which people think they're being funny, but they're actually being

47:35 Dylan: perverse, for instance, and therefore bullshitting.

47:38 Wes: Yeah, I think so. Or as we discussed with Trump, people are using the playframe. The playframe has been subordinated to bullshit. I think that's definitely possible.

47:47 Mark: All right, let's have some good old fashioned closings if anybody has the energy to do that.

47:51 Wes: Pleasant surprise. Go ahead.

47:54 Dylan: You should go read the essays as essays. They're really, really good. Totally readable. And surprisingly to me, I was pleasantly surprised.

48:04 Mark: Yeah, I feel like we stumbled on a.

48:06 Wes: You took the words right out of my mouth.

48:08 Mark: Another Schopenhauer in terms of just like pithy, sometimes funny, very clear essays that open up a. That are surprisingly systematic.

48:20 Wes: You know, I'd heard the book, the quote unquote book made a splash at a certain point. So I heard a lot about this book. It annoyed me that an analytic philosopher was delving into the concept of bullshit. And I just, I had a very prejudiced idea in my mind of what this was all about. I did not have a positive impression of what this would be. But of course, yeah, totally. I was totally wrong about that. He's, he's great and both of these articles are great.

48:46 Mark: Well, it's funny that the thing when we were initially like, well, this is not enough for a full episode. We need another thing. And you recommended this. Let's do the Stanford article. Stanford encyclopedia article.

48:56 Wes: I didn't say let's do it. Okay, well, you said I was giving that as background. Something I happen to have read in my own interest in hypocrisy and self deception and stuff which I think are related. But I did not mean to say, oh, we should just. Yes, because it's very dry and analytic. But I wasn't saying, oh, we got to read this as an official reading. But if you're interested, it's, it's the

49:17 Mark: definition of Lying and perception and deception and just the way that it started with, you know, you might think that here's a, here's a good formula of this. But what about if you're saying something to A is talking to B and C is overhearing and you're intending to deceive B, are you actually deceive C, are actually lying to C? Does this sound a little familiar? You know, we just did Grice. So I was like. Even though Frankfurt is also, you know, taking a definition, the one from black and saying, well, this is not quite right because there are cases.

But his style of doing it is so different than the way that Grice or this writer of this article does it. That like it doesn't feel like analytic philosophy anymore. I guess when you see him shitting in a sideways. Shitting a little bit on continental philosophy and you know, the reason there's so much bullshit in the world for one thing, is because as you were saying, there's this global skepticism and this relativism and he's laying some of that at the feet just like of cultural Marxism, basically.

50:19 Wes: Just like, where does he do that?

50:21 Mark: Did he not bring up the postmodernists in this essay? Or maybe it was just in the honest truth at the end.

50:25 Dylan: It was the end of the bullshit essay, the skepticism.

50:29 Mark: Yes.

50:29 Wes: Yeah, but he doesn't. He talks about skepticism, but he doesn't use the words relativism or postmodernism or Marxism or.

50:36 Dylan: But it's 1982. Right? That's what he's talking about.

50:39 Mark: Yes. And he's. I don't know.

50:42 Wes: We could. Anodyne innocent, you know, do anyway.

50:45 Mark: Yeah, we can this up more in the night cap that we'll record in a while. But thanks guys for fitting this in. Thanks listeners for hanging in with us. We love you. You should go follow us on the various.

50:58 Dylan: We care about you.

50:59 Wes: We care about you. Mark.

51:01 Mark: I'm not. We're not deeply invested in you, is it.

51:03 Wes: We're not bullshitting you when we say that.

51:07 Mark: I'm feeling it right now is what I'm saying. I'm really feeling it.

51:12 Dylan: We've.

51:12 Wes: We've never met you for the most part, and yet show us that you care.

51:17 Mark: Follow us on the social medias. Become a supporter. If you want to become a supporter, there are plenty of things you could do. You could reach out to us. Pl Partially examined life dot com. Tell us what you would like us to cover, what other contemporary figures that we might have brushed aside as being too lightweight, as I had done with Frankfurt that we really, really should spend some time on. Next time we're discussing the Identity Trap, the new book, with its author, Yascha Mounk. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

51:47 Dylan: Good night.

51:47 Wes: Good night.