a lefty’s log

are sycophants people who refuse to challenge other’s self-perceptions?

i just finished on bullshit, a book by harry g. frankfurt. i purchased it because it was eating up the best seller charts, and, well, it has a provocative name. also, i saw an interview with the author on the daily show. it, too was provocative.

i have to say, that at a scant 67 pages it *is* a short book, but it is no easy read. it is written by a princeton university professor of philosophy emeritus and bandies about words like “perspicuous” and “procrustean” with a few “bullshits” thrown in for good measure. and that’s just the third page!

i threw the book down a few times while reading it thinking *this* is bullshit, shoddy work churned out to make a profit on a provocative title. i even gave away my copy and turned to another. but, the idea intrigued me and i purchased it again. i continued reading because, well, i did buy it. twice. and wanted my money’s worth if i could salvage it. (maybe i should read it again.)

in the end, i still think it to be an unfinished work. there are portions that seem to be circuitious or fluffy, and there are others that seem to be just undeveloped. for example, starting at page 24 and then for ten more pages frankfurt goes on about how pascal wittgenstein called “bullshit!” on a complaining friend who’d had her tonsils removed. she said that she felt “just like a dog that has been run over,” and he took offense. “you have no idea how a dog that has been run over feels!” he exclaimed.

was this exchange worthy of an examination comprising 1/7th of the bulk of the book? is this exchange an example of how we should live our lives? should we be picking out the bullshit of each other’s conversation? or was it merely illustrative, saying in essense, “this is the nature of bullshit”? i’m not really sure, and i’m not even sure the author takes a position on all of this.

nonetheless, it is book worthy of publishing.

but to address the question i posited at the start of the post: if there is such an idea as bullshit (and i’m quite sure that there is), and there is an idea that one can hold to two ideas at once (say, one public and one private), does this preclude that i should disagree with folks all the time so as not to appear sycophantic or full of shit? is it my duty, in frankfurt’s view, that as a thinking person i should call bullshit as i see it?

i get the idea, based on frankfurt’s conclusion, that he would say no to this, at least philosophically. the conclusion of the book determines that although popular culture (dare i say “society”) deems sincerity to be the determiner of truth (capital tee), or to put it another way, society defines truth as it’s defined by the essences of our selves, this is bullshit.

to quote frankfurt, he says,

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial–notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. (67)

i wish he would expound on this idea, for it is captivating, but he didn’t. and i won’t

i have more, but i’ll post it later.