Lionel Trilling on Sincerity (Part One)

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0:33A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Lentenmeier.

0:39We'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 role, 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.

1:09So 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, he 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,

1:44I 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 in 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,

2:16but 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 Reads, specifically Close Reads Philosophy with Mark and Wes. You can find that at all your streaming platforms, your podcast platforms. If we do end up having a part two for this, and most of our discussions end up taking more than an hour for us

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3:08Our 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

3:38at the beginning of the modern epoch, 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,

4:09especially by those who make it their 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.

4:44One, of the sincerity of the person making the judgment. This 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

5:17that in a way Hegel 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?

5:49How 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 about 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.

6:23And here he's saying that the whole concept of society is, as it was in Hegel, after the fall from a 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,

6:57societies 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. But 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

7:27in 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? The 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,

7:59to 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. So 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.

8:32So 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. They 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,

9:03comes 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. But authenticity actually implies that we could oppose society and say, no, my personal code or whatever,

9:36or 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? I 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

10:06that 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. Not that it is normal for everybody to critique the society or anything like that. In fact, most people will not. They are still operating,

10:37especially 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 tailor, you know, early capitalism. And your last name is Taylor. Yeah, exactly.

11:05All 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,

11:36who is a critic of society, he's a 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

12:07kind of universal hypocrisy of things. It'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,

12:35right? So in other words, hypocrisy, right? How hypocritical is society, right? The degree of correspondence between principles avowed and actual conduct.

12:47And one might say in society, like Nietzsche, right? Society is necessarily hypocritical. Untruth 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

13:18in the development of the ideal of sincerity. Diderot's great dialogue with the scapegrace nephew of the composer Ramo. The 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.

13:50Its 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 it 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

14:20in 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. This 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,

14:51having 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. Freud 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.

15:23All right, so this is all just review of things that we have said at the beginning of the Rameau's nephew, but said in a much more dynamic way than we did, so that's fine.

15:35Very eloquent.

15:37Okay. 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 meant to represent the Freudian id,

16:08that 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

16:38of his ego. His ruling concern is with self-preservation, which, Freud tells us, is the ego's chief task. Out 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.

17:09He 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, Louis 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.

17:39So 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 fingers 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

18:09that he is not a genius.

18:12Yep, 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. Reduced 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

18:42mode 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. And stronger than his desire for respect is his appetite for demonstrative self-abasement. His ego, betraying its proper function, turns on itself,

19:12and 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. What do you think? Well, it's interesting, yeah, this question of whether

19:43Remo 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. So he's, in a way,

20:14he'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

20:44attacking people's narcissism and self-importance to the point where it can get him in trouble. 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

21:15truth 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 were 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

21:46fool 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 three things that Trilling talks about as a criterion of sincerity if we took him straightforwardly as delivering the goods as a fool

22:16it 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 sincerity and Rameau's nephew is definitely insincere but he might be a representative of authenticity so right so the criticism of

22:47sincerity 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 you want to be this party guy entertainer and so you just can't even help yourself that you just

23:17you 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 his things out of prudence but but here his appetite for self so trilling is not connecting these

23:48two 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 question 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

24:19there 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 probably 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

24:49all 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 level 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

25:20society 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 raising 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

25:50characterization 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 error 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

26:22French 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 thinkers 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

26:52Diderot 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 so 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

27:23of 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 who is alienated man do you remember the the infinite spaces from Pascal not really I

27:54don'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 the field in which man runs his spiritual course and

28:27and 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

28:57the with the Catholic church and in France and gets his you know gets his encyclopedia band 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

29:28introduces this element of alienation that's not simply basic to human nature and to religious existence sure okay in the 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

30:01tell us his Christian name which in point of fact was Jean-Francois the theory of society advanced by the nephew