From: zeleny@husc8.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,rec.arts.books,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Sincerity is Bullshit
Date: 25 Jul 92 19:39:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Jul25.153934.14165
 <1992Jul24.023146.14116@husc3.harvard.edu> <92Jul25.021431edt.47919@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <92Jul25.021431edt.47919@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum) writes:

>In <1992Jul24.023146.14116@husc3.harvard.edu>
>Mikhail Zeleny (zeleny@husc.harvard.edu) writes to an excessively
>large number of newsgroups:

Thank you for sharing your judgment of impropriety of my cross-posting,
Calvin.  However, I'm sure you will agree with me that it is the author's
prerogative to choose the venues for his writings.  Feel free to respond
wherever you see fit, for I shall do just that.

CBO:
>>>It seems quite ironic that Mikhail would quote from Harry Frankfurt's
>>>excellent little essay about bullshit and bullshit artists, since 
>>>Mikhail himself is one of the best examples of the bullshit artist
>>>manque that we have had the pleasure and exasperation to witness on 
>>>the net.

MZ:
>>Make up your mind, Calvin: either I'm "one of the best examples", or
>>"manqu\'e"

CBO:
>Why should I have to make up my mind?  Many of the famous folks on the 
>net seem to have done so prematurely, and end up defending outlandish
>positions.  Besides, when it comes to making up my mind, this
>particular dilemma is not one I have to face, because Mikhail has
>misread my expression.  He is, I was saying, an example of something. 
>Of what?  Of a "bullshit artist manque".  What kind of example? One of 
>the best.

Far be it from me to attempt forcing you to make up your mind: you are
hereby permitted to vacillate in perpetuity, or until such time as senility
or dizziness settles in.  Aside from this issue, I am happy to defer to
your autoexegetic capacities, for it is obvious that, in contradistinction
from Socrates, you are indeed the best interpreter of your own words.

MZ:
>>(one would think that, writing from Canada, you wouldn't have
>>this trouble with the _accent aigu_);

CBO:
>I don't believe I have any more trouble than the typical Anglophone
>Canadian.  In particular, I do not require explicit typesetter commands
>embedded in ASCII text intended only for human consumption in order
>to tell me where the accents are to be placed, whereas Mikhail seems
>to insist upon it (I also recall the nearly illegible slabs of
>Tex code he occasionally posted in the past in order to render logical
>formula).

Likewise, rest assured that it has never been my intention to separate you
from the typical example of your breed.  Please carry on with your
garrulous Anglophone ways; I shall try to tolerate the ensuing monotone
dirge as best I can.

CBO:
>Personally, I find "manque" makes for much easier reading than
>"manqu\'e".  I suspect this is also true of virtually all of the 
>French-speaking contributors to soc.culture.french: when they post
>in French, they uniformly leave the accents out. Do they also have
>"this trouble with the _accent aigu_"?

Your suspicion is wholly unfounded: in the group whereof you speak, most
French-language articles are written in what I am told is an adaptation of
the troff accent convention.  I'll be happy to share with you a shell
script designed to convert it to TeX, so that you may be properly estranged
from the texts in question.

MZ:
>>or is it that you and your tapeworms
>>had a little disagreement, what with your exasperation, and their chiming
>>in "we have had the pleasure"?

CBO:
>I took care of the tapeworms a long time ago, thanks.  But it seems like
>it would be Mikhail's tapeworms that are more ideally situated to take
>advantage of any of the bullshit he should happen to produce. 

You, Calvin, seem to be laboring under a false assumption that I regard the
production of bullshit as an infelicitous, or even a shameful activity.
Please be advised that this is not the case.

CBO:
>There are many on the net who have been pleased to read Mikhail's 
>posts from time to time.  There are many also who have been exasperated.
>(And the intersection of these classes is also quite large: there
>is no disagreement there.)  The "we" above is meant to refer to the 
>union of these classes.

I am sorry to have missed the momentuous occasion, whereupon you were
appointed the official spokescreature of the above group.  Still, given
your propensity for bombastic commonplaces, I in no way doubt your capacity
to speak for a vague multitude of your fellow Anglophone consumers of my
modest musings.

MZ:
>>Had you bothered to check the text,

CBO:
>Mikhail has no good reason to accuse me of not "bothering" to "check" 
>the text.  The tone of this phrase suggests a number of things.  One,
>that since I didn't "bother",  I was in some way negligent.  Two, that
>all that would be required would be a mere "check" of the text, as
>opposed to careful study.  This reinforces the implicit innuendo that
>I have been negligent.  This charge is unwarranted.  Mikhail can deny
>that he made it of course, since it's only innuendo.  As I understand
>it, that part of what makes for bullshit.

The figure in question was a litote, rather than a vulgar innuendo; to
spell it out, you may have bothered to check the text, but you certainly
haven't come back with even an elementary understanding of its message.
Take this observation as bullshit, if such interpretation should make you
feel better about your deficiency.

CBO:
>This reminds me muchly of the last time Mikhail used a similar phrase,
>in the "Rock implements all FSAs" thread, where someone finally had to 
>post enough of the text to show that it was in fact Mikhail who was
>being unfaithful to the text.

How nice for you to be endowed with such powers of voluntary recollection!
(Here, have some Hydergine.)  Yet observe that even if you managed to
demonstrate that I am indeed being "unfaithful to the text", there would
remain a much larger issue of being faithful to the truth; and as you will
undoubtedly recall, it is my opponents in the Putnam thread who failed to
refute my extension of his argument to arbitrary finite state automata, for
want of a coherent notion of implementation.  In our present situation, I
understand the point that "sincerity itself is bullshit" to be concerned
precisely with the cognate distinction between allegiance to an accurate
representation of an elusive phenomenal construct, such as a Humean self,
or, if you wish, a Barthesian text, and loyalty to its underlying,
substantial reality.  Given an exclusive choice between the two, you are
most welcome to take the former; as for me, I prefer to stick with the
facts of the matter.

MZ:
>>you might have noticed that Frankfurt
>>uses `bullshit', but certainly not `sincerity', "in a specific technical
>>sense". 

CBO:
>"noticed" continues to play on the theme of my negligence.  I am not
>nearly as bright as Mikhail, of course, so what he notices I may
>miss even after careful study.  But I think he is wrong here.  

You underestimate the scope of my insult, which wasn't meant to suggest a
banal interpersonal comparison.  It isn't relevant to this discussion
whether you are as bright, or even brighter than yours truly; the important
aspect of your intellect is that you are not bright _simpliciter_, or,
which amounts to the same thing, that you are not nearly as bright as you
think you are.  

CBO:
>First, as to the use of "bullshit":  Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit"
>is basically a conceptual analysis of "bullshit" as it is used in
>day-to-day life and elswhere.  He starts out:
>
>" One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so
>" much bullshit. Everyone knows this... 
>" I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of
>" bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory
>" philosophical analysis... 
>" My aim is simply to give a rough sketch of what bullshit is... to
>" articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept
>
>Clearly he is talking about "bullshit", and bullshit, as people normally
>understand them.  As with any conceptual analysis, a certain amount
>of revisionism will seep in, of course, but this makes no signficant
>difference. Note that the first thing Frankfurt does is to consult the 
>OED, which does not support the idea that he is using the word in any 
>specific technical sense.

Once again you are mistaken, Calvin: the first thing Frankfurt does is
to consult, not the OED, but the essay "The Prevalence of Humbug" by a
fellow analytic philosopher, Max Black.  The OED is considered ("quite
selectively") only after a detailed discussion of this article, in
which Frankfurt considers `humbug' as a genteel form of `bullshit',
and after a discussion of some anecdotal evidence about Wittgenstein's
putative opposition to manifestations of bullshit.  It is quite clear
that Frankfurt adduces these cases in order to qualify his use of the
term `bullshit' in a way that is quite different from the colloquial
practice.  In this, he is following the estabilished tradition of
Anglophone philosophy, which since Hobbes and Locke has aspired to the
standard of technical discourse, complete with explicitly constrained
meanings attached to every term.

MZ:
>>Indeed, the latter term occurs in the essay only twice, making its
>>first appearance in the penultimate paragraph, where it is used in a
>>perfectly standard fashion, reminiscent of Lionel Trilling's discussion of
>>Shakespeare: "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."  Oh, and do read _Sincerity and Authenticity_ before you
>>presume to pontificate on the subject of the "normal sense" of a cultural
>>topos.

CBO:
>Second, as to the use of "sincerity": it's hardly relevant to my point 
>that it occurs in the essay only twice.  And it's not relevant that it's 
>used in a fashion reminiscent of Lionel Trilling.  This may be true to 
>large degree, but I wasn't talking (or pontificating) about a "cultural 
>topos". I was simply talking about the normal use of the *word*, such as 
>would be brought to mind upon reading the quote.  I don't think I should
>be required to go off and read an entire book selected dictatorially
>before doing that.

Your low opinion of my humble suggestion for further reading has been
noted.  Observe that your disdainful appeal to "the normal use of the
*word*, such as would be brought to mind upon reading the quote" turns
precisely on the passage in question being lifted out of its context, which
surely includes Polonius' farewell speech to Laertes.  Compare:

"This above all -- to thine own self be true,
"And it must follow, as the night the day,
"Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Now Frankfurt:

"The contemporary proliferation 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 ``anti-realist'' doctrines 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 {\it
correctness} to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by
pursuit of an alternative ideal of {\it 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."

The merit of my suggestion consisted in emphasizing the commection between
the sententious suggestion of the senile Danish courtier, and Frankfurt's
diagnosis of the condition of sincerity.  Surely by failing to consider the
context of the concept in question (which, by the way, may also be found in
the classic book on literrature and sincerity by Henri Peyre), you commit
the same error of which you accused me in your previous article, in a
passage you have conveniently elided on this occasion:

In article <92Jul23.192727edt.47913@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
cbo@cs.toronto.edu (Calvin Bruce Ostrum) writes:

CBO:
>However, Mikhail makes no effort to point out that this quote is lifted
>out of context, even when his decontextified presentation of it leads
>someone else to agree with it. As Frankfurt says of those willing to
>bullshit, "[h]e is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need
>requires".

To return to your exhortation to attend to "the normal use of the *word*,
such as would be brought to mind upon reading the quote", I must confess
that, enmired in the morass of cultural intoxication, upon reading the
above text I immediately think of the Shakespearean passage.  It may be
that the customary reaction of your mind is to dismiss all cultural
connotations of the term it encounters in colloquial use, retaining only
such connexions as would be made by a "typical Anglophone Canadian", whose
grasp of matters historical may, for all I know, be akin to that of
Nietzsche's exemplary happy cattle. [1] Alas, unlike you, I am not at all
content with living unhistorically; consequently I tend to get most unhappy
with pronouncements like the following.

CBO:
>With the normal use of "sincere", most people think that it is possible 
>to be sincere, or at least to sincerely attempt to be so (how close is 
>that to the same thing?) without thereby committing bullshit.  By 
>normal use, I mean roughly the way the word is defined in a good 
>dictionary. 

A good dictionary, even that paragon of historical research, the OED, is
hardly equipped to define anything like "normal use"; at mest, it makers
must be content with reporting such use, and their success in this
undertaking will have very little bearing on normative questions of true
nature, such as we are considering at the moment.  Furthermore, the
Victorian sensibilities of your British Anglophone counterparts have
compelled them to terminate their historical account of the term in
question with their sole XXth century qoutation, the 1904 Harvard clich\'e
by Butcher: "At the root of all good writing lies sincerity of conviction."
Indeed, their treatment of `sincerity' and other related terms is wholly
unsatisfactory for our purpposes, for the simple reason that it ignores the
modern recognition of the fundamental opposition between sincerity and
irony, as practiced by Baudelaire, Wilde, and Nietzsche.  Thus it is clear
that no modern writer (think, for example, of Beckett) would formulate
Butcher's dictum, to whose substance he would nonetheless assent, in quite
the same terms.

CBO:
>But Frankfurt's use is quite different.  Frankfurt identifies two ideals,
>and designates them with the terms "correctness" and "sincerity"
>respectively.  Mikhail above quotes part of Frankfurt's account
>of sincerity. But there is a crucial ambiquity: is sincerity (roughly)
>the attempt to be true to oneself (call this the straight ideal), or 
>is it the  attempt to be true to onself *because* one has decided that 
>it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, and consequently 
>shunned the ideal of correctness (call this the reactive ideal).

You are demonstrably wrong.  Consider the next and final paragraph of
Frankfurt's essay: 

"But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and
hence susceptible both to correct and 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 all without knowing them.
Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience,
to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself
that is the easiest for a person to know.  Faxts about ourselves are not
peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution.  Our natures are,
indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less
inherent than the natures of other things.  And insofar as this is the
case, sincerity itself is bullshit."

Clearly, the dilemma is between correctness and sincerity, as defined in
the first paragraph quoted above.  Now, the final passage supports the
exclusive dichotomy between these alternatives by suggesting that the
choice of sincerity is incorrect, insofar as it turns on favoring the least
substantial aspect of one's experience as the basis of one's judgment,
while the choice of correctness is insincere, as it requires a deliberate
abnegation of the natural impulse towards self-representation.  Thus any
attempt to be consistently true to oneself, which you call "the straight
ideal", will be in the end indistinguishable in its consequences from "the
attempt to be true to on[e]self *because* one has decided that it makes no
sense to try to be true to the facts", insofar as in order to sustain what
you call "the reactive ideal", one must, in following the perpetual
vagaries of the self, inevitably come in conflict with the immutable facts
of correctness.

CBO:
>I don't know Trilling, but I suspect he uses the straight ideal
>of sincerity, although he probably comments that this kind of sincerity
>arose as an ideal because the ideal of correctness faded, without
>actually incorporating this story of its origin into its actual
>definition.  But Frankfurt himself appears to use the reactive ideal.

How silly of you to presume to judge a book you know only by title.

CBO:
>This is not clear from the text, but it seems crucial for the argument.
>*Why* is sincerity bullshit?  Because anyone who has adopted reactive
>sincerity as an ideal has shunned correctness.  But, if someone 
>recognises correctness as a false ideal, Frankfurt argues, he must 
>likewise recognise reactive sincerity as a false ideal:
>
>" But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate
>" and hence susceptible both to correct and incorrect description,
>" while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else
>" has been exposed as a mistake.
>
>For this reason, one cannot *really* be adopting reactive sincerity with
>sincerity (there is nothing to be any more sincere about than there was
>to be correct about with the rejected ideal of correctness). This must 
>lead to bullshit.

In this case, your speculations yield a nice example of inconstancy
implicit in sincere discourse.  For the moment, our reality is grounded in
the immutable aspects of Frankfurt's (manifestly non-Barthesian) text,
which, as I have argued above, is sufficient for sustaining the argument
that (straight) sincerity is bullshit.  In accordance with this text, it is
impossible to adopt reactive sincerity whilst retaining allegiance to
correctness, but it is quite easy to adopt it with straight sincerity,
which, after all, calls for no greater warrant than that given by one's
sentiment of the moment.  What leads to bullshit is not the putative
paradox implicit in reactive sincerity, but the inconstancy and ensuing
incorrectness in which it is grounded.

CBO
>However, the notion of reactive sincerity is a very strange one.  
>Straight sincerity seems more natural, and has the virtue that it
>can be adopted *along* *with* the ideal of correctness.  Now, both of 
>these ideals, in a primitive absolute form, are subject to the 
>criticisms that Frankfurt alludes to.  But suitably modifed forms of them 
>can quite possible be developed and advance hand in hand. 
>
>So, the upshot of this is that day-to-day sincerity is not bullshit,
>and perhaps there is even a "cultural topos" of sincerity that is not
>bullshit either.

This is sheer bullshit.  See above.

CBO:
>I recommend Frankfurt's interesting essay to anyone who has read this far,
>and request of anyone who knows anything about work that has expanded
>upon its final two paragraphs that they let me know about that work.
>(Work in analytic philosophy mode, that is, not in literary mode). Thanks.

I regret my inability to attach any meaning to the implied distinction
between analytic and "ordinary" philosophy, but some philosophical works
relevant to the subject, if not to the text in question (which originally
appeared in _Raritan_, universally acknowledged as a vehicle of "analytic"
philosophy) are the introduction and the title essay in Leo Strauss'
_Persecution and the Art of Writing_, and the first chapter of the great
last book by the late Gregory Vlastos, _Socrates, Ironist and Moral
Philosopher_.

>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Calvin Ostrum                                            cbo@cs.toronto.edu  
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>           "Can I have another piece of chocolate cake?" 
> "You can have your cake and eat it, and never have to puke up a thing."
>		-- Crowded House/Richard Thompson
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Ever mindful of your likely failure to catch the context of a literary
allusion, I enclose this quotation:

"Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is
meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about
again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the
moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholu nor
bored.  This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself
better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them
their happiness -- what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is
precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be
like an animal.  A human being may well ask an animal: `Why do you not
speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?'  The animal
would like to answer, and say: `The reason is I always forget what I was
going to say' -- but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so
that the human being was left wondering.  

But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to forget but clings
relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs
with him.  And it is a matter for wonder [...]", and so on.

"On the Uses & Disadvantages of History for Life", translated by
R.J.Hollingdale; highly recommended for all "typical speakers".

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Un de mes plus grands plaisirs est de jurer Dieu quand je bande."
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc