最近看的一本书,On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt,强烈推荐。巴掌大薄薄一本,不到一顿饭功夫就能读完。我把我认为是精华的几段都抄录在此,相信对咖啡店的各位会有所启发。
On Bullshit
Harry G. Frankfurt
It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth -- this indifference to how things really are -- that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresent what he is up to.
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.
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 try instead 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 peculiarly solid and resistent to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- nototiously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
- Re: On Bullshitposted on 08/08/2005
I noticed the book long time ago before it made to the best seller list but I never felt the need to browse it. It is unnecessary. Indeed there is way too much bullshit around everywhere. I've long believed Hemingway's call for writers to be "walking shit-detectors".
Being aware of the problem, the book itself was flushed into the toilet.:) - Re: On Bullshitposted on 08/08/2005
这本书就是要惊醒那些喜欢瞎扯淡的人,包括你。我认为我抄的最后两段尤其妙。 - Re: On Bullshitposted on 08/08/2005
chloe wrote:
这本书就是要惊醒那些喜欢瞎扯淡的人,包括你。我认为我抄的最后两段尤其妙。
Tell me, when and where did I dig your ancestral grave? :)
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