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April 3, 2005
Some Tangential Thoughts
On somebody-or-other's blog and on the Daily Show, among other places, I've been hearing about this book On Bullshit by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Although I haven't read it, the excerpted thesis seems self-evident enough, although, like many things, it's probably only blindingly obvious in retrospect. Bullshit, according to Frankfurt, is blatant disregard for the truth. Unlike a liar, who must be aware of the false truth-value of his or her lie, the bullshitter doesn't bother to evaluate the truth-value of his or her statements at all. They might be true. Then again, they might not be; he or she who bullshits cares not.
All of which raises an interesting ethical question: what insight does this give into the character of honesty? One thing I've been contemplating is that true honesty is an end in itself. Unlike bullshit, which, as Frankfurter observes, has as its end something besides the truth (since the bullshitter doesn't bother to evaluate truth), honesty seems to be some combination of that which is evaluated as true by the honest person and the pursuit of truth. The distinction between those two sides of honesty, I think, is that a person may have something he or she thinks to be true turn out to be mistaken. Our ethical category of "honest mistake" notwithstanding, it seems to me that honesty has to incorporate that additional Socratic component of the pursuit of truth, which helps shield one's perception of oneself as honest from being accidentally or unconsciously superseded by self-righteousness.
Completely setting aside the issue of a standard by which truth is to be judged, a person acts honestly, thus conceived, when he or she acts or says things he or she believes to be true, while also constantly seeking greater truth. The recursive nature (self-reflexivity) of honesty makes it an end in itself. I suspect that this conclusion can avoid dependence on the assumption of an absolute standard of truth so long as honesty is assumed to be an attitude that one takes towards other people. For example, when Frankfurt's book was being discussed with him on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked him about the relationship of his concept of bullshit to political spin. In politics, the statements one makes are always means to another end (i.e., political support) instead of ends in themselves, and so they aren't honest.
All of this, of course, smacks of Kant's Categorical Imperative in its second form. But drawing it out like I have here highlights an interesting relationship to a bit from Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (which I'm reading for junior tutorial) that struck me the other day:
Someone who can perceive the comedy and tragedy of life can resist the temptation to think in terms of purposes, which conceals the game that is played with us. (112 in my translation)
Since, as we've said, honesty has no ends or purposes, attitudes towards or statements about life that "think in terms of purposes" are not honest, which is to say, in Gadamer's terms, that they obscure "the game that is played with us." By "game" he means something very specific, and it's not something that should be negatively value-judged (if anything, it should be positively judged). More on this relationship between the above conception of honesty and Gadamer's conception of "game" and "play" tomorrow, or perhaps the day after: since Gadamer's project is to establish a separate claim to truth for the humanities as a discipline (as opposed to the "subject studies object" methodology of the natural sciences), I suspect he may be moving in this direction, and I should probably find out before I comment further.
Posted by David Richmond at April 3, 2005 8:31 PM EDT
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