A wise man once said: the world is the totality of farts, not of things.Footnote ¹ Whether or not one endorses the panfartism of the great Austrian mystic, it's outrageous that it has taken so long to have a serious discussion of the metaphysics of farts. Bill Capra (Reference Capra2022) has, at last, put some wind in our sails. However, we take issue with much of what he says and, hopefully, get to the bottom of the nature of farts.

Capra raises perfectly valid questions about the individuation and identity of farts, both at a time and over time. One may expect some degree of vagueness here, as elsewhere. One might also distinguish voluntary farts from involuntary ones. We take it that an involuntary fart is not a self-contradiction: it just slips out, as it were. Of course, farting involuntarily is not necessarily the same as farting accidently, or by mistake, or unintentionally. J. L. Austin (Reference Austin1956) would have had a field day here. These distinctions are not to be sniffed at.

However, Capra focuses his discussion on two theories of farts: what he calls the essential-bum-origin view and the phenomenological view. We prefer to call the former view the ‘buttocks-first’ view, and the latter the ‘smell-first’ view. According to the buttocks-first view, any particular fart has its origin essentially. The fundament of origin is fundamental to the fart in question. It makes it the fart that it is. On this view, not all epistemic counterparts of farts are farts, just as not all epistemic counterparts of gold are gold.Footnote ² There can be a ‘fool's fart’: something that smells like a fart but is not a fart (since it fails to have the right origin). According to the smell-first view, in contrast, a fart's origin is no part of its essence. Its essence consists entirely of its aromatics. It has a purely phenomenological essence – the what-it's-likeness of farts.

Capra wants to defend the smell-first view and to reject the buttocks-first view. Before reviewing his objections, it's worth pointing out that the buttocks-first view is the view of common sense. The whole point, one might have thought, of labelling some odour as a fart is to indicate its origin, to draw attention to its rectal beginnings. Be that as it may, this is the view that Capra rejects.

Capra makes a lot of a version of the infamous ‘fart in a lift’ scenario (pp. 40–1). (Farting in a lift is wrong on so many levels.) We are asked to imagine two people in a lift who fart simultaneously. The gaseous molecules thus emitted merge seamlessly. How many farts are in the lift? Capra opines that the buttocks-first view must say that there are two farts occupying the same space at the same time, whereas the smell-first view holds that there is just one fart. This, says Capra, is a point in favour of the smell-first view since to a bystander there would seem to be just one fart. But a defender of the buttocks-first view can accommodate this seeming, since the two farts combine to form a compound pseudo-fart, and that is what the bystander smells, thereby giving the illusion of smelling a single fart. So this thought-experiment yields no advantage to the smell-first view.

It's unclear, en passant, what point Capra is trying to make in the full paragraph on page 41 – namely, his discussion of ‘joint smelling’. This is an issue in epistemology – the so-called ‘problem of other farts’ – and can hardly have any bearing on the metaphysics of farts. Moreover, what Capra says here is simply wrong. On both views of farts, farts are mind-independent entities. Hence, there can be joint awareness of farts, on either view of farts.

Capra then proceeds to give two objections to the buttocks-first view, so let's look at these. First, on the buttocks-first view, ‘whether farts smell bad could come completely apart from whether they are bad, which seems absurd’ (p. 42). This is not the clearest of objections, but we can let the air out of it by noting that the buttocks-first view, though it holds origin to be essential, need not hold it to be the only essential feature of a particular fart. A fart's phenomenology may also be essential to it.

Capra's second objection revolves around the well-known ‘silent but deadly’ fart. Such farts can come upon us unannounced: lightning but no thunder, as it were. Capra thinks of ‘silent but deadlys’ as odourless, and he deems odourless farts to be impossible. (From which it would follow that ‘silent but deadlys’ are impossible; presumably not Capra's considered opinion.) Yet, he says, odourless farts are not impossible on the buttocks-first view; and so much the worse for that view. Not so, alas. First of all, ‘silent but deadlys’ are not odourless. That's why they're called ‘deadly’. Let that pass. Can there be odourless farts? Yes. Capra here overlooks the massive variety of farts, across a range of dimensions (fragrancy, pungency, loudness, viscosity, etc.). Farts run the gauntlet from delicate, perfumed lady-like offerings through to full-throated post-vindaloo sweet-and-sour specials. An odourless fart is just a limiting case, and quite possible. Hence, Capra's second objection lapses.

In sum, Capra has failed in his stated aim of unseating the buttocks-first view. Farts are smells, but not just smells. Their origin matters. It remains only for buttocks-firstists to stand up and defend their view, with an emphatic and triumphant retort!Footnote ³