On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

A member of the church staff was fascinated by this book and asked me to read it so we could talk about it. It’s a very small book, originally published as a magazine article in 1986 and then re-published as a small hardcover in 2005. Apparently it was a best seller and quite popular when it came out. I had never heard of it. It took me about an hour to read.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was reading. It begins almost as a parody of philosophical writing, so I thought it might be a joke. Frankfurt takes several pages, most of the book in fact, simply defining bullshit. Eventually I realized he was serious. Toward the end, he makes two interesting points.

First he distinguishes bullshit from lies by characterizing their respective relationship to the truth. To lie is to know the truth, or think you know the truth, and then to say something that you know not to be the truth with the intention to deceive. Bullshit on the other hand has no relation to the truth. It isn’t meant to deceive. It isn’t true or false communication at all. It’s just vacuous. To bullshit is simply to fill the space with words. Lying, thus, is a higher form of communication because it respects the truth while pointing away from it, while bullshit doesn’t care.

In the very final pages Frankfurt theorizes why contemporary communication is so full of bullshit. His theory is that with our modern extreme availability of information (and he wrote this in 1986 so it was even worse in 2005 and much worse in 2025) we now expect everyone to have an opinion on everything. Of course, no one can speak knowledgeably about everything so much of our talk is empty of value. Rather than speaking bullshit, we would be better served by allowing each other to confess, “I don’t know.”

I had not heard of Frankfurt so I looked him up. He taught philosophy at several universities including Princeton and Yale. He died in Santa Monica, in 2023.