Sincerity and Authenticity

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