The philosopher Harry Frankfurt died this week. He was unexpectedly famous for a bestselling book, On Bullshit, that originated as a playful academic essay only to find a second life as an editor’s marketing dream—a mischievous gift-book for the pseudo-intellectual in your life. It earned Harry an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and a lot of money.
This all happened after he’d retired from Princeton, having converted me from a budding metaphysician into a confused and ignorant action theorist too late to direct my dissertation—like a magician who performs one last inscrutable trick only to vanish in a puff of smoke, leaving his audience tormented by its secrets.
In truth, I’m not sure how he would have been as an advisor. Harry’s teaching style was efficient or lazy, depending on your point of view: in each seminar, he would pick two recent books in ethics to work through with students, and perhaps a co-instructor, over the course of a semester. Each class would begin with Harry reading his long-hand notes on the latest book chapter, his tone always forbearing: affectionate surprise at the naïve intellectualism of other philosophers.
Harry loved to puncture pretension—in that respect, the form of his popular success was fitting. And his conceptions of agency, and love, and personality, were consistently down-to-earth, opposed to rationalism and idealism. We love what we love, without needing reasons, and the closest we get to objective value is “volitional necessity”: the things we cannot help but care about, different for each of us, which give our identities what shape they have.
Harry started his career as a Descartes scholar and continued to teach the history of modern philosophy to undergraduates. At first, I found this incongruous: a scholar of rationalist epistemology who becomes an ardent anti-rationalist? But actually, his later work on love and ethics shares the Cartesian urge to locate what cannot be questioned, transposed from belief to desire and subtracting God. Hence the need for volitional necessity—a necessity that is not absolute, or imposed from outside, but internal to the structure of one’s will. (In truth, I think many of us manage without it: there is nothing we can’t help but love.)
For Descartes, even the eternal verities depend on God’s volition, which is utterly without limit. They are only contingently necessary. This prompts a riddle Harry answered in an early note.
Question: “If God is all-powerful, can He make a boulder so heavy even He can’t lift it?”
Harry: “Yes; and He can lift it, too.”
Volitional necessity is still more contingent: our identities may depend on it—or not—but our existence, or coherence, isn’t necessary. It’s possible to fragment under pressure. Harry was known for his dry, at times desiccating, wit. I think his reply to an audience member at the lectures that became The Reasons of Love could be his epitaph.
Audience member: “What I don’t understand is how, on your view, I have any assurance that my wife will continue to love me.”
Harry: “I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”
BONUS CONTENT: Harry Frankfurt in his own words.
"The Importance Of What We Care About" was a collection of fairly dry essays about coercion and free will, equality and entitlement... and "On Bullshit" was the lovely little Easter egg hidden away in it. When it became a hit I felt like a film snob aggrieved that some favourite masterpiece had actually become popular.
The more memorable details in the collection were the illustrations he'd picked up from various interviews and biographies: the comment about the traditional Italian clown family breaking their son's legs at an early age so he could perform better as an adult; what Sartre said to Castro about needs and desires.
What a joy. Thank you!