Frankfurt's On Bullshit Opens With Wittgenstein Yelling at a Sick Friend

Fania Pascal had her tonsils out in the 1930s and was recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home in Cambridge when Wittgenstein telephoned. She croaked into the phone that she felt "just like a dog that has been run over." Wittgenstein, disgusted, replied: "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." That exchange — a sick woman, a bedridden complaint, a philosopher refusing the metaphor — is where Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit begins.

Frankfurt's argument turns on it. Pascal wasn't lying. She knew, vaguely, that "run-over dog" was a stretched analogy for self-pity. She also didn't care whether the analogy was accurate. The bullshitter, Frankfurt writes, isn't trying to deceive about the world; the bullshitter is indifferent to whether the words map onto the world at all. That indifference, not falsehood, is what makes bullshit distinct from lying.

The consequence Frankfurt drew was sharp: a liar still acknowledges the truth, because hiding it requires knowing it. The bullshitter does not. "Bullshit," he wrote, "is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." The essay was a 1986 piece in Raritan. Princeton University Press reprinted it as a small hardcover in 2005. It spent twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, in part because the early-2000s media climate gave the essay a second life it hadn't had as a journal article.

Whether Wittgenstein was being fair to a friend with a sore throat is a separate question. Frankfurt notes the asymmetry without resolving it: maybe Pascal was bullshitting; maybe Wittgenstein was being a jerk about figurative language. The point of the essay sits in the gap between those readings.