The Bellman.
sell-out zone
Saturday, August 20, 2005
The return of philosoblogging?!
No, not quite yet, but fair warning. Once I get myself fully organized for the coming semester my writing here is likely to take a turn for toward the pedantic. In the meantime, to prepare the waters, here's a passage from one of the texts I'll be teaching this semester, Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit.
When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more that hot air can serve those of communication.
