Teaching Bullshit and Assholes - Part 1 (Guest Post by C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma)

Teaching “On Bullshit”

by C. Thi Nguyen

I recently taught a "Bullshit and Assholes Week" in my introductory ethics class, and just had a lifetime peak teaching experience. It was for my first attempt at teaching Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". Raw, pure, unrefined teaching ecstasy.

I was actually prepping for the class the day before and totally freaking out that I'd picked something too hard for gen-ed, intro ethics – that it was too dry and too tediously analytic. But it turned out to be a TOTAL DELIGHT. It is, in fact, a perfect way to introduce students to conceptual analysis. Because the article is, I now realize, this perfect escalation of gradually improving attempts at getting the right analysis of "bullshit," in a wonderfully teachable sequence.

First pass: is bullshit the same as lying? The answer: no, because there's plenty of bullshit (administrative red tape) that's not lying. Second pass: is bullshit pretentious lying? No, because some bullshit is pretentious, but not lying (excessively precious artisanal-signaling food). And some bullshit involves lying, but no pretension.

The moment the article really hit, for my students, is when Frankfurt proposes the account that bullshit is bullshit because it is sloppy. And the students all saw it at the same moment: that excessively precious artisanal-signaling food may be bullshit, but it is certainly not sloppy. In fact, it is bullshit because *too much care has been put into it," perhaps in the wrong sort of way. And so "bullshit" needs to be an abstract enough concept so that it encompasses some bullshit which is bullshit because it is sloppy, and other bullshit which is bullshit because it is too carefully crafted.

When the students saw it, they were, like, jaws agape in illumination and pleasure. I think they went from laughing at the fact that the professor was talking about bullshit, to laughing at how deep the analysis could go.

It is basically the most rapt and participatory I've had my 200-ish person lecture. Basically, the students have clear and strong and shared intuitions about how you use "bullshit", but haven't articulated them - but it's really easy to get them to see how much there is to say about their usage, and what depths it reveals.

I ended pushing on Frankfurt's conclusion - that bullshitting is not caring about the truth. Because of examples he himself uses - like that spit-and-polish uniforms and perfect drilled marching are bullshit, qua military, because it doesn't serve a genuinely military function. And I offered my students a slightly modified generalization: that bullshit is an activity that doesn't care about that activity's usual function. (This seems like the obvious generalization from Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit speech: that bullshit doesn't care about the usual concern of speech, which is conveying truth. But the generalization also includes bullshit military spit-and-polish, which is bullshit because it doesn't serve military functions.) (I know this is not quite right yet.)

And: towards the end of the class, right there in front of my students, I realized how close this was (background inspiration for?) Bekka Williams and my "Moral Outrage Porn" article and our definition of porn. So I told the students about our porn article, and then I wrote this on the board:

• X-bullshit = engaging in X while not caring about the usual function of X.
• X-porn = representations of X used for immediate gratification, while avoiding the typical costs and consequences of actually engaging with X.

And we all kind of stared it awhile, trying to figure out the connection.

And then one student raised his hand, and said, "So what's the difference between bullshit and porn? Because it seems to me that full-dress military marching is bullshit, but also kind of military porn."

And this is a question I had never heard before. And I thought about it for a second, and I said: "I think the soldiers marching in the parade might think it's bullshit, and people at home watching it on TV might be using it as porn. So maybe there's a deep connection between bullshit and porn: sometimes the reason you're forced to engage in this bullshit is to generate porn for other people, and the 'not caring about the typical function' is preserved between the two."

And somebody in the front row muttered, "Holy SHIT that is cool."

And that is why I teach.

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In a happy continuation of this teaching experience, his teaching assistant, Imree Parma, then had a similar experience in a class entitled “Is this class bullshit?”

Bullshit Session

by Imree Parma

In order to encourage an attitude of candor, I start my classes a lot like a stand-up comedy routine. I let them know that this Friday, like every Friday, we would be discussing “bullshit” and then asked my students “what are some things that are total bullshit?’ and I got a list: Parking tickets, spelling, twitter, Gen Ed requirements, the ending of Game of Thrones, girl pockets, etc.

I then told them that for class we were going to have a “Bullshit session” in the sense that Harry Frankfurt defined in their assigned reading. I read an excerpt from Frankfurt to set the ground rules for those who maybe didn’t do the reading: “The main point [of a “bull session”] is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it.”

I wrote on opposite sides of the room “This class is Bullshit” and “This class is NOT Bullshit” and asked them to choose a side and write as many arguments as they wanted for their given position on the board and that no one would face any retaliation for what they said.

The level of participation was awesome and I liked how much people were willing to share and debate with one another. One of the students on “Team Bullshit” argued that each day of class cost her $10, and that it was a better use of her money if she used it on malaria nets or famine relief (an argument lifted directly from a previous discussion). It was interesting how the people who were on “Team Not Bullshit” pulled many of their arguments/definitions directly from the reading and showed how the class wasn’t bullshit according to Frankfurt’s own definition- to which there was plenty of back and forth as to the validity of each definition/argument that came from “Team Bullshit”.

The last argument we looked at from “Team Not Bullshit” was an argument that essentially said that the entire class participating and trying to make their case that the class was or was not bullshit was enough to prove that at the very least our class wasn’t complete bullshit.

Comments

[Guy]

I like to teach Cohen's "Deeper Into Bullshit" alongside Frankfurt, then give students case studies where they have to argue that the case constitutes either Franfurtian BS, Cohenian BS, both, or neither.

[David]

Unfortunately no time to engage with particular question myself at the moment, but does the definition of X-porn work for inspiration porn? I did a quick ctrl-F of the paper you linked and didn't find anything on it

It seems to me that at face value, while inspiration porn is used for immediate gratification, what makes it instrumentalist in the way that would qualify it as a form of 'porn' isn't the avoidance of 'typical costs and consequences,' but the way it falsely represents and objectifies disability and people with disabilities in order to achieve that gratification.

[Treading Water]

This made me smile and sounds amazing. Well done.

[Hayley]

I taught "On Bullshit" for the first time this year, and I also had an amazing experience. I paired it with Rachel Barney's "(Aristotle) On Trolling" which students also really loved. Then we segued into Mill on free speech, looking at cases of deplatforming that deprived bullshitters, trolls, or genuine assert-ers of opportunities to speak.

[Animal Symbolicum]

This is wonderful. But how does your definition of bullshit distinguish bullshit from lying? If I lie, am I not engaging in an activity (speaking) while not caring about its usual function (communicating what I believe to be true)?

[Some Effect Will Follow]

In On Truth, Frankfurt offers a brief account of the difference between lying and bullshit based in how each relates to truth.

If I remember correctly, a lie has a careful relationship to the truth, seeking to obscure it by setting up a fake "truth" to block out knowledge or recognition of what actually took place.

Bullshit, on the other hand, doesn't require a careful relationship to truth; it's a different kind of obfuscation. Again, if I remember correctly, it may involve half-truths, or mostly truth with strategic lumps of bullshit involved, to result in some further effect in the listener based on the belief, which itself doesn't need to be very precise and may be more useful if it's not.

Both manipulate people by affecting their understanding of the world, but seem to have different means and aims. Based on the preliminaries, he goes on to spell out the very serious moral questions that arise when manipulating others' understanding of the world, including when done for the sake of shabby self-interest. Guess I should pick it up again, it's very short!

[Animal Symbolicum]

Some Effect Will Follow: I'm not sure if your comment is a response to me, so ignore my response to you if it isn't.

I know what Frankfurt says to distinguish lying and bullshitting. But Professor Nguyen proposed a more general definition of bullshit that, as far as I can tell, doesn't distinguish between the two. If I'm right, that's reason to reject the generalization and just stick, for the time being, with Frankfurt's original definition that successfully does distinguish between the two.

[Doug Plumb]

You may like my "Assholes & Bullshit: A Language Problem" on Smashwords.

[Flatbushzubumafu]

I was actually one of the students in this class. One of my favorite lectures and if I could ever meet professor Nguyen again, I’d like to tell him he changed my life for the better. Loved this class and thank you for your work professor.