On Bullshit

[e_dog]

that's eerie!

what on earth could he've meant by that?

[tinkerjack]

I think it was a compliment.

[V-Agent]

my acerbic comments were not directed at you.

more, at the publishers of that series. i cannot understnad how people could respond so well to a book series (both the for dummies and the idiot's guides) that simulataneously insults its reader and expect the consumer to buy it. and yet it works!! how?

This might help with the case:

[Zlatko Waterman]

All:


Just a brief comment on teaching and bullshit.

Many years ago, a music teacher whose class I was taking ( I was a full professor of English at the time) asked me a question. I couldn't answer it. It had to do with the major or minor interval between two notes on a score of Schubert we were studying.

I remarked that sometimes I didn't even know an answer to deliver to my students, who asked questions like: "Where was King Lear's wife when all this was going on . . .?"

The music teacher ( he was quite young, very good, but young) opened his eyes widely and said, aghast, "Ohhhhh . . . don't EVER let them know you don't know the answer . . . you should NEVER do that . . ."

I, who was in my forties at the time, smiled and said, " I'd rather let them have the truth and go look it up themselves than deliver some confusing bullshit to save face."

Since the teacher ( let's call him Doctor Warren) was in control of the class, he skipped past my comment and went on, delivering me the answer he had asked for in a rather condescending manner.

I have to recall the comment of the ( rather obnoxious) Jack Nicholson character in "Five Easy Pieces" : "I don't speak French . . ." ( on the occasion of members of his family and their friends joking in French, partly for the snob value of doing so ).

Professor Warren just went on speaking French.

To an "academic" ( I never "made the grade" there, though I had all the badges) there is a sort of thrill, as e-dog points out, to using, and being heard using, vulgar slang. At least to some of them there is.

I remember a teacher of mine who was demonstrating the anapest and the dactyl using the word "Motherfucker" as an example. But, of course, that was in 1967-- somewhat of a different country in that time zone.

What I strongly disliked about academic life was the humorlessness of many of the careerists ( I'm speaking of professors here) using terms like "bullshit."

My best teachers were those who used bullshit effectively-- to point toward the truth.

I very much agree also with e-dog in his admonition to read the "originals" of Plato ( by which I think he refers to English translations).

But translators and their notes vary.

In Book X of "The Republic" ( 595-597, approx.), for instance, there is a description of an artisan, and finally an artist, who "holds the mirror up to Nature" ( as Hamlet paraphrases in his instructions to the Players who have come to Elsinore).

Alan Bloom's note in his translation ( with his notes and interpretation) is quite useful:

( quoted from Bloom)

"The difference between the mirror held to nature and the product of the imitative Sophist is parallel to the difference between the lowest level of the divided line--where things are seen reflected in water or on smooth surfaces--and the wall of the cave--where the prisoners see the reflections of artifacts, only some of which have natural models. The prisoners' problem is ascending toward truth. The cause of their errors is connected with this mixture of natural and man-made things. In this discussion of poetry Socrates elaborates the problem and reveals the essential nature of the cave."

( end quotation)

AHA! Are the prisoners only contenting themselves with bullshit?

My more serious point is that an occasional illumination ( pun intentional) from a skilled translator can be a great help for a first time ( and twentieth-time) reader.

Auto-didacts, like Gore Vidal ( who never went to college) , can find this sort of note very strengthening.

Allan Bloom, by the way, a flamboyant homosexual on his own time, is revealed in "Ravelstein", his close friend Saul Bellow's novel, published after Bloom's death in 1992.

Bloom is shown as a lover of handsome boys, jewels, furs and luxury cars.

But he was also a lover of truth, though he knew how to bullshit people into believing he was straight as he inveighed against "queers" and "easy sex."


(link to Robert Fulford's comments on "Ravelstein")

http://www.robertfulford.com/Bellow.html



--Z

[tinkerjack]

Took my basic two years of college English from 1959 to 1961. I would have probably driven you to despair with my attitude. I was bored, disinterested in this waste of time. I wanted more science. I all ready knew how to write good English didn't I? The Prof for one of those courses was a pretty well respected

A teacher who loves his subject and who loves to teach. It doesn't get any better than that.
Z I can't tell how much it pains me sometimes to reply to you. I feel almost sadistic. Every time you ignore my careless writing and say something positive about it i think you must be a saint. My excuse is a sense of urgency, a feeling that i have no time to go back and learn some Basic English writing skills. I am old and not taking care of myself very well. But I am full of good intentions and resolutions for the coming year. Just like every one of the past forty years.

I could say the same about Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. But I have read the Poetics or what fragments there are of it. I had a classics professor who would cry out sometimes, "What an enemy we have in Greek!" Because he could not find the right English words to translate the Greek text. I read Camus in French because of a beautiful French professor who led us through The Stranger. He did not try to make us speak the language, just to read it.

Five easy pieces, Susan Anspach, man she is so beautiful, and probably what I remember most about the movie. Good movie , but I never quite understood it. He had issues with his father? The end of the movie he finally goes to see him and cries? More than I have ever managed to do for my father.

Bloom I read some of Closing of American Mind, and a few of the letters in Love and Friendship but know nothing about him. I did not realize that homsexuality was an issue for him. Takes courage to be your self, to live your own life, your own gender.

[booklover]

Many years ago in college...philosophy 101...the proff is handing back essays...offers me mine I see the big red A on it ...he peers over his glasses and says...Don't ever bullshit me again...

LOL...I had a very similar experience. I got my paper back with 3 grades on it: an A, a C-, and a final B+

The comment said: At first I thought, Mary really knows what she's talking about here!, then I reread it and thought: This is BULLSHIT! (and I got mad at you for bs'ing me), then I thought: Pretty damn smart!

It's a shining moment in life for me. hee hee hee!

Regarding the book: ON BULLSHIT by Franfort..............I LOVED IT. Sent a few copies out to bullshitters I know.

[abcrystcats]

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Yay. I'm going to read this. In sales, I'm on the receiving end of people's bullshit all the time. I'm puzzled by this, because I never give it out. So then, why .... why is it OK to yank my chain just because I'm offering a product?

I could give countless examples, but here's my favorite phone prank: I go through my whole phone spiel which ends with a question: "Would that be OK?" The person says, "I don't know, just a minute" and hands the phone to someone else. He says hello, and I repeat the pitch. He answers "I don't know, just a minute" and hands it to another person. I'm pretty stupid, so it took three or four passes before I got that I was being bullshitted. It was funny and harmless, but a classic example. "I'm not interested" or "No" will do nicely.

Here's what really baffles me: people who represent themselves as richer or more important than they really are. A guy shows up allegedly looking for health insurance and rattles off all kinds of elaborate commercial business needs. The businesses, which he describes in detail, DO NOT EXIST. He does not purchase ANYTHING, not a thing, but goes through the whole charade about needing health insurance and insurance on these fictional other entities, wasting his time, wasting my time, just in general, being a loser with a weird story. Why did he DO that?

We have had a few people in our office who've pulled this feat. Some have purchased things they weren't able to pay for, but when we talked to them, they were LOADED and wanted to follow up their initial purchases with other better ones later.

What POSSIBLE purpose does this serve -- lying to strangers who you'll never see again, for no good reason? Like -- going OUT of your way to drive to their office and visit them, just to tell your stories and not accomplish anything else --

This is kind of behavior is unfathomable to me and I'll have to read the Bullshit Book to figure it out.

[e_dog]

Z-ko,

the dialogues of Plato are all Greek to me, so i have to read the English translations.

in any event, sure, translations and all interpretations differ. i think it is Borges -- and this is the only thing i ever intend to quote from him because there are few more obnoxious intellectual gestures than summoning the authoritative prestige of J.-L. Borges -- who said: a classic is a work that loses nothing, and perhaps gains, in translation.

however, the danger is to think that whatever some scholar has written is therefore true. declarations of the form, implicit or explicit, that work of art/literature means X and only X. as an absolute tatement these are usually limiting the reader from seeing the range of differing perspectives. so, provided we take commentary with a grain of salt, as mere suggestions or guidelines then yeah it is useful.

sometimes, though, having a work pre-interpreted for you can ruin the experience of the work itself by prejudging things and inclining you to make a certain inference of meaning rather than a very different inference you wold independently make.

my advice, or my hermeneutic method, which i don't always follow is to encounter the work first and only if it requires further investigation with outside help, or if you need to learn its historical context, then check out a commentary, and be selective in choosing that! then, return to thework and try to suspend what you know the commentator thinks, so as to assess it for yrself.

[e_dog]

one more note on philosophy. the reason i say not to read stuff about Plato, to simply read Plato is that the dialogues tho they deal with fundamental, perrennial philosophic questions are pretty well articulated. Socrates the character and presumably the man -- if we buy Plato's rendition -- was pretty good at explaining things with his own examples and tropes.

that is Plato is both deep and accessible in a way that Aristotle, say, is not (regarding accessibility). it's like, in a weird way, Walt Whitman's poetry. to read a book about Whitman is totally ridiculous. just read Whitman! (the poetic counter-figure would be T.S. Eliot with his footnotes, which one commentator intriguingly suggested were a mockery of academicism, a proto-deconstruction.)

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear e-dog:

Of course my admonitions and recommendations never insist that a reader rely on interpreters, such as Bloom.

Fresh contact with the original is essential, indispensable. Your Whitman example is a good one, as is your apothegm from Borges.

But the difference you identify between contact ( in its parent language) with the original and contact with translations is also important. Plato in Greek ( I know enough Koine Greek and enough smidgens of Classical--Ancient-- Greek to appreciate the slipperiness of many translations of Plato), like Borges in Spanish , admits subtle interpretation. Though Borges, having a solid grounding in English as a child, tends to write his native language tinctured by the syntax, rhythms and educated diction of English.

I do not imply that I "know" Greek. I don't. My point in the post above is that a teacher should show everything he knows, and some of what he doesn't know ( I never had the time to show ALL that I didn't know about my subject!) to his students.

The Hebrew nugget of wisdom, "Learn to say I do not know, then thou shalt make progress . . ." is my guide.

I'm not an enemy of pedagogy, just a careful user of it in the classroom.

And the classroom is sometimes ( whether we like it or not), a battleground.

Making yourself completely independent of all interpreters, no matter how difficult or obscure the text one is reading, can be desirable and reading the original is always the starting point. Plato is better than his interpreters, and so is George Orwell and the writer(s) of The Gospel of St. John.

I don't mean to "pull rank" here, but I would have to ask you how many times you have stood interpreting Shakespeare or some other text in front of a classroom filled with forty students, thirty-five of whom are mediocre?

The situation I describe is an equivalent to "the heat of battle."

The "battle" aspect is regrettable, but there are assaults, and there ought to be in a lively classroom where debate is energetic. The five students who are gifted, brilliant, and resourceful are watching you perform , silently, never taking their eyes off you for a second.

Their young judgments are harsh, but usually very fair. Just as they should be.

Bullshit is not going to cut it with them.

They may also have consulted some "settled opinions" of critics and interpreters themselves before they came to class.

How do your views and comments match up to those "authorities" they just read? Are you fully prepared to defend what you say and the way you read the text they have before them?

How do you maintain their respect? How do you do a conscionable and creditable job with "the mass" of "ordinary" students?

Those five exceptional students are the ones a teacher lives for, of course. But the others require more aid than I can usually conveniently ( or at any cost) provide them. Nevertheless, they remain my responsibility, to some extent, also.

I do enjoy "discussions" ( i.e. reading and learning from) in the presence of brilliant readers like George Steiner, however.

And I often shared with my students what I had learned from critics like Steiner, the Blooms (Harold into the mix) and Thom Gunn when I taught Old Will.

"After Babel", George Steiner's book on the problems and perils of translation, is one I frequently refer to on the question I mention here above.

William H. Gass's "Reading Rilke" is another incisive and imaginative work on the difficult task of translation.

Using these scholars was my way of trying to make up for my own ignorance, and joining in the debate -- usually fostered by those five students I spoke of.


--Z

[e_dog]

i am not familiar with Alan Bloom, though i am a fan of Harold (even tho i think he gets almost everything wrong in the end, he nevertheless identifies the right themes like few, if any, can -- which is, i think, the best one should hope for in a critic). is there any relation 'tween the Blooms?