Lionel Trilling, ‘Sincerity and Authenticity’ (1972)

I had dipped into Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) before, but in a desultory and superficial manner. Recently I sat down and actually read the whole thing. It’s a very remarkable book, I think. Indeed: I’m a little surprised it’s not better known, although I daresay part of the positivity of my reaction has to do with the happenstance that I read it whilst in the middle of a longer-term, (intermittent, but still ongoing) read of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. This latter is taking a while, because Taylor’s book is … well: enormous, and complex (I’m halfway through it at the moment, and though I will finish it, that’ll take a while). Taylor’s core argument is that ‘we’, as human beings, have changed; that we no longer live in an ‘enchanted’ world but a secular one, that meaning and value are no longer predicated upon something exterior to reality (as in a divine cosmos) but interior to it — in us, our societies, our selves, our secular ‘modern moral order’; and that this is the case whether or not we are, personally, religious or not, with various consequences, bad or better.

Trilling argues something similar, but in 170 pages instead of 8000, or whatever the count is for Taylor’s book. Similar but not the same, a more tightly focused gloss upon the idea — which of course predates both Taylor and Trilling — that from the later Renaissance or thereabout we move into ‘modernity’, and things change quite radically: we become, as Weber say, disenchanted , we shift from shame cultures to guilt cultures (as Nietzsche argues), we replace porous sensibilities with buffered ones (in Taylor’s parlance). In short we come to enjoy the benefits but also the disadvantages of being modern, Freud’s civilisation and its discontents.

I don’t propose to go into Taylor in this particular notebook entry. Instead I’m notating, so as to get clearer in my own head, what Trilling argues in this book, and adding some thoughts thereupon.

Sincerity and Authenticity originated in a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1970. In book form it comprises six, elegantly discursive chapters that work neatly together to develop a persuasive and illuminating thesis: ‘Sincerity: its Origin and Rise’, which makes a series of ur-Taylorian points about a large and significant shift in human sensibility, broadly conceived — broadly that ‘sincerity’ and its related though not identical category ‘authenticity’, were invented roughly 400 years ago and that the two concepts have developed since then in a complicated mutuality. There’s a chapter on ‘The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness’ — a reading of Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau and Hegel’s use of the same in the Phenomenology which absolutely blew my mind — then a chapter on the rise of ‘sentimentality’ through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, another on ‘The Heroic, the Beautiful, the Authentic’, one on ‘Society and Authenticity’ and a final chapter on ‘The Authentic Unconscious’, in which Trilling wrastles with Freud and Marcuse.

So: what is ‘sincerity’? Trilling calls it a state of ‘congruence between avowal and actual feeling’ [p2]; ‘the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretence’ [p13]. According to Trilling, a focus on sincerity as constitutive of proper subjectivity came to characterize Western society and culture at the beginning of the modern epoch, four centuries ago or so, in part as a reaction against older, traditional modes of communal organization. He thinks this new valorisation of ‘sincerity’ was central in creating that ‘entity that now figures in men’s minds under the name of society’ [p26]. Were we not ‘sincere’ before? Or more precisely, was sincerity not valued, praised, held up as normative before? Trilling thinks not:

The sincerity of Achilles or Beowulf cannot be discussed: they neither have nor lack sincerity. But if we are to ask whether Young Werther is really as sincere as he intends to be, or which of the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor or Marianne, is thought by Jane Austen to be the more truly sincere, we can confidently expect a serious response in the form of opinions on both sides of the question. [pp2–3]

We might want to quibble with this — either on the grounds of the counter-examples he ignores (what about Chaucer’s Pardoner, for instance?) or else with reference to Trilling’s own examples. We could argue, for instance, that for Beowulf sincerity is one of the keys to his character — that is to say, it’s crucial to the way Beowulf is presented whether he is in Denmark merely to help the Danes, out of the sincere goodness of his heart, or whether his coming is (for instance) a bid for power. His ‘sincerity’ is proved, over the course of the poem, I think, although it’s not something we can be sure of at the beginning (or perhaps we can). As for Achilles: well, this seems to me a profound and important question. I’d put it like this: what’s more sincere than anger? I’m not sure I can think of anything.

But I fear I’m missing Trilling’s point, which has to do less with individuals and more with the social and cultural contexts. There have, he concedes, always been villains, dissemblers, bad-guys — Sinon fooling the Trojans, Medea fooling her husband — but they’re not his focus. Trilling puts considerable emphasis on this moment in Polonius’s speech to Laertes when (he suggests) a string of platitudes suddenly rises to the level of piercing profundity:

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.

At this moment (Trilling suggests) Polonius ‘has a moment of self-transcendence.’ If we were to try to read these words as merely platitudinous, Trilling says, we would fail, ‘defeated by the way the lines sound, by their lucid moral lyricism’ [p.3]. Indeed, Trilling things they mark a profound sea-change in human self-consciousness. It is, he argues, not surprising that Shakespeare — a player as well as a writer, a man whose stock-in-trade depended upon him and his company pretending to be who they weren’t — is so deeply fascinated by questions of sincerity, of appearance versus reality: both the obvious potential for Iago-like hypocritical wickedness (‘there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ as Duncan ruefully notes) but, more interestingly, also the potential for something more obliquely redemptive. Trilling doesn’t discuss it, but I was very much put in mind of Prince Hal’s speech in 1 Henry IV:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

Hal’s ‘return’ to sincerity, as king, is a curiously double-edged moment, isn’t it? Henry’s rejection of Falstaff is a necessary gesture, signifying that he is stepping-up quite properly to his role as King; and yet it is painful and even tragic as well. Falstaff, we might say, is both sincere — in his gluttony and self-indulgence and his cowardice, all of which he owns magnificently — and complexly insincere, a player and fabulist to his well-upholstered bones, as when he ‘plays’ the king with a cushion on his head instead of a crown.

Back to Trilling though. Our social world, he says, no longer partakes of divine hierarchy; it is instead a merely human elaboration of individual energies and desires. In such a condition, the concept of sincerity is ultimately a ‘public’ or ‘social’ one, since sincerity is demanded less for the sake of the self than for others — hence his exclusion of figures like Achilles from the category, I suppose. He makes, via a caricature of national values (but you see the point he’s gesturing towards) the distinction between ‘English’ and ‘French’ versions of 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’. [p58]

These two models, one outward-looking (‘duty’, ‘manners’) and one inward-looking, construe different valences of sincerity. This, though, is only a way-station on Trilling’s larger argument. More importantly he thinks that Jean-Jacques Rousseau combined the two in a new, hugely influential model: ‘on his pre-eminence in sincerity Rousseau is uncompromising’ [p.58]. If that looks contradictory, well it should: the two versions can’t be neatly combined. Quite the reverse, they set-up a tension in the individual that cannot be resolved and that reduces him/her, caught on the horns of contradictory impulses, to be true to him/herself and also to be true to society, to the state of une âme déchirée — a torn-up soul (here’s my obligatory Elvis Costello reference here: ‘in the tiny torn-up pieces of his mind/He’s irresistible too’). Trilling prefers the Hegelian phrase ‘disintegrated consciousness’.

I have to say, I found Trilling’s discussion of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau — which, to my shame, I’d not read before — and of the use Hegel makes of it in the Phenomenology of Spirit (as the antithesis of the older unified ‘heroic’ soul, by way of dialectically producing a new Geist-becoming-aware type of subjectivity) absolutely gobsmacking. The reason it smacked my gob, at least in part, is that it spoke to me in a penetratingly personal sense, though I don’t want to get into all the messy specifics of that right now. The larger argument is the way living both these sincerities at once leads to a radical kind of insincerity. As Rousseau puts it, with modern society ‘it now became in the interest of men to appear what they really were not.’

And, as Trilling points out, sincerity itself, when practised as a social virtue, recommended to us by the Poloniuses of the world, leads inevitably to insincerity: ‘we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic’ [p.11]. So we arrive at ‘authenticity’, which has to do with our true self, our individual existence, not as we might present it to others, but as it ‘really is’, apart from any roles we play. … To describe authenticity, Trilling borrows a phrase from Rousseau, ‘the sentiment of being’. We moderns are characteristically anxious about being, about ‘reality’, or, more particularly, about our lack of reality, about our lives which seem to us, as the popular term has it, ‘unreal’. To quote a different critic: ‘that the word [authenticity] has become part of the moral slang of our day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences’ [p93]. [Richard Handler, ‘Authenticity’, Anthropology Today, 2:1 (Feb, 1986), 4]

Trilling riffs interestingly on the Wordsworthian valorisation of being: ‘the intense meaning Wordsworth gave the to the word “be” became its common meaning in moral discourse: being is the gratifying experience of the self as an entity.’ [p122]. This, Trilling suggests, brought the concept into inevitable conflict with the developments of Capitalist society through the 19th and 20th-centuries; and he quotes Marx to the effect that ‘the great enemy of being was having.’ ‘The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor dust will corrupt — your capital. The less you are, the more you have.’ [Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts].

From here Trilling moves into his final chapter, in which Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation are read as, in essence, elaborations on the sincerity/authenticity problematic (not Trilling’s word, but still). My sense is that the book goes awry here; Trilling’s argument gets a little hijacked by R D Laing-style polemicising that posits mental illness as actually just mental wellness under a different, unrecognised-by-the-squares aegis: ‘there’s no such thing as schizophrenia’ etc (‘so far from being an illness, a deprivation of any kind, madness is health fully realised at last’ [p170]). It’s not that I disagree with this — although as it happens, I do — but rather that it sells short the immense potential of the ideas Trilling develops across the majority of his book.

Graham Hough sees Sincerity and Authenticity as Trilling’s ‘last and finest book’:

This has the advantage of being composed as a whole — the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard — instead of being made up of separate essays. But it is clearly a development of the train of thought started in Beyond Culture. It uses the same landmarks, Le Neveu de Rameau, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy, and, standing over against these, the English novelists of the 19th century. The densest part of the discussion centres on Le Neveu de Rameau, or rather on the interpretation of it offered by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Diderot’s dialogue is between himself, Diderot-Moi, a rational social being, accepting and accepted, and Rameau’s nephew, blighted by being only the nephew of the great musician, disappointed, embittered, a sycophant, a hypocrite and a mountebank. In Hegel’s analysis Diderot-Moi appears as ‘the honest soul’ and the nephew as ‘the disintegrated consciousness’. On the face of it, all that is worthy of respect appears to belong to the first, all the baseness to the second. And Hegel comes down decisively on the other side, in favour of the base, the disintegrated consciousness. Simply (no, not simply, for nothing in Hegel is simple, but mainly) because it does not accept, does not submit, rejects the social order — and so represents the effort of Spirit to resist the constraints imposed upon it from outside. While the honest soul is arrested in a static harmony, the disintegrated soul is the next necessary phase in the evolution towards the freedom of the Absolute. This comfortless antithesis, with its reversal of the expected values, had evidently haunted Trilling’s imagination for some time.

I agree that the Diderot-Hegel section is the best of the lot. Which explains, I suppose, why I found reading Trilling’s short book in the middle of my read of Charles Taylor’s enormous one so useful for my comprehension of the latter — Taylor, of course, began his career as a Hegel scholar [*sings* “Hegel — Hey boy — Secular DJ — HERE WE GO!”].

I wonder, though, why this book has become eclipsed (assuming it has; perhaps I’m simply unaware of its currency) especially when considering how famous Tayor’s 2007 volume has proved? I did wonder if the rise of what we might, broad-brush if distortingly, call ‘postmodernism’ through the 80s and 90s made a book called Sincerity and Authenticity seem like it had simply missed the target. After all, didn’t Pomo valorise the ironic and challenge all that fell under the ‘jargon of authenticity’? In fact, Trilling’s dialectical account of the ‘base’-sincerity antithesis to the older ‘noble’-sincerity has a lot of value in assessing a good deal of pomo art. But we are where we are.

I suppose I wonder about this because, at first blush, it sometimes looks like aspects of Trilling’s book are simply backing simply the wrong horse. Here, for instance, is one of his 1970 hostages to fortune:

The hypocrite-villain, the conscious dissembler, has become marginal, even alien, to the modern imagination, of the moral life. The situation in which a person systematically misrepresents himself in order to practice upon the food faith of another does not readily command out interest, scarcely our credence. [p.16]

Uh, excuse me? The Great Gatsby? Humbert Humbert? Severus Snape? Don Draper? Walter White — or Saul Goodman? The more I thought about it, the harder I found identifying examples of sincere characters that have really hit home. But perhaps this too is me missing Trilling’s point.

Let’s step outside literature, and ask ourselves: Trump. Is he sincere? Of course not, only a fool would suggest as much. Ah, but is he authentic? Authentically a clown, a blowhard, a tribalist, a narcissistic, a grotesque old granddad spending Thanksgiving bloviating about blacks and muslims and women? Of course he is that. It misuses the word to call Homer Simpson either ‘sincere’ or ‘insincere’, but he is authentically what he is. Trilling’s final example of the authentic character (in his fifth chapter, ‘Society and Authenticity’) is Conrad’s Kurtz: hardly the sort of individual one might rationally choose to be President of the United States. And yet this hybrid Kurtz/Homer Simpson, having made himself into a ‘character’ on reality TV, persuaded tens of millions of Americans to vote for him. Ubu (t)Roi-mp. Maybe Trilling was on to something after all.

…….

[Postscript] Thinking about this a little more … I wonder if what I’m taking as a new spin on all this, viz. the Trumpian ‘sure I’m insincere, but at least I’m authentically insincere. I am what I am, and it’s out there for everyone to see’ — is actually an old spin on all this. Isn’t that precisely Chaucer’s Pardoner, after all? What’s so fascinating about him is the way he spends his prologue bragging about how he rips everyone off with his fake relics and wares, and then tries to sell exactly those relics and wares to the selfsame pilgrims he’s been boasting to. It’s a study less in hypocrisy than in a particular kind of shamelessness … shamelessness triumphant. Very Trumpian, really. I also found much to like in this older Fredrik deBoer post on the contemporary and widespread (and lucrative) culture of self-care illustrative of a certain, rather toxic orientation between sincerity and authenticity, and also this more recent one about ‘Kayfabe’ as (this isn’t how deBoer frames it, though he could have done) a Trillingian sincerity-insincerity individual-in-society unity.