According to Frankfurt, self-preservation is the “protean mode of concern” – the basis from which we make decisions. This self-preservation is “not itself grounded in reason, but love.” When Frankfurt talks about love here, he’s not referring to romance or lust or any of those common definitions, but rather to a “mode of caring” that is involuntary and not rationally determined. The object can be, among other things, a person, an ideal, a group.

So, because an individual is invested in this love, and because this love is non-utilitarian, it necessarily provides a basis for deciding what to care about. Frankfurt sees this in an evolutionary schema-it requires a “confidence in what we cannot help being.”

“It’s important to you to understand what’s important to you,” said Frankfurt.

[From “On college, bullshit and love” by Naimh Wallace]

“And now,” said Neville, “let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is the story of the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells winkles. Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged  figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving — on the earth the trees, in the sky the clouds. I look up, through the trees, into the sky. The match seems to be played up there. Faintly among the soft, white clouds I hear the cry ‘Run,’ I hear the cry ‘How’s that?’ The clouds lose tufts of whiteness as the breeze dishevels them. If that blue could stay forever; if that hole could remain forever; if this moment could stay forever —

“But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble — images. ‘Like a camel,’ . . . ‘a vulture.’ The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent and Baker) feel the same abandonment. They like this better than cricket. They catch the phrases as they bubble. They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses. And then we all feel Percival lying heavy among us. His curious guffaw seems to sanction our laughter. But now he has rolled himself over in the long grass. He is, I think, chewing a stalk between his teeth. He feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we are bored. I detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if he said ‘Look!’ but Percival says ‘No.’ For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in the extreme. The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment has come when Bernard’s power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“Now let me try,” said Louis,” before we rise, before we go to tea, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavour. This shall endure. We are parting; some to tea; some to the nets; I show my essay to Mr. Barker. This will endure. From discord, from hatred (I despise dabblers in imagery — I resent the power of Percival intensely) my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in the gardens.

“Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty spaces in the blue which they then recover, shaking the leaves which then replace themselves, and our ring here, sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlastingly. This I see for a second, and shall try tonight to fix in words, to forge in a ring of steel, though Percival destroys it, as he blunders off, crushing the grasses, with the small fry trotting subservient after him. Yet it is Percival I need; for it is Percival who inspires poetry.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

During his famous embassy to Rome in the second century B.C., Carneades took advantage of the occasion to speak the first day in favor of the idea of justice, and on the following day against it. From that moment, philosophy, hitherto nonexistent in that country of healthy conduct, began to perpetrate its ravages. What is philosophy, then? The worm in the fruit. . . .

Cato the Censor, who had been present at the Greek’s dialectical performances, was alarmed by them and asked the Senate to satisfy the Athenian delegation as soon as possible, so harmful and even dangerous did he consider their presence. Roman youth was not to frequent minds so destructive.

On the moral level, Carneades and his companions were as formidable as the Carthaginians on the military. Rising nations fear above all the absence of prejudices and prohibitions, the intellectual shamelessness which constitutes the allure of declining civilizations.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I have won the game,” said Jinny. “Now it is your turn. I must throw myself on the ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with triumph. Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances — the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. Only, when I have lain alone on the hard ground, watching you play your game, I begin to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing into an alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.

“Now the tide sinks. Now the trees come to earth; the brisk waves that slap my ribs rock more gently, and my heart rides at anchor, like a sailing-boat whose sails slide slowly down on to the white deck. The game is over. We must go to tea now.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from 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. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

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 “antirealist” 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 correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of 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 instead try to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to 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. Facts 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.

— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“They have friends to sit by. They have things to say privately in corners. But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them like amulets against disaster. I choose out across the hall some unknown face and can hardly drink my tea when she whose name I do not know sits opposite. I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes. I leap high to excite their admiration. At night, in bed, I excite their complete wonder. I often die pierced with arrows to win their tears. If they should say that they were in Scarborough last holidays, the whole town runs gold, the whole pavement is illuminated. Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to my body.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements of food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.

— Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders’ delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and what she said and make poetry.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(quoted in On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt)

But where are we? Surely it is the part of the novelist to inform us whether we are in an hotel, a flat, or hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining. We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us. But as we listen, our confusion slowly settles. A rope is flung to us; we catch hold of a soliloquy; holding on by the skin of our teeth, we are rushed through the water; feverishly, wildly, we rush on and on, now submerged, now in a moment of vision understanding more than we have ever understood before, and receiving such revelations as we are wont to get only from the press of life at its fullest.

— Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4

126

No problem has a solution. None of us can untie the Gordian knot; all of us either give up or cut it. We use our feelings indiscriminately to resolve problems of our intelligence, and we do it because we are tired of thinking or because we are too timid to draw conclusions, out of an absurd [?] necessity to find a support, or out of a gregarious impulse to return to the others and to life.

Since we can never know all the elements in a problem, we can never solve it. We lack the data necessary to attain the truth as well as the intellectual processes that would exhaust the interpretation of those data.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

154

An aesthetic quietism with regard to life, which enables us to think that the insults and humiliations inflicted on us by life and the living merely reach a contemptible periphery of our sensibility, a remote exterior of our conscious soul.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

165

I look for myself, but I do not find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, clearly delineated in long rows of vases. I must make something decorative of my soul.

I don’t know what overly /pompous/ and well-chosen details define the substance of my spirit. My love for the ornamental exists, no doubt, because I feel in it something identical to the substance of my soul.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

Yes, if I had been rich, protected, brushed, ornamental, I wouldn’t even have been this brief episode of pretty paper amid bread crumbs; I would have remained on a plate of the kind “No, thank you very much,” and I would have taken myself to the sideboard to grow old. Thus, rejected after they’d eaten my practical core, I go with the dust that remains of Christ’s body to the trash bin, and I don’t even imagine what happens next, and among what stars; but it’s always a matter of going on.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these intolerable fetters?

“How? How?” he repeated, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.

— Anton Chekov, “The Lady with the Dog”