One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

This is the opening paragraph of an essay titled “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, which was written back in 1985, and most recently (Jan 2005) published by Princeton Press as a book.

If you want to know more, check out Prof Frankfurt’s appearance on the daily show, where I -incidently- first heard about the book; or his Princeton Press interview. (A quick google search will link to other videos including lectures on love and ethics.)

The book is a quick and fascinating read, and rings appropriate and true. Mostly, it is about the distinguishing charactersitics of bullshit, and how it’s different from humbug and lying. It also touches upon the dangers of bullshit, before ending with an attempt to answer the question: “Why is there so much bullshit?” (– almost every word in it is worth quoting, but let me only quote this last part:)

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

This digs deep, and potentially renders most of my words and deeds under the umbrella of bullshit — not that otherwise was ever implied. Now that that’s recognized, I have no desire to say anymore, so expect this silence to last for sometime, maybe ever — even this implication of concern for the truth might be labelled as bullshit.

Yes, Marcus, this confirms it; it’s all bullshit anyways.

Update:
Ok, so maybe that was more than a tad overly melodramatic. What can I say, it was late at night, and I had had a difficult day, which amplified the resonance of certain ideas from the book with certain feelings I’ve been toying with. Plus, you have to remember that (if we have learned anything from Cosmo Kramer is that) 94% of our communication is nonverbal; i.e. I’m only using 6% of my skills here. See.

Rebecca Goldstein
Random House Inc (1983)

Frigidity we call it in women, impotence in men. The terms reflect, I think, the male point of view. But there’s coldness and want of power on both sides. I certainly felt impotent, a thing of naught.

I briefly considered masturbation, as (and in much the same spirit) I considered jogging: as something that, no matter how unpleasant, might be good for me. For I thought it possible that my body would go quite dead, become incapable of ever feeling pleasure again; and that, at least according to collective opinion of the day, couldn’t be healthy. But then again perhaps a sexual death, if possible, would be the most reasonable solution. I had once read a former inmate’s account of prison life, and he had written that after several months of celibacy all desires have mercifully vanished. Prison had been much easier after that.

But could it all be made to disappear? Despite my respect for Naom’s views, and Naom’s contempt for Freud’s, I couldn’t rid my thinking of such concepts as repression. I had an image of molten libidinous matter, seething in the psychical depths, which could be buried but never destroyed. And eventually the volcanic eruptions in personality would come, the lava of the libido spewing forth in geyser-like behavioral aberrations. The best one could hope for would be sublimation (which might, if Freud was right, even make a genius of me). Is it possible to die a merciful sexual death? And where would that leave one?

Sartre says the object of sexual desire is a “double reciprocal incarnation,” most typically expressed by the caress: “I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be born for me insofar as it is the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh.”

But it seems to me that even deeper than Sartre’s object lies another: a double reciprocal mattering, the most typical expression of which is the gaze. In gazing with desire on the Other I reveal how he, in my desire, permeates my sense of self; and in his gaze I see how I similarly matter to him, who himself matters at that moment so much. It’s this double reciprocal process that accounts, I think, for the psychological intensity of sexual experience. It answers to one of our deepest needs, a fundamental fact of human existence: the will to matter.

Noam had sadly missed the point in thinking the object of sexuality is no more, and no more interesting, than a sensation. His is the solipsistic view of sex, and it leaves out the complexity, the depth, and the reason this part of life matters so much to us. Without the Other and his gaze, the act is little more than clumsy masturbation. And so it was for me with Noam, who now was always turned away, psychically if not physically, like the man in the da Vinci sketch. Making love under such circumstances is hardly the powerful affirmation of mutual mattering it’s meant to be.

To matter. Not to be as naught. Is there any will deeper than that? It’s not just unqualified will, as Schopenhauer would have it, that makes us what we are; nor it is the will to power, Nietzsche, but something deeper, of which the will to power is a manifestation. (And who am I, daughter of a shtickele chazzen from Galicia, to argue with the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche?) We want power because we want to matter. Neither sex nor power lies at the level of fundamental facts. Beneath are the heaving thrusts of the will to matter. And the will to create? to procreate? These too are expressions of the fundamental will. Deeper even than the will to survive. We don’t want to live when we become convinced that we don’t, can’t, will never matter. That is the state which most often precedes suicide–always, I think, when the cause of suicide lies within.

To matter, to mind. Curious to compare the verbs we have formed from the nouns. What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be–and there’s the tragedy. Spinoza tried to help us out of it: We can make ourselves matter because of what we mind. No, no, rather: We shouldn’t mind that we don’t matter. It–of which we’re a part–matters. Dissolve the individual will to matter in the objective picture of the whole. It’s rather a drastic solution, but then perhaps nothing less will do. And does one thereby dissolve the individual? Is this the solution to the problem of personal identity? Is this will our very essence, with which we are and without which we are not? Perhaps. In any case, it’s very close to the realization of the self. We no sooner discover that we are, than we want that which we are to matter. In spite of Spinoza.

Can anyone truthfully say, I don’t matter and I don’t mind? Not I. Of all my many mind-body problems, the most personally and painfully felt has been this: Do I matter as a mind or do I matter as a body? This is the problem that produces the pattern, the pendulum swings of my dangling life. But somehow or other I must come out mattering.

And where was I now? I had hoped, like the good fairy tale taught, to save myself by marrying Noam. My mattering to him, who himself mattered so much, was going to do the trick. It had always been a battle against self-hate, and that’s a bloody battle. I certainly didn’t have the stuff to stand up to Noam’s attacks, his palpable contempt. If I have quaked before every idiot’s judgment, if the shrug of the shoulders always been a movement I’m incapable of executing, imagine how it was to be standing before the Highest Judge, the Genius, before whom no invalid inference could be hidden, and to hear the verdict delivered: You are damned, you are dumb.

by: Salman Rushdie

A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things; he’s unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

A man who Invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he’s managed it. Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a few notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don’t exist if children don’t clap their hands. Or you might simply say: it’s just like being a man.

Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another. You’ve got it: Love.

by: Ahdaf Soueif
London : Bloomsbury, 1996.

I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember. I remember, for instance, your old nanny coming into your room, the edges of her tarha [headscarf] bitten between her teeth to hide half her face. Her eyes, filmed with cataracts, were so dim she must have been seeing you as though through a mist. I remember your husband turning from the phone, and the small gesture of your hand that stilled the impatient words on his lips. The old woman muttered indistinctly as she moved towards you, her arm describing cramped, arthritic circles with the smoking incense-burner. Through the window, the darkness of the Cairo night was so intense, it seemed that if I reached out my hand I would touch black velvet.”

(from “I think of you”, page 129)