Harry Frankfurt

Based on Wikipedia: Harry Frankfurt

In 2005, a slim book with an unprintable title became an unexpected bestseller. At just sixty-seven pages, On Bullshit climbed the New York Times bestseller list and landed its author—a seventy-six-year-old Princeton philosophy professor—on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The book's central argument was deceptively simple: bullshitting isn't the same as lying, and in many ways it's more dangerous.

Harry Frankfurt had been quietly working on this problem for decades. The original essay appeared in 1986, tucked away in an academic journal. But when Princeton University Press republished it as a tiny hardcover, something about the timing struck a nerve with readers.

Here's the distinction Frankfurt drew: A liar knows the truth and deliberately conceals or distorts it. A bullshitter, by contrast, doesn't care what's true. The liar plays a game with fixed rules—there's a reality out there, and the liar is trying to hide it from you. The bullshitter has abandoned the game entirely. Truth and falsehood are equally irrelevant. All that matters is the impression being created.

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction."

This is why Frankfurt considered bullshit the greater threat to civilization. Liars at least acknowledge that truth matters—they pay it the compliment of trying to hide from it. Bullshitters corrode something more fundamental: the very idea that getting things right is worth the effort.

Born Into Mystery

Frankfurt entered the world under a different name. On May 29, 1929, a baby named David Bernard Stern was born at a home for unwed mothers in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. He never knew his biological parents.

Shortly after birth, he was adopted by Bertha and Nathan Frankfurt, a middle-class Jewish couple. Bertha, whose maiden name was Gordon, taught piano. Nathan worked as a bookkeeper. They raised the boy in Brooklyn and later Baltimore, and they named him Harry Gordon Frankfurt.

His mother had ambitions for him. She wanted Harry to become a concert pianist and began teaching him from an early age. When he chose philosophy instead, she consoled herself that it was "close enough" to her backup plan for him: becoming a rabbi. Frankfurt continued playing piano throughout his life, taking lessons well into his philosophical career.

What It Means to Be a Person

While Frankfurt became famous for his work on bullshit, his most influential contributions to philosophy concerned something far more fundamental: what it means to be a person.

Not every creature with a mind qualifies as a person, Frankfurt argued. Consider a dog that wants to eat, to run, to sleep. The dog has desires, certainly. But does the dog ever want to not want something? Does it ever wish it had different desires than the ones it has?

This capacity for what philosophers call "second-order desires"—desires about our desires—is what Frankfurt believed separates persons from what he called "wantons." A wantons is any being that has wants but doesn't care which of those wants wins out. The dog is hungry and eats. The impulse arises and is followed. There's no internal negotiation about whether this is the right appetite to be having.

Humans are different. We not only have desires—we evaluate them. We wish we wanted different things. We're ashamed of some appetites and proud of others.

Frankfurt made this more precise with the concept of "volitions." Not every desire becomes action. You might want cake and also want to eat healthy. If you reach for the salad, then eating healthy was your volition—your effective desire, the one you actually committed to. The cake was just a passing want.

Now here's the crucial move. A second-order volition occurs when you're not just choosing between desires in the moment, but when you're actively trying to shape which desires you have in the first place. The person who not only resists cake but works to cultivate a genuine preference for healthy food—that person has a second-order volition.

Frankfurt's definition of personhood, then, comes down to this: Persons are beings with second-order volitions. We don't just have desires—we care about which desires we have.

The Struggling Addict

Frankfurt illustrated this with the example of addiction. Consider someone hooked on drugs. At the first-order level, they want the drugs. The craving is there, insistent.

But what happens at the second order? This is where the distinction between person and wanton becomes vivid.

One addict might simply not care about their addiction. They want the drugs, they take the drugs, and the question of whether they should want the drugs never arises. In Frankfurt's terminology, this person is acting as a wanton—at least with respect to their addiction. They follow their impulses without evaluating them.

Another addict desperately wishes they didn't want the drugs. They have a second-order desire: they desire to not have this first-order desire. When they act on their craving anyway, there's an internal conflict—they're doing something they don't want to want to do.

This second addict, despite their failure to resist, is fully a person in Frankfurt's sense. They have the defining capacity of personhood: the ability to stand back from their desires and evaluate them. Their tragedy isn't that they lack personhood. It's that their personhood is at war with their compulsion.

Frankfurt Cases: A Challenge to Common Sense

One principle seems almost self-evident: you can only be blamed for something if you could have done otherwise. If a hurricane destroys your neighbor's fence, no one blames the hurricane—it had no choice. Moral responsibility seems to require freedom.

Philosophers call this the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. It states that a person is morally responsible for what they've done only if they could have done otherwise.

Frankfurt attacked this seemingly obvious principle with a series of thought experiments that have become famous in philosophy. These "Frankfurt cases" are designed to describe situations where someone couldn't have done otherwise but still seems morally responsible.

Here's one version. Imagine a woman named Allison. Unbeknownst to her, her father has implanted a chip in her brain. This chip is programmed to force Allison to walk her dog if she ever decides not to. But Allison, knowing nothing about the chip, freely decides to walk her dog. She gets up, attaches the leash, and heads outside. The chip is never activated.

Now the question: Is Allison morally responsible for walking her dog?

Intuitively, yes. She decided to do it. She wanted to do it. She did it. The chip never came into play.

But here's the puzzle: she couldn't have done otherwise. If she had decided to stay on the couch, the chip would have forced her outside anyway. The outcome was guaranteed. Yet our intuition insists she's responsible.

If Frankfurt is right, this shows that moral responsibility doesn't actually depend on having alternatives. What matters is acting from your own will—doing what you want to do for your own reasons. The existence or non-existence of blocked alternatives is irrelevant to blame or praise.

The Compatibilist Vision

This matters because it suggests a way to resolve one of philosophy's oldest puzzles: the conflict between free will and determinism.

Determinism is the view that everything that happens is the inevitable result of prior causes. Every choice you make was determined by the state of the universe a moment before, which was determined by the moment before that, stretching back to the beginning of time. On this view, you couldn't have done otherwise because the laws of physics guaranteed exactly what you would do.

This seems to threaten free will. If everything is determined, how can anyone be truly free? How can anyone be responsible for anything?

Frankfurt's answer was compatibilism—the view that free will and determinism are not in conflict. If moral responsibility doesn't require the ability to do otherwise, then even in a fully determined universe, you can be free and responsible. What matters isn't whether you could have chosen differently, but whether your actions flow from your own will, from your own reflective desires.

You're free when you do what you want to do, when your actions express your second-order volitions rather than forces external to your evaluating self. The addict acting on cravings they despise isn't free—not because determinism makes freedom impossible, but because there's a conflict between what they do and what they want to want.

Frankfurt's version of compatibilism became enormously influential. It offered a way to take seriously both the scientific view that everything has causes and the everyday intuition that people are responsible for their choices.

What We Care About

Later in his career, Frankfurt turned his attention to a question he thought philosophy had neglected. Philosophers spend enormous energy on epistemology—what should we believe?—and on ethics—how should we act? But there's a prior question that shapes both: What should we care about?

To care about something, Frankfurt argued, is to see it as important, as having a claim on your attention and action. What you care about reveals your character. It defines who you are.

But here Frankfurt took an unexpected position. Most philosophers assume that importance is objective—that some things simply matter more than others, independent of our attitudes. On this view, we should care about important things because they're important. Our caring should track the objective importance of things.

Frankfurt reversed this. Caring about something is what makes it important to you. Before you cared about it, it might have been irrelevant to your life. Once you invest your caring, it acquires the power to affect your well-being. Your caring creates the importance.

This explains why different people find such different things important. It's not that some people are wrong about what matters. Rather, what matters to a particular person depends on what that person has invested their caring in.

This view attracted criticism. What about misguided caring? If someone follows a charlatan's medical advice and cares intensely about avoiding a food that's actually harmless, has their caring made avoiding that food genuinely important? Critics argued that some caring is simply mistaken—caring based on false beliefs doesn't create real importance.

Frankfurt explored these themes in his 2004 book The Reasons of Love, examining how love represents the deepest form of caring and what role it plays in giving life meaning.

A Life in Philosophy

Frankfurt's academic career wound through several institutions before arriving at Princeton. He earned both his bachelor's degree and his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, completing his Ph.D. in 1954 at age twenty-five.

He taught at Ohio State from 1956 to 1962, then briefly at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 1963 he joined Rockefeller University in New York City, where he remained until the philosophy department was shuttered in 1976. From there he moved to Yale, where he chaired the philosophy department for nearly a decade. Finally, in 1990, he arrived at Princeton, where he taught until retiring in 2002.

Among philosophers, before On Bullshit made him a public figure, Frankfurt was best known for his work on the rationalist philosopher René Descartes—the seventeenth-century thinker famous for "I think, therefore I am." Frankfurt's first book, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen, offered an interpretation of Descartes's Meditations that influenced how scholars understood that foundational work.

His honors accumulated over the decades. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He held a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Frankfurt married twice. His first marriage, to Marilyn Rothman, produced two daughters before ending in divorce. He later married Joan Gilbert.

Truth and Its Enemies

After On Bullshit became a sensation, Frankfurt published a companion volume in 2006 titled On Truth. If the first book diagnosed a disease, the second was his attempt to articulate what was being lost.

Frankfurt worried about what he saw as a "dwindling appreciation in society for truth." The success of bullshit depends on people not caring enough about truth to resist it. When bullshitters face an audience that demands accuracy, that checks claims, that values getting things right, the bullshit fails. But when indifference to truth becomes widespread, bullshitters flourish.

There's something almost paradoxical about Frankfurt's fame. He spent decades doing careful, rigorous philosophical work—the kind of precise analysis that requires caring intensely about getting things exactly right. Then he became famous for diagnosing a cultural condition defined by the absence of that very caring.

Perhaps that's why the book resonated. Readers recognized something in Frankfurt's analysis. They had encountered bullshit and felt its peculiar offensiveness—not the sharp sting of being lied to, but the deflating realization that the speaker didn't respect them enough to bother with truth or falsehood.

Harry Frankfurt died on July 16, 2023, in Santa Monica, California. He was ninety-four. The cause was congestive heart failure.

He left behind a body of work that changed how philosophers think about freedom, responsibility, and personhood. And he left behind a tiny book that gave millions of ordinary readers a concept they needed—a name for something they had always known but couldn't quite articulate.

The liar and the bullshitter are both enemies of truth. But only one of them still believes that truth exists.