About this time last year I read a book titled On Bullsh*t. I found its argument so insightful and challenging that I posted a short reflection on the book. I quickly found out that a small minority of vocal Christians felt obligated to rebuke me for reading a book with “bullsh*t” in the title. Indeed, no other article on my site has ever spurred so much controversy.

The general thesis of On Bullsh*t was that bullsh*tters are indifferent to whether they speak truth or falsehood. Words merely serve the purpose of manipulating others’ opinions and attitudes. Because of this, the bullsh*tter is worse than a liar. At least the liar has an interest in the truth insofar as he seeks to deceive. He knows that there is a difference between getting things right and getting things wrong. [For an expanded version of his argument, read my What’s Worse than Lying?]

Frankfurt has now written a sequel, which he admits is better viewed as a prequel – a prolegomena, of sorts. When writing On Bullsh*t, he assumed that most readers would agree that indifference to truth is reprehensible (and thus, so is bullsh*t). Consequently, he omitted any explanation “of exactly why truth actually is so important to us, or why we should especially care about it” (5).

Sidetracking the thorny issues of truth’s relationship to ontology or epistemology, Frankfurt focuses on a pragmatic defense of truth: “My discussion will be concerned exclusively with the value and the importance of truth, and not at all with the value or the importance of our efforts to find truth or of our experience in finding it” (11). The questions he takes up are: “Is truth something that in fact we do – and should – especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?” (14)

Frankfurt rejects a radical postmodernism that rejects any shared objective reality and exclusively relegates truth to personal subjectivity and nothing more:

The point on which the postmodernists especially rely is just this: what a person regards as true either is a function merely of the person’s individual point of view or is determined by what the person is constrained to regard as true by various complex and inescapable social pressures. (21)

The problem with this perspective is that it doesn’t work in the real world. Frankfurt notes that no one assumes that engineers and architects work with truth as defined as their own particular combination of perceptions and biases. They must make things work in reality. From whatever point of view an engineer comes to his or her work, he or she must be correct. The same applies for medical practitioners. We expect physicians to make sound judgments in relation to what is helpful and harmful to us. “No one in his right mind would rely on a builder, or submit to the care of a physician, who does not care about the truth” (24).

And yet many continue to believe that “judgments cannot properly be regarded as being either true or false,” relegating all judgments to mere expressions of “personal feelings and attitudes that are, strictly speaking, neither true nor false” (28). But we need to distinguish truth from error in order to survive together: “Civilizations have never gotten along healthily, and cannot get along healthily, without large quantities of reliable factual information. They also cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs” (34). This is not only true for society in general, but for individuals in particular: “Our success or failure in whatever we undertake, and therefore in life altogether, depends on whether we are guided by truth or whether we proceed in ignorance or on the basis of falsehood. It also depends critically, of course, on what we do with the truth. Without truth, however, we are out of luck before we even start” (36). Indeed, our very concept of rationality depends upon the notions of truth and factuality. What good is rationality if we have no respect for the distinction between true and false?

Truth also provides a certain vitality to life. Living according to the truth – our true nature – makes us feel alive. The philosopher, Spinoza, has this in mind when he speaks of “joy”. Joy “is a feeling of the enlargement of one’s power to live, and to continue living, in accord with one’s most authentic nature” (44). Consequently, we love that which brings us joy. When a person “identifies someone or something as the object to which he owes his joy and on which his joy depends” he “inevitably loves that object” (45). This is why we must learn to love truth: our joy depends on living according to truth. Life – true life, real life – is found in truth. In contrast, “ignorance and error… leave us in the dark” (60).

Truth also has a close relationship to the notions of trust and confidence. Frankfurt draws attention to the archaic English word “troth” to prove his point. We understand “that in the ceremonies of betrothal and of marriage the man and the woman may undertake to ‘pledge their troth’ to each other” (68). In doing this, “each promises to be true to the other… Each gives an assurance to the other that he or she can confidently be trusted to be true” (68). What is true for individuals is also true for society: “Social and communal relationships… can be efficient and harmonious only if people have a reasonable degree of confidence that others are on the whole reliable” (69).

Since truth is so closely connected to trust, honesty, confidence, and interacting with reality, non-truth – or the lie – undermines these qualities by setting up an illusory world. I quote at length:

The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs. They are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to impose his will on us. He aims at inducing us to accept his fabrication as an accurate account of how the world truly is. (77-78)

The world according to the lie is “an imaginary world” and leads to a life of alienation from others and, ultimately, from the self:

A person who believes a lie is constrained by it, accordingly, to live “in his own world” – a world that others cannot enter, and in which even the liar himself does not truly reside. Thus, the victim of the lie is, in the degree of his deprivation of truth, shut off from the world of common experience and isolated in an illusory realm to which there is no path that others might find or follow. (78-79)

As a result of his lies, the liar refuses to be known by others. Isolated, alone, in a world of his own devising, the liar betrays himself.

Frankfurt ends by arguing that individual facts – truths – are important, but so is the truth. An accumulation of individual truths is necessary for a good life and healthy society. However, the search for the truth in a broader sense is also of value. Caring about the truth “provides a ground and a motivation for our curiosity about the facts and for our commitment to the important of inquiry. It is because we appreciate that truth is important to us that we care about accumulating truths” (98).

Our belief in an objective, external reality connects us to the reality of other personalities. If we lose this, we are left with only our own subjectivity. We are left alone. So, ultimately, our belief in truths and in the truth connects us to a much larger world. For that reason alone, truth is to be loved and sought. Frankfurt concludes:

Thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves. In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control. If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities. (100-101)

Obviously, this book will probably not receive the attention that Frankfurt’s previous book did – the title is not nearly as provocative – but it should. Frankfurt demonstrates that lies are truly destructive – both personally and socially – and that truth is necessary for a healthy, whole, joyful life.

And that’s no bullsh*t!

Quotes excerpted from On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
© Richard J. Vincent, 2006