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by
Jim Holt
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May 17 - June 5, 2018
Evelyn Waugh once observed, “Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice—all the odious qualities—which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.”
It was only in the twentieth century that the use of “bull” to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species—or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of “bullshit,” a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915.
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn’t be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter’s fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truth teller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game
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One proposed test is to add a “not” to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn’t, that statement is bullshit.
Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (There is nothing outside the text).
(Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” suggests that the proper aim of art is “the telling of beautiful untrue things.”)
