Lionel Trilling on Sincerity (Part One)

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We've got a new reading in front of us. It is Lionel Trilling's 1972 book, Sincerity and Authenticity. So he's a literary critic. We're reading the chapter in it called The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness. I know just from looking at some things online about this book, Sincerity is about being true to your social

0:34role, right? Don't get above your raisin. Don't get beyond your station. Authenticity is the more modern notion of being true to your inner self. So this book is tracing the history through a number of philosophers and things like that. Wes, you had suggested this. Why Trilling? Well, while we were reading Rameau's nephew for The Partially Examined Life, I was looking for commentary on Rameau's nephew. And I noticed that Trilling in this book on the sincerity and authenticity,

1:06he devoted a chapter, the second chapter that we're going to look at here today, on Rameau's nephew in the context of a larger, I think he's commenting on a few different works and the whole theme, of course, is its sincerity and authenticity and the difference between them as he uses them. I think Rameau's nephew is kind of a central theme throughout the whole book, but the second chapter here is where he concentrates on it. And yeah, I found it helpful what I, the excerpts that I had looked at

1:42in preparation for that episode. I think he's a great writer. I've always loved him. He's not a philosopher technically. He's a literary critic and part of the New York intellectuals, but a very astute thinker. All right. And if folks want to suggest things to us, you should email us. You should just do that through the contact form at partiallyexaminedlife.com. It's the easiest way to do that. And we'd love if you leave a nice rating and review for Close

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2:45Start us off, Wes. Our investigation of sincerity has no sooner begun than it has led to public and even to political considerations. This, if it is surprising at all, cannot be more than momentarily so. Doubtless, when we think about sincerity, we first conceive of it as a quality of the personal and private life, as bearing upon the individual's relation to himself and to others as individuals. Yet the intense concern with sincerity, which came to characterize certain European national cultures at the beginning of the modern

3:19epoch, would seem to have developed in connection with a greater public event, the extreme revision of traditional modes of communal organization, which gave rise to the entity that now figures in men's minds under the name of society. The salient trait of society, as I have suggested, and what differentiates it from the realm or the kingdom and even the commonwealth, is that it is available to critical examination by individual persons, especially by those who make it

3:50their business to scrutinize the polity, the class of men we now call intellectuals. The purpose of their examination is not understanding alone, but understanding as it may lead to action. The idea of society includes the assumption that a given society can be changed if the judgment passed upon it is adverse. In the framing of such judgments, the ideal of sincerity is of substantial importance. It is adduced as a criterion in three considerations. One, of the sincerity of the person making the judgment.

4:23This must be beyond question and fully manifest. Of the two, of the degree of correspondence between the principles avowed by a society and its actual conduct. Three, of the extent to which a society fosters or corrupts the sincerity of its citizens. All right, so this kind of reminds me a little bit of where we were leaving off with our discussion of Habermas on The Partially Examined Life because we were discussing Habermas's criticism that in a way

4:54Hegel with his absolute seems to foreclose on the possibility of actual criticism, right, of everyday society. The sort of thing that the cultural critic might be engaged in. He performs his criticism and brings it to an end at this very high abstract level, but how do we deal with actual social conditions? How does the philosopher intellectual actually use critique to bring about change? So it's going to be a couple of weeks before that Habermas episode comes out, but that's okay because it's

5:31about Hegel and where Hegel was going, the things that we have released on The Partially Examined Life feed. This opening statement seems quite different than the summary that Google had gave me of what this was about, right? That sincerity was keeping to your social role. So that sounds like it is something within the innocent, unreflective society. And here he's saying that the whole concept of society is, as it was in Hegel, after the fall from

6:05a mere, what is the ancient polis, the more idealized state in which customs are never questioned because people's thinking- Ethical substance. The ethical substance there. One, we say the ethical substance, something like that, you know, whereas, you know, you'd think just the ordinary use of the term, societies have been around, maybe say the tribe or something like that, right? In the tribe is the ethical substance, that we are, people are one with the ethical substance.

6:39But here he's saying the emergence of society is no longer just keeping to your assigned role in the ethical substance. Although I assume there's still division of labor in things, right? The ethical substance, the ancient Greek polis still had slaves and citizens and men and women in different roles. Like, so there was nothing about, it wasn't that kind of unity. So it seems like this is a different stage. I think the way Habermas characterizes this, right?

7:14The civil society, he associates with the realm in which people come together, almost like social contract theory, but come together in a state of interdependence to work on their needs. So it's pretty much an economic sphere as opposed to the state. And the question is, to what extent does the state incorporate civil society? Habermas seems to think that for Hegel, right? The state kind of takes over their sort of authoritarian implications.

7:46So society in ethical substance, according to Habermas's reading of Hegel, it's not yet emerged, right? The two are still lumped together. And what we call society is just an extension of the family and the economics of the family. So there's already less distinction between state and something like civil society when we're in ethical substance. So it's not something that is as critiquable, right? You know, as you were pointing out, if we're in ethical substance, we simply take these norms for granted.

8:23They almost seem like they're natural. They're no different than natural phenomena who could possibly question them, right? It hasn't even occurred to us to question them. With the emergence of society, comes the possibility of this type of critique, I think, that Trilling is talking about. And, right, it's a critique. I think sincerity is possible with an ethical substance, right? Because it's just, we're not pretending, we're not feigning something to another.

8:55But authenticity actually implies that we could oppose society and say, no, my personal code or whatever, or my true inner self or some criterion that comes from me as an individual tells me that there's something wrong with society. And then I, of course, become an intellectual and write books and tell people what's wrong with society and what's wrong with certain expressions of culture, right, as an art critic. Anyway, let's, do you want to say something about that?

9:28I just want to look at the three, the three things he puts at the end here, but go ahead. Sure. It makes a lot of sense that, that breakdown, but that's not the breakdown that he's giving here. He's saying sincerity only becomes an issue when you have intellectuals who are making judgments. I mean, I don't know about only, but at least sincerity comes to the fore here when you have, so I like the idea that, yes, you have to have alienation for society to be available for critique.

10:05Not that it is normal for everybody to critique the society or anything like that. In fact, most people will not. They are still operating, especially if you say society is characterized by an economic as opposed to political. It's certainly not the norm for people to criticize economic society. In fact, they take economic society as if it were given by nature. We just have to have jobs. You were born the son of a tailor, and so you will be a

10:38tailor, you know, early capitalism. And your last name is Taylor. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, yeah, let's go on to these three criteria. Well, let me just, okay, so I got this wrong about sincerity. It's only arising within the context of society. Is that what he's saying? He doesn't say only, but. Okay. He's not talking about authenticity yet, for sure. Okay. So the three consider the criterion of sincerity. Among intellectuals. Yeah. Critics. As opposed to, just to look forward, the nephew, Ramo's nephew, who is a critic of society, he's

11:16a commentator on society, but is not sincere in any way. And that's sort of what Hegel is pointing at based on his observation of, his reading of Ramo's nephew, is that you become, what, a dandy? Is that one of the. It's one of the things. Yes. Diderot himself, or the persona that he's playing, is the representative of sincerity, right? Sure. The philosopher. Yep. Ramo is pointing to the kind of universal hypocrisy of things.

11:47It's too cynical to be sincere. Yep. Because of number three here, the society corrupts the sincerity of its citizens by its very incentive structure. So there's the sincerity of the person making the judgment. That must be beyond question. I don't really fully understand that. There's the degree of correspondence between, right? So in other words, hypocrisy, right? How hypocritical is society, right? The degree of correspondence between principles avowed and actual conduct. And one might say in society, like Nietzsche, right? Society is necessarily hypocritical.

12:23Untruth is a condition of life. We naturally pay tribute to values we don't fully act on. And someone like Ramo despairs of that fact, but someone might counter, that's just life. You know, we can't give up our hypocrisy. We can't give up avowing these things because then we're just completely base. The last of these considerations is the subject of a work which must always have a special place in the development of the ideal of sincerity. Diderot's great dialogue with the scapegrace nephew of the composer Ramo.

12:58The date of the composition of Les Nouveaux de Ramo is uncertain. It was written sometime between 1761 and 1774 and for reasons of discretion was not published in the author's lifetime. Included among the books and manuscripts which were purchased from Diderot by his son, by his patron Catherine the Great, it was clandestinely copied, smuggled out of Russia and brought to Germany in 1803. Its subsequent career is legendary and sums up the intellectual life of Europe for a century. Schiller, when it was shown to him, recognized its genius with rapture and rushed the manuscript to Goethe upon whom

13:35it burst, as he said, like a bombshell. Such indeed was Goethe's enthusiasm for the literature, for the dialogue that he had once engaged and translated. In order to annotate the text, he undertook a headlong reading of the French literature of the 18th century, as a result of which he recanted the famous adverse judgment he had made upon the French mind in his student days at Strasbourg. Goethe's translation, whose progress was Schiller's chief concern in the last month of his life, last months of his life, was published in 1805.

14:09This was the version read by Hegel, who cited the dialogue in Phenomenology of Spirit, enshrining it as a work of exceptional significance, the paradigm of the modern cultural and spiritual situation. Part of Hegel's comment, which I shall presently touch on, is quoted by Karl Marx in a letter to Engels in 1869, in which he says that, having just discovered that he owned two copies of Rameau's nephew, he's sending one to his friend in Manchester for the fresh pleasure this unique masterpiece will give him.

14:42Freud read the dialogue with an admiration which was doubtless the more intense because its best-remembered passage, which he quoted on three occasions, formulates his Oedipal theory in unabashed simplicity. If our little savage, that is to say any boy, were left to himself and to his native blindness, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passions. He would strangle his father and sleep with his mother. All right, so this is all just review of things that we have said at the beginning of the Rameau's

15:15nephew, but said in a much more dynamic way than we did, so that's fine. Very eloquent. Okay. It is scarcely possible to describe the protagonist of the dialogue in a way that will be both summary and accurate. The significance of his character lies, of course, exactly in its contradictions. Because the younger Rameau breaks the taboos of respectable reticence and, at least on the occasion of the conversation with Diderot in the Café de la Régence, discloses all of his desires, we are tempted to think that he is

15:48meant to represent the Freudian id, that he is a creature of drives, lustful, greedy, wholly obedient, as Freud says the id is, to the inexorable pleasure principle. And this way of thinking about the nephew seems the more permissible because of the virtuousness which marks his interlocutor. The Diderot of the dialogue is the avowed defender of rational morality. But in point of fact, Rameau's behavior is not id-directed. It is almost wholly under the control of his ego. His ruling concern is with self-preservation, which, Freud tells us, is the ego's chief task.

16:23Out of this concern, he is preoccupied, we might say, obsessed with society and with the desire for place and power in society. Above everything else, he longs for artistic success. In part, he wants this for disinterested reasons, in part for the adulation and affluence it will bring. He is tortured by envy of his famous uncle and bitter at having to live in his shadow. He still does, poor man. The Penguin translation of Rameau's nephew displays on his cover a reproduction of Louis Carragi's,

16:57Louis Carragi, uh, Caramontel's portrait of the great Rameau. All right, so that's a footnote. I guess the footnotes are being put in line here. Is that what's going on? I guess, yeah. Yeah, that's what it looks like. So we have these bracketed things which are footnotes. Okay. His own talents are by no means negligible. His taste in music is exigent and censorious. His command of the musical repertory is prodigious and by extravagant effort he has, as he puts it, subdued his

17:33fingers to do his will on the keyboard and strings. But despite his native abilities and the cruel self-discipline to which he has subjected himself, he must endure the peculiar bitterness of modern man, the knowledge that he is not a genius. Yep, that's pretty, that's pretty rough realization. And although he is committed to the purposes of the ego, which his superior intelligence might well allow him to achieve, he hardly manages to maintain himself.

18:05Reduced to a bare subsistence as a parasite at the tables of the rich, he already directs all his ingenuity towards perfecting the devices of systematic flattery. Yet he cannot succeed even in his, in this miserable mode of life. his thwarted passion for what society has to offer goes along with a scornful nihilism which overwhelms every prudential consideration. He is the victim of an irresistible impulse to offend those with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself.

18:39And stronger than his desire for respect is his appetite for demonstrative self-abasement. His ego, betraying its proper function, turns on itself, and finds expression in a compulsive buffoonery at once inviting shame and achieving shamelessness in a fashion that Dostoevsky was to make familiar. The fellow, Diderot says, is a compound of elevation and objectness, of good sense and lunacy. He has no greater opposite than himself. I guess I don't, yeah, have significant disagreements with that characterization.

19:12What do you think? Well, it's interesting, yeah, this question of whether Remo is pragmatic or whether he is simply a libertine, right, a representative of the id or just someone who's being very pragmatic in a cynical way, a representative of the ego or whether in some sense he's a representative of the superego because he wants, he does want, actually want fame and status. he just despairs of getting it right.

19:43So he's, in a way, he's down on himself and we see the contradiction. I think we brought this up in the episode on Remo's nephew. We see the contradiction between him being such a amazing flatterer of people and it's kind of parallel to his ability for music, the idea is that those two things are related but also that he is the court jester and he's going to work on attacking people's narcissism and self-importance to the point where it can get him in

20:20trouble. In any case, it's impractical because he's a pauper. None of this ends up being practical. Right. I don't think this was our analysis of the guy's behavior right? The victim of an irresistible impulse to offend those with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself as if this is part of the just nihilism whereas we were saying the clown is a truth speaker and even though being a fool truth speaker is entertaining when you yourself are not the butt of the joke it does go if you

20:57were being the pure fool then you also have to speak truth to power that would so it's not that he is trying to be self protective but then can't help himself it's actually part of the way of his mode of being self protective of being this fool that would lead to him turning it you know it's a sword that cuts both ways. he's attacking society's hypocrisy at great personal cost right and this is one of the

21:29three things that Trilling talks about as a criterion of sincerity if we took him straightforwardly as delivering the goods as a fool it sounds like that is a sincere position or is it because part of it is that you're doing it with a wink in a way that it is you're speaking truth but you are with sort of doing it with plausible deniability it's just a joke well I think I think Diderot is a representative of

22:01sincerity and Rameau's nephew is definitely insincere but he might be a representative of authenticity so right so the criticism of sincerity might be what's at stake here but we'll find out well what about the second one his stronger than his desire for respect is his appetite for demonstrative self-abasement so it's his ego is turning on itself flying expression in a compulsive buffoonery again I'm not it could be that hey you have gotten in such habits that

22:33you want to be this party guy entertainer and so you just can't even help yourself that you just you know you play the clown long enough and that is ends up what you believe yourself to be that you end up having a certain nihilism and lack of self respect just because this is the habit you've gotten in but again this is presented as a betrayal that that he's normally is sucking up to his patrons and doing

23:05his things out of prudence but but here his appetite for self so trilling is not connecting these two things together in the way that I just did yeah he's I mean I think the he's turned on himself right the super ego factor here is he's not living up to some standard and we can think in terms of these very very high standards like trying to be a genius and at the beginning of the dialogue right the

23:37question is whether geniuses are actually good for society or good for themselves whether it's good to be one and Ramo contradicts himself on this through the dialogue there are lesser standards right not why not just be a successful music teacher the sort of things things that Diderot brings up and and have some prestige and make a lot of money why isn't that that good enough so we get the sense that there are these very high standards

24:09probably because he has a famous uncle as part of the problem he doesn't live up to them and then once you don't live up to society's standards it becomes very tempting to say well the standards are all BS and I'm going to make my profession the pointing out of the hypocrisy of those standards people don't actually live up to them maybe a few geniuses live up to the standard of their craft but but at a personal

24:41level they're just awful people right that's the way the dialogue begins they're not living up to these broader ethical norms so then the task becomes to attack society attack the standards to which one holds oneself but but he's doing both at once right he's attacking himself for not living up to them he's debasing himself being a masochist and then on the other hand he's involved in this project of trying to reject the standards well and you're

25:14raising an interesting question about the standard of one's craft whether geniuses they redefine the standards so they're not living up to the standards they're subverting the standards and some but this is sort of off topic something to keep in mind though good point the characterization goes further what a chimera what a novelty what a monster what a chaos what a contradiction what a prodigy judge of all things imbecile earthworm depository of truth sink of uncertainty and

25:48error glory and scum of the universe the words of course are Diderot's are not Diderot's but Pascal's of course Wes didn't you recognize Diderot's dialogue continues and further particularizes Pascal's sense of the human contradiction of man as the opposite of himself the French Marxist critic Lucien Goldman speaks of Pascal I guess it's Lucien anyway speaks of Pascal Pascal's the first modern man but he but by this he means that Pascal anticipated the ideas of the German

26:21thinkers who followed Kant in particular Goethe Hegel and Marx one may the more readily suppose this to be true because of the affinity the three men felt with Diderot if it is Diderot rather than Pascal himself whom Hegel chose to exemplify the modern anthropology one reason is that in Rameau's nephew even more decisively than in the Ponsays of Pascal society is understood to be the field on which man runs his spiritual course to be sure nothing

26:55so much confirms our awareness of the developing authority of the concept of society as the extent to which it figures explicitly in Pascal's representation of the difficulties of religious life for Pascal however man's existence in society is but the manifestation of his cosmic alienation whereas for Diderot the silence of the infinite spaces is not frightening it is not even heard for Diderot society is all in all the root and ground of alienation it is social man

27:28who is alienated man do you remember the the infinite spaces from Pascal not really I don't remember him talking about society at all much less society getting in the way of authentic religious life but I would have to read listen to our episode well the the silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me Maffray or something like that famous line from Pascal but what's okay so what's the difference he's pointing out here society is that for Pascal

28:02the field in which man runs his spiritual course and and the cosmic right so the alienation we feel is cosmic alienation it's sort of part of our fundamental human condition and sure I suppose relationship to God but right that's off that's not Dider is not worrying about the religious element here he's an atheist and in a in a massive conflict with the with the Catholic church and in France and gets his you know gets his encyclopedia

28:35band because of it of course you know then with the French Revolution the the church really takes a beating but but anyway for Diderot society is the root and ground of all alienation it is social man who's an alienated man so that that sounds a little bit more like Rousseau right there's there's something wrong with society or society introduces this element of alienation that's not simply basic to human nature and to religious existence sure okay in

29:05the great dialogue the alienation is very literal it begins with the name of the protagonist who the nature of society being what it is does not possess himself is not his own man he's not Rameau but Rameau's nephew this nephew of Rameau's the Oxford companion to French literature is at pains to assure us was a real person but the companion following Diderot himself does not condescend to tell us his Christian name which in point of fact

29:35was Jean-Francois the theory of society advanced by the nephew rests on his recognition of the systematic separation of the individual from his actual self the social being he tells us is a mere historic historic histrionic representation every man takes one or another position as the choreography of society directs with the mimetic skill which is the essence of his being the nephew demonstrates how he performs the dance upon which his survival depends quote there on thereupon he

30:05begins to smile to ape a man admiring a man imploring a man complying his right foot forward the left foot behind his back arched head erect his glance riveted as if on someone's faith face open mouthed his arms are stretched out towards some object he waits for a command receives it flies like an arrow returns the order has been carried out he's giving his report he's all attention nothing escapes him he picks up what is dropped

30:36places pillow or stool under feet holds a salver brings a chair opens a door shuts a window draws curtains keeps his eye on master and mistress he's motionless arms at his sides legs parallel he listens and tries to read faces then he says you there you have my pantomime it's about the same as the flatterers the courtiers the footmen's and the beggars this the demonstration concluded it is agreed between Diderot and the nephew between the ma

31:06and the lui of the dialogue that everyone in society without exception acts apart takes a position does his dance even the king himself who takes a position before his mistress and God he dances his pantomime steps so he takes this thing that we all do which is we put on a certain social masks in society and he perfects it in almost a musical manner he can do these Robin Williams like transitions between different imitations with lots

31:36of you know it almost like miming he's using his facial expressions and body language to imitate both inanimate objects and events and people and the idea is that right all of this imitation it's it's the same as the flatterers the courtiers the the beggars it just kind of shows in and with greater clarity the type of thing that we all are trying to do but although less skillfully and less self-consciously no one is likely to read

32:06Remo's nephew without a ready awareness of its ambiguity in its first intention which is the one I have emphasized the dialogue passes a direct and comprehensively adverse moral judgment upon society it lays bare the principle of insincerity upon which society is based and demonstrates the loss of personal integrity and dignity that the impersonations of social existence entail but this is scarcely new it had been the theme of French moralists for more than a century and even

32:36if we grant as we readily do that Diderot pulls the moral case against society puts the moral case against society with undue dramatic force this cannot of itself account for the charmed sense of discovery that the dialogue gave to so many great minds of the 19th century and still gives to lesser minds of a latter day the entrancing power of Remo's nephew is rather to be explained by its second intention which is to suggest that moral

33:07judgment is not ultimate that man's nature and destiny are not wholly comprehended within the narrow space between virtue and vice you want to stop right there let's uh yeah sure so so society is representative of insincerity I think I had said it's right representative of sincerity but is really in hypocrisy I guess which all which amounts to the same thing it it feigns a kind of well I don't know Diderot is the representative of sincerity in

33:38the dialogue and yet and yes society is insincere and I think a philosopher like Diderot would more directly put the you know as Trilling puts it the moral case against society and does with the dialogue but Remo is making that himself Remo's nephew is making him himself making that challenge in a um a different way within the dialogue I don't think of Remo's nephew as himself sincere even though he's um sending up the insincerity of society

34:09anyway he goes back and forth yes the second tension was the one that I thought we should just presage before before uh actually reading what Trilling wants to say about it right to suggest that moral judgment is not ultimate that man's nature and destiny are not wholly comprehended within the narrow space between virtue and vice so I feel like we there was some reference in our discussion of of this of uh you know that maybe uh

34:41Diderot is prefiguring Nietzsche here that far from uh you know this just being Diderot is representing philosophical morality and philosophical morality is the correct view uh and and Remo's nephew is just uh a self-reflective example of the perversion of his particular society then no actually he has a point he is making value judgments that are local to his situation he is being somewhat rational within his situation so maybe this should give us the idea that at

35:12least given that society is not some place that rewards virtue and punishes vice that we want to be a little more subtle about our judgments of people in given circumstances which even that does not shake the foundations of morality in the way Nietzsche did but at least it's a step toward it yeah for Nietzsche if there's if there's a judgment that is beyond moral judgment it is quote-unquote life or uh more specifically aesthetic judgment and there

35:43are of course elements of this in the German idealists where there's something special and transcendent about aesthetic judgment and maybe it gets us to the absolute and and blah blah blah but um i suppose that it's possible that that's the path that trilling is going to go down here thinking um the possibility that aesthetic judgment is higher this is the thing that that of course Habermas is very critical of it goes hand in hand with the

36:14reduction of reason to power the kind of thing i think Habermas in the end things we can't do and i agree but i want to keep going yeah from this comes the sensation of enlargement of delighted liberation that the dialogue affords whatever is to be said in condemnation of the self-seeking duplicity of society of the great financiers their wives and their little actresses and sinners and of the courtiers and the king himself one person the nephew

36:46transcends the moral categories and the judgment they dictate diderot the doer deuteran the deuteragonist like as is someone who does deuteronomy is that what's going on here yeah we'll have to look that up the deuteragonist is a is at pains to treat him with discriminating condescension and to rebuke him for a deficiency of moral commitment but we know that diderot the author of the dialogue gives us full license to take the nephew to our hearts and

37:20minds where he figures not only as an actual person but also as an aspect of humanity itself as the liberty that we wish to believe is inherent in the human spirit in its energy of effort expectation and desire in its consciousness of itself and its limitless contradictions so a kind of representative of self-consciousness here which i think hegel of course would agree the climax of the dialogue and we might say of its protagonist's existence is ramo's

37:53disquisition on the superiority of the new forms of opera to the old the episode issues in his most elaborate mimetic display for he proceeds to be opera to impersonate the whole art this musical proteus or perhaps he is to be called panurge sounds all the instruments enacts all the roles portraying all the emotions and all voices in all modes the astonishing performance and this is the part that that hegel quoted right the astonishing performance proposed the

38:26idea which nietzsche was to articulate a century later that man's true destiny expresses itself not in morality but in art ding ding ding i get a point for that yep i i uh i was on the right track here but yeah that's that's the that's the way the paragraph ends with this idea that the the of the aesthetic is a as a value system that transcends the the ethical but something that kierkegaard ultimately objects to right

39:00wants to elevate the religious but but here um but before all that yeah this is that this is a very interesting idea because it's it's kind of a form of a particular form of self-consciousness this all right the liberty that we wish to believe is inherent in the human spirit consciousness of itself and its limitless contradictions so the suggestion seems to be that yeah this kind of hypocrisy is ineradicable it's part and parcel of human psychological

39:33conflict right we want to we want to pay lip service to these important social values but nevertheless we are desiring beings with all these different urges and we can kind of hide from them and even pretend they don't exist repress them to the point that we're not even that aware of them act out on them develop symptoms blah blah blah or we can become conscious of them um but then is that what does that mean is

40:06that cynicism is that liberation is that a cure or is that just decadence well first i looked up deuteragonist and that just means the second most important person in a narrative so the protagonist is the first one the deuteragonist okay yeah it's so second same deuteronomy is just second law the restatement of the law so right there's it's it's it's not as cool a connection as i thought it's just the number two yeah i'm not convinced

40:39that i mean it already seems like trilling is contradicting himself a little bit i just want to you know we'll see why this is not a contradiction that he has these uncontrollable urges to debase himself and i thought that his whole public displays of prowess of mocking would be a great example of him clowning in a very impressive way but that is debasing right he's in public he's he's making these faces he's jumping around uh so

41:11to say that on the one hand that this that he engages in this compulsively debasing behavior and that shows his nihilism but here uh because he demonstrates this prowess this shows how he's beyond social judgment he he's betraying something aesthetically advanced superior that should make us think that maybe we said this into the discussion that it was sort of where where words stop then you have to express things through the gestures and art and things like

41:43that um such that this is actually his nobility so i'm not sure which one trilling is saying that if you know maybe he's just capable of great baseness and great nobility um but i would definitely when reading reading it seeing this he's as very much tied together yeah all right he's turning yeah uh i'm on the last paragraph here yet if the second intention yet yet if the second tension of ramo's nephew is chiefly what engages

42:16us and constitutes the genius of the work our particular pleasure in it must not lead us to slight the first intention the moral judgment which the dialogue makes upon man in society is not finally rejected but coexists with its contradiction and upon it and upon its validity and weight depends the force of the idea that the moral categories may be transcended and it is the nephew himself who invokes the moral categories at the same time that

42:48he negates them the moral judgment is grounded upon the cogency of ramo's observation of social behavior and the shamelessness with which he exhibits his own shame yeah so we can't we can't do what ramo's nephew is doing if we entirely reject the moral categories there's nothing to send up right there's no hypocrisy to be pointed out in a way well i guess you could yeah i guess you can still point out hypocrisy if if you don't

43:20subscribe to the moral standards that others are are actually um trumpeting but failing to live up to but i don't know that that kind of critique would have much force i mean i'm trying to think of this in terms which again we brought up in their most nephews discussion of of the two socratic or the two kirkegardian forms of irony right socratic org irony implicitly makes use of and refers to some greater objective set of values

43:52it's just saying it's not here here on earth we are sinful and filled with contradictions but i can only say that because i have in somewhere in the back of my mind a hazy picture of something better versus the kind of irony that uh kirkegard was criticizing which is merely nihilistic and destructive and maybe it's it's a matter that this is a matter of degree that uh you know how hazy is the view can you can

44:24you have a basically nihilist right this is just a characterization of of of the nihilist as the frustrated uh idealist that the bouvoir gave in her ethics of ambiguity that to be a nihilist you have to have believed in something in the first place otherwise you know it's just you wouldn't get all upset about it but uh clearly the the the depth of ramo's nephew's self-hatred must be relying on some underlying moral sense well here very

44:57interestingly right the the idea that the moral categories can be transcended and and what i assume is aesthetic by aesthetic categories is dependent on this moral judgment that we make upon society and that's right that's ideological ideological critique which is closely related to this concept of hypocrisy um and is there in nietzsche is there in marx right nietzsche is calling everyone hypocrites as well he's saying that oh you're you pretend to be so holy and ascetic

45:29and moral and it's all really just will to power power and not only just will to power but the perverted form the worst form of will to power the one that's not in the open right resontama and all that stuff um and so i don't know yeah i mean the how does nietzsche right the question is always how does right nietzsche has to adhere to some standard if he's going to be worried about resontama and he

46:02says it's life at certain points um and and that somehow becomes connected to the to the aesthetic um but one can't abandoned abandoned standards entirely and it's not even clear that you can abandon reason you know as as habermas would like to say so if you want to make this movement to the aesthetic um it's not clear that you you've somehow transcended the reason even if you you've transcended some moral system of values but all right

46:35shall i read on sure section two when hegel in the phenomenology of mind makes his momentous comment on ramo's nephew he follows and carries to its extremity the line of dialogue the line of the dialogue's second intention he acknowledges no debt to diderot so the second intention i take to be this idea that moral categories can be transcended he acknowledges no debt to diderot for the idea that the nature and destiny of man are not ultimately

47:07to be described in moral terms indeed he seems to have persuaded himself that the dialogue is committed exclusively to its moral first intention and he faults it for this limitation in the single section of the phenomenology we shall have in view hegel holds moral judgment to be nothing but retrograde standing in the way of a true conception of the human spirit there is no trait whatever in the character of the nephew which he permits to be

47:40blamed or deplored what any reader naturally understands is a deficiency in ramo to be forgiven or accepted hegel takes to be a positive attribute and of the highest significance nothing less than a necessary condition of the development of spirit of geist that is to say of mind in its defining act which is to be aware of itself right yep so this special association here with self-consciousness although one that hegel i was going to want to transcend

48:12this is just on the way right but anyway goethe's translation of the dialogue was published while the phenomenology was in the course of composition the nephew who was referred to in goethe's text as a self-estranged spirit was co-opted by hegel to serve as the presiding genius of the section of his work called spirit in self-estrangement hegel represents the nephew as the exemplary figure of the modern phase of developing spirit and welcomes his advent with hierophantic glee

48:43at no point in his comment on the dialogue does hegel mention either its title or the names of its author and its protagonist and bails bailey's translation of the work to which hegel refers the work to which hegel refers is identified in an editorial footnote um so yeah he quotes it without of course he he cannot bring himself to make an explicit reference even if he finally does quote something but yeah i don't know why trilling

49:13would then say he is definitely saying that rose nephew represents the presiding genius of the section of the world if i remember correctly it's just that he's making a similar comment about society that ramo's nephew is making and that you know diderot brought to clear uh observation in that work such that the names of value judgments which are supposed to be ethically foundational become muddled they they switch so as we were discussing in our uh wealth

49:44versus state power section you know what was good from one point of view hey i'm the wealthy person and the state power is merely uh squashing me so the state power is bad and the wealth is good then well i can shift my allegiance to say i'm obeying the state power so actually the state power becomes good and i become good through my participation in the state power and then anything that would uh be disloyal that

50:14would count as bad so the the private hoarding of wealth becomes bad and instead actually then wealth it also becomes associated with the state power because because you're giving all your wealth to the state power the state power is making sure that you are taken care of so it all ends up being one you know so that so in these leaps of changing loyalties what was good becomes bad um there's no way from that description i

50:45just gave that you could easily fit ramo's nephew onto that what can you say something more about yeah connect so this idea of good and bad switching right there it's the there are elements to the in itself that are good good or bad and elements to the for itself or that are good and bad so the wealth is representative of the for itself right it's self-interest and the the bad part of it is selfishness or something

51:15like that and and interest in material things and things like that but the good part of it is just the heightening of one's inner life right uh self-consciousness is enhanced and then for the in itself represented by the state state power the good thing about that is that it right unites us in a collectivity and is potentially evocative of our altruism but it's also it's bad in the sense that it can become oppressive right authoritarian so

51:46the yeah i don't know how to the the that shifting back and forth between values does that mean that hegel holds moral judgment to be retrograde i mean we we know and and standing in the way of a true conception of the human spirit we we know that kantian morality if that's what trilling here means by moral judgment we know hegel thinks that needs to be transcended right we can't just find moral judgment in some in abstract maxims and rationality there's got to be something connected to hard and sentiment and to the rest of society

52:23it's not that we can go back to ancient greek ethical substance but we need to get a greater integration between what reason has done to morality and what it seemingly is left behind you know in a in a previous moment they can ultimately be synthesized but so here i would say so i'm a little yeah i'm confused by what trilling is saying there and then we all right so we're kind of ramo's position which seems nihilistic trilling is saying or or somehow cynical maybe some trilling is saying it's a positive attribute because it's a necessary

52:59condition of the development of spirit okay but we can say that about anything right that comes before absolute knowledge that it's a necessary condition doesn't mean that it's such a great thing it's his nihilism move on from it it's a determinative a determinate negation right it is like the first cut the uh socratic kind of irony um except maybe you know the more determinate the more you have in mind what the divine thing or you're the neck the next stage that is opposed to the imperfection that you are ripping on and certainly for plato it

53:35was actually quite clear that you know that that he he was maybe drawing an extra arrow or drawing in some detail to where socrates was pointing if you interpret socrates as merely negative hmm i don't like your conception of justice well then maybe plato you know well here actually is the right answer here's the conception of justice that you know by criticizing these individual things you are pointing to and and it's something we are acquainted with before we were born it is our divine inner nature yeah so yeah this position is a determinate negation and

54:11and it will lead to another determinate negation yeah right what it leads to correct me if i'm wrong if there's another step here but it's just the conflict between faith and and reason or knowledge right to the kantian distinction i mean that's right as far as we're going to find that out when we get to the faith but then this is making me frustrating that we're not frustrated that we're not going to go on and read the ethics section that comes after the faith we can do as much of it as you want i'm on

54:47board i'm all the way um i think we need to convince the other guys to uh well let's let's read one more paragraph here the difficulty of the phenomenology is proverbial and this is not the occasion nor have i the presumption to attempt to recapitulate the whole complex process of self-estrangement as hegel describes it but there may be discerned through the great maze a path which the uninitiated can follow with at least a little confidence its direction is marked out by a vocabulary different from that which characterizes the work as a whole amid the idiosyncratic

55:23distinctions distractions of hegel's terminology we find certain words that are comforting for the familiarity such words as nobility baseness service heroism flattery and a combination of the last two in a strange and possibly witty phrase the heroism of flattery we perceive that with those words hegel is describing a historical development which is to be sure abstract and paradigmatic but also concrete and actual so far as it is concrete and actual it has particular reference to the social and cultural development of the renaissance and the enlightenment and as we cannot fail to perceive of our own

55:59time yeah this is chilling saying yeah he didn't study enough he doesn't know what those sections mean really i would be willing to do one more of these uh i think this is interesting in that is forcing us to think about right when we talked about ramo's nephew we didn't want to be too heavy on well how does this connect with hegel we did a little bit of that but dylan was on it it hadn't been on that previous hegel and so we kind of this is making us rethink you know along with another later

56:35historical figure another modern person what actually is this connection between the two texts and so i'm fine spending another hour thinking about that i don't know that we want to spend four hours you know do do this entire essay listen you how many how many recordings did we do of galen i mean if we find it let's just see how we find how motivating we find it a lot of this has been recap and summarizing for people that have not read hegel's phenomenology or ramo's nephew whereas you know so hopefully that was at least a

57:11good review for listeners uh but i feel like we're just getting into the juicy stuff hopefully it's there all right thanks for supporting again if you want to hear the part two that we do uh again sometimes i make the part two public if if there's got part three and part four but i'm thinking this alone will be a two-parter so part two will be behind the paywall that's part uh patreon.com slash close reads philosophy uh but thanks thanks for listening if you uh are listening to this on a podcast player or you have access

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