Sincerity and Authenticity

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

by Lionel Trilling

Now and then, writes Lionel Triling, it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself. In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Essays, Psychology, Art

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling (née Rubin), whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.

Reviews

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Partial Memories

Few books have influenced my worldview as much as "Sincerity and Authenticity".

If I had to name two others, I would say Karl Marx’ "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" ("the Young Marx") and Sigmund Freud’s "Civilization and Its Discontents".

If I had to name a third, I would say Erich Fromm’s "The Art of Loving".

If I had to name a fourth, the only thing that makes me hesitate to mention Herbert Marcuse’s "Eros and Civilisation", is that I can’t remember whether I have actually read it.

Perhaps the pseud in me just pretends that I have read it. Perhaps I just liked the title and that was enough. I could guess the rest.

Partisan Views

All of this reading happened over thirty years ago, when I had just finished an Arts Degree in English Literature and Political Science.

I was determined that I keep my mind alive by continuing my readings in these areas of passion.

I started a lifelong obsession with writers and critics associated with the magazines "Partisan Review" and "Dissent".

Many of them were Jews whose families had come to America from Russia or Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

They had a passion for literature and political science, to which I will add philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Not many of them wrote fiction, at least not convincingly, but they nevertheless wrote with style and they appreciated the style of those about whom they wrote (especially Freud and his ability to tell stories).

All these years later, I still derive enormous pleasure from their thinking and writing, and the fact that I think and write at all owes a lot to what I learned from them.

Less Than Total Recall

My two favourite New York Jewish Intellectuals were Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.

While they both wrote extensively about literature, I would say that Howe was the more overtly philosophical and political.

I am about to commence a personal reading project that involves a more philosophical slant (Kant, Hegel, Marx and the Continental Philosophers up to Zizek).

However, a few days ago, I thought I might indulge in a little preparatory distraction by re-reading Trilling, primarily so that I could enjoy his style and critical authority once more.

The title of the book is so precise and definitive that for me it almost marks this territory as that of Trilling, at least up until 1970, when he presented the lectures upon which the essays were based at Harvard.

If called upon, I could launch into a rant that defined how Sincerity and Authenticity related to my personal philosophy. The subject matter of the book was that fresh in my mind.

Imagine how surprised I was when I discovered how little I recalled of the book (apart from what was implicit in the title) and how much more it contained that is relevant to my current reading interests.

Suffice it to say, I was exhilarated to read Trilling from a new perspective.

A Moment of Sincerity

The book purports to explore the origin and rise of sincerity and authenticity as subject matter of literature.

It quickly establishes that the process started 400 years ago and that the two concepts rose in parallel in both culture and society.

However, what I had forgotten was just how vital to Trilling’s story were philosophers like Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Marcuse and Foucault, not to mention writers like Diderot, Goethe, Flaubert, Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, and psychoanalysts like Freud, Norman O. Brown and R.D. Laing.

This is not just literary criticism, it is fully-fledged cultural criticism of the highest order.

In order to properly engage with it as a discrete work, it helps if you have some comprehension of Hegel.

I am at the beginning of my Hegelian journey, largely initiated by the extent to which he has been newly embraced by European philosophy (although I infer from this book that America made such an attempt in the 50’s and 60’s).

However, insofar as I attempt to grapple with the Hegelian aspects of “Sincerity and Authenticity”, I might misunderstand Hegel and inadvertently or advertently succumb to Trilling’s polemical intent, not to mention my own.

I hope you will pull me up, if I do.

Begin the Beguine

To tell the story of this book, I really ought to define some of the key terms. However, Trilling hasn’t made this task easy for me.

Late in the book, he says, with a hint of patrician bemusement:

"Irony is one of those words, like love, which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning – other such words are sincerity and authenticity..."

He dances around the words with subtle skill and refinement. He tends to assume we know very well what he is talking about.

The problem now is that both words have become a little old-fashioned or have been co-opted and stripped of meaning by advertising.

Here is the best I can do.

Sincerity

The closest Trilling comes to a definition of "sincerity" is "a congruence between avowal and actual feeling".

If I tell you I feel well or happy or sad, then I actually, really am.

What I say publicly about how I feel privately is true.

There are two aspects of this equation: firstly, I am being honest with myself (or my self); and secondly, I am being honest with you.

As Polonius counselled Laertes in "Hamlet":

"This above all: to thine own self be true
And it doth follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Conversely, both Shakespeare and Trilling seem to suggest that, if you deceive someone else, you also deceive or betray yourself.

French and English Sincerity

Trilling makes an interesting differentiation between French and English sincerity:

"In French literature sincerity consists in telling the truth about oneself and to others; by truth is meant a recognition of such of one’s own traits or actions as are morally or socially discreditable and, in conventional course, concealed.

"English sincerity does not demand this confrontation of what is base or shameful in oneself. The English ask of the sincere man that he communicate without deceiving or misleading. ..

"Not to know oneself in the French fashion and make public what one knows, but to be oneself, in action, in deeds, what Matthew Arnold called ‘tasks’..."

In other words, the English do not impose a "positive duty" to be full and frank, only a "negative duty" not to deceive.

The French seem to be more concerned about the soul, whereas the English are concerned about the arena of action, enterprise or business. It is still permissible for a sincere man to have secrets.

In both countries, the concept of sincerity became more important as society segmented into discrete public and private spheres, and within these spheres we each became an individual, not just a member of a family, village, crowd or society.

Literature was concerned with "dissimulation, feigning and pretence". Plain speaking was valued.

Authenticity

Trilling supplies less overt guidance with respect to the meaning of "authenticity".

After citing Polonius ("to thine own self be true"), he waxes lyrical:

"What a concord is proposed – between me and my own self: were ever two beings better suited to each other? Who would not wish to be true to his own self? True, which is to say loyal, never wavering in constancy. True, which is to say honest; there are to be no subterfuges in dealing with him. True, which is to say, as carpenters and bricklayers use the word, precisely aligned with him. But it is not easy..."

There follows a discussion of both philosophers and psychoanalysts.

Trilling quotes Schiller:

"Every individual human being…carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his life’s task to be, through all his changing manifestations in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal."

Trilling then asks: is the archetype, the ideal the "own self" to which one should be true?

Whatever the answer, at this early stage, it is apparent that there are already two selves: the actual and the ideal. We have been split in two.

Is one authentic and the other not? Can both be authentic?

It is implicit that authenticity requires one self and a degree of comfort with this self.

The moment you have two or more selves, you have scope for conflict and confusion and inauthenticity.

Trilling then focuses on the implications of multiple selves or inauthenticity.

Hegel

In the second essay, "The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness", Trilling uses Hegel as the basis for this discussion.

In the "Phenomenology of Mind", Hegel discusses Diderot’s dialogue "Le Neveu de Rameau" ("Rameau’s Nephew")(which had been translated from the French into German by Goethe).

One aspect of the dialogue highlights how everyone acts a part, performs a role, takes a position, does his dance in order to comply with society’s expectations of them. These "impersonations" are insincere and cause us to lose personal integrity and dignity.

The second aspect is that Diderot suspends judgement on the morality of this loss of integrity. It is not shown to be a negative.

Hegel permits both selves to co-exist, and so posits the "self-estranged spirit" or the "self in self-estrangement".

The one self is an honest soul or noble self, the other a base self. Together, they constitute a "disintegrated consciousness". The self is "alienated" from itself. It becomes "inauthentic".

However, in Trilling’s opinion, Hegel sees the honest soul as more contemptuous. "It is defined and limited by its ‘noble’ relation to the external power of society, to the ethos which that power implies." It is more bourgeois. It needs the base self in order to express a negative relation with the external power of society.

The two selves, together, are both needed for the Spirit to move to the next stage of development. The two selves oppose an integrated selfhood in order to advance towards "a higher level of conscious life".

Thus, both selves, and therefore, their alienation from each other, are required for the development of the Spirit. The dialectic is, by definition, two-fold. The self must be disintegrated in order to eventually become free.

The Sentiment of Being

Trilling resorts to Rousseau to oppose the Hegelian analysis.

Rousseau sees a positive in society that is not present in the "savage":

"The savage lives within himself, the sociable man knows how to live only in the opinion of others, and it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he draws the sentiment of his own being."

Still, neither Rousseau not Trilling considers this view a solution to alienation. A conflict between self and society still resides in the individual. It is reflected in the language of David Riesman’s "other-directed" and "inner-directed" personalities.

Plus he argues that culture and art contribute to these behavioural distinctions; they are "agents of conformity".

Jane Austen’s "Mansfield Park"

Trilling had a high regard for Jane Austen.

He sees her as supportive of the "noble" against the "base" self. She implicitly denies the Hegelian dialectic. The goal of nobility can only be achieved by rejection of the base and compliance with the dictates of society.

Trilling acknowledges that this is "not an effort of liberation but an acquiescence in bondage, a cynical commitment to the way of the world, to the metropolitan society which Rousseau had denounced as the enemy of all true being."

However, he says, "when its first unease has been accommodated, it can be seen to have in it a curious power of comfort."

In other words, submission, acceptance, conformity, the "single-mindedness" of knowing one’s place in the world, do away with alienation.

Being and Having

Trilling further discusses the concept of "being" in terms of Wordsworth and Marx:

"...being...is the gratifying experience of the self as an entity."

However, this experience could be compromised by social forces: "the great enemy of being was having."

To quote Marx from the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts":

"The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being."

We might have capital, but we don’t have a life. We are estranged or alienated from our labor and from our selves and other selves. We cease to be humans.

Marx’ goal for communism was to get to the point where we could "assume man to be man, and his relation to the world a human one".

Man had to transcend alienation, and he could only do that through Marx’ self-fulfilling prophecy of Communism.

In a sense, Hegel required alienation to move the Spirit to a higher stage; Marx moved Man to a higher stage by overcoming alienation.

However, Marx’ prescription required a revolution against the bourgeois State.

Freud and Marcuse

In the last essay, "The Authentic Unconscious", Trilling explores the implications of a psychoanalytical understanding of the mind in terms of the Ego, the Id and the Super-Ego.

The conflict between these aspects of the mind are sources of disintegration, alienation and mental illness.

Freud recognised that the Super-Ego was required to regulate the self or the Ego, but that it is unduely harsh and gratuitous in how it goes about its task.

While therapy could attempt to bring aspects of the Id and the Super-Ego within the consciousness of the Ego, Freud did not see any end to the conflict. "We are all ill."

Trilling regards his last work, "Civilisation and Its Discontents" as relatively pessimistic in this regard.

He then investigates Marcuse’s "Eros and Civilisation", an attempt to achieve a harmony between the basic ideas of Marx and Freud.

Marcuse believed that the conflict could be overcome and that, even within the time since Freud’s last book was published, there had been a move towards a more sexually permissive world.

However, ironically, while this illustrated the ability of culture to change, Marcuse was skeptical about whether the particular changes were positive. He actually felt that they were detrimental to some positive aspects of the growth of the individual within a family context.

How Do You Integrate the Self?

It’s at this point that Trilling is most polemical and, therefore, most trapped within the social, moral and political framework of the time in which he was writing.

Rather than pull all of these ideas into a single literary and philosophical whole, he spends the last pages attacking a then current trend of regarding mental illness and schizophrenia as an heroic assertion of the self against the evils of society.

Trilling clearly saw mental illness as a major social and cultural problem.

While he was skeptical of the ability of Marxism or Marcuse to overcome it, he failed to construct any strategy to deal with the disintegration of the self.

He did, however, see culture and literature as a playground and a laboratory within which we could thrash out the issues and potentially learn more about our selves.

Culture might increasingly perform the role of entertainment, but it still has the potential to be both playground and laboratory.

It's up to us to play, experiment and explore.

Perhaps, in doing so, we might address the adverse implications of our own divided consciousness and alienation.

Not only might we improve our relationship with our selves, but our relationships with other selves might benefit.

This is what I want to explore in my personal philosophical reading project.

[John Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself…” With those words, which rang boldly in my mind the first time I encountered them and did so again on second meeting, Lionel Trilling announces more than he may have realized at the time he penned them, as the opening to a series of six lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1970. Literature had long thought of itself, largely though not entirely, as reflecting what Pope called the proper study of mankind—that is, man himself, especially in moral terms—and literary criticism had followed suit to a great extent. Both have sometimes pursued other aims, especially since 1970. But many ordinary readers remain concerned much of the time, in a straightforward way, with what books have to tell us about people, the substance of our lives, the nature of our dilemmas, and for that purpose, as well as others, this slim volume retains its value.

Trilling begins with a very familiar example, Polonius’s words of advice to Laertes in Hamlet, and uses “to thine own self be true” as an approach to the concept of sincerity, which by Shakespeare’s time constituted an essential element in the moral life of Western man. Trilling argues that this is in fact a historical and cultural concept, not a timeless one: “we cannot say of the patriarch Abraham that he was a sincere man.… The sincerity of Achilles or Beowulf cannot be discussed: they neither have nor lack sincerity.” The simple statement he offers at the outset of what it means—until he complicates the discussion, that is—is that “it refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.” Though he describes it as a “state or quality of the self,” an essential element of sincerity is what one does, what one expresses.

By contrast, authenticity has more to do with what one is, though only once does Trilling comes close to saying so. By way of getting at what it means, after reminding us of his comment regarding Abraham, he picks up a similar but less known figure, the protagonist of Wordsworth’s poem Michael, also a shepherd, a father, and very old. In the poem’s climax, Michael, though trying to go on with the work of life after losing his son to the corruption of the city, is reported by neighbors sometimes to sit for a whole day, never lifting up a single stone. There is no question of what he expresses: “he and his grief are one.” Here, something newer than sincerity applies: at this point, “our sense of Michael’s being, … exceptional in its actuality, and valuable,” is a matter of authenticity.

From there, Trilling suggests, in a general way, a few things that pertain to authenticity, among them “not be[ing] like anyone else” and possessing qualities of “singleness and particularity” in one’s soul. He goes on to discuss one major angle of view on authenticity by discussing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Trilling reminds us that “To the making of Kurtz … all Europe has contributed,” and what Kurtz does, what he becomes, what he makes of himself, thus implies the view “that civilization is of its nature so inauthentic that personal integrity can be wrested from it only by the inversion of all its avowed principles.” (A countervailing view arises in the novel, in Marlow’s understanding of English civilization, but that’s a complexity I must skip.) The authentic life, then, requires grappling with the constraints and impositions of society. But it also requires, or may instead be taken to require, coming to terms with the unconscious, that realm of the mind discovered by the poets, as Freud insisted, that Freud himself did much to establish and explore. Though many of Freud’s theories are now granted less credence, the unconscious is still with us, and so (in Trilling’s view, which many share) is the import of Freud’s climactic work, Civilization and Its Discontents. In “pressing upon us the ineluctability of the pain and frustration of human existence,” Freud shares something with, in fact replaces the purpose of, what Trilling calls “the tragic element of Judaism and Christianity.” The point here, to risk a bald summary, is that authenticity entails acquiring this tragic sense, accepting it, living with it. An implication is that getting and having, the pursuit of happiness, even our attempts to ameliorate the difficulties of life through social, economic, and political action, however much these things are natural and perhaps necessary, are apt to hit a wall sooner or later.

That may be the grandest possible way of saying that sooner or later one’s heart will be broken, and no one can sing the blues until it is. But most of the time we’re not required to grapple the more dire elements of Conrad’s view or of Freud’s. Most of the time, sincerity and authenticity are tools we employ in somewhat simpler ways of thinking about others, whether persons or characters. Naturally, much of Trilling’s book focuses on characters. Beyond Wordsworth’s Michael, for instance, Trilling discusses Nathalie Sarraute’s view that Flaubert discovered inauthenticity and showed it to us in the figure of Emma Bovary, far more familiar to most of us than Michael. An earlier example is the peculiarly charming figure of Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s book by that name—a special case by virtue of being (originally) a real figure as well as a character in a dialogue. But genuine persons figure as well. Trilling reminds us early on of Castiglione’s Courtier, that forerunner of the modern book of advice (oriented, in other words, toward real life), which the less accomplished readers in Trilling’s audience (myself, for instance) will know of but will not have read, and he touches later on Rousseau’s critique of Parisians compared with Genevans.

Beyond our thinking about others, there’s the matter of ourselves. Much of what struck me about Trilling’s discussion of authenticity was what it told me about an individual’s quest to achieve authenticity for him- or herself—more precisely, about the challenges to authenticity seen by writers and thinkers that include Marx as well as Conrad, and Laing and Marcuse as well as Freud. But in truth one can’t go very far in applying either concept to oneself without also considering its application to others (and vice versa).

Allow me a moment of looking backwards, as a way to approach a point. The social and political movements of the 60s represented a twin-tipped analytical attack. If one angle of attack was directed toward how others lived, that is, how society proposed to arrange things for us, the other, which became dominant in the 70s, was self-directed. Despite my enthusiasm at the time for social and political reforms, the current that ran deeper for me as a teenager, my companions, and some of my elders had to do with ourselves. It was mostly in principle that we could be concerned with one particular man in a grey flannel suit or one particular housewife; what we felt to be urgent, however little we were sometimes aware of it, was whether the life usually entailed by adopting the suit or the apron could be conceived as fulfilling for us, as authenticating what we were and could make of ourselves. I’ve often felt, in other words, that authenticity is more an aspiration than a tool of judgment; we cared little about who seemed authentic, except for a pop star here and there, but a lot to be authentic ourselves. There was then, and still is, something slightly suspicious about asking whether a figure in my life appears, or (worse) might seek to appear, authentic to me. It raises in a practical way the philosophical question of how one can look into the soul of another.

Others were less reluctant than I was to attempt it. Jean-Paul Sartre not only discussed inauthenticity at length in his writing but also used it, I seem to recall, as a personal criticism, as did others in his circle and many who fell under the spell of existentialism. (I seem to recall a cartoon in which Sartre and de Beauvoir flung “inauthentic” and “bad faith” at each other.) But such cases were at least serious-minded, backed by a substantial understanding of what one meant by it.

In light of that, it’s ironic that nowadays one is likely to hear (or so I’ve found) “inauthentic” tossed about casually, as if authenticity has become something that anyone, especially a public figure, must sell the rest of us on. Enough of those barbs litter the ground that one is apt to trip on them.

Example: a recent New York Times critique of Texas governor Rick Perry’s performance in one of the numerous “debates” among aspiring Republican contenders for the American presidency. In a moment that quickly became practically notorious, Perry was unable to name of one of the three federal agencies he proposed to eliminate if elected, and the Times commentary I read, by Matt Bai, declared that Perry’s failure had to with “the most powerful commodity in American politics: authenticity.” Bai said the problem wasn’t that Perry had gone groping for a word, but that he “didn’t seem to know the basic details of his own proposal.” But I’m hard pressed to see how not knowing something, even something to which one has put one’s own name, is inauthentic, unless in a momentary sense. To insist that looking bad, as Perry certainly did, amounts to inauthenticity overturns even the simplest sense of the concept, which is not about appearances. Besides, the slip looked to me more like a severe case of not remembering. And if you take it to have been a memory lapse, it looked more authentically human than does the facile grasp of facts and slick command of words that the most polished politicians display.

It’s a principle of much public discourse nowadays, if public discourse can be said to have any principles, to invert Spinoza: where he proposed for himself “not to laugh, to cry, or to condemn, but to understand,” the commentariat wants least of all to understand, when its sights are fixed on a disfavored figure. This sometimes applies even to word choice. Lincoln Kirstein once observed that journalism is less concerned with what’s true than with what sounds important. “Inauthentic” fit the bill in the case I just outlined.

If following Spinoza is too much to expect—admittedly we’d lose some of our fun if we couldn’t condemn—one ought to recognize that the twin tools, as I called them, of sincerity and authenticity can sometimes be weapons, and to insist, for oneself as well as for others, on care in their use.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

This guy Trilling. You haven't, perhaps, heard of him. I hadn't until pretty recently.
He's magnificent. It's uncanny how he can bring together common threads from literature of different languages, centuries, and disciplines in order to create a structured new idea. ("Disciplines": he's the most understandable person I've ever read to use Freud and Marx routinely as sources of should-be common knowledge. And I don't mean just references to their ideas that kind of float in public conciousness, I mean specific illustrative quotations, like the sprinklings of the Church Fathers that you get in the writings of Catholics.)
The specific idea that he expresses in this book, which was originally a lecture series (at Harvard) is that we as humans living in society have built up over time new moral means of judging ourselves and others, and that two instances of our change in moral outlook have been what is meant by the words Sincerity and Authenticity. The last chapter explains Freud in such a way that I'm, for the first time in my life, seriously tempted to read the man himself.
It's a good argument. Read it if you can, together with everything else you can find.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self-help for the literary/philosophical set? Yields a long reading list, juicy underlined passages, marginalia, new vocab, a heightened sense/understanding of realities expressed in art and life. Excellent, accessible, often gorgeously phrased prose, too. Must read more Trilling.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lionel Trilling’s seminal book of criticism, Sincerity and Authenticity is a short but dense book of ideas. In the first section, “Sincerity: It’s Origin and Rise,” there is a discussion of a variety of sources from Arnold to Lacan. In section two, “The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness,” the discussion becomes less oblique as it gets more philosophical with discussions of thinkers like Dierderot and Schiller. In the third section, “The Sentiments of Being and the Sentiments of Art,” the dense philosophy of Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Rousseau are discussed. I was most familiar with the ideas of the fourth section, “The Heroic, the Beautiful, the Authentic,” in which there is a discussion of the novels of Jane Austen that was referred to in the wonderful Whit Stilman film Metropolis. Joyce and Flaubert are also discussed. Section five, “Society and Authenticity,” takes on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as well as looks at the connection between Nietzsche and Wilde. The last section, “The Authentic Unconscious,” is mostly focused on the influence of Freud but also encompasses thinkers like Sartre, Nietzsche and Foucault. It is a difficult book to sum up, but I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in it; however, it is necessary to have more than a passing knowledge of some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. This discussion of the idea of being true to oneself is exhausting intellectually.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Douglas Adams made clear to us forty years ago, the answers we come to from the questions we ask can only make sense to us when we understand the questions themselves. Adams, for one, played this up for laughs by teasing us about the near-universal desire for an answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” but the model he posits, to my mind, holds firm. Lionel Trilling, it would seem, thinks so too, and so walked into his series of lectures on sincerity and authenticity with a plan: set up and explain the nature of the question that leads us to afford such great import to these twin concepts. In six parts, Trilling progresses through much of Western philosophy, touching on Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Schilling, Freud, Sartre, and Lacan, by way of showing how the very idea of sincerity came about, was found to be possible, looked like it maybe wasn’t possible, was shown to be impossible, until it’s finally shown to maybe be possible again if you’re insane. But this is mostly it; the book is mostly about unpacking the questions, and less so about coming to more conclusive answers. Here, then, I, like Zaphod on Magrathea, leave this book a little less than satisfied. Trilling, of course, doesn’t deserve all of the blame for my disappointment, since I came to Sincerity and Authenticity looking for something that wasn’t on offer. “Sincerity” has, today, a bit of a talismanic aura to it, owing to how it has come to occupy a central place in contemporary literary criticism. The so-called New Sincerity which Adam Kelly (who directed me to this book) has been writing about for years, holds that the concept animating current literary fiction is, what do you know?, sincerity. This sincerity has to do with meaning what one says, but has more to do with the element of trust requisite to any claim to sincerity. And the significance of this emphasis of trust (or faith) with respect to sincerity can only be found after grappling with post-structuralism and postmodernism and irony, which Trilling does not do. At the end of the whole everything I think that his sincerity and the New Sincerity’s sincerity are incommensurate, that Trilling wasn’t ahead of his time but was exactly on time. I really like the stuff on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as his engagement with the social dialectic throughout the book, but I still didn’t quite get out of this what I was looking for, which isn’t Trilling’s fault. I still don’t understand the question yet.

[Greg]

Not a bad review, but I did not write it. gh

I am astounded by the amount of material and the range of topics that Trilling takes up in this relatively short book based on public lectures. The sections on Rousseau and Austen are provocative. Trilling extracts from their work a critique of artifice, of the theatre more specifically, that can justifiably take its place along with Augustine's. The final chapter, which begins with a short reflection on the (in)significance of narrative storytelling [as of the late 1960's anyway] and in which he weaves a story of the links between Freud, Sartre, Marcuse and Foucault on the theme of social life, is schematic but brilliant.

[Kerry & naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the spring of 1970, Lionel Trilling held the position of Charles Eliot Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. He gave a series of lectures that semester exploring the historical validity and idealization of sincerity and authenticity. One would think that a professor of poetry would give lectures on poetry--scansion, critiquing, writing, historical development of poetic forms, the future of poetry or what it should be, etc. However, that’s not what Trilling’s lectures encompassed. I don’t recall poetry being mentioned specifically at all, other than under the general auspices of “literature” or “art,” in these lectures, published in 1971 under the title Sincerity and Authenticity .

Trilling sets out to explore where the ideas of sincerity and authenticity originate in Western thought and culture and goes back about 400 years, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Polonius gives Laertes the following advice:

This above all: to thine own self be true
And it doth follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

(Hamlet, Act I, Scene III)

Framework

Trilling defines sincerity “as an essential condition of virtue”* in which a person who does not deceive themself as to who they really are, cannot, therefore, deceive other people in their dealings. Trilling immediately recognizes the arduousness of sincerity because of the many roles that human beings play to society. In today’s society, at least, it’s a given that people act differently when they are by themselves than when they are with their families, or with close friends, or in the presence of their bosses, or surrounded by strangers. We play these roles, to others and to ourselves, and it has resulted in our individual loss of sincerity. Trilling points out that the word sincerity itself is most often used in an ironic sense and denotes the lack of sincerity rather than its presence in post-modern life. The meaning of the word sincerity has been replaced by the word authenticity; although Trilling died in 1975, long before the rise of the Oprah-cult, his claim of “authenticity” as the buzzword for self-discovery and leading the best life, though “best” is an entirely relative term, holds true thirty years after Trilling first delivered his lectures.

Rather than giving a short summary of each of the six lectures included in Sincerity and Authenticity, I would rather summarize the book as a whole. Trilling frames his lectures in a loosely chronological basis, moving between philosophy and literary theory (often the same thing). He gives the basic tenets of certain philosophers and writers, those apropos to his topic of sincerity and authenticity, and delivers some rather lofty concepts in concise, understandable language. He moves from Hegel’s noble ethos vs. the base self to Goethe’s disintegrated consciousness to Rousseau’s and Wordsworth’s experiences of the individual. He touches on Joyce’s epiphany (or transcendent moment of sincerity/authenticity) and moves among various ideas that art and literature are bad influences or good influences or merely authentic/inauthentic experiences. Trilling dabbles in Marxism and examines the effect of Freudian theory on the very possibility of being authentic. Through it all, Trilling exposes the contradictions of philosophy and how one question gives rise to another and another and another.

Philosophy, after all, isn’t about solutions; it’s really about how to ask the questions that define human existence. Trilling isn’t concerned with finding the answer to whether it is possible for human beings to be sincere or authentic, to themselves or anyone else, but more concerned with chronicling how we’ve asked the question, or if it’s even the right question.

Elements of Style

I admit I read this with an open, unabridged dictionary close to hand, so that I could look up words or concepts I didn’t understand, though compared to some of the other philosophers and explications of philosophy that I’ve been exposed to, Trilling’s prose is very clear and reader-friendly. I’ve also been exposed to more recent literary theory and theorists who came to precedence after the end of Trilling’s life, but Trilling’s treatment of such paragons as Hegel and Freud were easy to understand despite my lack of familiarity with the history of philosophy.

Sometimes the printed word is less satisfying than the spoken word because print cannot always communicate the tone of the speaker, the gestures, and other emotional elements. However, I occasionally sensed an ironic tenor in Trilling’s lectures which leads me to believe that he used irony much more often than I picked up on, especially when exposing the contradictions of certain paradigms.

Overall

While I don’t envision anyone rushing out to buy a book on philosophy on anyone’s recommendation, let alone mine, I must admit that this is one of the best and least boring treatment of theoretical concepts with which I’ve come into contact. I don’t normally read philosophy for pleasure, and, I admit, this book was an assigned text in a literary theory class. That notwithstanding, Trilling raises some philosophical questions in a very engaging manner without condescending to the reader or resorting to the “philosophy for dummies” genre. If you are the least bit interested in literary theory, or in the concept of authenticity, I highly recommend this book. In fact, I should mail my copy to Oprah….

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chanced upon this book while waiting for a friend. The title "Sincerity and Authenticity" captivated me because I've been thinking of these concepts with much frustration for quite some time. Authenticity has been placed on a pedestal as a virtue and yet whenever a coworker or fellow churchgoer asks us, "How are you?" we reply, "I'm all right, yourself?" without revealing what we really struggle with. Or we'll tell customers to "Have a great day!" when they've been rude and irritating to us. It's not that I believe authenticity shouldn't be a virtue, it's that we so clearly do not carry it out.

I had hoped this book would be a valuable resource in my questions of how authenticity has become so elevated in society. While Lionel Trilling is very astute in stating, “At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason," I found most of the book tedious. Trilling draws upon the disciplines of philosophy, literature and psychology in assessing the evolution of authenticity in society, relying heavily upon certain thinkers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud. He basically rehashes and summarizes what they have already said.

My chief frustration with literary scholars is that they will use literary examples to prove their points but often times the reader does not have as detailed a grasp of the narrative and characters to entirely understand (I had this same problem with C.S. Lewis' "The Four Loves"). Although Trilling provides a brief overview of the character he uses, it means little to a reader who has never read the novel he uses. This is not entirely Trilling's fault as he initially gave these as lectures to students of English who would have been far more familiar with the classic canon of English literature than I am (with the fragmentation of such a canon and the introduction of works from non-Western writers, I think efforts to make arguments from literature will become increasingly difficult as fewer people become aware of authors such as Henry James and Moliere).

There is meat to this book, but it will best be of use to someone with an extensive familiarity with the classics of European literature and intellectual theory. I don't think Trilling makes any particularly profound or original idea in his analysis of sincerity and authenticity - he writes too abstractly and lacks concreteness to his thought.

[Chauncey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive display of creativity and subtlety. This book traces the cultural-conceptual move from sincerity to authenticity (going from Shakespeare to Freud and Conrad by way of various others). While incredibly provocative, I consistently wondered what the appropriate criteria of evaluation are for works such as this, works which provide a genealogy of an idea, and which don't obviously aspire to common standards of historical correctness. Such Hegelian work about understanding "how we got where we are" I consistently find interesting and baffling.

[Håvard Bamle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review: 4/5
Trilling’s book circles the concepts through examples of their different but related meanings in history, philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis. Sincerity is explored initially, but most of the book is concerned with the search for the meaning of authenticity, in order to properly distinguish sincerity from this term. Although ‘sincerity’ is relatively well understood, Trilling highlights historical and cultural differences in what this concept entails. Trilling is not only interested in what the concepts mean in relation to human beings, but in particular what it means for a work of art|literature to be considered sincere or authentic.

The concept of authenticity is not clearly defined, except in negative terms of what it is not. An understanding of the term emerges gradually from the examination of several works of art, authors, philosophers, and others. The understanding that emerges is in line with existential philosophy, but not by privileging the existentialist definition above historically distinct understandings of the concept.

The basic understandings of each term established in chapter 1 are as follows:

Sincerity = Being true to one’s self to the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others.
Authenticity = Being true to one’s own self to the purpose of…. [one's own self?]

The book is lacking a concise definition of either term, and the concepts of truth and honesty move freely through the text, making it a bit obscure whether or to what degree “sincerity” or “authenticity” may be identified with these terms. I would have liked to see the two terms related more to each other, as they are mainly treated separately following the first chapter. The first chapter most directly addresses both concepts on a conceptual level, so if you’re only looking for a reference you really only need the first chapter. On the other hand, if that is all you are looking for, you would probably be better suited with more recent sources.


Summary:
Chp 1. “Sincerity: Its Origin and Rise”: Establishes a difference between Sincerity and authenticity. Suggests that what some call sincerity may better fit the term authenticity. Particular reference is made to Shakespeare (“To thine own self be true”, Polonius in Hamlet). A brief discussion of the word ‘role’ is also included in the presentation of sincerity, linking the crucial difference between the two terms to the use by authors of literary “personas”. A romantic definition of sincerity suggests that poetry where the author speaks in his own person is superior to poetry where the author speaks through a fictional persona. A historical account of difference between French and English understanding of sincerity follows in part 2.
Chp 2. “The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness”: Hegel
Chp 3. “The sentiment of Being and the Sentiment of Art”: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Jane Austen,
Chp 4. “The Heroic, the Beautiful, the Authentic”: Wordsworth, Flaubert, Sartre
Chp 5. “Society and Authenticity”: Joseph Conrad, Emerson, Oscar Wilde, Ruskin, Schiller
Chp 6. “The Authentic Unconscious” explores the concept of authenticity in particular relation to psychoanalysis of Freud.


Highlights:

[2] I propose the idea that at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity.
…
The word as we now use it refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.
…
[5-6] If sincerity is the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one’s own self, we can see that this state of personal existence is not to be attained without the most arduous effort. And yet at a certain point in history certain men and classes of men conceived that the making of this effort was of supreme importance in the moral life, and the value they attached to the enterprise of sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years.
[6] To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now at best a way of saying that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual admiration, it was at least conceived in innocence of heart.

[8] *Within the last two decades English and American poets have programmatically scuttled the sacred doctrine of the persona, the belief that the poet does not, must not, present himself to us and figure in our consciousness as a person, as a man speaking to men, but must have an exclusively aesthetic existence.
[8-9] The abandonment of this once crucial article of faith has been commemorated by Donald Davie in an interesting essay. As Mr. Davie puts it, A poem in which the “I” stands immediately and unequivocally for the author’ is at the present time held to be ‘essentially and necessarily superior to a poem in which the “I” stands not for the author but for a persona of the author’s. This striking reversal of doctrine Mr. Davie speaks of as a return to the romanticist valuation of sincerity; the title he gives to his essay is: ‘On Sincerity: From Wordsworth to Ginsberg.”
[9] I do not wish to cut the matter too fine – the word ‘sincerity’ will serve well enough for what Mr. Davie has in mind. Yet I think we will come closer to comprehending the development he describes if we use some other word to denote it. The unmediated exhibition of the self, presumably with the intention of being true to it, which Mr. Davie remarks as characteristic of many contemporary poets, is not with final appropriateness to be called an effort of sincerity because it does not involve the reason that Polonius gives for being true to one’s own self: that is if one is, one cannot then be false to any man. This purpose no longer has its old urgency.
Which is not to say that the moral temper of our time sets no store by the avoidance of falsehood to others, only that it does not figure as the defining purpose of being true to one’s own self. If sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not propose being true to one’s own self as an end but only as a means. If one is true to one’s own self for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all that this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follow upon the correct fulfilment of a public role.

[11] In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.

The word ‘authenticity’ comes readily to the tongue these days and in so many connections that it may very well resist such efforts of definition as I shall later make, but I think that for the present I can rely on suggesting a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life.

[19] Historians of European culture aare in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place…
[HB: he is talking about the creation of the “individual”.]


[99] … And through the nineteenth century art has one of its chief intentions to induce in the audience the sentiment of being, to recruit the primitive strength that a highly developed culture has diminished. To this end it proposes a variety of spiritual exercises, among which are suffering and despair and cosmic defiance; conscious sympathy with the being of others; comprehension of the process of society; social alienation. As the century advances the sentiment of being, of being strong, is increasingly subsumed under the conception of personal authenticity. The work of art is itself authentic by reason of its entire self-definition: it is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, [100] ignoble, or socially inacceptable subject-matters. Similarly the artist seeks his personal authenticity in his entire autonomousness – his goal is to be as self-defining as the art-object he creates. As for the audience, its expectation is that through its communication with the work of art, which may be resistant, unpleasant, even hostile, it acquires the authenticity of which the object itself is the model and the artist the personal example. When, in Sartre’s La Neusée, the protagonist Roquetin, at the end of his diary of queasy despair, permits himself to entertain a single hope, it is that he may write a story which will be ‘beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence’. The authentic work of art instructs us in our inauthenticity and adjures us to overcome it.

[102] Hell is other people…[is not a quote endorsed in the play… it really means] Myself am Hell. … It isn’t, then, hardnes of heart that makes Mme Sarraute speak of Emma Bovary with harsh contempt; it is fear, the terror, as Sartre defines it in an essay on Mme Sarraute, of the Hell of dehumanization that inauthenticity is.

[119] ‘Man is least himself’, Wilde said, ‘when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’

[121] Wilde’s aphorism, ‘The truth of metaphysics are the truths of masks’, can be taken to mean that it is. Not the philosophical treatise but the work of art which provides the model of the process by which we gain knowledge of existence – it is the work of art which best exemplifies the detachment achieved through irony.
Schiller has in mind a similar advantage for the heuristic enterprise when he says in the Aesthetic Letters that one of the beneficences of art is that it overcomes ‘the earnestness of duty and destiny’. Schiller presents the ‘mere play’ of the aesthetic experience as the activity of man’s true being. ‘Man only plays’, he says, when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’, and presumably the fullness of humanity includes the knowledge of existence.

[144-145] The dualism to which Sartre refers is that of the unconscious id, which is wholly comprised of the instinctual drives, and the coscious ego. ‘By the distinction between the “id” and the “ego”,’ Sartre says, ‘Freud has cut the psychic whole into two.’ The bad faith of psychoanalysis follows from this dichotomy. It consists of one part of the psychic whole regarding the other part as an object and thereby disclaiming responsibility for it.

[Serge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfect antidote to Antisocial. I appreciated Trilling’s thoughts on the hypocrite-villain, the conscious dissembler, whom he considered marginal but we know better... such a character flourishes online. The application of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian principles to modern literature brings into focus the revelatory character of tragedy and the opinion-forming power of art. Our moral story is to be found in the ebb and flow of the heroic and the anti-heroic.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is a fascinating read about the changing notions around "sincerity" over time and the evolution of the idea within a cultural context. I especially appreciated the passages dealing with the emergence of the "individual" - since our own current, tailored-to-every-man culture seems to be the far and inevitable peak of placing emphasis on such "individual" concerns.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I'm thinking about something, I always ask myself, "What would Lionel Trilling think?" This is the book I most wish I had written.

[Dan Pecchenino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this amazing book.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best book I know on the subject. Sincerely. Perhaps not altogether authentically. When your authentic self is an ironist, the two are difficult to distinguish.

[Aneece · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would that I could think as clearly as Lionel Trilling wrote.

[Miles Trujillo]

I find rating books very difficult. I liked this one, but I think I'm prone to like any good faith investigation into topics I find interesting. I'm gonna just quote that last paragraph or so, because I think it does a great job of encapsulating the text's themes in a digestible manner.

"Yet, the doctrine that madness is health, that madness is liberation and authenticity, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don't have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane--it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence--we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstance that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring. The falsities of an alienated social reality are rejected in favour of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ-- but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished."

This final paragraph shows that Trilling responds to the current mores of society from a perspective of criticism. That's a pretty obvious statement, but I point it out because I don't know what more to do with it. I think he does a good job of laying out the idealizations of sincerity and authenticity in western society, especially as they are lauded in art and theory. Nonetheless, I need to sit with it. The idea that authenticity brings with it a cheapened view of divinity, while also giving an, albeit reluctant, paean to alienation, is something I haven't considered. It brings to mind the possible values that alienation might bring to society.

It would be easy to say that this defense of alienation by figures such as Sartre, Freud, Marcuse, and Nietzsche are bourgeoise defenses for a status quo which benefits them. There is likely much truth in that claim. Nonetheless, the theory and cosmology which they accurately distill has truth insofar as it genuinely comes from the material conditions of a thoroughly capitalist society. And the cosmology of capitalist society should never be rejected wholesale if it is to be overthrown; it must be moved through and superseded.

Trilling avoids prescribing a path forward, so I'm gonna just let it sit for a bit in the back of my noggin.

[Common Sense · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lionel Trilling's *Sincerity and Authenticity* is an exploration of two moral concepts in Western thought from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Through a series of essays, Trilling examines the evolution of sincerity and authenticity, analyzing how these ideals have influenced literature, philosophy, and the individual's relationship with society. He delves into the works of key figures like Shakespeare, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Freud to illustrate the interplay between the self and societal expectations.

His insights into how sincerity evolved from a social virtue to a personal moral imperative, and how authenticity emerged as a deeper, more individualistic pursuit of self-realization, are both interesting. The discussion on modern literature's shift away from traditional narratives towards fragmented, subjective experiences adds some depth to his exposition.

However, despite these positive traits, *Sincerity and Authenticity* suffers from significant organizational issues that hinder its overall impact. The book lacks a clear, systematic structure, making it challenging to follow Trilling's overarching argument. Chapters often feel disjointed, with abrupt transitions between topics and analyses that, while individually insightful, do not coalesce into a cohesive whole. This fragmentation can leave readers struggling to discern the central thesis and the progression of ideas throughout the work.

Trilling's tendency to delve superficially into specific authors or philosophical movements without adequately connecting them back to his main argument contributes to the sense of disorganization. The abundance of references and dense prose may overwhelm readers looking for clear statements and clear arguments. The lack of clear summaries or conclusions at the end of chapters further exacerbates the difficulty in synthesizing the material presented.

In conclusion, this is a work of considerable depth that offers some valuable insights into the development of key moral ideals. However, the book's unsystematic organization and lack of coherence detract significantly from its effectiveness. Readers interested in the subject may find themselves simultaneously enlightened by Trilling's analyses and frustrated by the challenging navigation required to piece together his important ideas.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book because it was referenced in a more recent work on religion and power, and what little was quoted in that book made this one seem worth exploring. Well, it was, but not for any of the reasons I thought it would be. Mainly, the reference that appeared in the other book made it seem that this would be worthwhile to read for its emphasis on contemporary (well, contemporary-ish) notions of authenticity; but what I actually found most useful were the long historical digressions in these lectures, which I think gave context that was more useful than its relatively superficial diagnosis of its own historical era. For my purposes, anyways, it was more enlightening to gain understanding of Rousseau’s perspectives on sincerity and authenticity, for instance, than it was to understand Trilling’s ideas. I even enjoyed a lot of the literary exegesis in this book, even if some went way over my head and even though the final exploration of Freud read as curiously dated given its closer proximity to Freud’s actual writing/thinking. This isn’t necessarily a work I’ll engage with in too much depth or return to time and time again, but it provided some food for thought and some useful reference points, and at the end of the day what more could I really ask for?

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was torn between three and four stars - 3.5 would have been just right - but thinking about the book some more (and skimming a few reviews here, frankly) swayed my mind. I felt the lectures tapering off in the second half, as I started pausing over Trilling's readings and questioning the occasional point, less often lapping up his insights. I couldn't be bothered with the psychoanalysis in the last part - that's just me - but even earlier I developed reservations about Trilling's choice of material, which I incline to think was rather arbitrarily, or at least subjectively, determined. I mean that he made a number of decisions relative to featured texts and thinkers that would have gone quite differently with other lecturers on sincerity and authenticity - which sounds obvious, but goes to say that Trilling's treatment felt interpretive to me. That isn't an impression I usually embrace. His discussion meandered widely too, but there the depth of his reading, cogency of his conceptual vision, eloquence of his delivery, and magnitude of his understanding told in his favor. Were one only capable of writing a book like this...

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just some notes rather than a real review. Secular, western, survey, academic book on a topic that could easily be taken in other directions, a topic I've thought a lot about but probably didn't need to read a book like this on, but I'm glad the concept has been covered by, for lack of a better term, smart writers. I once asked a friend if the topic had been covered like this. He didn't mention this book but he did tell me about the topic being covered by Sartre, who was covered by Trilling in this book. It's funny that it took me ten years to stumble of the book that would have answered the question. It's a hard task to both wrangle and then compare all of these authors but Trilling manages to do it pretty well. It made me want to read more Hegel. I find it hilarious that Ginsberg is mentioned only because Ginsberg's name is in the title of an essay Trilling wants to reference.

[Harrison Glaze · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may have been in part the source for Tom’s infamous opinion on Mansfield Park in Metropolitan, but let’s not hold that against Trilling (whose argument Tom rather mangles in the movie anyway). A great critic at the top of his form.

[Yan · Rating 5 out of 5]

日读一书，想给十颗星。生词有点多，但依然让人停不下来。只可惜我读的书太少了，不然应该理解会更深刻。不过这样也好，可以把它当作阅读指南。感觉整理会比阅读还要耗时间，一定要好好整理。最后一章生生被上了一节心理课，完全颠覆我对“超我”的理解。找不到中文版，希望有机会可以对照一下中间实在不懂的地方...

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The earlier title of this book was called Philosophy for Dummies

---

Perhaps you'll believe me
Perhaps not

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a class of its own.

[Jezz Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

i might have enjoyed this more had I have properly read it. instead i read it half asleep trying to pull random bits of actual use for my diss

[Mitchel Granados · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los mejores libros que he leído, en tema personal, interpersonal, económico-social y arte. Narra cronológicamente obras de autores desde Rousseau hasta Foucault en los que se analiza la situación económica y social de cada época con respecto a cómo conocernos a nosotros mismos y convivir en sociedad.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pretty good history of what some people (writerly, alienated types) thought of some key terms between 1600 and 1970 in an imaginary land called Western Europe.

Are you being true to yourself? How would you know? What would that mean?

If false, is it society's fault and in what way?

According to Trilling, sincerity happened when the English got out of the villages and into the city and had to face other people in the light of the day and didn't have the church to tell them what to do anymore. Middle sixteenth century. And something similar happened in France, Switzerland, and Germany.

Authenticity happened in late nineteenth century when W. Europeans looked at themselves and said, "is this all there is?" They got really angry and demanded to be reconciled with the authentic.

[Rob Short · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the time it took to read. Makes a convincing case that the rise of "sincerity" is concomitant with the rise of democratic society in Europe. Presents Trilling's case (with plenty of Literary examples) in a mainly chronological order. Had I been his editor, I think I'd have lopped off the last chapter, where Trilling descends into a weird and nearly-totally-unrelated argument about madness and sincerity.