Bullshit and Philosophy Part 6
If this diagnosis is correct, Frankfurt's account has to be revised in at least two ways.
First, pretence is not an essential ingredient of bulls.h.i.t. Fania Pascal's utterance, for instance, qualifies as such, though there is no element of deceit or fakery involved. A mere indifference to the truth is apparently all that is needed.
Of course, a speaker will often try to conceal his own indifference when he knows that his audience is very concerned about how things really are. A politician, for example, who is primarily interested in getting re-elected instead of getting things right, has to hide this fact. The bulls.h.i.t he sells will usually be accompanied by pretence and deceit. However, this combination is not inevitable. Just imagine a politician who is fed up with all the fakery and phoniness and starts talking bulls.h.i.t openly, without hiding his complete indifference to the truth. The audience will probably feel shocked and the outcry, "Bulls.h.i.t!" will be heard everywhere. Yet, in contrast with the Fourth of July orator mentioned by Frankfurt, this speaker is not hiding what he is up to. Thus, in Frankfurt's view, his speech cannot count as bulls.h.i.t. This is a very counterintuitive conclusion.
Frankfurt's distinction between bulls.h.i.t and bull sessions is just as counterintuitive. For suppose one would ask the partic.i.p.ants in a playful bull session what they were doing. A natural response would be: "We are just talking bulls.h.i.t." Likewise, people witnessing a bull session will readily acknowledge that bull sessions consist mainly of bulls.h.i.t. Frankfurt ignores this and claims there is a fundamental difference between bulls.h.i.t and bull sessions. This distinction, centered around the presence or absence of pretence, is inevitably artificial. After all, as Frankfurt observes, the term 'bull session' is most likely an abbreviation or sanitized version of 'bulls.h.i.t session' (p. 38).
Second, bulls.h.i.t is not always a bad thing. Although the term is typically used to express indignation, irritation or disapproval, bulls.h.i.t is not always offensive. Frankfurt finds this particularly hard to understand. He is genuinely puzzled by the fact that "our att.i.tude toward bulls.h.i.t is generally more benign than our att.i.tude toward lying" and leaves it "as an exercise for the reader" to find out why this is so (p. 50). Perhaps the answer is not so difficult. Why is our att.i.tude towards bulls.h.i.t, resulting from a manifest indifference to the truth, so benign in many circ.u.mstances? Because in many circ.u.mstances the concern for truth and accuracy is not-and should not be-our primary concern. For instance, it is not our main concern, and rightly so, when someone is in terrible pain and in need of a comforting conversation. Wittgenstein's failure to appreciate this makes him, in Frankfurt's own words, "absurdly intolerant."
A bit of bulls.h.i.t from time to time might even be a good thing. That is what the old butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day comes to realize when he is reflecting on the practice of "bantering," or as contemporary Americans would call it, "bulls.h.i.tting": There is a group of six or seven people gathered just a little way behind me who have aroused my curiosity a little. I naturally a.s.sumed at first that they were a group of friends out together for the evening. But as I listened to their exchanges, it became apparent they were strangers who had just happened upon one another here on this spot behind me. . . . It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves so swiftly.... I rather fancy it has [something] to do with this skill of bantering. Listening to them now, I can hear them exchanging one bantering remark after another. It is, I would suppose, the way many people like to proceed. In fact, it is possible my bench companion expected me to banter with him-in which case, I suppose I was something of a sorry disappointment. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in-particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.138 Indeed, we should perhaps look at the whole matter of bulls.h.i.tting more enthusiastically than Frankfurt does. As a means to lay contact with others or keep the conversation going, it can be a source of human warmth and a blessing rather than a curse. Hence, we are not so sure that the world would be a better place without it. Just imagine that every conversation were to be informed by a strong concern for the truth. Conversations would be terribly fatiguing. For as Oscar Wilde once said: "The truth is rarely pure, and never simple." This is probably one of the reasons why Wilde himself was not too concerned about truth and accuracy in conversation. And we may be thankful for that. The world would certainly be a duller place without Wilde's splendid witticisms and epigrams, nearly all of which are brilliant examples of bulls.h.i.t.139 In "Concealment and Exposure," Thomas Nagel discusses another case of "benign bulls.h.i.t": "If I say, 'How nice to see you', you know perfectly well that this is not meant as a report of my true feelings: Even if it happens to be true, I might very well say it even if you were the last person I wanted to see at just that moment."140 Despite an obvious lack of concern for the truth, Nagel makes the case for polite formulae like this. "The first and most obvious thing to note . . . is that they are not dishonest, because the conventions that govern them are generally known. If I don't tell you everything I think and feel about you, that is not a case of deception, since you don't expect me to do so" (p. 6). Furthermore, polite formulas are a sine qua non of a stable society as they leave a great range of potentially disruptive material unacknowledged and therefore out of play. Nagel certainly seems to have a point. Polite bulls.h.i.t is often to be preferred to truthful expressions of hostility, contempt, derision, s.e.xual desire or aversion.
What about Frankfurt's most central claim, however, that the essence of bulls.h.i.t is an indifference towards truth?
A Different Kind of Bulls.h.i.t According to Frankfurt, the most distinctive feature of bulls.h.i.t is one situated in the speaker's state of mind. The bulls.h.i.tter is indifferent and hides this indifference. However, it would appear that an utterance often qualifies as bulls.h.i.t purely as a result of certain of its objective features independent of the speaker's stance. This suggests that there is another kind of bulls.h.i.t that should be explained not by reference to the state of mind of the producer but rather by pointing to certain salient features of the "product" itself.
This is the basic idea of G.A. Cohen's response to Frankfurt. In "Deeper into Bulls.h.i.t," Cohen notes that Frankfurt's definition of the "essence" of bulls.h.i.t does not sit well with the kind of bulls.h.i.t that concerns him the most, namely the bulls.h.i.t abundant in certain academic circles and best exemplified by the French continental tradition. This sort of bulls.h.i.t cannot be explained by reference to the indifference or insincerity of the producer. After all, some of the most hideous examples appear to be the result of honest academic efforts. What is missing in these cases is an appropriate connection to the truth, not as far as the state of mind of the producer is concerned but with respect to features of the texts themselves. More specifically, it is the "unclarifiable unclarity" of those philosophical or sociological texts, says Cohen, that const.i.tutes their high bulls.h.i.t content.
An unclarifiable text is not only obscure but is incapable of being rendered un.o.bscure, at least in a text that could be recognized as a version of what was originally said. A helpful trick is this: add or subtract a negation sign from a text and see whether that makes any difference to its plausibility. If not, Cohen says, one may be sure that one is dealing with bulls.h.i.t (p. 132). Unsurprisingly, he concludes his a.n.a.lysis in the same way as Frankfurt, with a call to oppose and expose bulls.h.i.t whenever possible. Academic discourse should always aim for the truth, and texts that are so obscure that the question of truth becomes irrelevant are a threat to any serious academic enterprise.
Now that we have a basic distinction between two kinds of bulls.h.i.t, Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.t and Cohen-bulls.h.i.t, we can ask the question: does this distinction enable us to cla.s.sify all the "flowers in the lush garden of bulls.h.i.t"? In other words, is every instance of bulls.h.i.t necessarily an instance of Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.t or Cohen-bulls.h.i.t? To answer this question, let us return to books like Chakra Balancing Kit or The Hidden Messages in Water Crystals or Numerology Helps You to Master Your Relationship and to Find the Right Career or Astrology: A Cosmic Science. Do we have a convincing account now of the specific kind of bulls.h.i.t to be found in these pseudoscientific works? It does not appear so.
The plethora of pseudoscientific nonsense, though widely recognized as a paradigm of bulls.h.i.t (if you Google 'astrology and bulls.h.i.t', for instance, you get 290,000 hits), remains surprisingly unharmed by the attacks of Frankfurt and Cohen. Neither provides an appropriate explanation for this form of bulls.h.i.t. Firstly, pseudoscientists typically have a firm and sincere belief in their practice and go to great lengths to prove the truth of the doctrines they endorse. They are not indifferent to the truth, quite the contrary. Thus, Frankfurt's definition of bulls.h.i.t does not seem to apply. But Cohen's definition falls short as well, for the predictions and statements of pseudoscientists are often very specific and explicit as opposed to unclear or unclarifiable. Just think of astrologers predicting an earthquake or hurricane on a specific date or bogus healers providing a detailed diagnosis and a.s.sessment of a patient's condition.
Here's a serious lacuna in the literature on bulls.h.i.t. Not only is pseudoscientific bulls.h.i.t very prominent and visible, there is also no doubt that the bulls.h.i.t of pseudoscientists is at least as damaging and therefore as deserving of strict scrutiny as the bulls.h.i.t produced by advertisers or academics. After all, how many people are really affected by the philosophical impotence targeted by Cohen? And how many people are nowadays really deceived by advertisers? (In fact, people often seem to expect "good bulls.h.i.t" from these professionals rather than complete truthfulness . . .) Pseudoscience, though sometimes an innocent pastime, is known to have a large and damaging impact on the lives of many and to pose a threat to the credibility of science, medicine and even politics. These effects certainly warrant further investigation into the what, how, and why of this third kind of bulls.h.i.t.
But this is not the right place to carry out that kind of investigation. For one thing, it would necessitate a detailed account of the nature of pseudoscience which would go beyond the scope of this chapter. However, we do want to draw attention to a short, pertinent remark made by Cohen. After discussing unclarifiability as the key component of bulls.h.i.t, he briefly identifies "arguments that are grossly deficient either in logic or in sensitivity to empirical evidence" as another possible source of bulls.h.i.t (p. 131).
These features, insensitivity to evidence and fallacious reasoning, must be central to any a.n.a.lysis of pseudoscientific bulls.h.i.t. Admittedly, this characterization remains rather vague. But as a general rule, and in order to avoid bulls.h.i.t, we believe it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
III.
It's All Around Us.
Bulls.h.i.t in Politics, Science, Education, and the Law.
12.
The Republic of Bulls.h.i.t: On the Dumbing-Up of Democracy.
MARK EVANS.
Harry Frankfurt claims that "bulls.h.i.t is unavoidable whenever circ.u.mstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about" (On Bulls.h.i.t, p. 63). He then suggests that democracy may be especially p.r.o.ne to the production of bulls.h.i.t because it fuels "the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs."
It is the most popularly received wisdom about politics that politicians and others close to the exercise of power-media commentators, lobbyists, and suchlike-are inordinately disposed to pollute the polity with bulls.h.i.t. It is much more unusual and arresting to contend that the 'ordinary citizens' are also somehow responsible for some of democratic political culture's less edifying elements, particularly with respect to Frankfurt's very specific conception of bulls.h.i.t as discourse which is essentially indifferent to the truth: bulls.h.i.tters, for him, don't really even care that they don't know what they are talking about.141 For many, to claim such a thing would be not only arrogantly and offensively patronising but also a fundamental a.s.sault on democracy itself. The ordinary citizens are democracy's heroes: the people who are ultimately sovereign in the land, who graciously bestow the trust of office on those few of their number who have convinced them through the rigors of public debate of their fitness to rule, and who revoke that grant when they judge their representatives to have failed them. Their plain, good common sense is, at the heart of its self-image, democracy's very lifeblood. It's the basis on which citizens are to be honored, equally, as masters of their own political fates. Their elected politicians may be p.r.o.ne to bulls.h.i.t and other misdemeanours, but democracy survives their failings-so the story runs-because of its genius in its ultimate empowerment of the ordinary citizens.
So to say, with Frankfurt, that democracy itself actually encourages citizens to bulls.h.i.t looks like a critical blow to one of its justificatory props. If such bulls.h.i.tting isn't already bad enough in itself, the propensity to bulls.h.i.t would also indicate a crucial degradation, if not total lack, of the critical ac.u.men required to guard against other, perhaps more devastating forms of deformity in political life which thrive on untruth. And yet . . . there is something very reminiscent of the Emperor's new clothes here. Hasn't Frankfurt simply dared to utter something which is, when we pluck up the courage to query the treasured commonplaces of democratic life, really rather obvious? Hasn't it actually been said from democracy's very inception onwards, by those who share Plato's insight that political understanding is an expertise that we cannot possibly all share?
I shall call this claim "the Frankfurt thesis," and I argue that it should be taken very seriously. But, even setting aside democracy's own rosily optimistic mythology, some might immediately object to the thesis. Suspecting that it is paradoxically manifesting an indifference to the truth all of its own, they might claim that, in contemporary democracy, the fact of the matter is not that citizens don't care about the truth. The real crisis democracy faces is that, nowadays, citizens just don't care about politics. And many who make this observation central to their understanding of democracy would reject the idea that it connotes political incompetence on the citizenry's part. Rather, they would say that apathy or indifference is generally rooted in a well-founded cynicism about a system that so consistently fails to provide good government: why should citizens care much about, and engage with, a process that apparently cannot deliver what they would wish of it?
This alternative view can be called "the cynicism thesis" and I think that, actually, both are partly right. Adopting them thus does not turn one into an anti-democrat; the theses are arguments about, not against, democracy, and the point of elaborating them is to a.n.a.lyse how we might tackle the problems they identify. In fact, many supporters of the cynicism thesis have urged that what we need is more meaningful opportunities for citizens' partic.i.p.ation (what political theorists today often refer to as 'deliberative democracy.') And they would highlight modern information and communications technology as the means by which greater and more informed partic.i.p.ation can be realised.
The Frankfurt thesis shows-if it is valid-that matters cannot be as simple as that-and this is good reason for throwing such an uncomfortable argument into the debate about the health of democracy.
Bulls.h.i.tting and Lying in Politics The full elaboration of the Frankfurt thesis will require other conceptions of 'bulls.h.i.t' to supplement Frankfurt's own, but we can begin with his 'indifference-to-truth' definition to see how we might use 'bulls.h.i.t' both polemically and conceptually in political a.n.a.lysis. It's probably fair to say that when people condemn their politicians as bulls.h.i.tters, they generally haven't made Frankfurt's distinction between bulls.h.i.tting and lying.142 For him, in contrast to bulls.h.i.tting, the act of lying is premised upon knowledge of, and concern for, the truth: the liar knows what is true and is concerned to conceal it (On Bulls.h.i.t, p. 33).
Most politicians probably do tell lies some of the time, and some perhaps do tell lies a lot of the time. And it is belief in the truth of this claim that often gives rise to support for the cynicism thesis, basing its rejection of political engagement on the a.s.sumption that 'all politicians are liars and hypocrites, only in politics for their own selfish ends no matter what lofty goals and concerns they pretend to have'. Less subtle articulations of this view treat politicians almost as if they are a sub-species of humanity (or a species of sub-humanity) defined by its congenital disposition to lying and incompetence. But it's surely implausible to think that the modus operandi of politicians is to apprehend the truth and then systematically attempt to conceal it, all the time, as 'Frankfurt-lying' would have it.
Many different kinds of people go into politics, and for many different kinds of reason, at least some of which are sincerely based on principled commitment; and it is anyway incredible to believe that everyone in the political process can consistently muster the peculiar psychological energies necessary literally to live by lying in the way many seem to a.s.sume politicians must.143 This isn't to deny, however, that political behavior and discourse is beset with evasion, prevarication, dissembling and other forms of disconnection to the truth: what Frankfurt has given us, with his conception of bulls.h.i.t, is a way of characterising this without misleadingly sweeping it into the overly narrow category of 'lying'. To appreciate its utility in this regard, let us also equip ourselves with G.A. Cohen's distinction between "aim-bulls.h.i.tters"-those whose consciously entertained goal it is to produce bulls.h.i.t-and "disposition-bulls.h.i.tters," who are unintentionally p.r.o.ne, for whatever reason, to produce bulls.h.i.t. On Frankfurt's definition, liars are always 'aim-liars', so to speak, but not all bulls.h.i.tters aim to bulls.h.i.t (see Chapter 8 in this volume).
Consider what can retrospectively be seen as a cla.s.sic statement of political bulls.h.i.tting provided by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four's account of Winston's work in the Ministry of Truth: Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by doc.u.mentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.
All history was a palimpsest, sc.r.a.ped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.... Even the written instruction which Winston received . . . never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was slips, errors, misprints or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy. But actually he thought . . . it was not even forgery. It was merely the subst.i.tution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie.144 What's of particular interest here is how the routinized production of falsehood converts what might have started out as lying into bulls.h.i.tting: the truth becomes essentially forgotten in the process of telling whatever story is told to serve the regime's purposes. To see this, we should realize that Winston might actually insert a truth in one of his daily corrections to the historical record of The Times. But it isn't there because it's true, or believed to be false, and the inst.i.tutionalized rewriting of history is deliberately undermining the capacity-and, crucially, the willingness-to distinguish between the true and false. (The Party aims to destroy the very distinction, of course.) As Orwell's satire suggests, totalitarianism provides the most obvious examples of ideologies and regimes attempting to embed themselves not simply in a web of lies-because that implies the truth remains, in its conscious concealment, as a potentially refuting presence in their midst-but in a mora.s.s of bulls.h.i.t, where the premium is on adherence to their tropes and to the tales they tell to legitimate themselves and their actions, removing any notion that there could be a genuine realm of facts underneath by which the veracity of what are forwarded as truth-claims could actually be tested. The 'interests of the working cla.s.s', the 'manifest destiny of the superior race', the 'wise guidance' of the party, or 'the great leader', when intoned often enough as mantras, become criterial of 'reality', manipulable to explain away anything and insulated from the very conceptual possibility of facts which would expose their bankruptcy. (I think it is implausible, for example, to think that racists are typically liars in the Frankfurtian sense. They dogmatically persist in their views, impervious to, and hence essentially uninterested to confront, the facts which could undermine their beliefs.145) Hence, when Vaclav Havel famously campaigned, in Communist Czechoslovakia, to "live in truth" he is actually best understood as calling for a political order which did not require one to live in this kind of political bulls.h.i.t. Such totalitarianism aims at bulls.h.i.t and many of its hapless victims become disposed to reproduce it even as they mistakenly think themselves already to be 'living in truth.' 146 Without implying any degree of moral equivalence between them and totalitarianism, I claim that an a.n.a.logous disengagement with the truth is evident in the belief-systems and the practices of liberal democracies and their governments. It is no less pertinent for its tragic obviousness to cite the Bush Administration's notorious "weapons-of-ma.s.s-destruction" story told to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a prime example of such bulls.h.i.t.
When we consider its demonstrably false elements, we might reasonably conclude that some outright lies were indeed told in the construction of that case. But I doubt that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and their many vocal lieutenants and supporters were always consciously lying. Rather, they manifested a quintessentially bulls.h.i.tting disconnection to, and disinterest in, the truth, or in the evidence to the contrary of their intentions that pointed to truths about WMDs in Iraq which they wished to resist. And when the facts to the contrary became too visible to ignore, the bulls.h.i.tting shifted tack to suggest other supposed justifications were also in place all along: 'humanitarian intervention', 'democratisation' and suggestions, made both directly and indirectly, of Saddam Hussein's complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
These examples of ordure may have issued from aim-bulls.h.i.tters who consciously sought to deflect concerns for the truth (for example: the 'humanitarian' justification may not be a lie as such, but the post-war insistence on its strength as a justification may be intended to divert attention away from the fact of the failure of the original official justification: a post hoc 'rejustifica-tion'). But there's no reason to think that such tales were not or could not also be spun with the sincerity of those who were merely disposition-bulls.h.i.tters.
The point is that, just as totalitarian mythologies do, the story took on a life of its own: it had to, insofar as the decision to invade was not something which, for the Bush Administration and its allies, could be allowed to stand or fall on the evidence. What might indeed have started as lie-telling gradually slipped free of reality altogether in a way that lying doesn't. What mattered was that, from the Administration's perspective, some justification for the invasion had to remain in play; what was actually the case on the ground, so to speak, was not essentially germane. (The same refusal to face relevant facts is evident in its claim that the invasion has not been subsequently disastrous for Iraqi society.147) The Myth of the 'Well-Informed' Citizen At this point, a supporter of the liberal-democratic status quo might object that the Iraq invasion is just a one-off, and not therefore evidence of a systematic propensity to bulls.h.i.t as is present in totalitarian regimes. But even if they fall well short of totalitarian proportions it is hardly difficult to come up with other examples of such bulls.h.i.tting on the part of just about every liberal-democratic government. (The partisan belief that it is obviously only 'the other side' that bulls.h.i.ts is itself bulls.h.i.t.) This is evidence that can be adduced in support of a claim that liberal democracy as a form of political order functions in a way that disposes those in, and around, power to bulls.h.i.t-and if we rested content with that claim, we might be tempted to conclude that the cynicism thesis is well on the way to vindication. For on this basis one could perhaps plausibly surmise that the reason for such a prevalent disposition to bulls.h.i.t is that politicians invariably have a lot that they wish to hide. Their dissimulation becomes so routine that they cease to tell lies as they retreat into a self-justificatory fantasy-land of bulls.h.i.t whose illusions have to be propped up by ever greater piles of the stuff.
To insist again, Frankfurt-thesis advocates don't deny that politicians produce lots of strikingly malodorous bulls.h.i.t. But they would warn against the frequent tendency to be so overcome by its pungency as to fail to discern its other sources. Not only do we have their claim (a): that citizens do their own fair share of (Frankfurt-) bulls.h.i.tting about politics, but we can also extend the thesis as stated thus far with a further claim (b): that democracy exhibits a tendency to produce other, non-Frankfurt forms of bulls.h.i.t which act to reinforce the Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.tting of citizens.
Substantiating (a) first: it is obvious that not all citizens are political cynics, or are as cynical as they like to think themselves to be. Many of them buy into the bulls.h.i.t of their politicians in their own 'understanding' of the political world and doubtless do their own bit to embellish and propagate it. Indeed, it's plausible to suggest a rule of thumb that, insofar as the citizens in question know even less about the facts with respect to which politicians are bulls.h.i.tting, they are therefore more likely to be bulls.h.i.tting whenever they confidently offer political opinions and evaluations. Now, the key to the Frankfurt thesis is not simply to understand why citizens formulate and voice such opinions but also to grasp why they tend to do so with such confidence.
An explanation for this runs as follows. The political world and the choices that have to be made therein are incredibly complex, very difficult to grasp and negotiate. The idea that even its essentials can be properly understood by anyone lacking a high degree of intellectual ability and trained expertise is frankly absurd. But electoral democracy has to resist acknowledgment of this truth: in both its theory and practice it a.s.sumes a degree of political competence on the part of the citizenry-in the ideal of the 'well-informed' citizen-that it does not (indeed cannot reasonably be expected) to possess. Citizens are effectively encouraged, indeed they often feel themselves obligated qua citizens, to formulate what often turn out to be incorrect, over-simplified or otherwise flawed views on a whole range of issues without a concern for these failings being properly accommodated in either the mindset or the inst.i.tutional embodiment of democratic deliberation.
The electoral need to pander to such views surely accounts for a significant amount of the bulls.h.i.t spewed forth by politicians. For when they campaign for votes they are forced, consciously or not, to present things in terms that citizens can understand (and of course many of them do not in fact possess much more than their voters in the way of such expertise anyway). 148 Candidates for office have to attempt to pull off a very delicate balancing trick. They have to (a) offer a sufficiently compelling critique of their opponents along with (b) an equally compelling account of what they would do in office instead, all the while (c) saying and (d) doing a host of things to try to co-opt typically dissimilar groups of supporters into what they hope to be a winning coalition, and (e) explaining away whatever actions and statements in their past (no matter how recent or distant) might cause them personal and/or political embarra.s.sment.
Sometimes they will deal with such difficulties by dodging the crucial issues, for example by pretending that certain concerns are of great importance when in fact, they are not-a strategy which has the effect (intended or otherwise) of deflecting critical attention to those issues which are really important (the 'politics of distraction'). Or they confront the political world with dogged (sometimes 'fundamentalist') adherence to a simplistic set of ideological nostrums and a refusal (again, intended or not) to contemplate the possibility that they might fail to explain that world and orient us satisfactorily in it. And of course the flow of this bulls.h.i.t is hardly stemmed once election time is over . . .
Anyone who has actually studied politics-beyond the superficial, more-or-less partisan ephemera reproduced in the media to the more coolly detached, scrupulous and theoretically rigorous writings from academia, say-is fully aware of how simplistic and naive (and, to that degree, deluded) much everyday ('real-world'149) political discourse tends to be. And the point is that it has to be: not, perhaps, in every respect as actually manifest, but over-simplification is a functional necessity for democracy. Citizens indulge in the same kind of bulls.h.i.t as politicians when they affirm such over-simplified views, and its metaphorical stench becomes more noxious the more doggedly such views are affirmed in defiant indifference to the facts which would reveal the suppressed complexities.150 As already suggested, even acceptance of the cynicism thesis may sometimes be based on bulls.h.i.t: most citizens fail properly to pursue the question as to why politicians always seem incapable of delivering their campaign promises, often resting content with the a.s.sumption that this must be down to their personal characters rather than being indicative of far more profound systemic problems in the polity. Depressingly, what keeps this whole system going in the wake of such a judgment is invariably more of the same: other campaigners feed on this 'diagnosis', promising to be a 'different sort of politician', trotting out plat.i.tudes on governance designed to accord with the voters' own 'plain common sense'-which is in fact usually a highly fragmentary, partial and ill-informed experience of the world, very poorly equipped to deal with political realities. When this leads to what could be called the 'Governor Schwarzenegger Syndrome', perhaps this is not too serious: but dangerous demagogues and fundamen-talisms also thrive in such circ.u.mstances.
Yet all of this can hardly be said to be a fair criticism of the citizens in question, if it is wholly unreasonable to expect them all to have the time and competence properly to understand politics. I certainly don't think that democracy produces a lot of aim-bulls.h.i.tters amongst the citizenry and I share Cohen's preference to focus critically on the product-the bulls.h.i.t-rather than its producers. And even if, on these lines, we agree with Winston Churchill that "the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter," we're not committed to rejecting democracy altogether (We have a reason instead to adopt Churchill's belief that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.") But we shouldn't shy away from the observation that some of democracy's problems arise from the bulls.h.i.tting misapprehensions of political reality that citizens as well as politicians manifest.
'Dumbing-Up': Some Distortions of Democratic Equality All of this is not to say that we cannot increase current levels of knowledge and critical appreciation of political realities and arguments among the citizenry as a whole (although the present argument would be hoist by its own petard if it thought this partial amelioration was an easy thing to achieve). But now we must confront claim (b)'s deepening of the Frankfurt thesis, for this proposes that there are certain obstacles in democratic culture even to modest proposals for improvement which again are difficult to own up to in a democracy.
Although one of modernity's defining moments was the conversion of 'democracy' from 'bad' to 'good' thing, many defenders of democracy in modern times have nevertheless peddled highly elitist conceptions of who is actually fit substantially to engage in politics: for them, democracy works only if an elite political cla.s.s is largely left alone to rule, barring the occasional election to keep them in check. But apart from any other reservation we might have about this as an ideal, such 'democratic elitism' is clearly p.r.o.ne to internal tensions: how can any such elitism be reconciled with the principle of equal respect for citizens, on which democracy is founded? The problem that claim (b) draws our attention to, however, is that this tension has in recent times been 'resolved' in ways that are detrimental to the very modest kind of purely intellectual elitism needed in the fight against bulls.h.i.t.
To explain: elitists have traditionally feared that increasing the voice of the ordinary citizens in politics, and culture more widely, would inevitably lead to a dumbing-down in those spheres, such is the mediocrity of the latter's competence and tastes. There has been a powerful reaction against this view in the name of democratic equality, but one form it has taken has challenged the very idea of the objective standards invoked to distinguish, for example, good and bad, right and wrong, or sophisticated and mediocre, beliefs and judgments. 'Equal respect' leads to the relativist game of 'I'm valid, you're valid: we're all ent.i.tled to our opinions', wherein having 'an equal right to express an opinion' becomes conflated with the claim of 'equal validity of whatever opinion is expressed' (where 'validity' means 'equal intellectual merit').151 And no matter what nonsense this may legitimate, the anti-elitist aim is to raise everyone's view to some level of substantive equal worth: it is, in effect, a dumbing-up.
Such vulgar relativism is famously easy to dispatch in the fabled Philosophy 101 course and, perhaps more pertinently, those who think that they affirm it consistently can very often be shown not to do so absolutely. Few such putative relativists, when pushed on the matter, are happy to play the equal-validity game with the serial murderer's, rapist's, or child-molester's conceptions of the good life. Some will readily embrace the idea that there are clear objective standards of evaluation for performance and achievement in sport and art, say, without thinking that those who objectively achieve less are thereby denied equality of respect as people. But many do not apply this idea to the evaluation of specifically political views. In a putatively democratic way-which actually leaves out the crucial deliberative element of democratic discourse-it seems to be enough for opinions to be aired and left to stand as they are. From such a perspective, any argument about one's views against those of others-as anything more constructive than mere 'sounding off'-is pointless: nothing is bulls.h.i.t (or, if something is, then everything is).152 Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.t has a natural bedfellow in relativism and, to remove it from political discourse, we must retrieve the democratic ideal of equal respect from the relativist clutch that has taken such a strong hold on it.
Those who prefer to think of the situation in political culture as a dumbing-down might describe such relativism as an obvious product of ignorance: overwhelmed and embarra.s.sed by the complexities of politics, perhaps jealous of those few who seem more capable of getting to grips with them, the ordinary citizen-encouraged by a distorted reading of what democratic equality implies-reacts by stubbornly refusing the possibility of such qualitative distinctions in political knowledge. But this quasi-Nietzschean story of democratic ressentiment, of 'timid little people' dragging us all down to some lowly, facile common cultural denominator, fits rather poorly with the dumbed-up self-images of the age. I agree with Laura Penny's belief that we live in "an era of unprecedented bulls.h.i.t production" (Your Call Is Important to Us, p. 1). And a significant amount of it is, I submit, the result not of a timid but an a.s.sertive, indeed aggressive, demand of equal validity in the discourse of multifarious spheres in social life.
Part of the phenomenon I have in mind is exemplified by the peculiarly 'in-your-face' form of 'respect' that many wish to command today (sometimes ironically at the expense of any respect they might show for others). But I wish to highlight another aspect to it, which is much more responsible for bulls.h.i.t. As societies become ever more complex it is only to be expected that types of knowledge multiply and the division of labor becomes ever deeper. Old hierarchies of knowledge and expertise are bound to be displaced: but there is an underlying but striking resistance to the idea that what arises in their place is a new hierarchy of expertise, in the following sense. Almost every field of human endeavor, almost every profession, no matter how humdrum, increasingly indulges in its own forms of discourse and 'knowledge', its own professions of 'expertise'. This is exhibited by the pseudo-intellectual jargon so many of them increasingly spout. In other words, expertise has in a sense become 'democratized', and in a way that threatens to hollow out the very notion of 'expertise': everyone is an expert in something. We know that some types of bulls.h.i.tter pretend to an expertise or experience that they do not in fact possess. But in the democratization of expertise we encounter others who are pretending to be experts in something that is not in fact a matter of 'expertise' at all. To posit any causal link between this and democratic equality of respect is probably to oversimplify quite seriously its provenance. But this phenomenon comports well with the relativizing understanding of such respect and, I suspect, it provides a powerful cultural bolster to the insulation of ordinary citizens' political views from expert critique, and more widely to the toleration of bulls.h.i.t in politics and, indeed in many other spheres of life.
My example of this phenomenon is the 'management-speak' that the growth of the 'American business model' of economic organisation has fostered; it has particular pertinence here insofar as its paradigms have been used radically to redesign not just direct economic activity but much modern governance and indeed many other social inst.i.tutions and practices more generally (who, to take just one small example of it, can get away without a 'mission statement' nowadays?) Much of it-as I'm sure readers who are not utterly complicit with it will readily agree-is fatuously pretentious and overblown. But it provides succor for those who are complicit with it: they can show off their 'expert' familiarity with a putatively privileged set of discursive terms that masquerade as referents for supposedly complex matters which mimic genuine intellectual complexity and profundity but which are not, in truth, complex at all. Some of it is undoubtedly bulls.h.i.t in something like Frankfurt's sense. The word 'downsizing', for example, is, I suspect, deliberately chosen to overlook the facts about the human cost of the policies it denotes. But here is an area which requires other conceptions of bulls.h.i.t to get its full measure as a dissembling discourse.
So, to identify more fully the targets in the struggle against bulls.h.i.t, we need to expand on the typologies of bulls.h.i.t provided by Frankfurt and Cohen. For future elaboration and a.n.a.lysis, then, I would suggest the following. In addition to (1) 'Frankfurt-bulls.h.i.t', indifference to truth, and that proposed by Cohen (2): unclarifiable unclarity, discourse which is not only unclear, but whose meaning cannot be rendered clear even on a.n.a.lysis, we have: (3): clarifiable unclarity: discourse which over-complicates the expression of claims that can be much more straightforwardly expressed.153 Bulls.h.i.t (4) might be plain, straightforward rubbish: discourse that is plainly deficient in logic, coherence or factual grounding.
Bulls.h.i.t (5) is irretrievable speculation: discourse that may be perfectly clear, and might not be rubbish but is crucially lacking in any plausible means of verification.
Bulls.h.i.t (6) is pretension or over-portentousness: discourse which may or may not be superficially complex but which over-intellectualises the straightforward, the obvious, sometimes even the trivial and ba.n.a.l.
Bulls.h.i.t (7) includes evasion, elision, insincerity, procrastination and other forms of dissembling in discourse that fall short of lying, which is very common in, though hardly exclusive to, politics.154 Philosophy versus Bulls.h.i.t The various forms of bulls.h.i.t that have dumbed-up democratic culture and paradoxically drowned out the voice of genuine expertise in political conversation have sources and effects that lie well beyond politics as well, of course. The battle against them will have to be fought on many fronts, and with a variety of weapons. My own small contribution to the struggle includes a call to restore objective standards to our political arguments, and a respect for such standards in evaluating their quality. This has elements of an intellectual elitism in that such respect will incorporate greater acknowledgment of the authority of certain people to lead certain debates, not only with their greater factual knowledge but also their greater ac.u.men in critically a.n.a.lysing the interpretations and arguments made in politics than we find in, say, partisan media commentary.155 But this implies no extra social or political advantages for them. When I say that they are to 'lead' debates, I signify the intention that these should continue to be democratically inclusive; I am not advocating a political discourse in which the elite only talks to itself and hence effectively monopolises input into the political process.
If one suspects that such an arrangement would still be very much 'us-and-them'-the handful of experts versus the ma.s.s of distinctly inexpert citizens-then we should consider how such a gap might be narrowed. For even if citizens will never all have high levels of political expertise, that is no reason to rest content with the low levels of critical political understanding many of them currently possess. Certainly, liberal democracies should think about how they 'train' the citizens of tomorrow in their 'citizenship', or 'civics', school education to see how political knowledge might be deepened and critical ac.u.men sharpened. In order to develop thus as citizens, people have to learn more of the Socratic skills of self-examination: to recognise how their own views may be imperfect, and how one may go about refining them.
More generally, I propose that an anti-bulls.h.i.t discursive culture may develop if there is greater practice of, and respect for, the techniques of a good old-fashioned a.n.a.lytic-philosophical style, which prizes clarity of exposition and rigor of a.n.a.lysis in pursuit of truth and the 'best argument' objectively understood. A tutor of mine at Oxford, one of a.n.a.lytic philosophy's spiritual homes, once told me that a.n.a.lytic philosophy was "a very good bulls.h.i.t detector."
The expertise I have in mind, then, will exemplify this style and will aspire not only to command respect and acquire intellectual ('opinion-leading') authority in its competent execution of a.n.a.lytic-philosophical critique but also to provide models of, and standards for, a.n.a.lysis and argument that others should want to try to share. It's a small tragedy for democracy when the taste and apt.i.tude for this kind of philosophical discourse is confined to the ivory towers of academia. For such philosophy would seem to be a prime tool in tackling, in its variegated forms, bulls.h.i.t not just in politics but in all other spheres of life.
It is thus highly regrettable that the a.n.a.lytic-philosophical style has very many critics in philosophy itself, nowadays; many philosophies overtly want to eschew truth, objectivity and clarity. For this reason, as Cohen points out, in the struggle against bulls.h.i.t it is not enough to have an enthusiastic ma.s.s or 'lay' audience for philosophy per se in order to increase people's bulls.h.i.t-spotting capabilities. Too much philosophy nowadays exhibits one or more of the forms of bulls.h.i.t,156 and this may be partly due to the desire to produce interesting, arresting, 'fashionable' ideas for an impressionable lay audience to consume: 'being lay, that audience will read philosophy only if it is interesting', he suggests, and this does not necessarily mean 'being interested in truth.'157 When for whatever reason "truth is not even aimed at, false, or rather, untrue theses abound' and typically 'they are protected against exposure by obscure statement and/or by obscure defense when they are challenged: so bulls.h.i.t, too abounds" (p. 39). So a philosophical culture has to have the right kind of philosophy in order to be disposed against bulls.h.i.t.
When we consider just how important truth is in politics (as indeed it is in most other areas of our lives), and how the forms of bulls.h.i.t degrade our political and social life, it seems simply absurd to embrace styles of philosophy which disparage truth (whether in aim-bulls.h.i.tting manner or not) and end up contributing to the clogging of our discourse and 'understanding' with bulls.h.i.t. Apprehension of hard and uncomfortable truths, and clear and rigorously sophisticated thinking about their resolution, are absolutely vital as we confront the huge, and hugely perplexing, problems in the world today.
But the presence of bulls.h.i.t in our political discourse severely problematizes our efforts to grasp them. Much of this bulls.h.i.t is the product of the politicians, but the political bulls.h.i.t of the citizens themselves also significantly obscures accurate perception of these tough challenges. The Frankfurt thesis helps us to focus on its source and hence to ponder its resolution. As such, it deserves much greater attention; for certainly one thing it would be potentially catastrophic to do is to use the ubiquity of bulls.h.i.t as an excuse to adopt instead the crippling inertia which can so easily become the natural upshot of the cynicism thesis.158
13.
Political Bulls.h.i.t and the Stoic Story of Self.
VANESSA NEUMANN.
Bulls.h.i.t is not, as it is popularly misconstrued, hot air-the remaining exhalation after speech is done. Far from it. Bulls.h.i.t is a certain kind of speech, intended to distract or obfuscate in a general way, in order to achieve a desired effect-often one that is nonrational and emotional, where emotions become reasons for a course of action.
Bulls.h.i.t is fertile ground for philosophical investigation because it is intentional and ident.i.ty-forming. Either of these conditions would suffice to make it a subject of philosophical interest; both together make it an important matter for investigation.
Bulls.h.i.t is particularly useful and interesting in the arena of political discourse, where it is most often recognized by the general public. Its familiarity and pervasiveness in politics are good reasons to examine bulls.h.i.t in the political context. However, political bulls.h.i.t has important consequences that it would be a mistake to overlook.
How to a.n.a.lyze Bulls.h.i.t Two major strategies have emerged in the definition of bulls.h.i.t, and each has its proponents. Mine is neither of these. The first strategy is to discuss the agent-relative action of bulls.h.i.tting, addressing the question of what it is to bulls.h.i.t-or, the related question of how one knows when someone is bulls.h.i.tting. The second strategy is to identify bulls.h.i.t by its content: what is bulls.h.i.t or the related (but not equivalent) question of how one can spot bulls.h.i.t. Harry Frankfurt is the main proponent of the first strategy and G.A. Cohen of the second.
As Cohen demonstrates ("Deeper into Bulls.h.i.t"), Frankfurt defines bulls.h.i.t in reference to the agent producing the bulls.h.i.t-namely, the bulls.h.i.tter. Bulls.h.i.t is defined in reference to the speaker's intent to conceal the fact that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him.159 As Cohen rightly points out, in Frankfurt's theory the bull wears the trousers. Cohen offers a different definition of bulls.h.i.t that makes reference solely to its content. In essence, he tries to make the s.h.i.t wear the trousers.
As Cohen sees it, the main difference between his approach and Frankfurt's is that Frankfurt's bulls.h.i.t is concerned with utterances in everyday life. This sort of bulls.h.i.t corresponds to the second definition in the Oxford English Dictionary ("trivial or insincere talk or writing") and, for Frankfurt, its primary locus is the activity and its essence indifference to truth. Cohen, in contrast, argues that his bulls.h.i.t is concerned with utterances in the academic setting, and corresponds to the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary ("nonsense, rubbish"). Cohen takes bulls.h.i.t's primary locus to be output and its essence to be unclarifiability. Producers of Cohen bulls.h.i.t may not be bulls.h.i.tters, as they may not have the intent Frankfurt's requires-they may not be insincere, though their product is nonsense. Frankfurtian bulls.h.i.tters, likewise, may or may not produce Cohen bulls.h.i.t: they may be insincere but succeed only in producing "nonsense, rubbish." Still, their intent to deceive makes them bulls.h.i.tters.
Cohen makes no secret of the fact that there is a reason for these divergent approaches: they are concerned with different contexts. While Cohen is concerned to identify and eradicate bulls.h.i.t in the academic context, Frankfurt is concerned to identify bulls.h.i.t and bulls.h.i.tters in ordinary life. Cohen wants to examine bulls.h.i.t in the academic setting, and he deems the identification of content a more promising strategy on two counts. First, it is more diplomatic or courteous-and less agent-relative. Second, it is more practical, since content is more easily identified than intention, although, as Cohen grants, identification of content may indeed lead to an identification of strategy. "For reasons of courtesy, strategy and good evidence," he writes, "we should criticize the product, which is visible, and not the process, which is not. We may hope that success in discrediting the product will contribute to extinguishing the process" (p. 135n).
Frankfurt and Cohen do not exhaust the intellectual landscape of bulls.h.i.t. My concern is a third, largely unnoticed, context: the mechanism of bulls.h.i.t-how it works and what its effects are, irrespective of whether we are confronted with Cohen bulls.h.i.t or Frankfurt bulls.h.i.t. Cohen grants that "the word 'bulls.h.i.t' characteristically denotes structurally different things that correspond to those different interests" (p. 119, italics in original). The setting or context therefore affects the form of bulls.h.i.t. There is a relation that is critical to this third strategy: the relation between speaker and listener-between bulls.h.i.tter and bulls.h.i.ttee.
This alternative way of looking at bulls.h.i.t helps us see how bulls.h.i.t typically works in political discourse. What makes a speaker or writer (I'll here use 'speaker', for short) initiate or spread bulls.h.i.t? How does it work on the listener or reader (I'll here use 'listener', for short)? We will see that bulls.h.i.t plays a significant role in political discourse, and that, as such, it is difficult to extricate.
In politics, bulls.h.i.t distracts or obfuscates, in order to create an impression that may or may not be true. I follow Frankfurt in the contention that bulls.h.i.t may or may not be true, and that bulls.h.i.t's truth-value is irrelevant. It is not by virtue of its falsity that a statement can be considered bulls.h.i.t. Even a true (or partly-true) statement may be bulls.h.i.t. Even if true, a statement may be non-germane, irrelevant, or obfuscatory-thereby making it a prime candidate for bulls.h.i.t. Bulls.h.i.t therefore differs from lying and resembles bluffing, though it is not bluffing. Often, bulls.h.i.t is a mix of true and false statements, the mixture determined to suit the purpose of the bulls.h.i.t in question.
In politics, purpose is crucial for a.n.a.lyzing bulls.h.i.t. The better it fulfills its purpose, the better the bulls.h.i.t. There are several possible purposes, but they fall into two broad categories. The first typical purpose of political bulls.h.i.t is to depict the speaker as someone different ('better,' given the circ.u.mstances) than she is. It is usually intended to identify the speaker as someone desirable to the listener. This is familiar from the personal and the political arena: "I'm one of you," or "I am what you need or want." This is familiar from electoral campaigns, but also from political commentary. The second purpose is to identify groups of people, usually to specify a target or justify a political course of action-as in the Orientalist or structuralist approach: "They are different from us, so we should treat them like this." From slavery to the war on terrorism to the racially-underpinned left turn in South American politics, this second purpose is pervasive-and dangerous.
Bulls.h.i.t is difficult to extricate from political discourse because it is so useful: it serves the interests of so many different groups. Both sides of a debate resort to bulls.h.i.t, and bulls.h.i.t gives them power over the parameters of the debate. A prominent example of this is the pervasive use of moral language, without the attendant commitment to moral constraints. Moral language is used to praise and condemn actions, and those who perform them, as just and unjust, virtuous or vicious, or just plain right or wrong. The speaker (a politician especially) seeks to score points with her const.i.tuency by putting forth the narrowest judgments without providing the underpinning normative commitments that might constrain her future actions. Such talk, rather than illuminating a framework for morally acceptable behavior, is designed to make the speaker appear superior to some compet.i.tor, while giving the speaker wiggle room for the future.
Take the common example of one politician condemning another for accepting a free trip or other favor from a corporate ent.i.ty. The second politician is condemned as bad or corrupt, without any further explanation of why accepting such a favor is bad, or of what it is that is morally compromising. Avoiding such an a.n.a.lysis or fundamental discussion then allows the speaker to "wiggle out" of future accusations of a similar sort by citing various alleged differences: "Well, my case is different, because the corporation in question is different, the type of favor is different," and so forth. So, the speaker can appear morally concerned and, even, to speak for morality itself (not unlike speaking on behalf of G.o.d, espousing what is surely "G.o.d's will"), although she does not say anything that would constrain her from accepting a different sort of bribery. Here, moral language is used solely to advance personal or group interests-not to illuminate ethics in politics. Moral language is reduced to a tool in the compet.i.tive struggle for political advantage.
The stakes are high. The struggle for political advantage is a winner-take-all game. Surely the power of one agent is constrained by the relative power of other agents, and this in turn is constrained by a system of procedural checks and balances. However, since the rules are themselves subject to revision by those in power, the struggle for political power is a struggle for control over the rules of the game. Bulls.h.i.t is the main tool for the ultimately unconstrained struggle for the flexible and malleable rules of political power.160 There's a distinction worth making here. In the context of public political discourse we get both kinds of bulls.h.i.t: the kind custom-crafted by those deviously intending to obfuscate and the kind innocently repeated by those too uncritical to recognize bulls.h.i.t, who often seize upon bulls.h.i.t that strikes a chord with them or fits some self-image or narrative they embrace.
Stories Shape Our Feelings Bulls.h.i.t's role in political narratives gives it one of its most interesting features. Bulls.h.i.t links images and types which are both familiar and fascinating, and so taps into cultural prototypes. It uses familiar expressions to convey mental images, and leaves an impression that achieves the speaker's goal.
A narrative, or story, is not merely an interpretive framework superimposed on otherwise disconnected acts, images, impressions and emotions. As Peter Goldie argues, a person's narrative is that person's life insofar as it is understood as a sequence of meaningful and emotional episodes.161 The narrative structures of our lives themselves shape and color how we understand and how we feel about particular episodes in the past, and how we will perceive and interpret episodes in the future. Narrative also shapes how we view others, their lives and their attendant worthiness, and how they relate to us and affect our lives. In short, it forms our understanding of our place in the world.
The narrative is therefore much more than the mere stringing together of impressions and emotions into a coherent structure. The narrative structure itself shapes our feelings towards objects and, by extension, to particular episodes. It's largely due to an event's location in the narrative that we feel the way we do about something or someone. When asked why we feel as we do about someone or something, we often say, "Well, there's a story behind it." It's this background story that gives the emotion its content-we wouldn't feel anything if there weren't a story. So the relation of an event or emotional episode to a narrative is symbiotic; it flows both ways. The episodes shape the narrative of which they are a part and give it meaningful content, and the narrative shapes the content of the emotion we experience. As the narrative and the background story evolves, so do our emotions.
To understand how bulls.h.i.t functions in this light, we need to look at the nature of emotions themselves. As Goldie shows, emotions relate to values in important ways. First, emotions give epistemic access to values. If I feel love or fear, for example, then there is something that I love or fear (p. 4). This is a stronger claim than saying merely that emotions have aboutness or ofness. This is demonstrated by the fact that emotions can be phrased as transitive verbs of the standard form, 'A Fs B', where B is the object picked out by the emotion-verb F experienced by the person A. "An object of an emotion, in this sense, could be a particular thing or person (that pudding, this man), an event or an action (the earthquake, your hitting me), or a state of affairs (my being in an aeroplane)" (p. 17). Emotions thereby reveal the people, objects, events, and states of affairs we value, positively or negatively-the ones we want and the ones we wish to avoid. There is a caveat here, though, that applies to any intentional state.
First, the object of the emotion has to be identified in a sufficiently fine-grained way to capture why the person feels that emotion about that object: Oedipus might be delighted he married Jocasta, but would not be delighted that he has married his mother. Secondly, the object of an emotion need not exist. Jimmy might be afraid of the Abominable Snowman, when there is no such creature. (p. 18) Emotions, finally, are not created in a void: there are significant conceptual relations between emotions and the beliefs that ground them. I fear losing the man I love because I believe that my life would be substantially impoverished without him. If I believed I would be better off without him, I probably would not have the same fear. Perhaps this is an a.s.sessment rather than a belief? Then consider a different example. I might be angry at seeing another woman with a coat like mine if I believe it's mine and she has stolen it. I wouldn't feel the same anger if I believe she has simply bought it at the same shop, rather than stolen mine; I would find it an amusing coincidence.
Martha Nussbaum believes that the narrative of an emotion is in fact the narrative about judgments.162 These judgments are about things important to us that we do not fully control-both the lack of control and the importance are implicit in the intense experience of an emotion. This is, in fact, the Greek Stoic view of emotions. Not only are emotions intentional in that they point at their object, but they are deeply intentional in the way they are internal and encompa.s.s a set of beliefs about the object. These beliefs pertain to the value of the object. The object is seen (believed, judged) to be important. "So there seem to be type-ident.i.ties between emotions and judgments; emotions can be defined in terms of judgment alone" (p. 196).
Emotions also shape values. Pride, vanity and resentment are predispositions, but they are also emotions that shape what we value, what is important. If I'm proud, I will value respect or independence or both. If I'm vain I will value praise and attention. If I'm resentful, I will value stories of perceived rivals brought low. These emotions and their attendant value are not disruptive of a life's narrative, but very much part of it. The triumvirate of emotion, judgment and narrative is as old as philosophy itself. The Greek concept of eudaimonia, commonly mistranslated as 'happiness', encompa.s.ses them. In eudai-monistic theory a well-lived life (mistranslated as a 'happy' life) is one that includes all those things to which the agent ascribes intrinsic value-all that the person deems important in her life, without which she would not consider her life complete (p. 190).
Imagination, and the dynamic character of judging ourselves, takes place against the background of narrative (p. 51): "what would my life be like with/without/if . . . ?" The evaluation of importance is, as mentioned above, shaped by the narrative and pushes the agent's cognition towards an object, itself a.s.sessed within the framework of the narrative. "When we have an emotion," Goldie says, "we are engaged with the world, grasping what is going on in the world, and responding accordingly." That's why "the emotions can be educated" (p. 48). Goldie gives the example of how children are raised to have an appropriate, and proportionate, response to appropriate stimuli: "this warrants sympathy," "this