Sincerity and Authenticity (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

By Lionel Trilling

Book Overview

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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674808606
• ISBN13: 9780674808607
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Subtle, nuanced intellectual and literary history

This book, based on lectures he gave at Harvard in 1970, is delight. Trilling draws a fine but deep distinction between two conceptions of selfhood. Sincerity, or being true to yourself with an eye to being true to others, was the dominant concern of Renaissance and early modern thought and literature, from Shakespeare to Rousseau. Beginning with Wordsworth, gaining momentum throughout the 19th century, and finally emerging with full force in the 20th, though, there is a new, more morally demanding ideal of being what or who one is, apart from all external conditions. Trilling's discussion wanders about quite freely, but his observations about literature and ideas are always brilliant and refreshing. Highly recommended.