Thought of the Day V

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 easiest for a person to know.  Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution.  Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial - notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things.  And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

-Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit