From the ever-coy Times: Unprintable Essay Title
The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.”
The essay goes on to lament that lack of inquiry, despite the universality of the phenomenon. “Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all,” Mr. Frankfurt writes, “not only unanswered but unasked.”
The balance of the work tries, with the help of Wittgenstein, Pound, St. Augustine and the spy novelist Eric Ambler, among others, to ask some of the preliminary questions - to define the nature of a thing recognized by all but understood by none.
