" Sincerity itself is bullshit " ou a sinceridade é uma treta ( tradução livre )

É o que diz Harry G. Frankfurt ao terminar o seu livro " On Bullshit " ( editado em 2005 pela Princeton University Press e já trduzido para português pela Livros de Areia, em 2006, com o título " Da Treta " ).

Lembrei-me dele por causa da Dra. Manuela Ferreira Leite e da sua campanha baseada na verdade e porque alguns comentadores, nomeadamente os que lhe são afectos e não só, consideraren que a sinceridade da senhora é uma das suas mais valias quando comparada com a representação / artificialidade dos outros candidatos, nomeadamente José Sócrates. que serão "produzidos" por agências de marketing ou assessores e com tal não sinceros.

Para reflexão deixo os dois últimos parágrafos ( páginas 64 a 67 ) do referido livro :

" 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 confidenc 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 quiet 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 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 truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures, 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. "

Sublinhados meus.