Authenticity, RIP: Lionel Trilling Revisited 

“The simplest Surrealist act,” André Breton declared in 1930, “consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” In 2016, Donald Trump boasted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”  

Was Breton a proto-Trumpster? Could Trump be a closet Surrealist? A deeper but curiously plausible answer is that both statements testify to the power of authenticity in modern culture. Such is the interpretation we might draw, in any case, from reading Sincerity and Authenticity, a fascinating if somewhat forgotten book by the American literary critic Lionel Trilling.  

The etymology of “authentic,” Trilling reminds us, is authentio, an ancient Greek word whose meanings include “to commit a murder.” Authenticity, Trilling maintains, is always latently violent. As a concept, it suggests that individuals have an obligation to express what they deem to be their “inner truth,” even when doing so threatens social norms.

When Trilling, a preeminent literary scholar and Columbia professor, delivered the lectures on which his book is based in 1970, what alarmed him was his culture’s fascination with authenticity in its most extreme forms—the avant-garde’s gleeful shattering of venerable artistic conventions, or Kurtz’s primitivist injunction, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to “exterminate all the brutes.” Now, fifty years after his death, Trilling’s book seems both extraordinarily insightful and hopelessly dated. Trilling feared we were becoming too authentic. Yet our culture seems to have abandoned authenticity as a cultural value with little more than a shrug.  

In some respects, of course, authenticity seems to carry more weight than ever. Populism has brought into the political mainstream figures who embody the visceral dispositions and primal concerns from which the sophistications of liberal culture and neoliberal markets had grown increasingly distant. Progressivism has its own fixation on authenticity; its condemnation of cultural appropriation rests on the assumption that cultural artifacts have true and rightful owners from which they must not be alienated. A wide range of consumer habits—from tourism to food preference (“locally grown” or “farm to restaurant”)—place a premium on authenticity. Authenticity would thus appear to be deeply embedded in what Trilling calls our “moral slang.” 

Yet it is striking how much of Trilling’s account of our culture’s long infatuation with the ideal of authenticity now rings hollow. Consider his reflections on what he dubs the “disintegrated consciousness.” To explain this idea, Trilling examines Rameau’s Nephew, Denis Diderot’s brilliant but cryptic dialogue between an Enlightenment philosopher—a stand-in for Diderot himself—and the eccentric nephew of a great composer. The nephew’s identity is “disintegrated” because it consists entirely of the sum of his contradictions and his ability to mimic any social role. Yet precisely because he lacks a coherent personality, the nephew, Trilling argues, seems to intuit truths about the social world that elude his interlocutor, whose common sense is presented as a failure of insight.

The wrecking ball of authenticity does not confine itself to smashing social norms. It also pulverizes individuality itself. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s wake, authenticity embraces the Dionysian ideal of self-dissolution, in which abandonment of consciousness and reason become prized cultural goals. Even insanity becomes valued as “a state of being in which an especially high degree of authenticity inheres.” Trilling cites the philosopher Norman O. Brown, who, in a 1960 address, praised the “blessing” and “supernatural powers” of madness, particularly “holy madness.” When Jim Morrison—an enthusiastic Brown reader—admonished his generation to “break on through to the other side,” he was embracing a form of Dionysian authenticity that Trilling would have recognized.  

Today, however, the idea of Dionysian self-dissolution feels remarkably old-fashioned. In many ways, the discourse of mental health (though not psychoanalysis) has an even firmer grip on our society than it did on Trilling’s. Concerns about anxiety, disassociation, “suicide ideation,” substance abuse, and other ailments are not only pervasive, but have become the dominant idiom for discussing existential challenges. Yet these conditions are associated primarily with suffering and the values they inspire are “care” and “wellness.” In contrast, the figures Trilling analyzes—the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Brown, the anti-psychiatry movement—saw mental illness as an authentic response to alienation and social repression.

Faced with artistic works from an early era that celebrated madness—Antonin Artaud’s theater, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade—our culture seems condemned to miss the point by taking them at face value, that is, as evidence of justified concern for human suffering. The idea that, as Trilling puts it, “disorder, violence, unreason” might be accorded “moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for” such experiences has become distinctly foreign. Far from valuing disintegration as a path to deeper insight into oneself, our culture values coherent self-presentation or, more prosaically, having a personal “brand.” Far from cultivating self-dissolution, social media influencers and athletes cultivating their “name, image, and likeness” double-down on their identity as much as possible. “All personality is rigid,” Brown intoned dismissively in 1966. “The ego is public relations.” Okay, Boomer. 

Another reason Trilling’s critique of authenticity has lost its purchase lies in his belief that art is the primary vehicle for achieving authenticity. Whatever one thinks about authenticity’s continued relevance, it strains credulity to say that we still care about art, at least as a society. Trilling was writing at the peak of American middlebrow culture, for which high culture was a major reference point. Movies and television shows made nods towards Freud’s theories, while rock music sometimes sought inspiration in Nietzsche or Warhol. Though their audiences were limited, the latest Parisian literary fashion, the films playing at art house theaters, and museum exhibits exerted some cultural influence. Writing in 1970, Trilling observes that the devotion to art was “probably more fervent than ever before in the history of culture,” since art had replaced religion as the “spiritual substance of life.”  

Yet the days when underachievers fashioned themselves as artists and when every New York waiter was an aspiring actress are long gone. We need a new word to capture the current dynamics of elite and popular culture, which is the exact opposite of middlebrow. Popular culture no longer places high culture on a respected (if distant) pedestal. Rather, social elites take their cues from our culture’s most unabashedly demotic forms. Even such standard-bearers of educated opinion as the New York Times now take it for granted that streaming series have become the zeitgeist’s only relevant form of expression. These days, it is not unusual for universities—once the main force behind middlebrow culture—to tacitly discourage reading. We are comfortable with the idea that art is entertainment, especially when it fulfills mental health discourse’s project of ensuring that we feel good about ourselves. Whatever energies we summon from authenticity, they no longer rely on art. 

The demise of art, which Trilling considered so central to authenticity’s appeal, raises an interesting question: have we reverted to sincerity? Before there was authenticity, Trilling contends, there was sincerity. He sees sincerity as authenticity’s precondition and antithesis. Sincerity came into its own as a cultural ideal during the early modern period. Its significance can be pinpointed in the famous scene in Hamlet when Polonius gives his son Laertes tips on how to behave in society. One piece of advice famously stands out from the others: “To thine own self be true.” According to Trilling, Polonius was recommending a truthful disposition towards oneself as a means of ensuring one’s good reputation. Sincerity, in short, is “the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one’s own self.” The interest in sincerity advanced in lockstep with an intense preoccupation with dissembling, as personified by such literary characters as Iago and Tartuffe. 

The evidence of a return to sincerity is compelling. Wokeness, for instance, looks at the storm and stress of aesthetic expression with a suspicious eye, placing far greater stock on our ability to align our private conduct with our public self. To take social justice seriously means, in the first place, to acknowledge our own racism, sexism, homophobia, or cisnormativity as the necessary condition for fighting these ills on the social stage. By the same token, we are also a culture that is deeply concerned about deception. Trilling’s claim that sincerity no longer “command[s] out interest” sounds wrong. How else is one to understand the belief (on both the left and the right) that the country is governed by cabals of pedophiles than as a fear that deceit is ubiquitous and a longing for a more sincere society? The idea that deviants and criminals could be seen as paragons of authenticity now seems relegated to a distant past. Trilling notes that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre, and Jane Austen all share a deep concern with sincerity. While they may not be widely discussed, these are names that are at least still recognized. Compare these to the obscurity of the writers that Trilling considers to be champions of authenticity, such as Nathalie Sarraute or R. D. Laing. The canon of sincerity appears to have prevailed as authenticity’s heroes and heroines have faded away.  

Trilling was not a traditionalist. He did not bemoan a culture of narcissism, nor was he even a critic of authenticity as such. What worried him was the cultural dynamic that authenticity unleashes. Like revolution, authenticity devours its own children: any given conception of authenticity lays the groundwork for deriding earlier forms of authenticity as inauthentic. Trilling recognized that authenticity was prone to self-sabotage: that the quest for ever more authenticity would undermine the cultural achievements—such as a coherent self and sophisticated forms of self-expression—that made it valuable in the first place. This is why Trilling remained so attached to psychoanalysis in the face of radical efforts to denounce its conservatism. For Trilling, Freud was appealing precisely because he was a conservative: for all his attention to the unconscious and repressed sexuality, Freud’s aim was to preserve culture and society in a way that would “sustai[n] the authenticity of human existence that formerly had been ratified by God.”  

Yet rather than continue along the destructive path that Trilling prophesied, authenticity’s cultural glitter is plainly diminished. At best, authenticity is a kind of “luxury belief,” a post-materialist preoccupation that blossomed with the abundance of the postwar era. In our more precarious times, the aggressiveness and exigency entailed by authenticity have lost their glow. The pursuit of authenticity smacks of entitlement and seems more likely to result in anxiety than safety. We find ourselves, in a sense, somewhere between a discredited form of authenticity and a tepid and debased strand of sincerity. Our online, political, and economic identities place a premium on social connections, so that, as Trilling put it, “the avoidance of being false to any man” would seem to require “being true to one’s own self.”  

It is revealing—and a sign of a sincerity-based culture—that the primary weapon for discrediting our political enemies (regardless of our partisan affiliation) is to accuse them of deception. At the same time, faith in our social connections seems tenuous at best. Few people trust institutions or believe that the broader society shares their values. Many are pessimistic about the future and have little difficulty imagining an impending apocalypse. In such circumstances, aligning ourselves with communities we trust is destined to be more instrumental than sincere. Maybe we are in one of those moments when sincerity not only prevails but is in danger of becoming, in Trilling’s words, “one of the cherished attributes of Philistine respectability.” 

By its own example, Sincerity and Authenticity proves its claim that literature is crucial to gauging a culture’s health. Yet the lesson Trilling drew from his examination of changing conceptions of truth in Western literature may have lost its relevance, even if his analysis has not. From Trilling’s late twentieth-century perspective, authenticity was a cultural force that risked destroying culture itself. In the early twenty-first century, the time has perhaps come to rediscover it.  

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