Sobre la verdad

New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 22, 2006
Questions for Harry G. Frankfurt
Fighting Bull
By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Q: Your new book, “On Truth,” is a sequel to “On Bull—,” a slim philosophical tract published by Princeton University Press that became an accidental best seller last year.

What do you mean by accidental? People didn’t know they were buying it?

How many copies have been sold?

More than 400,000 so far, and still counting. This book has been translated into 25 languages — Croatian, Korean, not just your everyday European languages.

I see it’s called “Sobre Falar Merda” in Portuguese, “Stronzate” in Italian, “De l’Art de Dire des Conneries” in French. But do those words actually mean the same thing?

In many of the languages into which the book has been translated, there is no equivalent for our word “bull—.” I am very puzzled by that.

Do you think the book would have sold many copies if you had called it something less titillating, say “On Lying”?

I think the transgressive aspect of it did have a certain influence on its success. But the magnitude of the response makes me think that something else was involved. People in this country are starved for the truth.

In your new book, you are especially critical of academics and their theories of postmodernism, which treat all truth as an artificial construction as opposed to an independent reality.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. I originally wrote the bull— essay at Yale, and a physics professor told me that it was appropriate that this essay should have been written at Yale, because, after all, he said, Yale is the bull— capital of the world.

But there is probably far more bull— in politics and entertainment than in academia.

I hope so!

What about in philosophy, which you still teach?

I think there is a certain amount of bull— in philosophy — people pretending to have important ideas when they don’t and obscuring the fact by using a lot of impenetrable language.

What do you think the pursuit of truth requires?

Recognizing truth requires selflessness. You have to leave yourself out of it so you can find out the way things are in themselves, not the way they look to you or how you feel about them or how you would like them to be.

Can you tell us about your childhood, briefly?

I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted.

Why did she wait so long?

She claimed that when I was 6, she tried to tell me that I was adopted. According to her story, I closed my ears. So she went to the doctor and asked his advice, and he said: “Well, wait a year. When he’s 7, maybe he’ll be ready then.” So when I was 7, she told me again, and again I wouldn’t listen. So she waited another 29 years and told me when I was 36.

Did you try to find your birth parents?

They may be people whom I really wouldn’t want to be associated with. They might not like me. Why would I want to go into this wilderness without a map?

Because you just wrote a book about truth, and isn’t truth by definition an unknown wilderness?

As a philosopher, I’m not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

True enough. So let’s get back to your new book. Why is the book so short? It’s only 101 pages.

Well, “On Bull—” was shorter. It was 80 pages, or something like that. I’m all in favor of that.

Because you think short books are less likely to contain academic nonsense?

What I think is that a short book can contain a lot of bull—, but a long book almost inevitably contains a lot of bull—.

Since author interviews are a famous source of self-aggrandizement, I must ask you this, Are you bull—ing me?

Absolutely not. I wouldn’t think of it.